Gibson Boys Box Set

by Locke, Adriana

  “I’ll still cook for you and drop it off at your house. And if she doesn’t like that, then she’s not the right one for you.”

  “I’ll add that to the checklist.” I wink. “Good luck with Lance.”

  She frowns. “A part of me hopes Mariah is pregnant. The other part of me just hopes it’s not bad news.”

  “There’s some optimism for you,” I joke. “Why don’t you just hope for something good?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “No. You said you hope it’s not bad. That’s not saying you hope it’s good.”

  She shoos me toward the door. “Get out of here. You’re giving me a headache.”

  “Night, Nana.”

  “Love you, sweet boy. And get a haircut before Sunday, will you?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  I trudge down the back steps. The sun is almost completely over the horizon, the night sky a deep blue with stormy looking skies. Silver stars begin to sparkle despite the clouds, and I wonder if Hadley is looking at them.

  I imagine holding her in my arms as we sit on the swing on my back porch and having her point out all the little shapes she can find in the sky. Stopping in my tracks, I look up at the bright flecks and smile.

  “Hey!” Lance calls out as he and Mariah turn the corner of the house. “What are you doing here?”

  “Eating your dinner,” I tease. “Hey, Mariah.”

  “Hey, Machlan.” A bouquet is in her hand. “How are you tonight?”

  “You warming Nana up for something?” I ask, nodding at the bouquet.

  “Yeah. No. Maybe?” She looks at Lance. “Maybe this is a bad idea.”

  He whirls his girlfriend around and plants a loud, wet kiss on her lips. “It’s not,” he tells her. “Go work your magic with her, and I’ll be inside in a second.”

  Mariah grins as she gives me a little wave and heads up the steps to the back door. Lance, though, stops beside me.

  “You got Nana all fucked up,” I tell him. “She tried to get me to rat you out.”

  “You don’t even know why I’m here.”

  I shrug. “True, but I almost made something up just to look like the hero.”

  “Well, I should’ve told you so you could get a feel for her reaction before I go in.” He rubs his forehead. “She’s not gonna like this.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Mariah and I want to elope.” He cringes as I burst out laughing. “Stop it, asshole.”

  “She’s never gonna go for that. As a matter of fact,” I say, cutting off Lance’s attempt at interjection, “she was just trying to get me to settle down.”

  He jabs a finger my way. “Now that’s funny.”

  “Right?”

  He sticks his tongue in the side of his cheek, his eyes sparkling with some dickhead comment that I try to brace myself for.

  “How are things with Hadley, anyway?” he asks.

  I roll my eyes, my heart clamoring at the sound of her name, and head to my truck.

  “Oh, come on,” Lance calls from behind me. “I was just kidding.”

  “It’s really not funny.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  I stop walking and turn to face him. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did.”

  I sigh. “What made you stop fucking everyone you met and want to just be with Mariah? And elope now, apparent-fucking-ly?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Don’t you wonder if you’re rushing this?” I ask. “I mean, why do you need to get married right now? It seems like only yesterday we were looking at some sex app and now you’re getting fucking married?”

  Lance just laughs and heads up the porch. “First of all, it was a dating app.”

  I lift a brow. “I believe you used it for sex, not dinner parties.”

  He looks at the house guiltily before turning back to me. “Will you please lower your voice?”

  “Fine. Dating app. But how do we go from that to this?”

  “Because if I don’t marry her, someone else will.” He stops and flashes me a smug smirk. “Better think about that, Machie boy.”

  I watch him disappear inside the house, his laughter at my expense trailing behind him. As I climb in my truck and buckle in, I pause. Looking up into the night sky once again, I wonder if he might be onto something.

  Or not.

  The gravel flies behind my truck as I pull on the road.

  Thirteen

  Hadley

  A shot of lightning catapults through the air. It illuminates the sky before a crack of thunder roars through Emily’s backyard.

  “Looks like rain,” I note.

  “Feels like it too. I think the temperature just dropped ten degrees.” Emily refills her wine glass with a light pink Moscato. “We’ll be switching this out for hot chocolate soon.”

  “I’d take hot chocolate over that stuff now.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t like wine. How are we even friends?”

  I squish my nose. “Wine is so bitter. Or flat. Or … something. There’s nothing to it.”

  “Ever had Moscato?” she asks.

  “No. And I’m quite okay with that.”

  “Your loss.” She takes a long sip before resting her head against the deck chair. “I told Josh to go fuck himself tonight.”

  Twisting in my chair, I feel my eyes bug out. Her eyes close. I’m not sure if she’s in complete thought or blocking out thoughts altogether, but she seems peaceful.

  “What happened?” I ask her with a heavy dose of caution. “I thought things were going great?”

  “They were.”

  “And then …?”

  She lifts her head and looks at me. I scan her eyes for tears or a sign that she’s unsure about her decision, but there’s none of that. We could be talking about anything factual—Pilates is overrated, buttercream icing is better than whipped, or how no one really looks good in orange.

  Or, apparently, how she and Josh weren’t mean to be.

  “I’m so confused,” I say after a long silence.

  She pulls her knees to her chest. “He never wants to do anything I want to do. It’s always about him and, to be honest, I’m sick of it.” She looks at me and makes a face. “Everything is what he wants—what we do on the weekend, where we go for dinner, how we have sex. I mean, sometimes I really want to be bent over a damn chair! Is that too much to ask?”

  I know she’s being serious, but I can’t not laugh. I also can’t formulate a good response. Luckily, my reaction seems to settle her in some way because, before my chuckles end, she’s shrugging.

  “Well, it’s true,” she says.

  “Hey, what about that guy from the lumber yard? What was his name?” I snap my fingers. “Jeremy! What about him?”

  “He’s cute, and based on the errant thing he whispered in my ear that night at Crave a couple of weeks ago, I’m one-hundred percent positive he’d bend me over a chair. But I don’t even want to think about dating again.” She sighs. “Finding a good man is like … buying an avocado.”

  “Ridiculously expensive?”

  “No, but that’s true too.” She laughs, pointing at me. “I was thinking more like a terrifying gamble. You can’t just go for looks because that perfect skin and amazing tan that leads you to think it’s spent the entire season getting perfectly ripe just for you may be a lie. The inside might be rotten. So you give it a little squeeze—firm, gentle pressure to kind of test the waters.” Her brows waggle. “Is it hard enough for a good time but soft enough to watch a romcom? Maybe. Or maybe it took a little blue pill and has mommy issues.”

  “Dude. Stop drinking,” I tell her.

  She picks up her glass and downs whatever is left in it. A burp belts through the air. “Okay.”

  I don’t dignify her belch with a response. Instead, I settle back in my chair and gaze into the night sky.

  If there was a way I could blink and be as flippant about relation
ships as Emily, I would do it in half a heartbeat. She dates men, falls in love, practically moves in with them, and then casts them away when things don’t pan out like it’s the crust on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

  Why can’t I do that?

  Why do I have to be cursed with feelings for one boy?

  “What?” Emily asks.

  I turn to look at her. “What what?”

  “You just groaned.”

  “I did?”

  “You did. And if I were your best friend who knew all your groans and snarls, I’d label this one as being rooted in Machlan.”

  My head hits the back of the chair with a loud thud. “Ouch!” I rub the spot, trying to distract both myself and Emily more than massage out a knot.

  “I was right. Surprise, surprise.”

  My emotions well up against the dam I built inside to keep them all back. I can feel them roaring against my lips like a hurricane lashing against the shores.

  Since Machlan left the apartment, my brain hasn’t left me alone. My mind doesn’t even feel like mine anymore, and that’s a tough thing to reconcile. One minute, I’m reminiscing about sweet moments with him, and the next, I’m almost in tears over others. Then everything flips again and I’m ready to kill him, and then reality hits and I feel helpless.

  Helpless is something I loathe. I call bullshit on it most times. You’re never helpless; you can always do something. I just wish I could figure out the something about this.

  Wine sloshes against Emily’s glass as she fills it again. “Just thinking I might need this to get through this convo.” She takes in my reaction. “Or you might need it. Either way, I’m prepared.”

  “A regular survivalist,” I joke.

  She leans back in her chair again. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”

  “I don’t know.” It’s almost a whine, but I’m too overwhelmed to care.

  “No, you do know. And I know, and he knows, and the whole damn world knows.”

  I groan again, louder this time. So loud, in fact, that my voice fills Emily’s entire backyard, and her neighbor’s dog starts to howl right along with me.

  “Stop.” Emily laughs, shoving me in the arm. “I think you’ve officially lost it.”

  Lost it. Her words send a shiver across my skin. The thought of losing Machlan knocks the wind out of me. How I thought I could do that—just distance myself from him forever—seems idiotic now.

  It’s always this way once I’ve spent time with him. Five weeks, five days, five hours—it’s always the same. Maybe it ends badly or we drive each other crazy, but I always walk away knowing two things: one, I love him and, two, he’ll never commit to me.

  “What if I lose him completely, Em?”

  My friend doesn’t need a further explanation; the look on her face shows she gets it.

  My chest shakes as I take a breath. It’s the kind of shake that happens when your body is full of adrenaline, prepping to keep you going through some perceived danger. There may not be a lion in the area, but I’m on the cusp of getting eaten alive anyway.

  She lays her hand on my arm, giving it a gentle squeeze before removing it. “Isn’t that what you came here for?”

  My entire body sags, pressing down in the wooden deck chair so hard I think I hear it crack.

  “Yes. No. I don’t know anymore. When I’m away from him, he’s what I want, and I tell myself I have to make it stop. Then I’m with him, and it’s really apparent I can’t make it stop.” I cover my face with my hands. “I just want to be one of those women who is all confident and independent. One who calls a number and meets up at a hotel when she needs a man.”

  Emily snorts.

  “I mean it.” I look at her with every intention of being serious but end up laughing as soon as our eyes meet. “Stop making me laugh!”

  “It’s my job.”

  “Well, make it your job to help me figure out how to live my life. Just make all my decisions for me, will ya?”

  “You need to relax,” she says. “Seriously.”

  “I know.”

  The temperature seems to drop. I run my hands up and down my arms as the crickets in the lowlands get louder. It makes me think of camping with Machlan—campfires and s’mores and the taste of bug spray. I close my eyes and imagine his red tent with the hole in the top from the summer night when Peck forgot to watch the fire and the top of the tent went up in flames.

  What a fun time of my life that was—being with my favorite people, doing the simplest things. Making memories that are still some of my most precious possessions.

  “How do people survive this?” I ask. “How do they love someone who doesn’t love them back and go on and have a happy life with someone else?”

  “Maybe they don’t.”

  “Oh, gee. Thanks.”

  She laughs. “Maybe those people never get married because they refuse to see the big sea and all those other hunky fishes swimming around them. Or maybe they do get married and are never truly happy because they keep thinking about the fish from the reef back there.”

  I struggle to keep a straight face. “You’re so super helpful.”

  “Hear me out,” she says, waving a hand to shush me. “You know how you can go three days and not eat cake and as soon as you say you’re on a diet, all you can think about is cake?”

  “Wait a minute. What happened to the reef?”

  “They’re connected. I promise. Stick with me.”

  “Okayyy …”

  She shimmies in her seat. “Okay. So, all you can think about is cake, right? Well, it’s the same thing here. It’s the same thing as Fish Girl.”

  I pretend to think. “Nope,” I say, shaking my head fervently. “I’m not following you.”

  “Gah!”

  “Cake and fish should never go together.”

  “They go together in this way: you want cake on minute one of a diet because it’s what you can’t have. As soon as that luscious piece of heaven slathered with buttercream goodness is off-limits, you need it like you need air. Am I right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” she says, her eyes lit up with excitement. “And it’s the same for Fish Girl. She’s swimming in this vast ocean that comprises like three-quarters of the world and can’t see all these ah-mazing fish she encounters every day because she’s still all obsessed with Reef Boy.”

  “Look, Em …”

  She shakes her head. “You want what you can’t have. It’s basic human nature.”

  My gaze drops to the glass of wine, and I contemplate guzzling it. It certainly couldn’t make me more confused or sick to my stomach.

  Not everything she’s saying is resonating. I don’t want Mach just because I can’t have him. I want him because he’s so threaded in my life—in who I am and how I got to be this person—that I can’t imagine not having him. Or not wanting him.

  “Maybe I have to accept I won’t have him like I want him,” I say, testing the idea out loud. “Maybe I need to …”

  “Maybe you need to take the pressure off it. Stop ‘being on a diet’,” she says, using air quotes. “You stress constantly about your relationship with Machlan—how it’s defined. What it is. What it isn’t. Maybe you just need to let it be.”

  “Let it be, huh?”

  “Yes,” she says, grinning. “Let it be. Let it be whatever it is. Give it the organic room to just develop into a great friendship or an intense hatred or a friends with benefits or maybe just mutual acquaintances. You’ll never know what it can be if you don’t stop trying to shove it into one of the two boxes you’ve already decided it has to go in.”

  I gulp, my mind processing this too quickly. Everything kind of jumbles together as if I did drink the wine, but at the same time, it seems clear. And possibly logical.

  “I almost kissed him today,” I say. I toss it out there as though it’ll change her mind. She only laughs.

  “I’m sure you did. The two of you together is like watching two people have s
ex without the sex.”

  “That’s gross.” I stand, stretching my arms overhead. “I need to get going.”

  “You got somewhere to be?”

  “Yeah. Bed.”

  She yawns, getting to her feet too. “I’m tired myself and that bottle of wine didn’t help.”

  I pull her into a quick hug before heading toward the gate at the side of the house. I wave. I might even respond to something she says offhandedly as I walk away. I’m not sure. All I do know is that I have to figure out if I can just be friends with Machlan Gibson or if that’s a recipe for disaster.

  Fourteen

  Hadley

  I slide my toothbrush over my teeth.

  The sky is a hazy mass of grays. Buckets of rain aren’t pouring from the sky, and the wind doesn’t sound like it’s two seconds from ripping the stairs off the front of the apartment either. Both were constants all night as I lay on the bed and listened to the weather be as contrary as my feelings.

  By the time the rain switched to a drizzle and I finally drifted to sleep, I had worried myself into an emotional coma. Now that it’s morning, or early afternoon if the clock isn’t lying, a sort of peace blankets me. I have no solution to my predicament. There isn’t some grand plan to wrench my heart out of Machlan’s hands. But there does seem to be a confidence that I’ll figure it out and that feels good.

  That feels like me.

  I spit, rinse, and spit again.

  Plucking the toothbrush back in the coffee cup next to the window, I think through a highlight reel of my relationship with Mach. The only consistency throughout the years is that there was always pressure.

  Pressure not to be together from Cross.

  Pressure to be together as a result of our choices.

  Pressure not to be together because things were too hard, and then pressure to be together because it really felt like our final shot.

  “Maybe Emily’s right,” I say. “Maybe I just need to let it work itself out.”

  The words barely get past my lips before my palm hits my forehead. It sounds so simple to say those words. It seems so easy in concept. But giving up control when it comes to this particular situation is so crazy hard for me.