by Cecy Robson
Sean holds his hands out. “Then what’re you newbies waiting for? Order up the first round.”
“Us?” she asks, looking at her friend. “We have to pay?”
“Damn straight, yeah,” Sean says like it’s obvious. “Everyone knows virgins always buy the first round. Ain’t that right, boys?”
The rest of my team, even those loitering on the outside deck, start chanting “virgins, virgins, virgins,” pumping their fists in the air.
“Aw, hell,” her friend says. “Come on. Let’s go get our cherries popped.”
They walk in, but we don’t follow. Becca’s made no move to slip out so I know she means to talk. I smile softly. “What’s up?”
She looks to the ocean, where the waves sweep in to bathe the sand with all its salty heaven. But I doubt she really sees it, even though like me, Kiawah is a part of her. She crinkles her nose and then takes my hand. “Last summer,” she says.
“Yeah, last one,” I answer quietly, knowing how she feels because I’m feeling it, too. I squeeze her hand, my tone mirroring all the emotions fluttering inside me. “Time to grow up, right?”
“I wish we didn’t have to,” she mumbles, keeping her stare on the sea as if trying to gather some strength from it. “You still serious about applying to the Peace Corps?”
I was hoping we didn’t have to have this conversation any time soon, but I’ve kept things from her long enough. “I applied over winter break, Becks.”
Her mouth slowly falls open. “I told you to wait—to not do something drastic just because of what those doucheheads did to you.”
The “doucheheads” she’s referring to are Hunter, my ex-boyfriend, and Blakeney, my ex-friend. They once held my heart, until I caught them in bed and they ripped it from my chest.
Her words chip away at me. Not because I’m not over Hunter, or Blakeney. I am. I’m just not over their betrayal. I could never hurt anyone I claimed to love or called a friend. But they didn’t feel the same.
I try to smile, knowing Becca needs my reassurance. But I can’t quite manage this time. “You know I’ve always talked about going and serving. Ever since I was little.”
“So you’re telling me, if he’d stayed faithful and been a real man instead of a little bitch—if you’d agreed to marry him like he kept talking about—that you still would have signed up to join the Corps? Come on, Trin. Finding him fucking Blakeney was like a pen being slapped in your hand, forcing you to sign on that dotted line.”
“No, it wasn’t,” I insist.
I don’t want tonight to be about the bad things of the past. Not with the five of us together after too many months apart. But here we are, focusing on things I’ve tried hard to forget. “Becks, as much as I thought I loved Hunter, and as much as I believed that he wanted to marry me, I realize now we never would have worked out. I’m going into the Peace Corps, exactly like I’ve always planned. But knowing who he is—who he really is—he wouldn’t have waited for me, and he sure as anything wouldn’t have joined up just to be with me.”
Even through her sunglasses, I can tell Becca’s eyes are narrowing. “He’s still a douche head, and so is she.”
“I won’t argue with you about that,” I tell her. My head falls against the seat rest. Do you want to know something about Becca? She’s sweeter than maple syrup and about as kind as people get. Until you hurt someone she loves. I’m among the lucky few she loves. But it’s because she loves me, that she reacts the way she does.
She pushes her sunglasses up to her head, pegging me with enough disappointment to make me ache. “When do you leave?” she asks.
“September. But I won’t know my placement for another few weeks.” I answer so softly, I’m not sure if she hears, but her tensing posture assures me she does. “Daddy used his connections at the UN and arranged it so I’d have time to take my boards and have one last summer here with all of you.”
“So from Princeton to the Peace Corps. From rich kid, to just another volunteer. "She sighs in that way she does when she’s trying not to cry. “Nice,” she says, not that she means it.
My attention falls to our hands and to how hard she’s holding me. “It’s the right thing to do, Becks,” I tell her.
“Helping people is the right thing to do. Signing up for twenty-five months with no way out, that’s above and beyond.” She shakes her head. “Hunter and Blakeney are assholes for what they did to you.”
They are. But she needs to know that’s not why I applied. “Becks, it’s time to grow up and move forward, and to do the things we’ve always planned.”
“What if I don’t want to?” Her voice splinters and tears glisten her eyes. “What if none of us do? I don’t want life to go on without the five of us together—you, me, Sean, Mason, and Hale—especially you, Trin.”
Like me, she wishes she could stop time, and that somehow things could be different. But somethings can’t be helped, and this is one of them.
Her parents and mine had offered to send us backpacking across Europe, but we chose to come back here. Back home to spend one last summer doing what we loved, and to pretend to be forever young, forever free of life’s demands, forever friends. As I look to my pseudo sister, I swallow hard and hope that the latter stays true.
Tears trickle down her cheeks, causing my eyes to sting. But Becks doesn’t need me crying with her. Right now, she needs my strength, and maybe a little of my humor.
“Trin, Becks!” Sean hollers from the deck. “What the hell? We’ve got shots waiting and horny women who can’t wait to have a piece of me.”
“Sorry!” I yell, hopping out of the jeep. “Becca dared me to spell my name across her belly with my tongue and I couldn’t refuse.”
Instead of taking it for the joke it is, Sean freezes. “No, shit,” he says.
Becca doubles over, practically falling out of the driver’s side seat. I hurry around to steady her and lead her forward. Sean continues to stare at us, his eyes clouded with whatever dirty thoughts are swimming through his mind as we stumble into Your Mother’s.
My laughter fades as I look to where the rustic blue double doors open up to the rear deck. But I’m not staring at Hale as he points to his raised shot glass filled to the rim, or at Mason who’s smiling politely at the women admiring his muscles. And my, I barely notice Sean shooting past us.
I’m too busy gaping at the smoking hot bartender with the Army Ranger tat inked to an arm as thick as my thigh.
Holy Baby Jesus in a manger sleeping on a bed of hay.
“Hmm,” Becca says in a purr. She leans in close to whisper in my ear. “Who do we have here?”
Brown strands of wavy hair spill around his strong features and startling light eyes, and a thin beard lines a jaw I could probably pound horseshoes on. If I knew anything about horseshoes. Or horses. Or, pardon me, what was my name again?
Not to be rude, or inappropriate—I do have morals, after all—but that tight blue shirt stretching across his broad chest is one pec flex shy of ripping in half. Or me ripping it in half when I straddle him.
“You want to straddle him?” Becca asks, a delighted gleam fixing on her face.
I look at her, realizing I spoke out loud. “No?”
She busts out laughing. This time, she’s the one dragging me forward. “Come on, Trin. Time to have fun.”
We stroll toward the hot guy. Or as I call him, ‘my future baby daddy’ because for the first time in too long I’m looking—we’re talking full-out gawking—at a man. He has my attention and whether he means to or not he’s not letting go.
I smile his way, not because of what he looks like, but because I can’t seem to help myself. I think maybe Becca smiles at him, too. But “sex in a tight T-shirt” isn’t impressed by her charm, and he sure isn’t captivated by mine. He scowls—as in scowls—which of course earns him a wink from me.
Hey, sticks and stones, or whatever, I’m going to get this guy to smile. Even if it’s clear he doesn’t want to smile at me.<
br />
READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM
Eternal
A Carolina Beach Novel
by Cecy Robson
Chapter One
Landon
The wind picks up, brushing the gritty sand along the shore in that graceful way it only seems to do during winter. Kiawah is always bustin’ at the seams in the summer, drawing tourists from as close as North Carolina to as far as Sweden.
I take a long pull of my beer and dig my feet further into the sand. This time of year there are two a kinds of people: the locals and lonely. I was always the former and only mildly entertained the latter. That changed when I caught my wife blowing her manager with the same wild enthusiasm she blew me.
“God damn it,” I mutter.
I’m not sure which part was more disturbing. Her blowing him in the kitchen, the same place we’d fucked earlier that morning, or her finishing him off while I stood there like an idiot.
I’m going to go with her finishing him off.
I can still picture her rising from her kneeling position, the front of the four hundred dollar blouse she insisted on buying flapping open and exposing her bare breasts with each step she took.
“It didn’t mean anything, Landon,” she told me, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
Maybe. But his teeth meant something to him. I could tell by the way he kept batting at his face, looking for them when the police finally pulled me off him.
The pathetic way he looked bordered on comical. Shit, the whole damn thing was comical. I might have even laughed if my heart wasn’t busy joining his teeth on the floor.
Bernadette wasn’t a perfect person. I knew that long before I put a ring on her finger. But I’m not either so I thought we’d be perfect together. She needed someone to help her, to take care of her, and I was willing to do it. Hell, I was willing to do anything for her.
Up until that moment when I found her on her knees.
Call me a fool in love.
But don’t make me look like one.
I push my half-drunk bottle into the sand, reminding myself it’s been a year, and it’s time to move on. Sounds great in theory, but pride to a man is as important as working hard, decency, and family. That’s how I was raised. That’s how it should be. Bernadette, however brief, was family. She kicked at my pride almost as hard as I nailed Blaze (nice fucking name by the way) in the nuts. All that left me to do was work hard, and damn, didn’t I give that shit my all?
The wind picks up, stirring swirls of yellow and sending them to ghost over the water. Mother Nature is doing her best to soothe me, reminding me of the peace and quiet I need and pulling my focus to the vast ocean and the cresting the waves that build and crash along the shore.
Peace, I repeat in my head.
“Quiet,” I say out loud.
“Trin,” I mumble when my phone vibrates in my back pocket.
I pull it out, sure enough it’s my baby sister Trinity. The peace and quiet on Kiawah is no match for her. “Yeah?”
“Now, Landon,” she says, her South Carolina accent as thick as mine. “Is that anyway to say hello?”
She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “What if I was Miss Universe, calling to tell you I had the cure for diabetes, and whether or not I shared it with the world depended on how you answered the phone? Wouldn’t you feel bad that all those people out there with diabetes wouldn’t have a cure because you answered the phone with ‘Yeah?’ sounding broodier than shit, crankier than a leprechaun shoved up some poor unsuspecting bull’s ass, and about as pleasant as the matador trying to coax him out—”
“What hell does that even mean, Trin?”
“It means you should go to Becca’s New Year’s Eve party tomorrow night,” she explains like it’s obvious.
“I’m busy,” I tell her.
“Doing what? Besides drinking a beer and looking at an ocean that’s not going anywhere?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, muttering a curse when she plops down beside me.
Like me, she’s barefoot. Most people wouldn’t dare walk on the beach in the middle of winter. But ever since we were little, Trin and I have always loved the feel of sand sliding beneath our feet, even in the cold.
Her jeans are rolled up like mine and she’s wearing a heavy coat like me. Hers is burgundy, mine is navy. I didn’t bother with a hat. She did, a gray beanie tight enough to keep her long black hair away from her pixie face. Even after having my nephew, she’s still thin, lacking the muscle that’s keeping me warm.
She motions to my beer. “Landon, where are your manners? Aren’t you going to offer me a drink? I am a lady after all.” She huffs. “Your momma raised you better than that.”
I pass her the bottle. She takes a sip and makes a face. “It’s warm.”
“I kept rolling it in my hands,” I admit. “I suppose it’s hard to keep it cold that way, even in forty-degree weather.”
She nods like she understands. “How long have you been out here?”
I lie. “Not long.”
“How long have you been out here?”
I smirk. “A while.”
“How long, have you been out here?”
“I guess long enough.”
I start to stand when her thin arms wrap around me, keeping me in place. “Landon, as your favorite and only sister on God’s green earth, I owe it to tell you that dark, hairy, and cranky doesn’t fit you.” She rubs the scruff on my jaw like she’s trying to swipe it off. “Lord, it’s like an opossum crawled up your chest and spit out a litter of babies across your jaw.”
I edge away. “Your husband has the same damn beard,” I remind her.
“Oh, that’s not true.” She smiles and turns her attention toward the ocean, her stare getting that dream-like look it always gets when she thinks of Callahan. “My man’s beard is all alpha and sexy.” She makes a face. “Yours is, well, possumy.” She holds out her hand. “And if that’s not a word, it should be. At least when it comes to whatever the hell is on your face.”
“Trin, if you’re trying to use your charm to talk me into going to Becca’s party, it’s not working.”
“Why? She was nice enough to invite you.” She shrugs. “Besides, it’s almost New Year’s Eve. Time for a fresh start and a new beginning.”
Her voice quiets at her last few words. She doesn’t mention Bernadette. But after this year, I suppose I’ve mentioned her enough, and so has Trin.
If hate were a super-power, Trin’s hate for Bernadette would have crushed the Fortress of Solitude and slapped Superman upside the head for being a little bitch. And Trin, she likes everyone.
My family is from money. It’s not something I really think about, or obsess over it, it’s just always been there. We were taught to take care of it, add to it, but most of all be generous with it, since we had so much. Maybe that’s why it was easy for me to give as much as I did to Bernadette. I wanted to see her happy and maybe give her the life she always dreamed of. But where Trin and our Momma would drop a few grand setting up and auction to help raise money for the children’s hospital, Bernadette would drop a few grand on herself.
My parents insisted on an air-tight pre-nup. It pissed me off at the time, especially since they didn’t insist the same thing when Trin was marrying Callahan. But they saw Bernadette for who she was, not like me. Love makes you blind, but it doesn’t make you deaf when the woman you thought you knew calls you a wife-beater to your face.
It should have been an easy divorce. Sign here, initial there, and walk away. Instead I dropped close to a hundred grand defending the abuse charges she filed against me.
“He’s always been violent,” she cried to the judge. “Look at what he did to my manager.”
Her attorney was more than happy to present the pictures of her manager’s busted up face and put the police officers who responded on the stand. Those fine members of law enforcement admitted they pulled me off Blaze (again, nice fucking name), but they were more than happy to menti
on Blaze’s pants and drawers were down to his ankles when they found him.
“Landon,” Trin says, her voice sad.
It’s never a good sign when my sister grows quiet, and the way she wraps her arms around mine and leans her head against my shoulder. The last time she did that, our granddaddy Palmer had passed.
She knows I’m remembering, and she doesn’t like it one bit.
It was bad enough Bernadette had accused me of hitting her, something I’d never do to any woman for any reason. But to try to make me out to look like a monster, and get all the gossip mags talking about Landon Summers, wealthy son of Owen and Silvia Summers, accused of threatening his wife’s life, and soiling the Summers’ name, it was more than I could take. She wasn’t messing with me she was messing with my folks, two of the best, most generous people I know.
“She said I was hitting her,” I say aloud, before giving it too much thought.
“I know,” Trin says. She adjusts her hold. “But Landon, anyone who knows you didn’t believe her.”
“But there are a lot of people who don’t know me, Trin.”
She sighs. “I know that, too.”
The waves start drawing closer, but it’s not until a large one slaps hard against the shore that she speaks again. “Did she ever hit you?”
I don’t bother telling her about all the shit Bernadette threw at me: her hair dryer, the damn crystal jewelry box, or all those dishes she smashed when she wasn’t getting her way. But I don’t need to. When Trin lifts her head, it’s clear she knows enough. “Landon, why didn’t you say anything?”
“I couldn’t do that to her.”
Trin scrambles to her feet, knocking over the beer, her face pink with rage. “But she did it to you—even when it wasn’t true!”
“That doesn’t make it right,” I say. “To be accused of something like that, it’s total horseshit.”
“Horseshit she was more than happy to fling your way.” Her breaths come quick. “She didn’t even blink on that stand. You saw that, right? She wanted money and she didn’t care what she had to do to get it.”