by Kira Graham
However, I don’t care about either that or his attempt to smash his glass of vodka in my face, because I’m already moving once I get a look at Alex—only to come to a dead stop when I get a better look at her and take in…whatever the hell it is that’s happened to her.
“Jesus,” I mutter, my tongue thick and dry in my mouth.
She’s wearing an oversized men’s shirt, a pair of black leggings, and slippers, and, to be honest, I haven’t ever seen her look sexier. Until I glance down and take note of the way that she’s—well, it’s probably not polite to say…
“Did you eat a fucking cow? Whole?” I burst out, still unable to fully process the changes in her.
I don’t want to, I think, when I take another gander at her waistline and see the undeniable girth there. She’s fat. Just fat, Chilli. It’s breakup weight, I tell myself, in order to get rid of the curdling burn that settles in my gut.
“Screw you!”
“We already did!” I yell, falling silent when all the chatter around us stops, and sixteen pairs of eyes fall on me.
I shouldn’t have said that, and I know it, but after weeks of struggling to get hold of her, and then learning that she’s purposely moved—and that Rosetta isn’t just pissed at me, but super pissed—this new shock is just too much. Alex, my…friend, the woman that I thought was my friend, pussed out and ran away. And, looking at her now, I finally know why.
She went and got herself knocked up! By another man.
“Well, it must have sucked, seeing as how I hardly remember,” Alex sniffs, leaning in to give her mom a kiss and a hug, and somehow managing to stay away from a full lip-lock when the woman goes in for an overly wet smooch.
“Liar,” I accuse, dodging Sin’s fist as I pop up beside Honey, shamelessly using her as a human shield.
“Me? A liar?” Alex sneers, waving off Sin, who isn’t shy about physically removing her aunt to get to me. “You’re the one who stopped talking to me after our little…confrontation. ‘We’re pals, Al,’” she says mockingly in a singsong voice that is at odds with her sneering expression. “’You’re the first woman who’s ever liked me for me.’ Well, guess what, buddy? I don’t like you. You’re an ass with little to no staying power.”
“We talked about my boundaries,” I counter, filled with frustration because it’s true.
Okay, so I reacted poorly, but then I tried to fix it. And I would have fixed our friendship if Alex hadn’t dropped off the face of the Earth, only to return in this condition. Did she go out and sleep with the first guy she met after what happened between us? Goddammit!
“And I was okay with boundaries. I wasn’t looking for anything, Hart. Not a goddamn thing, so your cut-and-run act was useless at best.”
“Well, it was obviously well-timed,” I hiss back, waving a hand at her belly. “You clearly moved on fast—”
“Stop it!” she hisses right back, getting so far up into my face that I glance down to make sure that she isn’t levitating.
She isn’t. I just can’t explain how a woman so short can be going toe-to-toe—and standing literally face-to-face—with me.
“Alex—”
“I have the flu, fucker. Got it? That’s all this is. A little water bloat, a little upset stomach, and that’s the way we’re playing this. Now, get out of my way, stay out of my life, and don’t you dare make a single disparaging remark, because I have to tell ya, I’ve had just about all I can take out of you for the time being. Sin! Come on. Let’s go get some tea and talk about sleeping arrangements, because no way is your gassy ass bunking in my bed.”
And just like that, she walks away, her belly cutting a trail towards the kitchen and out of sight. Turning slowly, I find all eyes on me, with some in a state of narrowing that would scare me, if I were the kind of guy who scares easily. And no, my running routine with Alex doesn’t count. It was a knee-jerk reaction—
“Yeah, you can say jerk again,” Ares mutters, shaking his head and turning away from me.
“Guys—”
“Oh, my God—no wonder the denial train is chugging away,” Cleo mumbles, also shaking her head at me before sniffing and walking off towards the kitchen.
That leaves me with the elder Sweets, my parents, and my brothers, who all turn away to continue their conversations, while I am left locking eyes with Rosetta. She’s like a feral animal, I think, feeling my balls shrink as she sniffs and narrows her eyes to slits, then nods and totters off on her heels without a word.
In my world, that’s bad news. The last time I got that look, I ended up getting dog shit on my hand, tripping over my own feet, and falling face-first into that hand. Basically, I ended up with shit on my face, puke down my suit, and the unequivocal knowledge that if I didn’t make up with Rosetta, she’d kill me. Slowly.
Aaaand she’s right back on that train, it seems, chugging towards the spot where Alex has tied me to the tracks and left me to rot. Dammit.
“Addy—” I start, turning to my oldest brother for help.
“Don’t talk to me,” he hisses out of the side of his mouth, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead when I sit beside him on the couch. “They’ll think that I’m your ally, and I won’t be able to sleep if Cleo thinks that I’m in the enemy camp. The last time that happened, I woke up without pubes, and let me tell you, man, that shit itches when it grows back in.”
“No one’s gonna back me up here?” I ask, disgust pouring from me when Paris comes waltzing our way—only to come to a dead stop, spin on his heel, and immediately head in the opposite direction.
When my phone vibrates, I curse and show Adonis the text.
“He’s right. We have to keep our friendship a secret,” Adonis says in reference to Paris’s text.
“You’re my brothers!”
“Would you lower your voice? If Rosetta hears you, she’ll come back in here,” Zeus whispers, checking the kitchen door like the pansy he is.
Jesus, has everyone here lost their minds? I ask myself when conversation turns to Alex’s flu, which isn’t the fucking flu but obviously a damn baby!
“Traitors. Are you all listening to yourselves? She’s pregnant,” I mutter, wincing when Jack slaps me and claps a hand over my mouth, his own mouth trembling as his eyes fill.
“She’ll bolt again if we don’t play her game, boy! Do you want her to bolt again? Rosetta says that she went so dark that it took three bribes, a date with a cop”—at that, Zeus curses and throws me a murderous glare that I take to mean that his wife went on a date with a cop—“and a hack into the social security network to find her new phone number!”
“Rosetta hacked into the security—”
“Never happened!” Honey trills, giving me a hard look. “Innocent until proven guilty. Thank the Lord that my girls all know how to clean up after themselves. Jack, honey, are you going to check on your lamb?”
“Yes, Honey. You just relax, have a few cocktails with Lovey, and make sure that those wild ones don’t kill each other before they’ve tasted my mint sauce,” he croons, giving her an X-rated smooch before sidling off.
The look he gives me as he passes by, on the other hand, is so full of violence that I take a light step back and use Adonis as a shield. And no, I’m not ashamed, because any man in touch enough with his feelings to cry as much as Jack does, is more than capable of actually killing me.
“Don’t look now, Alex, but I think that the great Chilli Hart is scared of Jack,” Rosetta coos when they walk back into the room, and I find all five Sweet women glaring at me. With intent.
“Like we can blame him! Remember in ninth grade, when Delcourt Brewster told the tennis team that I slept with him? As if! Like I would ever go for a guy who thinks that tennis is a real sport!” Alex sneers, earning a round of giggles from the old ladies and all the men, who nod as if she’s right.
I played tennis in high school! It’s a very physically challenging sport!
“Yeah! But he wasn’t singing so easily after Uncle Jack g
ot in on the story,” Sin trills gleefully, her eyes locked on me. “Remember what happened?”
“A series of mysterious accidents that no one could prove or disprove. My personal favorite was when Del’s tires blew out for no good reason. And on his first day driving that Porsche, too,” Alex muses, though she doesn’t look at me. Not even a little.
Dammit.
“Ooh, my favorite was when they tried to accuse my Jacky of infecting the boy with that disease. What was it again, Sinai?”
“Dysentery,” she trills, happily, as if it were nothing more than the flu.
I’ve heard that people can die from that, and that contracting it isn’t exactly common, not with the scientific strides that we’ve made in the last century. So, if Jack somehow did pull that off, he must have put some actual work into it. Christ!
And right now, as he ambles out of the kitchen, he’s looking at me in a way that makes me wonder if eating here is a good idea.
“Last thing I remember hearing about old Delcourt is that his parents were home-schooling him. Compromised immune system,” Cleo muses, giving me a glee-filled smile that makes my ass go tight.
I know the Sweets—have known them ever since Rosetta Sweet, now married to my brother Zeus, decided that she was in love with me. It’s the face. When women see this face, they seem to lose their minds over me. It’s something that I’ve hated all my life, because, just once, I want a woman to love me for me, and not for the face.
Now, Chilli. Didn’t that almost happen? my mind asks me before I can stop it, the image of Alex, laughing and smiling at me, filling my mind’s eye. She didn’t love me, though. We were friends, I remind myself, pressing the memories back while eying her belly in my peripheral vision. And now we’re not. Heck, I don’t know why she’s still pissed at me. She’s obviously moved on.
“Sigh. I like that story. It reminds me of the time that Anna Freeman mysteriously contracted crabs from the toilets at school. After she called Sin a man-stealing whore,” Rosetta muses, giggling when Cleo mutters that she doesn’t have to say the word “sigh,” just make the sound.
“Firstly, Rosetta amuses me when she says sounds; it’s just funny. Secondly, that crab thing was no accident. Me ’n’ Cleo got Ash Callan to sit on that toilet seat after we heard that she’d bumped pelvic bones with Garth Brookes—not to be confused with the country singer, ’cause that man be sexy. I wonder if he’s still touring—” Tee asks, getting cut off by gagging sounds and curses from us all.
“Who the hell listens to country?” Adonis shudders, pulling Cleo in close when she starts to sniffle, obviously traumatized.
“Me! I do,” Tee says, ignoring the boos that surround us, and shrugging her shoulders casually. “I had to start going to anger management therapy after I tried to flatten that pig, Anders, with my car. They said that I shouldn’t listen to death metal anymore. They were right.”
Even I chuckle at the easy, comically uncaring way that she mentions the episode that landed her in jail three months ago. The story goes that Tee was having a bad day, and that she spilled coffee on herself when some jackass cut her off and almost sent her into oncoming traffic. Now, whether that recounting of it is true or not, everyone agrees that what happened next was the biggest problem. Tee, being Tee, which basically means that her temper exploded and her brain stopped working, put her foot down, rear-ended the guy, and drove him off the road. Once that had happened, she waited until he stumbled out of his car. Then she pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor and aimed her mangled car at the guy.
How he jumped over his car, no one will ever know, but it was essentially a miracle—not only for him, but for Tee, too. See, in the state of Georgia, as in most places on Earth, it’s a crime to aim your car at another person with the intention of pinning them to their hood, and in Tee’s case—which she told anyone who would listen, including the cops—she intended to cut him in half with her car. All that being said, Tee got her ass arrested for attempted assault—brought down from attempted murder because Rosetta is personal friends with the mayor, who is afraid of her and basically kisses her ass any chance he gets—and then barely avoided prison time when the judge sentenced her to eighteen months of anger management therapy.
The rest of it is quite comical, too, really. See, Nefertiti—or Tee, as we all call her—is an anger management therapist herself, and actually helps others to understand that violence isn’t an option. The irony of that, while not lost on any of us, has been something of a running joke ever since Tee’s been in the program. While the sessions have been intended to calm her down and help her reshape her reactions to things that upset her, she’s now more violent than ever. At least, her personality is. It’s as funny as hell watching her get pissed off, only to see her stop mid-assault because the judge warned her that if she hurts anyone again, to prison she will go.
So, yeah. She’s in the program and apparently listening to country music, the one genre that I was always convinced would drive people to violence.
“The issue here isn’t about death metal, Garth Brookes, or the fact that my eardrums just spontaneously started to bleed,” Rosetta mutters, giving Tee a sympathetic look. “It’s about Daddy’s penchant for violence when one of his babies is hurt. You listening, Chilli?” she asks, smiling darkly at me when I peer out from behind Adonis and meet her eyes.
The coward tries to shift and pull away from me, his muttered professions of love to Cleo making it clear to all that he’d hang me out to dry if he could. If I’d let go of him and allow him to move away, that is.
“Now, Rose—”
“Do you know, Chilli, that we’re all just a little…less hindered by morality and the legality of certain things? Did you also know that I spent a night talking to another man, out on a date, while Zeus sat at the table beside us, so drunk—which he had to be in order to stop himself from attacking the guy—that he had to be carried out of the restaurant? Even worse, do you know that, thanks to you, I was forced to say so…sooor…oh my God, I can’t even say that word a second time!” she yells, her whole body shuddering. “In any case, I had to say that word to Zeus, because the fact is, I’m married—which means that I shouldn’t be going out on dates with other men just so that I can get them to break the law and help me find Alex!” she yells, her fist already shaking at me before Zeus steps closer, hugs her, and starts crooning whatever incantation it must take to get Rosetta to settle.
Me, I’m a little scared, but mostly, I’m annoyed, because what the hell? How is it my fault that Alex pulled a midnight flip and decided to stop seeing and talking to everyone? I didn’t make that choice for her, and in fact, I, too, was searching for Alex.
“How is that even my fault? Are you hearing yourself, Rosetta? That’s on Alex here, who, by the way, hasn’t responded to any of my texts, voice messages, or apologies. I said I was sorry,” I say at Alex then, giving Rosetta a smug look. “Unlike some people I know, I can actually say the word and mean it. I should have called you and talked to you, like a man, instead of running away. I thought that we were friends, though, Al, and that you’d at least give me a chance to explain and make things right—”
“Make it right? Make it right?” Alex yells, stepping into the middle of the room to stop Rosetta and Tee from rushing towards me.
Her red hair, up in a messy bun, practically shoots fire as she puts her hands on her hips, right around that swelling middle, and glares at me.
“You can’t make shit right, you asshole. We were friends. Were. Until you stopped talking to me and went out on a date with Mindy!” she sneers, throwing Sin a look of apology because it seems that the woman is now besties with that psycho baker who is just way too chipper for me.
“We didn’t go out on a date! I commissioned her to supply the desserts for a small party that I threw for the groundbreaking down in Utah!”
Like I would ever date Mindy fucking Marcy. I may screw around a lot, and yeah, if I actually notched my bedposts, like some peopl
e accuse me of doing, then the things might look like gnarled old twigs about to collapse by now, but I would never stoop that low. Mindy may be cool, nice, kind, and apparently a friend of the family’s now that the girls have stopped despising her, but she’s still the same girl that I met months ago who made me want to run like hell.
She’s the girl that people would have called the bubbliest person around during high school. She’s the epitome of that chipper cheerleader type who hops around and has such verve for life that her voice is always helium-pitched. She is not my type. Okay, so I did consider having sex with her, but come on, the chick is hot. I didn’t, though—not after she opened her mouth and the words, “Isn’t this fun? Do you wanna share a dessert? Oh my gosh, this is so exciting!” fell out of her gob. I may be a man-whore who attracts women in droves, but I do have standards. I like my women jaded and aware of my limits. The limits being no commitment, no second date, and no sticking around of any kind. That means that anyone I sleep with cannot be as bubbly, as chipper, or as kind as Mindy. I just can’t bring myself to hurt their feelings.
“That’s not what it looked like to me, and no, before you get all creeped out about it, I was not stalking you or watching you! I saw it on her social media. Jesus. Have you seen the unicorn obsession she has?” Alex asks disgustedly, turning to face the others, who all agree and launch into an argument about the existence of unicorns, before Sin whistles loudly and turns them back to the conversation at hand. Which is about me. Whom everyone seems to want to attack.
Once again, I will say it: I had nothing to do with Alex’s going MIA. I am not to blame for that, and hello—she moved on pretty fucking fast if that belly is any indication, though from the size of her, she must have already been pregnant before we had that one night.
“Well, whatever it was, it was just business.” Sort of. “She’s with Nate, remember, and besides, I only gave her the business because Honey asked me to,” I tell them, causing all eyes to turn to Honey, who just shrugs guiltily and titters.