by Julia Kent
“If she isn’t in my bed, warming her side, she’s ‘disappeared.’”
“Your side?”
“My third.”
“Much better.”
Mike lowered his voice. “Not the place for this conversation.” A massive grunt and then the slam of four hundred pounds of iron against a padded floor punctuated Mike’s point.
“Definitely not the place. You know a much better location for this talk?”
In unison they said: “The hospital.”
Chapter Eleven
Lydia, Caleb and Miles all crowded around Madge as if she were a china doll.
“Quit treating me like I’m breakable!” she shouted, batting Miles’ hovering hands as she stood up from sitting on the bed.
“But you are, Grandma,” she said in a singsongy voice.
“Who turned you into Captain Kangaroo?”
“Captain Who?”
“Never mind.”
Lydia’s parents were on their way, and then the whole gang, minus Adam and Dan, would accompany Madge to her apartment and get her settled. With Dan and Adam back at the campground after a harrowing travel schedule that had flown them in to Albany and had them rent a car to drive home, Sandy, Pete and Miles had been free to come in and help. Despite her grievous indignation that five people would be required to transport one woman, Madge’s wish to be left alone to take the T home was cheerfully ignored.
Knock knock. Two warm brown eyes met Lydia’s when she looked up, attached to a wide-shouldered, well-toned man’s body under a tucked-in blue Oxford shirt and jeans. Alex. And then—
“Eddie! Thank God you’re here. Get me out of this loony bin.” Madge walked with a spry step, with an over-exaggerated sense of energy. “These people think I’m sick. Take me home and make love to me.”
Everyone avoided everyone’s eyes.
Mwah! Ed planted a relatively chaste kiss on Madge’s lips and Alex squirmed, those powerful arms covered with long sleeves, Lydia’s mind wandering to what he—
Damn it, Lydia. You don’t need three men.
The thought made her chuckle, which made Alex give her a look of curiosity, which made her insides warm up, which made her bat at the flames, because if Jeremy and Mike weren’t enough right now, then she was a true freak.
Already a half-freak, she didn’t need the full monty.
Again with the bad metaphors…
“Hey.” Jeremy’s face appeared from behind Alex, and then—
No.
Hell no.
Mike?
“What are you doing here?” she hissed.
Alex’s face changed to alarm. “I brought my grandpa—”
“Not you.” Head down, eyes tipped up with a schoolmarm’s righteousness, she plowed through the crowd at the threshold, leaving a very confused Alex to step inside, accidentally blocking her. The two performed an impressive do-si-do before she was in the hallway and went all crazy-eyes on Mike.
“Get out of here! My family knows you, right? You asshole! The last thing I need right now with Grandma’s health on the edge is for you to cause a scene.”
Alex stayed in the door way but seemed to be focused on Ed.
“You’re making a scene,” Mike said evenly. “We came here to see you and check in.”
“You ignore my texts,” she said to Jeremy, then turned to Mike, “and think you can invade here?”
“Ignore your texts?” Jeremy fished around in his pocket and pulled out his phone. “Shit. Battery’s dead.” The look he gave her was one of sincere contrition, with just enough self-horror to make her almost laugh.
Almost.
“If my parents show up, what are they going to think?”
“What’s going on—Mike?” Miles walked into the hall, nudging past Alex at the door, his face going from inquisitive to deeply suspicious. His eyes carefully catalogued the scene, resting first on Lydia, combing over Jeremy’s face, and then scrutinizing Mike so meticulously he might have been Benedict Cumberbatch with a bad case of OCD.
What felt like minutes ticked by. Even Alex turned slightly backward, as if sensing the shift in the interactions in the hall.
“Mike. Michael.” Miles said the names slowly. “Not Davis. Bournham. Oh, Jesus,” he muttered. “Mom thought it was a little weird that you paid for the month’s rental in cash.”
“Cash?” Lydia said, giving Mike a look of disdain. “You’re the guy Mom was trying to hook me up with?”
“What’s wrong with cash?” he asked.
“Drug dealers pay for big purchases with cash,” Jeremy said a bit sheepishly. “You tip people off when you do that.” He frowned and turned to Lydia. “What do you mean, your mom tried to hook you up with Mike. But you were with me...”
Lydia didn’t get a chance to answer.
“But not naïve people like Pete and Sandy,” Miles hissed. Lydia watched Miles’ temper go from a 1 to a 7 all too fast. She knew he had no respect for convention and would blow up in this hallway if she didn’t modulate this mess, and do it with as much tact and grace as possible.
Before Pete and Sandy arrived.
She did not need this. Not now. Not ever, but definitely not right now, with Grandma barely recovered, her own location in flux, having slept with two wonderful men in the same week, and not knowing what her future—hell, what the next day—would bring.
Add in Miles losing it on a hospital wing where he was as likely to be kicked out as tranquilized, and she was done.
Done.
As Mike and Miles squared off, their words exchanged in a great haze of white noise, Jeremy ignored them and watched her. Pulling her aside, he quietly asked, “Are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” Her answer felt like it was being sent through jelly.
“No.”
“How many women would be okay after being asked to join a threesome?”
Her voice wasn’t loud enough for the bickering men to hear her, but in the edges of her vision she realized Alex had reacted.
“There must be some trend I’m missing,” he muttered, looking back for a split second at her and Jeremy, and then taking two steps in the room and closing the door.
“Out!” she demanded, pointing at Mike. “You have to leave before Mom and Dad get here. Today is about my grandmother getting home and recovering, not about my family putting two and two together.”
Miles stopped mid-sentence, finger in Mike’s face. “You tell him, Lydia. Get this dick out of here.”
“I’m sleeping with that dick, so you keep your mouth shut, too, Miles.” His mouth went to an O of surprise that she found quite liberating.
“I thought,” he choked out, pointing at Jeremy, “that you were sleeping with him!”
“I am.”
“Both at the same time?” The door to Madge’s room opened and Alex happened to step out as those words were uttered.
“Not yet,” she said through gritted teeth.
“What do you mean, ‘yet’?” Miles yelped. Alex slunk away, mumbling about some woman named Josie and her dating service. Weird guy. Lydia was suddenly glad Grandma had never set them up.
She was getting sick of all men at this rate.
Mike stopped the silly argument with Miles and reached for her hand, which she let go limp. All her energy was draining out of her, every drop needed for Grandma, and now she was wasting herself on people who were fighting over details that meant nothing to her.
“Lydia, we need to talk,” Mike said.
“No, Mike, I need to help my grandmother. You want to talk? Come find me in a few days at the campground.”
“The campground?” Miles and Jeremy said simultaneously, then looked at each other with a move that seemed a little too scripted.
“Yes, the campground. I want you”—she pointed to Mike—“and you, Jeremy, to go. You want me? Come and talk to me in a few days after I’ve cleared my head. I can’t even see straight, much less think straight, because you two have been so blah blah blah abo
ut what you want.”
Breathing hard, she poked Mike’s chest. Miles smiled, a diabolical look. “Go away, Miles,” she said, eyes on Mike. Something in her voice made her brother halt, the grin peeling off.
“Fine. But if you come to the campground, Mike—”
“When,” Mike said.
“If, then you damn well better be prepared to deal with my parents. We don’t take kindly to being invaded.”
Lydia gawked at him. “Could you sound more like something out of Duck Dynasty? ‘Don’t take kindly’? No one in Maine says that.” Her voice dripped with scorn.
Flustered and defeated, Miles just looked down at her and glared. “You’re so busted once Mom and Dad figure out who he really is.”
And he was right.
She didn’t care.
“Get out of here.” Mike and Jeremy exchanged a look, Miles went into Madge’s room and Lydia planted her hands on her hips. “Just go. Please. If you want me to hear you out you have to listen to me, too. Give me what I want.”
“What do you want?” Jeremy asked, a kind and seeking tone in his voice.
“Space.” And with that, she followed Miles, the click of the door behind her a sweet, sweet sound.
Mike looked at Jeremy and found his best friend staring at the door Lydia had just closed, as forlorn as a puppy whose master has left for bed.
Pathetic.
Except he felt the same way. The two turned and started the slow slog to Mike’s car in the parking garage, Mike parsing out what, exactly, he’d done wrong. Coming here had been a gamble, yes, but he’d assumed he could stay hidden, at least until they’d figured everything out with Lydia and could talk about how to explain the truth to Lydia’s parents.
There wasn’t a good truth, though. He’d been deceptive, and had no right to their trust. His own naïveté hit him square between the eyes as he and Jeremy found the car and climbed in.
The Charles’ weren’t the gullible ones.
He’d been deceiving himself the most.
Every nerve, each muscle fiber and neuron, strained against his ever-thinning impulse control to spin around of find her, claim her, convince her, just—
Her.
Respect dictated that he do what she had asked, and all he could do was show her that he was capable of honoring her wishes. Overall, that seemed to be what Lydia needed most.
And what was so very hard to give.
“We blew that one, didn’t we,” Jeremy grumbled as Mike climbed in and started his car.
“What’s this ‘we’ shit?”
“You hid at their family’s campground, lying about your identity, and you think you didn’t screw this up big time?”
Shaking his head as he pulled up to the garage’s exit point, he put his ticket and credit card in the slot. “I don’t know,” he said absent-mindedly.
“Mr. Unequivocally Certain is giving the ‘I don’t know’ bullshit excuse now?”
“If I don’t know something, I’m man enough to admit it.”
“Then you’re a new man, because that wasn’t true two months ago.”
The drive to his apartment was painfully silent.
What the hell am I going to do with myself for a few days? Jeremy wondered. There wasn’t enough lobster, cheesecake, vodka and Lexi Belle movies on the planet to waste that kind of time.
Mike was grim. The drive was torture. He knew their friendship was fine—they’d weathered worse, though generally that involved Jeremy’s problems, not Mike and Jeremy’s shared problem.
Or, so far, not-shared problem.
A tiny voice keened inside, rocking in the corner of his subconscious, terrified that Lydia would reject them both and this was the end. Not facing that was why this was so hard. Sometimes our own mind is the boogeyman. Nightmares come from within.
Fueled and fed by worry and insecurity.
“You want to order Thai?” Mike asked, voice tight but not cold.
“Sure.”
A curt nod, a quick phone call, and then Mike went to his bedroom, turning back before he went in. “You handle the take-out guy?”
Jeremy patted his pockets, finding his wallet. “No problem.”
“I’d imagine a billionaire wouldn’t have a problem covering some satay and noodles.”
Great. This would be the meme for the next few days? Rubbing his money in his face?
Where was the lobster and the pay-per-view button?
“I can manage.” Mike’s voice held that commanding tone that Jeremy hated. Bullshit dominant crap never made him defer, and you’d think Mike would have figured that out by now, but he couldn’t help himself. Too much at stake.
“Apparently.”
Pushing all the macho passive-aggressive crap aside, Jeremy took a good look at his friend. Two days back in the city and he was tense. Both of them were. What had Mike learned about himself this past month? How were they able to morph into wanting Lydia and knowing that so easily?
“Let’s cut through the bullshit. Are you going to be all right?”
Mike almost continued through his doorway. Jeremy saw the hesitation, his eyes taking in how parts of Mike’s back tensed, his shoulders relaxing, a weird hybrid of emotional expression through skin and muscle.
“I don’t know who I am anymore, Jeremy. How can I tell you what I’m feeling?”
“You sound like Lydia.”
That stopped him. “How do you know?”
Shrug. “She talks to me.”
Mike looked at him with a ragged expression of raw need. “I’m glad she talks to one of us like that.”
And then he really did shut the door.
It would have hurt less if he’d slammed it, but instead Jeremy was left to wait for the delivery guy in the echoing silence after a single click, like a bullet sliding into a chamber.
Chapter Twelve
The nerve. What kind of person hides out at her parents’ campground for a month in disguise, and then shows up at the hospital like that?
A guy with balls of steel.
Or Michael Bournham.
Why did her heart have to do the jitterbug when she saw both Jeremy and Mike there, together? As if figuring out what she wanted after last night weren’t enough. Walking out of Mike’s apartment that morning had been heart-wrenching. She’d nearly changed her mind, wanting nothing more than to crawl back under the covers with him and talk.
Talk?
More than talk. But the words he’d spoken to her made life bloom, opening to possibilities she found breathtakingly beautiful. He wanted her. Needed her. And, maybe, loved her.
And she loved him right back.
Jeremy, too.
The drive back to her grandma’s apartment gave her the blessed time to think this through, Jeremy off with Mike and the whole family convening at Madge’s place. As she made the familiar turn off Cambridge Street she was grateful her parking sticker hadn’t expired. Doubly grateful snow hadn’t fallen yet, making parking a game of street Tetris.
As she eased into a spot, glad for a tiny car, she climbed out and found her mom, dad, Caleb, Miles, Ed, and Alex all clustered around Dad’s car, with the distinct sound of a disgusted Madge yammering at them all.
“Get away. All of you. I don’t need eight hands to help me climb out of a sedan. If I’m going to have eight hands on me, they’d better be attached to men wearing butt floss and dollar bills tucked in places not meant for sunlight.”
“Mom,” Sandy groaned.
“All of you need to leave me here with Eddie and Lydia. She’ll take good care me.”
Lydia took that as her invitation to dive in and rescue Grandma. “She’s right.”
“But you don’t live here any more,” Caleb argued. “I do. All that lilac crap is gone from the room now.”
“Let me guess,” she shot back. “Now it looks like the Red Sox threw up in there. With a touch of Dr. Who.”
“I haven’t had a room like that since I was seventeen,” he argued, but she c
ould tell she’d hit a soft spot.
“Five bucks says if I go in there I’ll find a TARDIS on something.”
He pursed his lips and turned away, marching into the apartment. “I’ll make a pot of coffee,” he called back to the group.
“Decaf!” Sandy shouted, then turned to Madge. “You can’t have caffeine for a while,” she explained. “Doctor’s orders.”
“The doctor can go fuck himself.”
“I’m not that well hung,” Alex said to her, deadpan.
The entire group froze in place, Pete’s mouth agog.
“What?” Alex asked, clearly embarrassed. “Everyone else can make jokes but I can’t?”
“You have the biggest joke of all, dear,” Madge said, patting his cheek.
Puzzled, he frowned and asked, “What’s that?”
“That girlfriend of yours.”
Lydia snorted.
Madge turned to her with raised eyebrows. “As if yours is better? Now you’ve got two of them hunting you down. The one with the glowing green eyes and the geeky Viking.”
Alex smirked.
“And your girlfriend knows all about threesomes,” she added, pointing to Lydia, then Alex. “Maybe you should introduce them to each other.”
Sandy, Pete, and Miles stared pointedly at Alex, who protested. “My girlfriend knows nothing...no...we’re not...not that there’s anything wrong with that, but we’re not in a threesome.”
Knowing she could get bitten, hard, by Grandma, she rescued Alex—and herself—nonetheless, patting Madge’s shoulder and looking pointedly at her mom and dad. “I think Grandma’s medicine is having a cognitive effect,” she said softly, twirling a finger around her own ear.
Pete leaped at the chance to believe that, his face flooding with relief.
“Right. So Josie works at that threesome dating service for shits and giggles,” Madge said.
Lydia caught Pete’s eye and mouthed, “Crazy!”
“Let’s get you a glass of water and your slippers,” Sandy said, shaking her head slowly and exchanging bemused looks with her husband.
“I want all of you to leave me and Ed and Lydia alone,” Madge insisted as she stood next to the car and began walking to her apartment with determined, if slow, steps. It pained Lydia to see her moving turtle-like, through her back was ramrod straight, eyes alert, aware, and very pissed.