by Lindsey Hart
She’d put four years of distance between them, hoping to leave Ross in the past. Hoping to move on. Hoping to forget. She’d had one taste of him and instead of being able to put it all aside, she burned furious, bright, bright enough to consume them both. This was her Ross. The boy she’d admired when she was just a kid herself. The boy she’d looked up to. Ross, her first crush. Ross, her always crush. The very same Ross who she’d tortured herself watching live his life without her, at least not in that way. He’d dated so many other girls. He was the high school football team’s quarterback. He was the most popular kid in school. He could do no wrong. Teachers gave him better grades so he could keep playing football, he was that good. He was tough. He was untouchable. He was everything she wanted but would always be just out of reach.
He was still the same Ross. The Ross who everyone saw and thought they knew, but who no one truly knew at all. The Ross with a soft heart beneath all the charisma and the bravado and the asshole, nonchalant, hero act. The Ross that never made himself vulnerable with anyone because that was probably his biggest fear. Wasn’t it everyone’s? Letting someone into the very core of them? Opening themselves up to the possibility of being forever shattered?
It was hers. She’d tried. She’d tried to tell him, that night before prom. To explain. It all came out wrong. She’d hurt herself and she’d hurt him in the process. Only, she’d never stopped to realize just how badly she’d scarred his heart with her stupid request. She hadn’t stopped to see his side of things. To realize, that, beneath that exterior, there was a heart that was so much more bruised and fragile than she ever would have known. Than anyone would have known or guessed.
“Ross…” She tried again, but the words wouldn’t come. Probably because there was nothing to say.
When he shifted, she turned to study him. The agony on his face broke her, shattered her, put her back together all wrong. This was a Ross she didn’t know. A Ross she’d never seen.
His hands came up, the knuckles bruised and bloody, the palms smooth and lined. She’d touched him so few times over the course of her life. Only when necessary. Or in play. Never like this.
Those hands, strong hands, blazing with heat and life, a little rough at the fingertips, cupped her cheeks. She didn’t pull away. Not when Ross tugged her to him. Not when he smashed his lips to hers.
The kiss was sad. It was sad and it was desperate. It was starving and hungry and vital, and still, she couldn’t stop. It was wrong. It was all wrong. This wasn’t how she wanted him but then again, the alley wasn’t how she wanted him either, and she’d more than let it happen.
He wanted comfort, not her. He wanted assurance, not her. Not Alix. She was there. She was just there at the wrong place at the right time. She knew they were both going to hurt after. Worse than they were already hurting, but she didn’t pull away. She didn’t shove back and give him a lecture about all the reasons it was wrong, and they couldn’t.
Instead, she drowned herself in him. Lost herself in his kiss. The feel of his tongue on hers. The warmth of his mouth. The sweet softness of his lips. The way his hands felt on her face, holding her there while he plundered her mouth. The metallic bloom of blood and the sharp sting when he bit her. The soothing of his tongue over the wound as he licked it away. The moans he ate up. The groans she swallowed down her own throat.
It was bliss. It was heaven. It was a lie and it was the truth. It felt so right, even if it was all wrong.
She let him blister her mouth before she broke away, panting. “Ross, we can’t. I can’t. Not like this. This isn’t what you need. This- you’re hurting. You’re scared. Everything is falling apart. You need a friend. I know that’s not me. That it’s always been Chance, but if you need it, I’m here. I’ll stay.”
He stared at her. Just kept staring. Unblinking. Staring and staring.
Ross, this new Ross, wasn’t a jock. He wasn’t the guy who half the teachers covered for just so he could keep playing football. He wasn’t that guy, the guy who was always the center of attention. He wasn’t the clown he was when he was with Chance. Up on the tower, his heart bleeding out all over the place, maybe he was just who he always was. And maybe all the parts of him that she’d crushed on and later, fallen in love with, were leaping to the surface instead of being smashed down.
“Look, Ross…”
“It’s okay.” He leaned back against the tower, refusing to look at her. “I get it.”
“I don’t think you do.” She leaned back too, ramming her back and shoulders up against the unyielding metal. Life sometimes felt a lot like that. Like if you punched at it, it punched back and all you got was bloodied, shredded knuckles. “I know we haven’t ever really been friends. I mean it though. If you need someone to talk to, I’m here. I’ll be here. If it’s Chance you need, I’ll go and get him. Anything. I- I just- we- don’t need to confuse things. I don’t want to be a distraction.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m sorry. Not because of this. But because I never saw what happened from your perspective. Can this be a real truce?”
He stared at her outstretched hand for a long while. “Yeah,” he finally breathed. His shoulders curled in a little, like saying the word hurt. Like he was deflating because he didn’t have the strength to hold himself up and be that same unflappable heart breaker who didn’t take life seriously, anymore. “Truce.”
They sat in silence, their shoulders almost touching, but not quite. His heat bled into her. She left it like that, for a long time, until the silence shifted and became loaded and unbearable. Then she turned her head and rested it gently on Ross’s shoulder. His shoulders were massive. He always looked like he was walking around with football gear on. That was one of the first physical things she’d noticed about him when she was thirteen. How he was gorgeous because he was huge. Fierce. How he was built like a man at seventeen, and before that even. He topped six feet at sixteen and kept growing and filling out.
Her attention, the things she noticed about him, his beauty, finally hit home when she woke up and realized her brother’s friend wasn’t just an obnoxious teenage boy. He was also gorgeous. Real. Raw. Masculine. He’d changed and she was bound to sit up and notice some time.
“Ross?” She mumbled, waiting for his response.
“Hmm?”
“Your mom- she’s- she’s a brave lady. This is crazy, but if anyone can kick this shit, she can. She’s the one person on earth you’d actually believe when she spouts that nonsense that looks like a banner quote on social media.”
He snorted, and she took that as a good sign.
“She’s always telling people to seize the day and really live it. That there won’t be another day like today, even if tomorrow is better. That if all we live for is tomorrow, all our tomorrows are going to be is a big stack of regrets about yesterday. She told me, one day, when I was sixteen and my parents were gone for three weeks, that I shouldn’t doubt that I was loved. I didn’t even tell her how I felt when they left. How Chance and I both basically felt abandoned. She just knew. She got it. She made me feel loved. She baked those cherry cupcakes she knew I liked. She’s strong. She’s so strong. She’s the backbone of your whole family. There’s no way she’ll go out and make your dad try and survive without her. He wouldn’t make it. He can’t even wash his own socks.”
Ross snorted again, but it was sadder sounding. “I know.”
His shoulder heaved under her head and even though her heart ached, her whole body tightened, and heat filtered through every single nerve ending she had. Her heart kicked up in her chest, swelling and aching all at the same time. She wished she could turn off her attraction to Ross, the things he did to her body, but she couldn’t now any more than she could before, when she’d tried so hard.
“That’s the worst part.” His voice was husky and raw in her ear. “If something happens to her, I know dad won’t be fine. I won’t be either. She’s the glue. She’s the glue holding us together. As a family. As people. She has to be okay. There isn�
�t another option.”
“She’d laugh if she heard you talk like that. She’d tell you to start doing your own laundry and take some cooking classes and learn how to be just fine on your own. She’d give you that push, even if it wasn’t what you wanted to hear or how you wanted to hear it.”
“She’d give me a kick up the ass is what you’re trying to say.”
Alix fought a sad smile. “Yeah. She would.” A shudder vibrated up and down her spine. “I don’t know what I would do if it was my mom or dad. I know they’ve always tried to be there in their own way. I know they’ve done the best they can and that they love me and Chance. We’re a family. For better or worse.”
“We are too. And it’s always been better.”
Ross leaned forward and bowed his head. He scrubbed at his face but left his hands there. Even though her hand trembled, she set it on his back and rubbed it in small circles, offering comfort the only way she could. She felt like the entire world had turned upside down in the last hour. She’d come to the tower because she wanted to be alone. Because her parents were out on a date with each other- yes, they still did that- and Chance was MIA, probably out with his flavor of the week.
She’d gone to think, about Ross and what happened in the alley. About making a real truce, because after she calmed down, she realized she didn’t want to spend all her time fighting and holding grudges. That wasn’t where she wanted to be. It wasn’t who she wanted to be.
She’d never imagined that her evening would end up like this. Her turning down the one man she always wanted when he actually wanted her back. Them sitting up there like the old friends they never really were, more connected in that moment than she swore she’d been with anyone in her entire life. It was painful. It was raw. It was also the most honest she’d ever been with him. With herself. The most she’d seen Ross open up and actually feel. She always knew it was there. She just wished that the transparency she’d craved could have come with happier circumstances.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said, even though she was pretty sure it wasn’t. She had to hope. They all had to hope. What else could they do? “You have to be strong. For her.”
“I don’t know if I can be. When she told me, I couldn’t stand there and take it. I couldn’t listen to her tell me that she’s sorry or see the fear in her eyes. I was just so fucking angry. Why couldn’t it happen to someone else? Some evil fucking person?”
Alix shook her head. She looped her arm around Ross’s shoulders, even though it pathetically only went halfway. He was so huge, so broad, so masculine up close, and she was so small in comparison. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been lucky enough to graze his finger or catch his scent in passing.
Maybe she needed to go away. She needed to grow the hell up. She hadn’t got that memo when she got home, making demands and crazy conditions on something that should come naturally. She got it now. If this was all she was meant for, then it was the most painful role she’d ever play, but she’d do it. She’d be Ross’s friend.
“I’m here,” she said again. “Me and Chance both are. And my parents. If you want to keep this a secret again, I understand, but I know, and I’m not going anywhere.”
Ross leaned into her, just a fraction. They both stared out at the shimmering, shifting horizon. Below them, a world went on. A world went on without them. People hurt. People ached. People laughed and cried. They lived and they died. Life was shitty and broken and so beautiful that it hurt, all at their feet.
“I’m sorry I called you a bitch.”
“I’m sorry I was one.”
Ross sighed. She did too.
“Come over. I’ll bandage up your knuckles and give you some ice. You shouldn’t go home bloody like that. It will upset your mom.”
“Your parents aren’t home?”
“Are they ever?” It was said without heat, more affectionately than anything. It was really one of the first times she hadn’t been bitter about being forgotten. She’d never really stopped to realize that most people who had been together for three decades and raised two kids, didn’t bother keeping the fire alive.
“Mom will be okay. She’ll understand.”
“Are you sure?”
Ross finally turned. Her arm fell away when he did and she shifted back, giving him space. He wasn’t crying, but his eyes were red-rimmed and he looked exhausted. Broken in a way she’d never seen him before.
“Yeah. Thanks, Alix Bear.” He unfolded himself from the hard metal platform, slowly, like he’d aged a thousand years sitting there.
Her heart ached and fluttered in her chest all at once. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Ross walked over the edge and threw a leg over the railing. “I will,” he called, right before he disappeared from view and left her with the dull clang and bang of him scaling his way to the bottom.
Alix leaned back, listening to the crunch of Ross’s steps on the street below. She watched him slide in his car, watched his headlights flare to life, watched him drive away.
Her heart was still fluttering. Her palms grew damp. She could still feel the lingering warmth of his heat leaching into her shoulder. Still smell his dark, spicy, maleness in the air around them. Her lips tingled with the roughness of his kiss. The echo of his pain filled up the night around her.
He wouldn’t have meant it before. He never would have confided in her. He’d been there for less than an hour, but their whole lives had shifted. He wasn’t the same Ross he was from this morning. And she wasn’t the Alix she’d been when she got up here.
She didn’t know what that meant. She realized how little she knew about anything.
All she could do was sit up there and send out her hopes to the universe.
CHAPTER 10
Alix
It turned out Ross meant it.
Evelyn was proud. She wanted as few people to know as possible. She did her best, going through rounds of chemo and radiation, taking it all with a smile while hiding the pain, the nausea, the fatigue, the hopelessness and the fear.
The Rivers didn’t tell anyone. Not even Alix’s own mom. Ross’s dad, Dale, took Evelyn to her treatments when he could. He was a financial analyst and she didn’t want him to give up his work, even though they had enough money to retire. He loved his job and she loved the normalcy it brought to their lives. She was changing. Everything was changing. She wanted as many things to stay the same as possible. The rest of the time, she and Ross took Evelyn together.
Alix was stunned when Ross texted her the first time. He’d confessed to her that he couldn’t do it alone. He needed someone. Not her. Someone. He’d literally typed the word. She didn’t care. If he wanted someone, she could be his someone.
For weeks, they took Evelyn between home and the hospital. She never followed them in when they got back. She knew without even asking that it was too intimate a thing, to be in their home, watching Ross care for Evelyn when she was at her worst. Their home was their sanctuary, where they could come apart, fall apart, break apart in private. Where they could do it together without the world intruding.
It was a Monday morning, nine grueling weeks since she’d first arrived home. Summer had come and gone. She’d barely noticed its passing. Her own family got on with it. She became very good at faking it. At telling them she was going out with friends, going job hunting, blah, blah blah. It was the first time ever that she was glad that her parents were rarely around, and Chance was busy with his own life.
She would have been enraged at them for not even noticing that someone else’s world was caving in, but Ross stopped by the house. Evelyn called a few times and made excuses. It was her parent’s busy time, gearing up to do their trade shows again, since it was becoming more and more apparent that they were never going to stop selling RV’s.
Though it was mid-August, the heat blanketing the city was still as unrelenting as ever. Alix stood alone in her parent’s kitchen in front of the blender, combining things sh
e’d found in the fridge for an attempt at a smoothie. She wasn’t sure if carrots could be mixed in with everything else, but she decided to give it a try, seeing as her mom had just splurged on one of those fancy blenders that were supposed to work kitchen miracles.
Apparently, pureeing a carrot was one of them.
She was about to throw in a banana and half a can of dubious looking pineapple she’d found shoved halfway to the back of the fridge when her phone dinged.
Pretty much the only person who ever texted her anymore was Ross. She dropped everything and lunged for it.
Just met with mom’s doctors. It’s good news. The cancer treatment is responding well. They can’t believe it either. It’s almost completely gone. A few more treatments and they’re hopeful that she’ll be back in remission. It’s pretty much a #fuckingmiracle.
She grinned to herself. That was so Ross. She typed back a response before she even thought about it.
OMG! OMG! Seriously! That is THE BEST news! I’m so ridiculously happy for your mom! And you. And your dad. We should do something to celebrate.
Her phone dinged a minute later.
She’s not out of the woods yet.
Right. She nodded her head in the kitchen, holding her phone, in the middle of making a massive mess trying to put together a stupid smoothie. She was standing there nodding and grinning like a fool and she didn’t even care. Not one bit.
Right. Well, still! Is there anything I can get her? Can I make her cupcakes and bring them over?
Ross responded almost right away.
She doesn’t have much of an appetite still, but I think she’d like that.
Alix’s fingers flew.
Okay. I’m sorry, they’re going to be from a box mix. I’m not talented like she is.
She could practically see Ross grinning at her through the phone when she read his response.