by Ava Moreau
Right now, he wanted to finish this drink.
Also, he wanted Becca. He was pretty clear on that.
Also, he didn’t want his best friend to leave.
Also, he didn’t want his best friend to hate him.
Oh, yeah. That’s where it got complicated.
He finished his drink. There was one job off his list.
Next up, he was going to have to talk to Becca. That’s all there was to it. Maybe she’d laugh it off. Maybe their time together had meant something to him that it didn’t for her. But he had to know for sure, so he could move to the next thing, which was figuring out how to fix things between him and Trent. If he knew for sure whether Becca was interested or not, that next part would be easier. Right?
But…maybe one more drink to work up the nerve to see her again. He called the bartender over.
Jack was a big guy, but three shots (he’d ended up asking for one more, for courage) made him a little nervous about driving. He looked at the truck keys in his hand. Yeah. Maybe that wasn’t the smartest idea.
So even though he wanted to rush right over to Becca’s, he couldn’t. It wasn’t like Myers Lake had a cab company or anything, and the last thing he’d want to do is ask somebody for a ride, because then he’d have to explain where he was going (and why he was unsteady on his feet, this time of the afternoon). He’d have to walk it off. That was fine. A little physical activity was good for clearing the head.
But he didn’t get far.
“What are you doing downtown?” asked a familiar voice.
When he turned, he realized he had passed by the florist, and here was Sarah, standing in the door, an apron covering her clothes, and a bundle of flower-less stems in her hand.
“Oh, hey,” he said. Yeah, that sounded intelligent.
“I thought you were helping Becca pack all that stuff up. Is she done already? I thought she was going to call when she finished.”
Shit, what do I say? The one thing Jack was no good at, was lying. His whole life, women had told him his face was too honest, and gave everything away.
“I don’t know if she’s done yet or not,” he said.
“Well, clearly not, because you’re here, and she’s at the house. Did you get a lot of stuff hauled?”
“Uh…”
Sarah stared at him a second and shook her head. “You don’t know if you hauled anything? Wait a second…have you been drinking?”
“No! No, of course not. I…no.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m going to call her.”
“No, you don’t have to do that, no, I was just on my way over there.”
“In your condition?”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“You’re clearly not. You came from the direction of Snuffy’s.” She came up close to him and sniffed. “Just as I thought. You abandoned my sister when she needed you, and went off for a drink. I can’t believe you, Jack.”
“I’m telling the truth, I was going to swing back over there soon,” he said.
“Well, you can come with me, then. Hopefully Trent is being more help than you are. Give me a second to get my keys.”
Jack’s heart sank. This isn’t the way he wanted it to go at all. He had envisioned driving boldly up to the house, marching in and declaring his interest in Becca. Naturally she would be interested too, and she’d shed whatever she was wearing, and they’d do it on the bare wood floors. And the stairs. And maybe out in the yard.
Now it wasn’t going to go that way at all. There was no way he could confess how he felt, with Sarah there. Worse…what if Becca explained why she was at the house by herself? She wouldn’t. Surely she wouldn’t. No way would she tell Sarah about the threesome from this morning.
Threesome in the sense that you sucked Trent’s—
Okay, okay, remember rule one, that never happened.
Glumly he got into Sarah’s car and let himself be chauffeured to Becca’s.
However, an idea occurred to him, as she drove them in the direction of their family home. Who would know Becca better than her sister? Who would know her likes and dislikes, her taste in men? Jack could ask Sarah about her…get a better idea of his chances.
“Is Trent still there?” Sarah interrupted his thoughts. “Or did he bail on her too?”
“Nah, I dropped him at his house. Listen, though, let me ask you—”
“I can’t believe you two. Why did you volunteer to help, if you were just going to ditch her? I may not agree with all the choices Becca makes in life, but I was happy she came down to help take care of things. Once we get that house on the market, it’s going to help Mom and Dad—”
“She’s pretty committed to her life in the city,” said Jack. He’d meant it as a question, but it came out as a statement.
Sarah silently nodded. “That she is. She’s always had this vision of herself as a successful businesswoman. I’ll give her this, I don’t know anybody who has worked as hard as she has, to achieve her dreams. She’s like the shining example of all those career development lectures they gave us back in high school.”
Jack laughed at the unexpected memory. “I’d forgotten all that stuff. All those aptitude tests.”
“Why did they even give us those things? Half our class got told their skills made them suitable to be nurses or retail workers.”
“My test suggested I go into carpentry or welding,” said Jack.
“But they kept pushing it like we might all be lawyers and CEOs one day. Hell, I don’t know, if any of us do succeed like that, it’ll be Becca.”
“And Trent,” said Jack sadly.
“Trent? Oh, he’s an odd one,” said Sarah. “I never understood why he stayed in town. He’s like the anti-Becca. All the skill, all the dreams…but he never left.”
Yeah, because he didn’t want to abandon his best friend, Jack thought, with a wave of guilt washing over him.
I’ve been holding him back all this time.
He thought about the pain in Trent’s voice, when he’d confessed about getting the job offer in Corinth.
He hadn’t been keeping a secret from me. Not like that. He just couldn’t figure out how to tell me that he finally had to make a choice between our old life and his dreams.
Suddenly he felt really bad about that fight. Fighting over Becca, when everything that had bonded them together since they were kids was at stake.
They pulled into Becca’s driveway, next to the rental car. “Now this time, you’ve got to stay and help,” Sarah said.
He’d pictured them standing on the porch and knocking. But of course, this was Sarah’s house too. She had the keys. She unlocked the door and let them in.
“Becca? It’s me!” she called. “I brought back your lousy helper!”
A startled cry from upstairs, a moment’s pause, and then Becca appeared at the head of the stairs. Wrapped in a blanket. And clearly nothing else.
Jack’s cock immediately began throbbing at the sight.
“Holy shit!” Becca said. “I didn’t expect to see you here!”
“What are you doing?” asked Sarah. “That doesn’t look like packing!”
“Oh, I had to throw my clothes into the wash.”
“You did? Why?”
Jack understood in a split second why she was washing her clothes; his jeans were still kind of itchy from putting them on when his legs were wet from the lake. But how to explain that to Sarah, who thought they’d been here all morning packing?
Becca cast him a panicked look. “I…I just…”
“It was her coffee,” said Jack.
“What now?” asked Sarah.
“While we were helping her, she spilled her latte. Big mess. It just got everywhere. She didn’t bring a change of clothes, so had to wash her stuff…so she kicked us out of the house.”
He had no idea if that sounded convincing or not. Sarah looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she nodded.
He realized, she must have seen his discomfort and thought he was bas
hful about being here with a nude Becca.
“Well hell, Jack, why didn’t you say that to begin with back in town? And why the hell were you drinking? And why wasn’t Trent with you?”
It would’ve been hard enough to think, even if Becca hadn’t been right up there, her blanket draped over her like a toga, her naked body just underneath, out of sight but so obviously there, its ripeness almost calling out for him…
Fortunately, Becca at least had some common sense. “Damn, Sarah, why the third degree? Jack, the dryer is going to be another ten minutes or so…I guess if you want to wait down here, Sarah can bring my stuff up to me?”
“Let me see how much you’ve gotten done so far,” Sarah said, and marched up the stairs, leaving Jack alone.
This was not going how he planned at all.
13
You haven’t gotten a damned thing organized!” said Sarah, her hands on her hips, inspecting the room like their mom used to do.
The whole thing felt so similar to Becca’s childhood that she felt a moment’s vertigo over it, like she was suddenly much smaller.
Still, her reasons for not getting things done…the fact she hadn’t even been here much today…she couldn’t exactly explain that to her sister, even though Sarah seemed to demand an explanation.
“I know,” Becca said. “I’m working on it.”
“Are you? Are you? Because this is so important, Becca. You have to get this room cleared out so we can sell the place, and I know you don’t care, I know it doesn’t matter to you, with your perfect life up in the city, but—”
Ah, there it was. This had less to do with her room than it did her decision to break with family tradition, to leave Myers Lake. In Sarah’s voice, she could hear the jealousy and disappointment. But this wasn’t a fight they needed to have. None of this was Becca’s problem, not really. She’d offered time and again to have it all packed up, shoved into storage for some unspecified future date when she’d finally have time to confront Sarah’s feelings about her life.
“Okay, look,” she said. “You’re not going to stand there and berate me for not cleaning my room. I’m not a kid, Sarah, and you’re not Mom.”
“I just don’t understand why you can’t—”
“I’ve tried to be practical about this. I don’t know why you needed me here, in person, to do this. But here I am. I’m doing what you asked me to. Sarah, really. Look at me. Back in Myers Lake. If I’m not going fast enough for your tastes, I’m sorry. But it’ll get done.”
Sarah gave her a look somewhere between annoyance and sympathy. She started to say something else, when they both heard the dryer ding downstairs.
“There, see?” said Becca. “Nice clean clothes so I can get back to packing.”
But as she walked to the bedroom door, Sarah stopped her. “Um…you’re naked under that blanket.”
“Well, yes. That’s because my clothes are downstairs. As we established.”
Sarah shook her head. “Jack is downstairs too. I don’t know how you people do things in the city, but down here, we have a little human decency. We don’t parade our bodies in front of men.”
Yeah, right, if you only knew. The fact that Jack was downstairs was as agonizing as it was confusing. Why had he come back? Why did he seem tipsy?
“Fine then,” she said. “Fetch me my clothing.”
Sarah rolled her eyes and headed down. Becca heard the murmuring of voices, and then Jack’s hearty laugh.
A stab of jealousy: Don’t laugh at my sister’s jokes. She’s probably joking about me, isn’t she?
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she told herself. Jealousy? Over Jack? A one-night stand? Not even that, a one-morning stand! She had to get over it, get past it, get her job done and then get back to the city.
But she was interrupted in these thoughts. She heard another voice. Trent? You showed up too?
Things sounded tense. She left her room, and went back to the head of the stairs, so she could look down without being seen.
It was just the two men; Sarah must have gone on to the laundry room.
“I sure as hell didn’t expect to see you here,” said Jack.
“Likewise,” said Trent. “Where’s your truck?”
“Never mind that, why are you showing up here behind my back? I thought we’d agreed—”
“We didn’t agree to anything. You told me to stay away from Becca, and I said that wasn’t fair. That’s not an agreement.”
They had a fight, she realized, still in her hiding place atop the stairs. They were practically at each others’ throats. There was so much testosterone in their body language. Trent wasn’t a big pushy kind of guy, but looked coiled and ready to strike, while Jack was like a steamroller ready to crush anything in his way. They hadn’t come to blows yet, but were verbally circling each other, trying to see how far they’d need to take this battle.
They were fighting over her. It took a minute to settle in. At first she felt like scoffing…but then, it was strangely alluring, wasn’t it? Two warriors going to battle over her. Their attraction, their lust, so overwhelming that it was too big for anyone else in the world to even look at her. Any competitor must be destroyed…even if it was your best friend.
She shook her head. Boys. I swear. It was ridiculous. She wasn’t here to be fought over. This wasn’t the middle ages, she wasn’t some damsel who needed knights jousting at each other over her.
Although they certainly knew what to do with their lances…
That’s what she kept coming back to. Even though in her world men didn’t fight over you, even though that seemed hopelessly old-fashioned and retrograde, there was something fascinating in it. Something primal that stirred a desire in her, a desire she wasn’t sure she could admit to anyone else. It went beyond the simple ego-boost of knowing a couple of incredibly hot men were going to come to blows over you, and touched something deeper.
But she couldn’t think about it now. She couldn’t. Their fight was useless. She was leaving soon, and she didn’t have time for a boyfriend in her life, and as exciting and fun as this morning had been, it couldn’t change her life. It couldn’t change her mind. She had things to do, goals to reach, and that’s what was most important.
Then why are you so eager for your sister to leave, so you can be alone with them again? Why does the thought of seeing them again, all masculine and angry, make your skin tingle?
Sarah came out of the laundry room, and Becca ducked back inside her bedroom. She heard Sarah’s lecturing tone, even though she couldn’t make out the words. She could just imagine it, though. How could you boys just abandon Becca, you were here to keep her on task, you sit on her if that’s what it takes to get her to finish her work.
She could imagine their cowed looks, after Sarah got done with them. Then Sarah’s footstep was on the stair.
“Here are your things,” her sister said, carrying in the clothes.
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t see any panties in there,” Sarah said. “I looked all over the dryer, checked the lint trap in case they somehow got stuck—”
Becca could only hope that she wasn’t blushing as much as it felt like she was, thinking of how her underwear was sinking to the bottom of Myers Lake now, torn and useless.
Because these two guys don’t let anything get in their way, when they want something.
“Mysteries of laundry,” said Becca. “Maybe they’re stuck in the legs of the jeans or something. Anyway, thank you for bringing it all to me. I promise I’m going to be good and clean my room.”
Sarah looked at her steadily for a moment. “All right. Good, because I’m missing work to be here. It’s a crazy day, and I can’t afford to be away from the flowers for even a second.”
“I’ll call you when I’m all done.”
“Okay. Also… Becca, I don’t know how to bring this up.”
“Oh no, what now?”
“No, no, it’s nothing about you. It’s them,” she said, gest
uring at the downstairs. “I don’t know what’s gotten into those boys, but they’re acting funny. Like a couple of tom-cats about to start sparring. I hope I didn’t make a mistake, getting them to help you. Hopefully they’re not getting any big ideas about you.”
“Oh, I’m sure they’re not,” said Becca. “They know I’m headed out of town shortly. I am not on the market.”
“Yeah, but you never know with men. Sometimes they don’t understand subtlety. If you need to roll up a newspaper and bop them on the nose, you have my blessing.”
Becca was surprised that Sarah wrapped her arms around her and gave her a hug.
“I love you, little sis,” Sarah said. “Finish this up, and maybe we can go out later. I feel like I haven’t seen you in a thousand years.”
“I’d like that,” said Becca, realizing she meant it honestly. She did want to talk to her sister, to catch up…to do anything except talk about the topics they’d been circling around all this time, her leaving for the city, her life apart from her family, all the things that made conversation with Sarah so uncomfortable.
But then Sarah was gone. She heard one more lecture being given to the boys, and then heard Sarah’s car starting.
Maybe I’ll just rush downstairs naked. How’s that for clearly communicating that I’m off the market? I’ll let them have me right there on the floor, and—
And no fucking way. That was the path that led to madness. To not reaching one’s life goals.
“Be sensible,” she told herself, as she pulled on her warm, dry clothes. “You’re here to do a job, and that’s all.”
14
Trent wished things would calm down enough that he could have a minute to think. From the minute he’d decided to come back to Becca’s, his thoughts had been a swirl of confusion. First Sarah’s car had been here, and he’d realized things might get awkward. Then he’d seen Jack was here too.
He’d been shocked that his best friend would just show up, without talking to him about it first. Shocked that Jack would assume his chance with Becca was more important than his friendship. It was a betrayal, if you really thought about it, one that was as enraging as it was unprecedented, and…