“We didn’t tell anyone,” Val said. “We weren’t sure what would happen, if it would go well . . . or if we’d make it.”
“That’s not true,” Corbin said. “This one wasn’t sure. This one didn’t want to jinx it. This one didn’t want to steal your spotlight.”
“Can you blame me?” she asked, glancing at the ground.
“No, but I want the record to show that even though I’m a blind idiot who took too long to realize what was right in front of me, I was on board with this relationship from the first kiss. I went along with your secrets because you’re good at the sex.”
“Oh my God,” I said, covering my eyes as a naked and horizontal Corbin and Val flashed across my imagination. “Mental images happening. I can’t.”
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you,” Val said quietly. “It’s weird.”
“Lake,” Manning murmured in my ear. “Why don’t you and Val go talk in the house?”
I slatted my fingers and peeked at the couple. Corbin grinned ear to ear, but Val looked like she was going to be sick.
“I don’t want to spoil your day,” she said.
“Nothing could spoil today for us,” Manning said, massaging my neck. “Especially not this news.”
Well, at least one person in the group didn’t think this was strange. Manning must’ve been over the moon to finally verify that Corbin had an actual love interest who wasn’t me. “Fine, but you—” I pointed at Corbin. “Stay out here. No spying.”
Corbin showed us his palms. “All I ever wanted was to eat cake in peace.”
Val followed me up the back steps and into the kitchen. She sat at the table as I switched on the overhead light, hiked up my dress, and took the seat across from her. “Let’s have it.”
“Are you mad?” she asked.
“Mad?” A host of emotions ran through me. I was confused. Weirded out. And somewhere between repulsed and curious. It hadn’t really entered my mind to be upset, though. I planted my elbow on the table and my chin in my palm. “No. Why would I be?”
“Corbin was in love with you for so long, and you guys had a thing I never understood.” She picked at nothing on the table. “I feel like I should’ve asked your permission or something, but it happened kind of fast.”
“You don’t need my permission. Who am I?” I deflated in my chair with a sigh, running my hands down the lace of my dress. “I don’t really know how to feel. Just start from the beginning.”
“It’s a short story, but it goes back a long time. I’ve always . . .” She laced her hands on the table, then opened one, as if trying to find the words. “I’ve had a crush on him since high school,” she rushed out. “I actually noticed him my first day, but as soon as you introduced us, I could see he liked you, so I sort of ignored how I felt.”
“Jesus, Val. I didn’t have feelings for him.” I remembered back to that first year in high school when Corbin and I had become friends. I couldn’t even really pinpoint why we’d gotten so close, except for his romantic interest in me. “You could’ve gone out with him.”
“Not knowing how he felt about you.”
Back then, I’d thought Corbin’s crush wasn’t a big deal. It’d been easier to ignore it than squash it, but that’d ended up costing all of us in the end, it seemed. “How long have you been together?”
“A few months. Six or eight.” She cleared her throat, glancing at the fridge. “Maybe ten. When I say it happened fast, I mean suddenly we were in it and the more time that passed, the harder it got to tell you.”
My stomach dropped—not because they’d kept it a secret, but because Val and Corbin were only finding each other now—after over a decade and a half of knowing each other. Could they have been together all this time? Was it my fault they hadn’t been? “Why not years ago, when I moved in with Manning?” I asked. “Why not in college?”
“So many reasons.” She lifted her bare shoulder. “Mostly, after everything you’d been through with Tiffany, I didn’t want you to feel like I was betraying you by going after Corbin. So I kept it to myself.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that.” It’d been so long since I’d had any inkling of interest in Corbin, but I had to admit at one time, I’d wanted to love him. I’d wanted to forget Manning and take the easy way out with Corbin. Would I have been upset if he and Val had fallen in love while my heart was broken? I couldn’t know for sure, and Val knew me as well as anyone, so maybe she was right. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be. It didn’t matter anyway.” She bent to remove one of her heels, massaging her foot. “It was so obvious he still had feelings for you.”
“But if you’d spoken up, he would’ve realized sooner.”
“I don’t think so. Back then I’d wished he’d see me, you know, really see me. But looking back, it wasn’t our time. He needed to get you out of his system.” She smirked as she replaced her shoe. “You, then lots of other girls.”
Manning entered the kitchen and set two coffee mugs and a pitcher of creamer in front of us. “I wasn’t sure how you take it,” he told Val, handing me some sugar packets from his pocket and leaving the rest on the table.
“Thank you,” she said, ripping one open. “This wedding crap is exhausting. You read my mind.”
“He’s good at that.” My face warmed as I remembered his earlier comment about drinking coffee to prepare for our night ahead.
He winked. Yep—definitely a mind reader. “Drink up, Wife,” he ordered.
“I really love the wedding arch,” Val said, balling up an empty packet. “Did you make it?”
“With help from Charles.” Manning turned to leave. “Let me know if you girls need a refill.”
“How about the food?” she asked. “Was it your idea?”
He paused, looking back. “What?”
“Manning planned almost everything,” I said. “Barbeque was his idea. I picked the color scheme, and he designed the ceremony and reception. He made all the arrangements for our honeymoon to the South of France, too.”
“Wow. You’re a machine, Manning.”
“A machine in love,” he agreed.
“Ah . . .” Val shifted in her seat, adjusting the top of her dress. “I’m sorry I ever, you know, doubted you.”
“I’m not,” he said. “You were looking out for her when nobody else was.”
“Except Corbin.” Val straightened in her seat. “He was always good to her. I feel like you should acknowledge that.”
Manning’s eyes dropped to mine. Corbin had no longer become a touchy subject between us, but that didn’t mean Manning had completely conquered those feelings of jealousy. He wasn’t about to concede in that department.
“He knows,” I answered for him.
“You and I have spent enough time together now,” she told Manning, “but I think a small part of me always worried you’d hurt her again.”
“I won’t,” he said simply.
“Then I guess I can relax.”
He turned to face her. “Are we good?”
Val knew all of Manning’s and my darkest secrets. She’d been there for most of our relationship, an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on every time he’d devastated me. But they’d each wanted the same thing for me from the start—happiness. There was no denying I’d found it, and no more reason to fight.
“Just don’t give Corbin a hard time.”
Manning showed her his palms. “He keeps his hands to himself and there’s no problem.”
She grinned. “I’ll make sure his hands are on me at all times.”
He nodded at me. “Need anything?”
“I’m fine. I won’t be long.”
Once he’d pushed out of the screen door and disappeared down the steps, I said, “You have no idea how happy you’ve made him with this news.”
“He doesn’t still get jealous over Corbin, does he?”
“No, not truly.” I grinned. “But he gets his hackles up when they’re in the same vi
cinity.”
“Dogs,” she said, shaking her head. “All of them. They’re literally reduced to their animal instincts.”
Val had no idea how true that was for Manning—and how much I relished his primal behavior. Or that I planned to encourage it tonight. I shivered, trying to mentally cool down so I could focus on the conversation at hand. “What were we talking about?”
“Nothing. We should probably leave things for now.” She stood. “We can get into more detail another time.”
At the thought of her ending the story of her and Corbin already, before we’d gotten to any of the juicy details, I was suddenly ravenous for more. Lots more. I must’ve been pretty okay with it after all. “Where are you going?” I cried.
“Nowhere,” she said, grabbing a dishtowel from the oven handle. She held it out to me. “You’re making me nervous as fuck with that coffee.”
I glanced down. I’d completely forgotten I was wearing cream, but fortunately, I’d avoided disaster so far. I took the towel and tucked it into the neckline of my dress, smoothing it down to my lap. “Better?”
“Much.”
“Then sit,” I demanded.
“We don’t have to talk about this today. You should be out there with your guests.”
“If you don’t tell me everything right now, I’ll be forced to torture you.”
She leaned her hands on the back of her chair, leveling me with a look. “You’re a vet, Lake. You wouldn’t harm a fly.”
“I’m not talking about physical pain.” I smiled sweetly. “I’ll just describe all the ways Manning and I plan to consummate our marriage.”
“Oh my God—gross,” she said, covering her ears. “Fine! I’ll talk.”
I laughed, sipping my coffee. “So did Corbin have any idea how you felt?”
“None.” She plopped back into the dining chair. “In New York, I thought Julian was ‘the one’ and that I’d moved on from Corbin, but the thing was, he was always there when Julian was a dick. It made my feelings for him really confusing.”
“And let me guess—Corbin never even suspected.”
“He lives in his own world,” she said, and we each bobbed our heads in agreement. “He was too concerned with what you were doing—and all his side-ass. But when everything went down with the Twin Towers . . .”
I sucked in a breath. Val had been a different person after the terrorist attacks. The news had turned her into a complete mess. “Was that the real reason you left New York?”
“It was awful, Lake. You know; you were there. Forget the fact that it felt like a personal attack on a city we loved, when I realized Corbin could’ve been there, could’ve died on some random Tuesday, it terrified me.” The tip of her nose reddened. She stood and went to a drawer, most likely to hide that she was getting emotional. “My feelings for him terrified me,” she said with her back to me. “I had to face the fact we’d never be together, and I needed to move on. So I left.”
I twisted in my seat, following her with my eyes. “And then he moved to Los Angeles, too.”
“Yes, but by the time Corbin bought his place in Malibu, I’d given up hope on us, not that I ever really had any.” She picked out a spoon and turned to lean against the counter. “He had girlfriends. I was busy with work. I stopped pining for him.”
Out back, someone raised the volume on what sounded like Justin Timberlake. The bass rattled me while I waited. “Until . . .?” I prompted.
“I went over to his house to surf one weekend. Surfing together wasn’t unusual, except that we usually met at my place or the beach. And you know I hung out at his house a lot, but for some reason we’d never surfed there.” I passed over her coffee mug when she reached for it. “Anyway, we were on his front deck in the early morning, checking the waves and putting on sunscreen. He sort of stopped and asked why I was still single.”
“Ha. As if he hadn’t been by your side through all of it. What’d you say?”
“I made some joke, like, ‘I don’t know—you tell me. You know me as well as I know myself.’”
“Aww.” It was so true, though. I was annoyed I hadn’t figured them out years ago.
She straightened her back, imitating Corbin’s sometimes unfair amount of confidence. “He was like, ‘Yeah I do, so what about you and me?’ He wanted to know if I’d ever thought about him ‘that way.’”
“Ugh.” I rolled my eyes. “Guys have it so easy.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking,” she exclaimed. “As if I hadn’t wondered about us a thousand times over the years.” She stirred her coffee and tapped the spoon against the rim. “Later, he told me seeing me in his house, how comfortable I was there with him, swapping my surfboard for one of his without asking permission—it’d fallen into some vision of the life he’d been trying to find with other girls.” Her eyes softened as she looked past me. “Like I belonged there.”
I covered my heart. “Someone to go out on the water with.”
“I guess? Oh, and get this.” She lowered her voice, smiling with a hint of mischief. “I was half-dressed in my wetsuit so I had my bikini top on. I adjusted the string to see if he’d look, and he did. Finally, something in his eyes changed, like he was seeing me for the first time.”
Val shuddered as I got goose bumps. “I mean, you’re super sexy,” I said, “so of course he’d noticed that, like, eons ago.”
“He says so, but until that day, it’d always been in a brotherly way. Weird-o.” She laughed. “I mean, he’d never ogled my tits that way before, so there’s that.”
“Fifty bucks says he did, you just never noticed.” I warmed my hand on my mug. “So what’d you say to all that?”
“I was honest with him.” She set the stirring spoon in the sink and took a quick sip. “My heart started beating so hard, I could barely hear what I was saying, but I didn’t want to lie. I admitted I’d had a crush on him up until recently.”
“How did he react?”
“He wanted to know why I’d never told him. Well, duh—he’d never asked.”
“He should’ve realized,” I said. “But then again, I didn’t. You’re good at hiding it. Too good.”
“It’s all that time I’ve spent on set,” she said, pointing at me. “I’m becoming one of you actor pod people.”
“Hey, I got out of that black hole somehow. I’m not an actress anymore.” I gestured to hurry her along. “But quit trying to change the subject. What happened next?”
“I tried to play off my crush like it was no big deal.” Her posture wilted. “You guys are so fucking important to me. My feelings weren’t worth risking your friendship or his.” She scratched her calf with her shoe. “So I picked up the surfboard thinking we could forget the whole thing, but he took it from me and set it aside. He could tell I was lying and that it wasn’t nothing.”
I was nearly falling out of my seat. “And then?”
“He asked if he could kiss me. At first I said no. I didn’t want to go back down that path, so I went with the easiest, most hurtful excuse I could think of.”
I grimaced, because I had a feeling that “excuse” had to do with me. “What’d you say?”
“That it would never work between us because he’d loved you and probably still did.” She straightened back up. “I wasn’t going to be anyone’s consolation prize.”
“He didn’t have any feelings for me at that point,” I said. “If you’d asked me, I would’ve told you.”
“He said the same. He still says it. It was a problem for us in the beginning,” she admitted. “Sometimes it still is. It’s hard for me to forget years and years of watching him pine for you.”
“I understand that better than anyone,” I said, setting aside my coffee to stand. I leaned a knee on the seat of my chair, addressing her so she knew I meant what I was saying. “Corbin and I had plenty of time and chances to try to make it work. We never did, and that means something.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m getting over it, most
ly because he tells me every day how much he loves and appreciates me.”
“He says he loves you?” I asked, clasping my hands. “Oh my God.”
Her face was uncharacteristically red as she said, “I can’t take you seriously with that bib on.”
I swiped the towel from my dress and tossed it on the table. “Did you reciprocate? Tell me you’ve said it back to him.”
“I could’ve right there on the deck. You know how charming he is.” She sounded annoyed, but then she smiled. “He got his kiss, and I was in love with him all over again. But I couldn’t tell him. It took me a lot longer to get over the fear that he’d leave once I said I loved him . . . but I eventually did, and he’s still here.”
For not knowing how I felt about this a few minutes ago, I could barely contain my excitement now. “I’m ecstatic.” Filled with awe, I sat back against the table’s edge. “I’m embarrassed I never saw it, and that I wasn’t there for you—but I am now.”
“I’ve been worried about what our friends would say. Mostly you, obviously.”
“You want to know what I think?” I gestured to the backyard. “I’ll go get the officiant right now. We can make this a double wedding like you wouldn’t believe.”
She laughed loudly. “Oh, no. I’m not the marrying kind.”
I rolled my eyes. She’d said that before, but I’d assumed she just hadn’t met the right guy. “You’re telling me Corbin’s okay with no wedding?”
“Yep.” She yawned, clearly in no rush to get down the aisle. Or was it a show? With Val I could never be sure. “We’re doing our thing for now.”
“But think of how much fun we’d have sharing an anniversary.” I picked up my mug, smiling over the rim as I took a sip. “I’d invite you on my honeymoon too, but I’m pretty sure Manning would kill one of us.”
She came over, put my coffee down, and hugged me. “Thanks for being supportive. I swear, I never wanted you to find out today.”
“Oh, I need in on this,” I heard Corbin say a moment before wrapping his long arms around the pair of us. “Are we all good? Val is seventy-five percent moved in to my place, but she wouldn’t take the final plunge without you knowing.”
Something in the Way: A Forbidden Love Saga: The Complete Collection Page 97