Tied Between

by Kira Barker

  Not bothering with waiting for a reply, I grabbed my beer and stalked outside, Simon following me at a more sedate pace. I stopped a few steps away from the sliding glass door, well away from where the other men were standing in a huddle around the grill.

  I usually wasn’t great with silence, but this one seemed heavier to me than it should have been. Rounding on Simon, I was ready to tear into him if he had the gall to chide me, but instead found him smiling at me, no longer hiding his amusement.

  “What?”

  He shrugged and sipped his beer, his eyes never leaving mine.

  “It’s convenient when you tell them what I want to but didn’t because of said unspoken rules of hospitality. Besides, you look so darn cute when you throw a fit.”

  That made me snort and look away, strangely mollified—but then it felt good to have someone with me who had my back. Jack was too much into defusing situations like these for me to feel like he actually agreed with me.

  “Cute, huh?” I asked, and because I felt I deserved a little treat after suffering through this, I grabbed the waistband of his jeans and pulled myself flush with his body, grinning up at him. After all, someone was likely watching us, and it only made sense to play the enamored couple now. I was surprised to realize that the thought rankled less than it likely would have before our heart-to-heart last night. Simon grinned down at me but didn’t kiss me, which, considering our bottles of beer, was likely a good idea.

  “Is it always like that? You jump at the hint of a trigger word, then go off like nobody’s business?” he asked.

  “This wasn’t unprovoked,” I pointed out.

  “Didn’t say that they didn’t have it coming. I’m just trying to get a better read of the situation. This is like watching a sitcom several seasons in, mid-episode. I know a few of the players, but the others are a complete mystery to me, and the outcome is kind of entertaining.”

  My life, the soap opera. I couldn’t exactly deny that things easily got a little absurd around here.

  “I could be more diplomatic,” I admitted. “Jack thinks I should be, even if he stopped voicing those thoughts a long time ago.”

  “Evidently because you asked him nicely,” Simon supplied, his mirth increasing.

  I gave him a suffering look. “So, yes, it pretty much is always like that. Only this time with some extra gasoline poured into the flames because I’m jumpy as hell, and these idiots are driving me crazy!”

  Simon reached for my chin and tilted it up, moving in as if to kiss me, but instead stopping shy of where I could have reached him, even if I’d gone up on my toes.

  “Look at it like this. Right now they are all too busy with their own drama, so we’ll slip through the cracks, unless you want to make a point of rectifying everyone’s beliefs.”

  “You mean the beliefs about me being a barren hag with shriveled ovaries who is not fit to even hold a child?”

  “I think ‘maneater’ should be in there, too, but pretty much, yeah, those beliefs.”

  Grinning up at him, I licked my lips. “Wanna know what I’d rather eat right now?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he suggested, leaning close enough that his lips almost brushed against mine.

  “A steak. Or a burger. I’m starving, and all those stupid veggies have made me crave real meat.”

  Simon laughed, shaking his head. “Yeah, right, stupid of me to expect anything else. Well, why don’t you go over to where all that meat is being tortured right now, while I go back to the ladies who value my presence more than the testosterone team over there?”

  “Aw, are you feeling left out?”

  “In the kitchen, I can at least shine with my dazzling smile. That will only get me so far at the grill.”

  “Jack likes your smile,” I remarked, but then gave him a soft push back toward the house. “Go dazzle the shit out of them. They’ll love you even more for putting up with me. To them, you can do no wrong.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  “I have Jack to keep me company if everyone else shies away from me because of my girl cooties. Don’t worry, we’ll get through this. Somehow.”

  Why did I feel like I’d just jinxed it? But considering Simon hadn’t a superstitious bone in his body, I didn’t mention it, just assured him again that I would be fine and trudged over to where no one would hopefully judge me by the fact that I liked to use my tits for something else than milk bags right fucking now.

  Chapter 23

  The barbecue went over better than I’d expected after the scene in the kitchen. While I got my share of weird looks when I joined the men at the grill, the fact that I could talk sports and was armed with a bottle of beer obviously spoke in my favor. My dad was still quiet, but he’d mostly stopped glaring at Jack—who pretended he was completely immune to it, but I knew that it must be bothering him. While his mother had certainly taken a greater part in my life than my dad in his—after all, he still had a dad, even if his parents were estranged and he only got to see him for a week or two each year, he was somewhere in the picture—but he’d still been like a father to him. There might have been some momentary bad blood between the two of them if Jack and I had started dating, but I would have expected things to settle down way quicker than with any other guy I might have had the hots for. Only now, with Simon in the game, things seemed all the more weird, and “weird” was clearly not something he was happy to deal with.

  But in one aspect, Simon had been right—the brood provided enough distraction and entertainment that we didn’t even get any attention unless we actively drew it, and avoiding that wasn’t too hard. Once everyone was seated in the backyard at the cobbled-together tables and garden chairs, things eased up further. We’d been banished to the lower end of the table, with Jack wedged between Jenny and his mom, and Simon and me opposite them. Distance made it difficult to keep up with Gina telling everyone—repeatedly—what a pig her husband was, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. We had our own little quiet ecosystem going on there, and my sister’s presence kept any remarks that any of us might have made to very diffuse hints only. She finally fessed up that Emily had grounded her for her underage drinking stunt—obviously—but she didn’t look too heartbroken that she had to spend time with us. That she clearly preferred our company to the brood helped—but then she was my sister, even if we only shared half our DNA. I continued to tease her about it, but Jack and Malory both were only too happy to regale her and Simon with stories of my less-than-sober late teen years, making Jenny stare at me a couple of times.

  And then it was time for our customary touch football game, and this year we’d actually have to turn it into a real game, not just me and Jack wrestling over who got to snap the ball. I’d kind of expected that we would break the tradition as this had just sounded like a recipe for disaster, but with Emily’s brother and her nephews, we actually had enough people who’d likely find it fun to punch and elbow each other enough to make the burgers and steaks reappear again. Somehow they didn’t strike me as the kind of guys who would play too close to the rules. All the more fun, if you asked me.

  Jack was the one to propose playing, and when he got the expected enthusiasm, I quickly excused myself to get my customary outfit for the occasion—one of Jack’s old high school team jerseys, which of course looked kind of ridiculous on me, but I didn’t give a shit. Upon my return, my father gave me a weird look—again—but there was no question that we’d play on the same team, with Jack. And when one of the older kids joined the brood team, I loudly elected Jenny to complete ours, daring Emily to protest. She didn’t, although she seemed tempted to, but family activities were apparently inside the limits of the grounding rules.

  My dad quickly explained the house rules—two-hand touch only, no hurting the other team players if someone actually did a tackle, no kick-off to save the windows, no kid-glove treatment for the girls. The last he added not for Jenny and my benefit but for the visiting team, obviously. We got belligerent smil
es, of course, but that was to be expected; and it only took us the first minute to wipe them off their stupid, hillbilly faces.

  It might have made the most sense to make Jack quarterback since he was the only one of us with actual experience, but he knew all too well that—lacking a solid block, or any, for that matter—I just loved to hurl myself through the line of defense before they got their bearings just as much as trying to outpace them by going around, that position once again fell to me. For more than a decade we used to play against our neighbors who, of course, knew all my moves, but with the smirky-mc-smirksters as our opposing team now, I could play all my cards in the first couple of minutes, scoring us a solid lead before they caught on to the fact that we meant business. And the fact that my dad had also done a good job teaching Jenny everything he’d taught Jack and me helped tremendously to let us play as an actual team in no time.

  As I ran, caught, threw, sometimes tackled, and laughed a lot, I felt my father’s reservations dwindle with every point we scored. Maybe it helped that Simon had excused himself from the start and was watching from the back porch, chatting quietly with Malory and Emily, or the fact that Jack and I were goofing around just as we had since we were five and my dad had taken it upon himself to teach us the rules of the most important sport in the world. There was all the usual arguing, shouting, complaining, whining, and laughing, with not a strange or out-of-place action in sight, making it easy to forget that things had, in fact, changed. While he hadn’t spoken a word in protest of the brood descending on his house—where I could hear it, at least—he looked mighty satisfied that his girls were kicking their asses, with Jack helping him to clear the path for us.

  And then I scored the last touchdown, making us win with an unchallenged 40-13, and Jack grabbed me and swung me around, turning my victory dance into a loud shriek. He was grinning at me, and I couldn’t not laugh, happy and content and free, and as he let me slide back down, I ended up pressed against his body, and then his hands were holding my face, and of course I kissed him deeply, because we’d just won, and why in the world wouldn’t I?

  That was, until the sudden deafening silence made red flags go off in my brain. I pulled away from Jack just as he pushed me off him, apparently realizing the same thing, but the damage had clearly been done. Everyone was staring at us.

  Well, almost everyone, because Simon was checking the clock on his phone, and at Malory’s raised brows, he shrugged. “That was almost five hours. At my most optimistic estimate, I didn’t think they’d make it past the one-hour mark.” She returned his smile, even if it had that slightly tense quality to it again that I’d seen before.

  A scathing comeback was burning on my tongue, but even I could see that it would not look great if I tore through the only uniting front that we could show now, so I swallowed it. Instead I hugged myself, not quite sure what to do with my hands. I certainly couldn’t pull off Jack’s relaxed, if somewhat defiant, stance at my side.

  Reactions varied. My father was pointedly not looking in our direction, finding new interest in one of the flower pots we’d used to mark the end zone. Jenny was staring open-mouthed at us, but when she noticed my look, she let her jaws snap shut and gave me a confused smile. Emily was blinking rapidly, clearly getting the whole picture but not sure what to make of it, but I kind of gave her credit for not screeching some random obscenity or something. But that was where the “quiet semi-acceptance” ended, much to my delight.

  I really didn’t care for the revolting partial leers the elder guys sent my way; apparently I’d just labelled myself as a slut, and even if they knew to openly show disdain, calculation was clear on at least Emily’s brother’s face. His young wife looked positively scandalized—me stripping down and doing a naked victory dance likely wouldn’t have made her that uncomfortable—but it was Gina, the scorned wife and one of my biggest fans already, who was the first to speak up.

  “What the fudge is going on here?” she demanded, using a tone that spoke plainly that it was, at best, a rhetorical question.

  “Fudge, seriously?” I shot back, but avoided dropping the appropriate f-bomb instead. It seemed rather obvious that that was also what was going on between Jack and me, so no reason to lead anyone to that conclusion if I didn’t have to.

  “Isn’t he your boyfriend?” she said, pointedly staring at Simon, who only glanced back with that unnerving neutral look that I hated when he used it against me.

  “He is,” I replied.

  “And still you’re kissing him?” As if that was needed, she now fixed Jack with her glare, but only got a bland smile in return.

  “I am,” I replied, ready to pat myself on the back for giving her nothing to keep building on. Not that she needed it, but still.

  “And you think that’s okay?” she went on with her interrogation, eventually hitting the mark where I just couldn’t keep to monosyllabic answers.

  “First off, I don’t see how any of that is your business. But, yes, I think that’s okay, seeing as all people involved are consenting adults.” And because I just could not for the life of me avoid falling onto my own sword, I had to add, “And it’s not like all we do is just kiss.”

  That finally did the trick of breaking the tense silence, but not in the best kind of way. The younger of the two nitwits shrieked and quickly covered the ears of her little daughter who happened to stand beside her, who was, of course, quite obviously not getting what was going on. One of Gina’s boys snickered and elbowed his brother in the ribs, but their mother’s frown was still firmly fixed on me. Emily finally got control back over her eyelids, but the look of utter disbelief on her face wasn’t much better. My father cleared his throat—a warning for me to shut up if there ever was one—but I pointedly ignored that.

  Before I could make it worse, Jack decided to jump into that breach, wrapping his fingers around mine and extending his other hand toward Simon. “We hold hands, too, you know?” he offered, still smiling, but I doubted that he was fooling anyone. Simon sauntered over to us, but was wise enough to ignore Jack’s hand except for a maybe slightly too familiar bump with his shoulder, and stopped on my other side, one hand lightly touching down on my hip where it was closest to Jack’s.

  “This is outrageous!” Gina bellowed, making me wonder if they had a TLC film crew hiding behind the picket fence or something. Did people react like that in real life? My anger was up and rolling, though, so not responding was not an option.

  “How is the fact that we’re building a happy family outrageous? Just because it involves more people than the traditional core unit? We love each other”—which was true enough—“and we respect each other and remain faithful. How is that worse than what you entertained us with over lunch just now? How because your husband keeps cheating on you, you’ve started flirting with the football coach and might or might not have had something with your neighbor?”

  That certainly didn’t go over well, but I hadn’t expected it to.

  “How dare you compare that perverted thing you do to the sanctity of marriage!” Gina shouted, her face taking on an unhealthy shade of lobster red.

  “How is what I do perverted while you’re fine with being a lying cheater?” I replied—not that quiet myself—not caring that I’d likely upend the boat with that. It had been sinking, anyway.

  Gina was at a loss for words, but now the men of her family didn’t find the exchange that funny anymore, and Emily supplied the warranted, “Erin!” gasp that I kind of deserved. The moment lost its last thread of hilarity, though, when my remark prompted my father to finally take a more active role as he stepped up to me, scowling.

  “I raised you better than this!” he accused—whichever part of the exchange he was referring to, I wasn’t sure—and when I just glared back at him, he added, “I will not have you talk like this in my house, to my guests!”

  Pain stabbed through my gut, but I forced my rising bile down, squaring my shoulders.

  “Your house, which is clearly no
t my home anymore,” I ground out, widening my eyes to keep the tears that suddenly burned in them from spilling. He winced but held his ground, not a word of apology following.

  “But I don’t understand—“ Emily started, cutting off with a helpless look at me.

  I was tempted to mock her, but, really, between her and my father, her reaction was the more understandable one.

  “I called him last night.” I jerked my chin toward my father. “I told him. I asked him to talk to you. Which he obviously didn’t.” I wondered if I should have told her that I was sorry, but then Jack squeezed my fingers harder, making me drop it. I wasn’t sorry. The only thing I was sorry for was coming here today.

  Gina saw the resulting silence as an invitation to keep stoking the fire. “And I really can’t fault him that. Who would? If my daughter came to me, telling me that she’s living in sin, doing God knows what…” She added a dramatic pause there. “Emily, darling, I’m so sorry that you have to put up with this. I know that you’ve mentioned in the past that she’s a troubled kid, but this goes beyond anything I ever imagined. Guess that’s what you get when a wild girl grows up without a mother. Bless her soul, but at least she doesn’t have to see what her daughter turned into.”

  And that really was the last straw.

  “You did not just say that,” I growled, taking a step toward Gina, which made Simon’s hold on me slip. Jack’s fingers tightened, but a quick shake let me free my hand from his. Anger, so hot that it shorted out my brain, welled up inside of me, a tsunami of rage that washed away common sense and any reservations I might still have had. “A fucking whore like you does not deserve to even talk of her, let alone presume that you know how she’d—“

  That was as far as I got before my voice was drowned out by angry shouts from all sides, and Jack was quick to jerk me back when Gina’s brother started toward me.