by L. J. Evans
Ava looked puzzled but then caught my gaze and looked down to find the box of extra-large, ribbed condoms sitting there. Her mouth dropped open, and her skin turned a beautiful shade of pink, like a sunrise creeping over the horizon of the ocean.
I ran my fingers over her blush, the smile still on my face.
“Where? Did she?” Her voice was a wash of mortification.
“It’s a joke,” I told her. “Mom and Leena have been buying them for me as presents since I was a teenager. Since they suspected I’d started having sex.”
“It’s so…inappropriate!” Ava gasped, but she was trying not to laugh as well.
“Yeah, I guess they just didn’t know how else to talk to me about it. I didn’t have a dad to discuss it with. They made a joke out of it while still getting their point across.”
“But…now that you’re, what, twenty-six? Don’t they think…I mean, don’t they know…” Ava was so flustered. It was cute and sexy at the same time.
“Ava,” I said her name, and her eyes flared. It happened a lot when I said her name. The look she gave me was like no one else in the world had ever called her by her name before. “I don’t want to talk about my mom, or Leena, or the reason they buy me condoms. I would, however, very much like to use one of those and get reacquainted with your skin and your scent and your touch. If you’ll have me.”
She responded by pulling at my T-shirt until it was thrown on the floor and then pulling off her own blouse before joining me in removing our pants. That was all it took for us to forget everything else, including my mom down the hall, decisions that were waiting for us both, and lives that weren’t settled. Instead, we simply lost ourselves in each other again.
♫ ♫ ♫
The next morning, I snuck out of bed while Ava was sound asleep. For a moment, I stared down at her with her dark hair sprawled about her face. I itched to move it and run a finger along her smooth skin, but I didn’t want to wake her. I pulled on sweats and a Coast Guard T-shirt and quietly made my way to the kitchen to make breakfast.
Mom came in as I was in the middle of tossing the first round of chocolate chip pancakes onto a plate and placing them in the oven to keep warm. Mom secretly adored these pancakes, even though most people said they were just for kids. She kissed me on the cheek, filled her coffee, and sat at the counter.
“Before Ava gets up,” she started, and I turned to her, expecting something about Ava. Maybe my face showed the defensiveness I felt, because Mom smiled. “I like her, but that isn’t want I was going to talk about.”
“She’s pretty impossible not to like.”
Mom laughed. “It’s cute that you’re so defensive. I’d ask where it’s all going, but I don’t think either of you have a clue yet.”
“No?” It was my turn to smirk, as my brain had been filled with lots of ideas about Ava, but we had a lot of uncertainty ahead of us before we could truly make plans.
“Okay, so what did you want to talk about?” I asked as I went back to the pancakes.
“I wanted to apologize.”
This stopped me completely. “What?”
“I should have told you I was selling the house.”
I looked at her, flabbergasted. It wasn’t that she shouldn’t have told me about the house. She should have. But she should have told me about the cancer more.
“Leena and I are two old ladies rattling around in two separate houses, paying separate bills, trying to take care of everything on our own. This was a wake-up call for both of us. I can sell, take some of the money, and help her redo parts of that old Victorian she’s inherited.”
It hurt that she needed someone, but she wasn’t reaching out to me. She was going to Leena, her best friend, instead.
“Why didn’t you just tell me that?” I asked.
“I’m never sure what I can.”
“What do you mean?”
She looked out at the garden, clutching her coffee cup tightly, fingers white. “If something happened to you…because you were thinking about me instead of focusing on your job…I couldn’t….”
I choked on the emotions that hit me as much as the quiver in my mom’s voice as it faded away. I realized she wasn’t just apologizing for the house. She was apologizing for not telling me about the cancer, too. But it was also the reason I continued to feel like a selfish bastard these days. My career was the reason for her apprehension, the reason she couldn’t count on me.
“Mom—”
“No. Don’t. I don’t want you staying here to take care of me. I want what every mother wants for her child—for you to follow your heart and make your life everything you dream it can be.”
My heart twisted, because the Coast Guard had been my dream. Now, there was also a good chance that it was going to be taken away from me. Stan’s words about a life that he might be able to connect me with had me, for the first time in my entire twenty-six years, wondering if there was something outside of the Coast Guard for me. I wasn’t sure it would fit me quite right. But it might allow me to have things that I hadn’t known were important before.
Mom was waiting for my response, and I just told her what I was thinking, like I should have done our whole life together instead of telling her the thing that would cause her less pain. Because I wanted her to start doing the same with me. I needed us both to just say the truth, no matter how much it hurt.
“I don’t want you to ever feel like you can’t tell me things, Mom. You have to trust that I’ve grown up enough to handle it. If you don’t tell me the truth, I’ll just worry more about what you’re hiding from me.”
“It’s hard, as a parent, to accept that your baby has grown up. That they don’t need you anymore.”
“I’ll always need you. Always. You’re my mom.”
I pulled her from the stool to hug her. To make sure she knew with my actions as well as my words that I meant it. My life wouldn’t be the same if she wasn’t in it.
Ava came into the kitchen at that moment, her hair up in a bun, my T-shirt on over a pair of leggings. She looked like my future. I swore that the whole room got brighter just because she’d entered it. More sun filling our lives. Ava filling our lives.
My mom reached out an arm to invite her into our hug, and Ava hesitated at first and then smiled, joining us. I got to hug the two women that I knew I loved most in the world. A girl who’d turned into a woman since I’d first seen her, and a woman who’d done her best to give me everything she could, even though we were both missing a part of us—Dad.
It felt like home. Mom might be going to sell the house I’d been raised in, but it didn’t really matter. Home was always going to be wherever these two women were.
Chapter Twenty-four
Ava
THE STARS
“Your heart burns much brighter than the moon
If you ever feel lost and broken inside
Just remember the way you helped me shine
The stars ain't got nothing on you.”
—Performed by Lady Antebellum
—Written by Kelley / Haywood / Scott / Busbee
On Saturday, Truck showed up at the house bright and early, bringing donuts with him. The guys shared a hug that I admired. In the last few weeks, their hugs had made me realize that my own awkwardness with hugs came from inexperience—a hugless childhood. Eli’s hugs were slowly increasing my comfort with them. When he hugged me, it felt like pieces of me coming back together. And when Mandy had included me in their hug on Friday morning, it had felt like yet another thing I’d been missing and suddenly found.
On hearing Truck’s voice, Mandy came bounding into the room.
“Travis!” she said, beaming a smile at him.
“Mama, you’ve been bad.” Truck waved a finger at her.
Mandy just swatted at him before giving him his own hug.
“You boys are ridiculous,” she said, muffled in his embrace. When she let him go, she reached for
the donut box, but Truck took it away.
“Nope. No donuts for you.”
“Travis!” The scold in her voice made me smile.
“Apologize.”
“For?”
“For?! You have to ask what for? Definitely no donuts for you.”
Eli was watching the exchange with his best friend and his mom with a smile. I was watching Eli with my own smile. This. This was something I’d never had. Jenna’s family and I had a good relationship. But it was always two teenage girls squirreling themselves away in a bedroom, avoiding parent conversations. They loved me, and I loved them, but we didn’t tease and harass each other like this. There was never the sense of camaraderie that filled this kitchen.
“You’d keep donuts from a dying woman?” Mandy asked with a smile. Eli’s and Truck’s faces fell, and Truck’s hand holding the donut box slipped. Mandy grabbed the box and started laughing.
“Ha! Got you.” She brought the box to the table where I was sitting. To me, she said, “You have to fight fire with fire when you live with boys.”
“That wasn’t funny in the slightest, Mom,” Eli said, coming around and squeezing into the bench with me.
“Yeah, what he said,” Truck agreed, sitting down on the chair beside Mandy. “I still think I need an apology.”
Mandy sighed heavily. “You keep one little secret and they never let you live it down.”
“Not little,” Eli grunted.
“Fine. I promise I’ll never keep anything important from either of you again,” Mandy responded.
“Mom!” Eli said.
“What?” she asked, all innocence.
“You just tried to give yourself an out.”
“I did?”
“Yes, the word important did not escape any of our attention.”
Mandy bit into her donut, still smiling.
♫ ♫ ♫
We spent the majority of the day like we had on Thursday and Friday: at the bookstore. Truck and Eli argued over comics and superheroes. It wasn’t a conversation that I knew much about, but I enjoyed their good-humored argument. Mandy came up beside me and handed me a huge encyclopedia-sized book with comics on the cover. She said, “You might need this. You’re playing catch up.”
None of us had seen or heard Jersey enter the building, even with the bell on the door, so I startled when she spoke in her whispery voice next to me.
“Let me know if you need any help,” she said. “Comics and I have a long history.”
Eli turned to us, a smile on his face as he continued to rib Truck. “I need some help here, ladies. Tell Truck the truth; the Hulk will never be the best superhero.”
Truck turned to us also, and his gaze stopped on Jersey.
“Too bad Wonder Woman is such a fad these days, because she is pretty incredible. But I kind of admire Jessica Jones more. She deals with a lot of difficult issues while still being strong. She’s complex.” Jersey’s voice was probably the surest I’d heard it in two days, but it was still quiet, barely lilting its way through the room.
Truck crossed his arms over his expansive chest and took her in. I heard Jersey swallow hard next to me, and when I looked at her face, it had the most color I’d seen on it.
“You just picked women because you’re female,” Truck said.
“You just picked a man because you’re male,” Jersey said back.
Eli and I exchanged a look because, really, Jersey had hardly spoken at all since we’d known her. Eli said she barely breathed in the bookstore, flitting around like a ghost, and I’d thought it an appropriate analogy once I’d met her.
“Not true. Natasha Romanov is one of my top five,” Truck argued back.
Jersey let out an exasperated sigh that I wasn’t sure Truck heard. “Of course, she is.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Truck stepped closer, taking in Jersey’s pale hair that was even lighter than his and her pale skin that looked almost translucent. He eyed her curves in the dress she was wearing, and I knew he saw what we all saw: a very pretty girl.
“She’s just a typical male pick. Deadly to men, so it’s like a turn on or something,” Jersey said with scorn.
Eli let out a chuckle. “I guess she told you. Okay, Jersey, you still agree with me, right? The Hulk is definitely not the greatest male superhero.”
She nodded. Then, as if realizing how much she’d just spoken aloud, her skin went from the very slightest pale pink to almost paper white again. She ducked her head and moved toward the back office to put her things down.
Truck’s eyes watched her as she went. He brushed a hand over his face after she’d gone. “Tell me you all saw her, too. She isn’t a ghost?”
Mandy smacked him on the arm. “Be nice.”
“Me?” Truck seemed shocked. He was still staring at the doorway where Jersey had disappeared.
It was something that Eli and I noticed and drew attention to the rest of the day—Truck perking up whenever Jersey was in the room. We teased him, and he’d brush it off, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from her pale figure. The playfulness of it all continued to lighten the mood that had seemed heavy this week before he’d appeared.
For dinner, we went to the Crab Shack because they always ate there when the boys came into town. Tradition. My heart snagged at that. I didn’t have any traditions, not even with Jenna. We loved each other and spent as much time as we could together, but there was no ritual that had become ours. Maybe because we’d never had the threat of death hanging over our goodbyes as this family did.
After dinner, we dropped Mandy off at the house, and Eli and Truck shared another tradition with me. We hit up a bar that was full of Coasties and locals.
“Well, I’ll be damned, if it ain’t Eli Wyatt and Truck!” the bartender called out when they walked in.
Eli and Truck shook hands with the man, and we all sat down at the bar.
“Who’s this lovely creature?” the bartender asked.
“Rusty, this is Ava,” Eli responded.
When I extended my hand, he brought it to his lips. “You are too lovely to be hanging out with these rookies.”
I laughed and pulled away. “I’m pretty sure Eli and Truck have their own fan club wherever they go.”
“Damn right,” Truck said.
The conversation turned to catching up on people they knew. Not quite gossip, but something close. I noticed that everyone avoided the question of Eli’s leg. Like avoiding talking about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Like they were all protecting him, shielding him as best they could before reality hit, just like Truck had been doing since the accident had happened.
“What can I get you, Miss Ava?” Rusty asked.
“I’d like a Salty Toad,” I told him with a smile, but I knew he wouldn’t know what it was. This bar felt like Andy and Lacey’s. It made me ache for them in a way I hadn’t in a long time. It gave me the urge to be behind the counter again. I was hoping Rusty would let me make the drink, so I could recapture a few moments of the calm I always felt when I was with them.
He scratched at the scruff on his chin. “Is that like a Bullfrog?”
I shook my head with a smile. “Nope. I don’t like anything made with an energy drink.”
“Well then, I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Can I show you?” I asked.
“Well…” He hesitated, and I understood the hesitation. Not many bartenders would allow some random off the street behind their bar.
“I promise,” I said, crossing my fingers over my heart, “I know what I’m doing.”
He still wasn’t buying into it.
“How about if I swear on the Coast Guard motto that I won’t mess anything up? Plus, you’ll get a new drink to add to your menu.”
More reluctance. I could feel Eli and Truck watching me, but this battle was between Rusty and me.
“One drink,” he finally said cautiously.
I smiled and went around the bar. When I looked up at Eli’s face, wonder was written there. It was like I’d just done something so amazing that it was worthy of a prize. My heart stammered in excitement.
I assessed the area, quickly finding the drink mixer, the shot glasses, and the ingredients that I needed. All except one. “Caramel sauce?”
“Well…hmm…I do think I have some for the sundaes in the back.” He left to go into the kitchen.
“Tell me, Miss Ava,” Truck said, picking up Rusty’s nickname. “Where did you acquire this bar expertise?”
“I’ve been working summers with Andy and Lacey at the Salty Dog.”
Truck frowned as if trying to figure out where that was, but Eli got it. “You’ve been to Rockport every summer?” he asked.
I nodded. “The house there was the only thing that Dad bought that I kept.”
Rusty was back. I finished pouring the ingredients into the mixer, shook it, and then poured it out into the waiting shot glasses.
“We usually serve this in a pint glass, but this way, you can all get a taste.” I handed them out to the men who were still watching me as if they’d never seen me before.
“Normally, I don’t drink while serving, but you’ve got me damn curious,” Rusty said.
“Cheers,” I said, bringing my own shot glass forward, and they all clanked their glasses with mine before swallowing the liquid.
I watched their faces. It tasted like a Milky Way bar to me. It was too sweet for most beer drinkers, but it was perfect for someone who didn’t want to taste the alcohol as it went down. None of them grimaced, which was always a good sign when you made a drink, in my opinion.
“That’s mighty tasty,” Rusty said. “Who taught you to make that?”
“I created it,” I told him.
“Well, ‘round here, I think we’ll just call that the Miss Ava,” he said with a grin.
I couldn’t help the huge smile that came over my face. I made another one and poured it into a pint glass for me before bringing it around to the counter and the stool that I’d been sitting at between Eli and Truck.