As we start lift off, I start sliding down the seat, but I’m past giving a fuck. I don’t care what happens to me at this point.
Dying would be a much needed relief at this point. If it wasn’t for the fact that I hate people who off themselves more than anything else, I would’ve gladly followed in my brother’s footsteps.
Spider reaches over me and snaps my seatbelt in like I’m a damn four year-old.
“Boy, you have a death wish, don’t you?” he says with a shake of his head, snatching the bottle from me. “You’re fucked.”
“Yeah.”
More than anyone will ever know.
Two hours later, we’re in Colorado and it’s cold as hell.
Not just because of the weather, I fucking grew up in Westbrook Blues so this is familiar—but because I’ve felt nothing but the chills since Spider took my fucking Jack.
“Give it back, we’ve landed,” I mutter at him as we step off the plane.
“No man. I think I’ll hold on to this for a while longer,” Spider says, his eyes covered in shades.
“Go get your own,” I grit out, checking him out. He’s walking with his bag slung over his shoulder, sans the brown paperbag that the bottle was in.
“I’m more of a Cognac and Ciroc kind of guy,” he says instead, not phased at all.
“You’re a cold beer kind of guy,” I fire back, getting pissed the longer this shit’s going on. “The fuck were you drinking mimosas for?”
“Trying to be fancy.” He chuckles.
“That’s not you,” I mumble. “Give me back my damn Jack.”
“You need to sober the fuck up, or this whole thing is going to be a mess,” he mutters for my ears only and I realize why, because right ahead of us is a black minivan, with King and Baby Blue standing there waiting for us like a fucking annoyed king and a nervous but excited queen.
No doubt the two make one hell of a striking couple, but this whole operation they have going on here, bringing all of us under one roof, it’s already fucked and all without my bit of input to mess it up as is my recently acquired custom of making everyone around me miserable.
And I thought I could handle it, even with the reinforcements we brought with us.
“Oh my gosh, you’re here!” Astraea all but screams, as she runs to hug Ivy the sweet and Kim the liar.
They hug for a long ass time, doing that side to side shit, high-pitched cries coming from their circle. “Ah, I know you’re all a bit mad, but I don’t really care!” Baby Blue squeals.
Yup. There’s my answer if I ever bothered to wonder if she regrets putting any of us in this situation.
She wouldn’t be the one and only Baby Blue I love if she did.
She spots Spider and gasps. “Spider!”
“Raea Raea,” the jerk shouts back. He picks her up and twirls her around. She giggles and I for a moment, I really do want to enjoy this trip, but I’m too fucked for that.
“Em!” she shouts, running for the brute god. He drops his bag, opening his arms for her. When she all but flies into them, he picks her up, twirling her around again, I wish she’d puke on him like she did when we were in sixth grade. Highlight of my year.
Glancing at King, I try to gauge his annoyed meter and see it’s bordering on anger. Good.
Some things have changed, but not everything. Life-long insecurities never really go away. I should know.
“Hey baby,” I hear Emmett say in that deep ass voice of his. When they pull apart, I’m surprised to see tears on Astraea’s face.
Ah shit. Feelings.
I can’t deal with that. But when her sharp, captivating gaze falls in my direction, I’m a goner.
She runs for me.
“Careful!” King calls after her, eyeing her footwork. She’s clumsy, but obviously doesn’t give a damn as she runs for me.
I stand there frozen, eyeing her. As soon as I open my arms for her, she’s there and I’m fucking home.
“Noah, my Blue Fairy,” she breathes in my ear, her small frame melting into me.
Not for the first time, I wonder what life would’ve been like if it had been her and me, but when I look over her shoulder, I see Kim watching us and the pain filters back in.
I try to pull away with a groan of pain. She hears me of course, so I try to play it off, but the fussy girl in my arms is having none of that. She holds me even tighter. Can she feel the anguish I’m in? Is that it?
“I missed you like you wouldn’t believe,” she whispers in my ear, then she starts planting kisses all over my fucking face. “I love you!”
God, this girl… “Love you too, Baby Blue.”
She pulls back, looks into my eyes. I have no idea what she sees this time, but the next thing I know, she’s hugging me again. “Whatever it is, we’ll work it out, I promise.”
“Baby Blue…”
“Whatever it is.”
My throat works to swallow the spiky ball lodged there. Over her shoulder I see Kim, watching us, her eyes dark with shadows of pain and sorrow.
Fucking feelings.
“Hey, it’s fucking cold out here. Let’s go!” I grumble, trying to act cool but the outpouring of affection this girl showers me in is almost enough to lure me back from the dark sinkhole I’m currently in.
Only my Baby Blue. But I’m afraid this time, it won’t be enough.
“Tell me you missed me,” she demands, her lips pursed, eyeing me closely. Seeing me, scanning me, assessing the mess I am.
“You know I did,” I mutter, looking into her, knowing I have no chance in hell of hiding that shit. “I missed you, Baby Blue.”
“Oh Noah.” She hugs me fiercely again. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”
I close my eyes for a brief second, not want to break her heart because the fucking truth is clear for everyone else to see.
Everything’s never going to be ‘just fine’.
Not for me anyway.
“Come on, Ivy, let’s get in,” Astraea says softly, linking my arm with hers and then grabbing Kim on her other side. “Ah, I’m so freaking excited that you’re both here.”
“Missed you too, you sneaky little witch,” I say, hugging her petite frame to my side. To be honest, I’m not mad at her lies of omission. Kim on the other hand.
“I’m rethinking my missing you because this is fucked up, Astraea,” Kim says, her voice low and pissed.
“Oh snap, you’re even full naming me now,” Raea says with a nervous chuckle. “You really are mad.”
“I’m so mad at you, Astraea, I have half a mind to turn my ass around and go back home to my sisters just to spite you.”
“Kimmy…”
“Don’t use that whiny voice with me, I have two annoying sisters, it won’t work.”
And for sure it won’t. I’ve seen Kim pissed. I’ve seen her scared, but I don’t think I’ve seen her so…despondent.
But if I look back at the times we’ve partied together, been around her, I can see the signs clearly. My smoking hot friend is a mess.
“If she wants to leave let her,” Alex King says from behind us, an unreadable expression on his face. “I can have Frank start up the plane now, even.”
“Ace!”
“What baby, I’m just saying,” he says, his voice taking on a softness I’ve never heard as he looks down at Raea with a look so heartbreakingly loving, I feel like I’m intruding by seeing it.
That’s the look of a man hopelessly in love with the girl he claimed when we were kids.
“King Alexander has commanded it, let it be so,” Kim says sarcastically.
“Kimberly,” Alex says. “Ever the petty one. Why are you dressed like you’re about to attend a fucking funeral?”
“I don’t know, it’s just been so dark out lately since I saw your ugly face, I just wanted to be dark along with it,” she says.
Everyone pauses. Noah passes us, and then opens the door furiously and gets in without another word.
“Well then,
nice to know you’re depressed,” Alex says with a smirk.
“I aim to please,” she counters with a naughty wink that I’m sure is to piss him off. And it works.
He grunts and walks off toward the waiting minivan with Emmett beside him.
Emmett…
“Ivy! We have so much to catch up on,” Raea says, jolting me out of my reverie of watching Emmett’s firm ass ahead of me. God this man.
“Well, she isn’t high,” Kim says with a laugh. “But I’m sure if we can get some of that Turkish stuff and spike not just the way she did it before…”
“Ugh, I wasn’t high on weed!” I grumble, but that does remind me of something. Emmett is drinking coffee again. “Now drop it before my brother hears you.”
“Whoa, whoa, Miss Innocent, we were just kidding,” Kim says with a laugh I envy so much as it literally turns heads.
Emmett turns around as if he heard what Kim just said. “Innocent, huh?”
He’s looking at me again with that gaze that got me in this mess to begin with, stuck on a guy who has never looked at me the way he looks at Raea.
God only knows how many times I’ve wished, prayed, and fucking doodled on all my books that he’d look at me like that. All in vain, of course.
Before I can say anything, my brother cuts in.
“What do you know about innocent girls, Easton?” he says with a laugh. “It’s not like you like girls like that from what I hear.”
My heart almost stops beating. My chest feels tight as I hear that.
Looking down at my shoes, I can’t help but start to share in on Kim’s regret for the trip.
“Is this us?” I mutter to Raea and she nods, watching me with an unreadable gaze. “Thanks.”
I quickly sidestep them and get in the front, looking down at my phone. As everyone loads up the bags with all the chatter and ribbing of a friendship solidified in years of trials and all the shit that has happened to them, I open up my texts and shoot Gran one.
Me: Arrived safely. It’s pretty beautiful here. Are you doing okay?
Gran: Ivy Marie. Rome won’t collapse in two hours.
Me: It can and you know it.
Gran: Well, not with me as king.
Of course she’d say that. I smile.
Me: Don’t you mean as general? And can I just say I’m impressed with your texting skills.
Gran: I’m switching off my phone. I’m working.
Me: Don’t, Gran! I won’t bother you. Well, not as much.
Gran: You better not.
“How is she?” Alex says from in front of me in the driver’s seat. I don’t know how he knew who I’m texting but I wouldn’t put anything past him. His ability to know everything is beyond surprising. “Hope she’s not pissed at spending Christmas without you and your brother.”
“You know Gran, she’s always more than happy to help out at the hospital.”
I don’t tell him that we never celebrate Christmas like ever. Not since my mother broke Gran’s heart the year my brother was born. And Samuel, well, he’d rather be out partying it up than think of our estranged mother.
“We should’ve invited her as well.”
“You already know what she would’ve said,” I say with a nervous laugh. “She’d tell you no and to stop bugging her. She’s the one who packed my bags with the speed of lightning. Just to get me out of the house.”
I feel a cool stare on me, but I don’t look at him, looking at Alex instead.
“I hear you’re doing fine in that department of sneaking out of the house,” he says with a smirk.
“Hear from where?” My jaw drops, looking up at him.
“Apparently rumor has it,” Emmett says from beside me. Bracing myself to see that ever present impassive expression on his sinfully handsome face, I turn to see him smirking at me. I almost do a double take.
“Rumor has it?” I croak out. Alex laughs, but I can’t look away from Emmett. God, when he looks at you like you’re the scum of the earth, he’s drop dead sexy but when he smiles—okay, it’s not really a smile—but WOW.
“I hear you like to party these days,” he says, his voice low and so damn sexy, I think I need a change of panties. “Didn’t know nerds like that too.”
“Who said I was a nerd?” I whisper. Why on earth am I whispering? He just winks.
“Everyone ready?” Raea calls excitedly from the passenger seat up front beside Alex.
“No,” Noah grumbles from the back. Kim stays silent and Emmett hums to himself and I want so desperately to hear him speak again.
“Let’s go party!” my brother hollers from the middle seat.
Why he’s here is beyond me, but I’m pretty sure it has everything to do with the call he got before I left the house. Before that, he had wished me a safe trip but now, here he is…
Suspicious.
“That’s the right energy for this holiday, Spider, you gatecrasher,” Raea says with a laugh.
“You bet I brought the heat,” he says with a laugh. And with that, Alex starts the car and we’re off.
Jesus, this place is paradise!
The drive to the cabin Raea and her man—who hasn’t been able to take his hands off her since they picked us up even when he’s driving—is a bit long and twisty.
“Are we there yet?” Noah grumbles from the back.
“If you keep whining, we’ll never get there,” Spider says with a laugh.
“Not my fault if King drives like a fucking snail these days.”
“Try driving on black icy roads, you dumbass,” King mutters from the front. “I have precious cargo in here.”
“Aww, I’m touched that you find me precious, King, thank you!”
I can’t help but laugh at that. I’m not so sure what’s going on within this group of friends but the tension is so obvious, it’s sizzling in here, but everyone pretends otherwise. I’m sure it’s all for Astraea’s sake.
I feel Emmett’s gaze on my profile but I do my best not to look at him.
“See, even Ivy finds you unbearably annoying, she’s indulging you by laughing at your antics,” King mutters.
“Ace, behave,” Raea says softly, then she looks back at Noah. “We’re almost there, Noah. It’s just that it snowed again last night and we need to be careful.”
“Last night? When did the two of you crafty liars get here?” Noah questions.
“Uh, two days ago?” Raea says.
“And before you ask, yes, we fucked in every room of the entire place,” Alex says proudly, making the boys groan, but I see Raea’s face reddening.
“Seriously?” Kim says for the first time since the car started.
“Her face is red so, yes, seriously,” I say to her and she groans.
“At least one of us is getting some,” Kim whispers and I laugh again. Emmett looks at me again, but this time, I can’t help but turn to look at him.
Those green orbs… they’ve starred in all my steamy dreams all my life that now, looking at him so directly like this, sitting next to him, feeling his pulsating energy oozing off of him in waves, I can’t help but be affected in a way I never thought possible.
To me, Emmett has always seemed larger than life, larger than anything thrown to him.
While most people decide to lean on their illness like a crutch, he decided to live his life like nothing’s wrong, going to the extreme of everything as if testing his heart. Through multiple surgeries, consultations, and all the times I’ve seen him fighting for his next breath, he still seems larger than life, his body toned and built into the perfect destroying machine.
Like the god of war.
It’s not fair really. He wasn’t a mere human.
He looks half a god and half marble. Both divine and untouchably cold, hard, removed from everything.
So what do I say or do, when he’s looking at me like this?
“This is fun and all, but where might Georgey boy be?” my brother questions, breaking the spell around me. “I don�
�t see him here.”
A heavy silence falls over the car like no one heard him. I glance around and see Noah and Kim staring out the window. In the front, Alex has an unreadable expression on his face and Raea… she looks devastated.
Pissed, I turn around to look at my brother who’s occupying the middle seat. “Are you out of your mind?” I hiss.
“What? I want to know where he is,” he defends but he doesn’t look all that concerned about Raea’s sketchy twin. In fact, I peer closer at him. “What?”
I don’t say a word. I just study him and notice that intelligent stare he always has when he’s… oh my God. He knows exactly what he’s doing, asking about George.
I bet he even knows where exactly George is right now.
“Watch it,” I whisper, but he just rolls his eyes, looking away but why? Why is he stirring the pot like this?
Turning around, I look out the window. Beside me, I hear Emmett’s phone buzz, but when I look at him from the corner of my eye, I see him tense up. He doesn’t bother reaching for the phone though, but his jaw starts ticking.
Behind me, my brother is also staring at Emmett. Not wanting my brother to start interrogating Emmett, I turn to look at the boy—well, young man now—who I’ve crushed on forever, bracing myself for whatever side of Emmett Easton I get, because the truth is, sometimes he’s sweet, but there are times when he’s… dismissive. It’s as if he’s unfeeling and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else, it drives me insane.
“Have you been here before?” I ask him softly, keeping my voice low. I have no idea why my voice automatically adapts to that tone when I talk to Emmett, it’s as if I’m desperate or something.
Jesus.
Get. A. Grip Ivy Marie Irving!
Emmett nods, but doesn’t look at me. “For ski trips and all that shit.”
He flexes his arms and I can’t help but lean in just a bit, wanting to be closer to his energy, but I’m still a whole seat away. Why didn’t I take the middle seat?
“You like it?” I know he does, this is Emmett’s favorite season of the year, just not his favorite holiday. “Skiing, I mean.”
He regards me then, never taking that piercing gaze off me. “I used to.”
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