by E. M. Moore
He shakes his head. “No one who really knows you though.”
“I think I forgot about that fact,” I tell him. This is the moment for me to be completely honest about everything. I pushed these guys away. I pretty much ensured that they’d battle their way back into my life. “I forgot how well you guys knew me. I know now. In my head, I believed you were just Brady’s friends, but maybe…” I hesitate because if I’m wrong about this, it might break me. “Maybe you were my friends too?”
He turns toward me. He reaches his hand out, pulling me by the shoulder into an embrace that warms me from the inside. I feel the brush of his lips on the top of my head, and I shiver. “You were always our friend too.” He pulls away, but he doesn’t get very far and not just because my hands are around his waist now. I don’t want to let him go. He slides his hands through the hair above my ear and cups the back of my head. “I have something to confess.” Pausing for a moment, he looks away, but when he faces me fully again, his green gaze is hard, confident and sexy as hell. “I wanted to be more than a friend, Briar.” He takes a deep breath, brushing his chest over mine. My nipples harden at the contact. “It started late Freshman year. You just…grew up. I don’t know if it’s because you were all of a sudden in the same grade as us, but you weren’t the little sister anymore. You weren’t even one of us to me, you were more.”
My lips tingle. He keeps glancing at them, making me acutely aware that they’re there and ready for him to claim. The feeling spreads, and my whole body buzzes with anticipation. I think Reid fucking Parker is going to kiss me out here under the prettiest sunset I’ve seen in a while. Although, I haven’t been looking for the pretty in my life lately. Maybe that’s all about to change right now.
He grips me hard. “God, I want you.” He shifts his hips closer to me, and I can feel how much he means that. He’s rock hard, and with just that motion, he’s already fanning the embers in my core.
I lick my lips in preparation to say something, but how do you tell the guy you’ve been friends with your whole life that you’d like to see if there’s something more there? Reid seems to be going with the straight on approach, but I just can’t seem to get the words to come out of my mouth.
He curses low under his breath. His fingers keep moving over my hair like he’s cherishing me. “I should tell you though.” He licks his lips and stares down at me hesitantly. “Your brother didn’t want me to pursue you.”
I stare into his green eyes, feeling their pull. Wait. What?
Reid swallows. “I would hate myself forever if I didn’t tell you that.”
“Brady knew? He knew you liked me?”
Reid nods. “I wasn’t going to move on his sister without telling him first. That’d be a dick move.”
“And he said no.” I don’t even pose it as a question because I can see Brady saying that. I don’t know his reasons. I’ll never know his reasons, but when Brady was adamant about something, he stuck to his guns no matter what. He was a bit stubborn in that way. I guess our whole family is.
“Why?”
His jaw hardens. “Look at me,” he says. “I’m not good enough for you. You’re super smart. You’re going to college to pull off some Bill Gates shit, and the only reason I’d be getting out of Spring Hill is because I’m a muscle head.”
“That’s what Brady said?” I ask, disbelieving. Brady loved Reid. There’s no way he’d put him down like that.
He shakes his head. “Not in so many words. He actually wouldn’t really say why, just that he didn’t think it was a good idea.”
I pull him toward me. “It was probably just an older brother thing then. Maybe he didn’t want to lose you to me.”
Reid dismisses that idea with a quick shake of his head. “We’ll never know, I guess. I dropped it after that, even though he watched me like a hawk around you. I didn’t mean to fall into it with you again, Briar, I swear. But when you were so lonely, so broken up and you needed somebody, I couldn’t stay away.”
My hands move up his sides. “I’m glad you didn’t.” I don’t want to think about where the hell I’d be if Lex, Reid, and Cade hadn’t forced themselves back into my life.
He shakes his head and steps away. He’s clearly still stuck on something. “I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve even talked to Lex about it. You should just be with him. He likes you. Really likes you, and we all know he’s the better person out of all of us. Hell, he’s like Mother Theresa in football pads.”
Bile rises in my throat. It tastes like slow boiling anger. “Maybe I’ll go be with Cade,” I offer.
Reid practically growls at that, but he’s not fazing me anymore. Shrugging, he says, “He’s probably better for you than me too.”
This is just so surreal. “How can the most popular guy at SHH have such a terrible opinion of himself?”
Reid lets go of me and forcibly steps back. “I have football, that’s it.”
“That’s it? It’s only the most important thing in Spring Hill, Reid. You’re acting like you’re some dumb jock, but you’re not. You’re a leader. You’re—.”
“Stop,” he snarls at me.
He turns to walk away, but I walk up to him and shove him in the back. I’m not one for physical violence, but this all stems from when we were kids. I used to like to play rough with them, which sounds dirtier than it is. Sometimes you just have to do what you have to do to get their attention. He stumbles a few steps, probably only because he was taken off guard. He turns around slowly. I place my hands on my hips. “You’re loyal. You’re smart. You loved my brother so much that you made sure I was fine, even when I pushed back and pushed back. You have real talent, Reid. Not just Spring Hill talent, but you could go so far. Being gifted at a sport is impressive.”
He walks straight toward me and gets in my face. “Then why does none of that seem to matter if my best friend couldn’t even trust me with his sister?”
I suck in a breath. There’s betrayal in his eyes. Wow. Brady really hurt him. I’m gathering that all this happened a long time ago, but it hurts Reid to this day, and now look. Reid will never get his answers. He’ll never know why Brady said no.
“I trust you,” I say. I move forward pressing my lips to his. It’s an awkward exchange of pressed lips until Reid takes over. His resolve seems to crumble after a moment of hesitation. Then, he wraps his arms around me and pulls me closer, angling his head to deepen the kiss. His skilled tongue passes over the seam of my lips until I open for him. It’s a free-for-all then. Our kiss seems to mimic Reid’s inner turmoil. One second, it’s passionate and all-out, kissing me with months of pent-up feelings. Then, it’s slower, more cautious, like he thinks this will be our last kiss and he just wants to savor it while he can, imprinting it on his memory.
If I have anything to say about it, it definitely won’t be our last kiss. This was what I was missing these past two years? Each pass of his tongue stokes the fire inside of me until I’m breathing so heavy I can barely scrape in breaths. Everywhere his hands glide over me, my skin sparks like it’s a live wire. I moan into his mouth, my fingers creep up his neck until I lace my fingers behind him, making him stay in place, feeding my soul with his kiss. But it’s more than that too. I’m feeding my soul with the fire inside Reid that makes him Reid Parker.
We kiss for minutes upon minutes. When he finally pulls away, my lips are swollen and satiated, and I’m light-headed on my feet. “Christ, Briar,” he groans.
My first thought is to tell him I’m so glad he broke up with Sasha, but I tamp down that word vomit and smile instead. No need to bring up that name to ruin the moment. “You can say that again.”
He stares at me, taking in every little nuance of my face. “When your brother first told me he didn’t think you and I were a good idea, I had a brief thought about sneaking around with you, but I didn’t think it would be worth losing my friendship with Brady over. After that kiss, it would’ve been fucking worth it. Worth anything.” He plays with my hair again
, tangling the darker tresses in his fingers. “What stopped me is that you never gave me any indication that you felt the same way. No lingering looks. No flirtations. Not anything.”
He implores me with his green eyes like he needs me to put an end to his suffering over this one point. Reid Parker doesn’t look like the star quarterback right now. He’s tense and unsure. He needs me right now instead of the other way around.
I give him a small smirk. “I’ve been wondering what world I was living in not to notice that my brother’s three best friends were super hot. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t because there’s no way Brady would’ve let me hang out with you guys if I was always drooling over one of you.”
Reid’s face temporarily pinches, but he brushes it off in the next second. He studies me, taking me in like I’m a world-renowned painting. “You’re fucking perfect.” His fingers tease over my collarbone, move to the center of my chest to trace down my cleavage, and stop just above my belly button. “I wish this whole party would fall away, and then it could be just you and me. I’d get you naked right here on this dock.”
I peek around. There are people everywhere outside the house. Some are even wading into the water at the base of the dock we’re standing on. We’re nowhere near being alone, but I can’t pretend my heart doesn’t skip a few beats at his words. “Mmm, voyeurism.”
He shakes his head. “Not my style. No one gets what I have, not even a look.”
It suddenly makes sense why he gets so upset with Sasha. I thought the whole stripping for him thing was stupid myself because who wants to see her strip tease? But it went beyond that for Reid. He’s territorial, which is probably why he punched Lex when he found out about us. I swallow. “You can’t fight with Lex anymore.”
Shadows cross over his face. “You have no idea how much I want to throttle him for touching you.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Funny. He told me it wasn’t your fault. He says he took advantage of you while you were grieving. He feels sick about it.”
I shake my head. “It was a mutual decision, but neither of us was in our right minds. I just wanted to forget. Don’t…don’t tell him that though.” The last thing I want to do is hurt Lex.
Reid kisses my forehead. “He already knows, baby.” He keeps his lips there, eyes closed. “He told me it wouldn’t work between you two. Not that he wasn’t hell-bent on trying.”
“It wasn’t one of my finer moments,” I confess. Shame washes over me at the fact that he and I did that. “Lex is too nice. He didn’t…” I trail off. I don’t know exactly where to go with that. “If I’d known he actually liked me, I wouldn’t have done any of that.” I blow out a hard breath. “Which I guess makes me sound like the skank Sasha keeps telling me I am.”
Reid turns my head toward him. “The fact that you’re questioning whether it makes you sound easy means you’re anything but.”
I let that sink in, but I only half believe him. I think Reid Parker would pretty much do or say anything to make me feel better.
22
The next few weeks are a blur of schoolwork, football games, and Reid’s kisses. We’ve only ever gone as far as some heavy makeout sessions. Hell, we did more when I didn’t know he liked me like this. It’s been frustrating, but what Brady said must’ve gotten into his head because it’s not like I haven’t been ready and waiting for more.
Things with Lex are fine even though we try not to be affectionate in front of him. Hell, we aren’t affectionate at all in school. Jules still doesn’t know what’s going on, and I think, in a way, Reid is trying to save me from all the Sasha shit, so the only time we have together where we can act like a couple is when he comes to pick me up in the mornings or if either one of us ends up at the other’s house after practice.
After pulling my grades back up to where they were in Freshman year, I’ve been begging my parents for a car. It’s been pretty much non-stop, but I feel like they’re giving in. It’s a Monday morning, and Reid hasn’t gotten here to pick me up yet, so I sit down with Mom and Dad for breakfast. Things seem more comfortable around here now that I feel like a human being again. “So…” Dad starts, his usually punchy early morning voice a bit reserved. My ears perk up, hoping this is the part where he tells me they’re going to take me car shopping, but the conversation doesn’t go that way at all. “Your mom and I have decided to go away for a little while. A couple’s retreat.”
I tilt my head at them. They’re both making their morning coffees. Even though I absolutely love the smell of coffee, I just can’t bring myself to drink it. I think it was all that talk about it stunting my growth when I was younger. “Yeah?” I ask, surprised at the sudden turn of events. We’ve only ever gone on family vacations before.
“For a week or so,” Dad explains. He comes down to sit at the table with me while I eat my Cheerios. “Now that it looks like you’re finally back on track, we’d just like to take a little time for ourselves.”
“If you don’t mind,” Mom tacks on.
She’s swirling the creamer in her coffee, but her eyes are plastered to mine. “No…I don’t mind,” I say. Listen, I know what it’s like to need something after someone’s gone from your life, and I think if my parents need this time, they should take it. No questions asked.
Mom looks a little relieved at my statement. Now that I look at her, she has more lines by her eyes than she ever had. “We’re hesitant to leave you here.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell them, trying to relieve any worries they have about doing this for themselves.
“Not just that, but physically leaving you here alone,” Dad says, clarifying my mother’s statement.
“Oh,” I say. I didn’t really think about that. I look around the house we’ve lived in my whole life. It will feel so empty without them here now that Brady’s gone. “Um…”
“We were thinking,” Dad says. “You can try to stay here if you want. It’s a lot of trust that we’re willing to give you because of how well you’ve been doing recently. Or, if you’re not up to it, we’ll talk to the Parkers to see if you can stay there. I know you’ve always gotten along really well with Mrs. Parker.”
This should probably be the moment where I tell my parents that I kinda, sorta, might be dating Reid Parker, but I’m certainly not opening my mouth about that right now. “Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean, I’ve stayed there before,” I say, trying to sound calm, even though on the inside I’m bursting at the seams.
Mom frowns. “I just hate to impose on the Parkers again,” she says. “Reid has been so good to Briar since Brady… Since Brady,” she says with finality. My mother’s words have piqued my interest. Could I have been that self-absorbed not to notice that my mother can’t even bring herself to say that her son’s dead?
There’s a short knock on the door and then Reid lets himself in. My stomach does that twisty thing it always does when I see him now. I don’t know how my parents haven’t noticed that I’m different around him. They definitely need this break more than I thought.
“Well, here’s Reid now,” Dad says. “Let’s ask him.”
“Ask me what?” Reid says. He turns to me and gives me a sly wink.
I don’t know how anyone can look like utter perfection in the morning, but he does. Always. Now that he and Sasha had such a public break up, the girls have been coming out of the woodwork, and since we aren’t official yet, I’ve had to stand by and watch all the flirtations sent his way. I like the mornings the best because that’s when I get him to myself.
“Well, Pam and I were talking, and we’d like to go away for a week or so. Recharge. That kind of thing. We just don’t know what to do with our baby girl here.” Dad reaches over and ruffles my hair.
“So…” Reid starts, looking somehow cute and confused all at the same time. I wouldn’t normally use the word cute to describe Reid Parker, but I think he’s showing a new side of himself to me.
“If it’s too lonely for Briar here at the
house, I was going to call up your parents to see if she could stay at your place.”
Reid’s green eyes light. He turns toward me, a real and true smile on his face. “I’m sure they would love to have her. My mom’s always thought of Briar as her only daughter.”
I’m sure that’s not exactly what Reid is thinking. I’m sure he’s thinking much more dirtier things to himself. I know I am.
Just as my parents said, they left for the airport that Friday while I was at school. I kissed them goodbye that morning, telling them to text me with pictures and updates on what they’re doing. I’m nervous as hell about staying at the Parker house, but I’m also a little sad to see my parents go. I know I actually ran away to put distance between us over the summer, but it’s been a long time since I felt that need. I could tell the same idea was going through my mother’s head when she left because she gave Reid the biggest hug and told him not to let me out of his sight. I swear she even asked him to send her updates in regard to me instead of asking for them from me.
I tried to reassure her I wasn’t going to go anywhere, but once trust is gone, it takes a lot to repair. The fact that they were even going to let me stay home by myself tells me that they’re trying to rebuild that foundation, the one I shook down to its core.
School flies by. I was on autopilot through most of it, writing down notes without thinking, collecting the homework sheets like a robot. It was an out-of-body experience day. I’ll probably look through my bookbag later and think, “We did that in school today?”
It just so happens that this weekend is an off week for the football team. I stayed after school to watch the guys practice and then Reid loaded me up in his car and we took off for his house. Ever since he found out my parents said I could stay at his place, he didn’t even ask me if I’d rather stay home. I’m not sure if it’s because he knows me and knows I would’ve been lonely there or if it’s because he wasn’t going to give me an option anyway. He wanted me here. With him.