by Gabrielle G.
Him being in New York today and coming back tomorrow morning, before leaving again with clients, is what we need to get back to normal. No kissing, not fucking, no sharing a soul. Darling and Asshole need to kill Sugar and Hot-stuff before we make the world explode.
“That’s funny how you denied the hairdresser thing but let all the other things I told you float in the air,” Donna says, cutting my last streak of hair. “Don’t fall for him, Avery.”
“For years you told me to give him a try. You’re the queen of mixed messages, you know that?”
“I told you to fuck him, once or twice, to ride him and come a lot. I never told you to play house and kiss the guy in front of the whole town.”
“Believe me, it’s not what’s happening here…”
“Uh-huh.” She takes the hair dryer and starts it full blast.
“Really, Donna!” I scream over the noise. “Not. What’s. Happening!”
“I can’t hear you!” she yells louder.
“It’s not what you think!” I try to say. She gestures that she doesn’t hear me.
Rolling my eyes, I mull over my situation, wondering how to be sure I can protect my heart and protect my little bee at the same time, trying to convince myself that what we shared last night was a joke of the universe. A sad and sick joke, because Barn and I aren’t meant to be. We can’t be. I can’t be the one promised to the town slut, and he can’t be the one who makes me happy.
14
Barnabas
Who I am, was never who I portrayed myself to be.
I’m the last child of a family of four, therefore I’m the clown, the loud kid, the entertainer.
I’m the sexiest man in Springs Falls, so I’m the town slut, the womanizer, the Casanova.
I’m the almost-lover of Avery Dubois, thus I’m a hopeless passionate soul in search of happiness. But the truth is, I’m the asshole to her stuck-up ways or at least, that’s what she wants me to be.
When I stroll into the kitchen, my attitude is on point. The last couple of days never happened. I never tasted her on my tongue, her cunt was never the finest place to park my dick at night, and I haven’t thought once about her delicate tits or luscious ass.
“Darling,” I announce my presence, ignoring the craving in my body to take her into my arms. She is standing at the sink in plain black leggings and a blue tank top lost in her thoughts. Without any regard for her, I reach for a mug, pour myself a cup of joe and walk out to the front porch, as I do every sunny morning.
“Asshole,” she mumbles as she reaches the door, “you’re back, and you used the last of the coffee.” I smirk. I was up with the crows, as my Aussie client said last week, organizing the weekend for the guys arriving today.
“Sorry, not sorry, sleepyhead. I’m sure there is some in the main house, or, crazy idea, you could make more, Princess…” I use all the disgust I have in me for broccoli to snarl her new nickname. It’s fitting. Princess as in Brave. Not because of the red hair. She always has been the one not afraid to be different from us, from any crowd, standing proud for who she is and not needing anybody, even less a man, to tell her who she is. She’s unapologetic, fierce, and beautiful. But I know that when you call a woman princess, that’s not who they think about. Avery is thinking about Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, or Cinderella. The old fairy tales she hates, where the prince saves the day while the princess awaits sleepily or cleaning the outdoor toilet with mice.
As if Avery would ever eat the poisonous apple, touch the spinning wheel, or want to go to a formal ball. She suspects the worst in people all the time, and they mostly prove her right. That’s how she navigates through her wounds and makes her world go ‘round. We all have our part to play in Avery’s story. Me? She needs to hate me. I always gave her my worst because I never wanted her to be disappointed in who she needs me to be, and as two nights ago never was, I’ll continue my worst so her ecosphere doesn’t crumble.
I know how to infuriate women. It’s something you learn fast when you have an older sister. I used to destroy her toys, color over her pretty drawings in brown, and go through her stuff. I still do. I can drive women crazy as fast as I can make them come.
“If you’re done sucking all the seed of happiness from Father Earth, I would like to drink my coffee in peace, Ave. Don’t you have a pussy to shave or some cellulite to burn?”
“Go fuck yourself!”
“I’ll Barn you whenever you want, darling.” I sip my coffee to hide my smirk. I haven’t laid eyes on her once this morning, and I know how much she hates not being acknowledged. I take the blunt I keep behind my ear and bring it to my lips.
“Alexis is going to come down any minute.” She stomps her feet. Come on, little Ave, bite back. I light my joint and inhale deeply.
“And?” She has to know that I wouldn’t smoke if I knew Lex was home. I texted my mom this morning and asked her to take Lex so Ave could rest and took her over to the main house while she was in the shower. If I’m her almost-lover and real-asshole, I’m still her fake-boyfriend, and I’ll still fake take care of her. “Want some?” I offer her the joint I know she won’t take.
“You’re not worth my time!” She’s trying hard, but it sounds flat. She isn’t as snappy as she usually is around me. I guess that’s what she’s like after a good dicking. I still snub her, looking into the distance. I set the coffee on the step, keep my joint between my lips and do the one thing I know will drive her nuts. I tie my hair in a man bun. I start by tilting my head back slightly while my hair slides between my fingers so I can take half of it in an elastic. I imagine her face contorting between pleasure and torture, and all I want to do is to rub one out. The grunts coming from her makes my dick beam to the sky. I chuckle, knowing she’s as wet as I’m hard. She scoffs and goes back inside without saying a word, and I let my hair down, to celebrate my little win of the battle I’m fighting against my own desire.
A car pulls up next to the barn. Pushing away the feelings of yearning and understanding, I meditate a second to bottle up my confusion and sprinkle happiness into my shit. It’s showtime.
Throwing my joint in the coffee, so I’m sure she’s not tempted to drink it, I leave her to tend to her desire in solo. If she were my girl, I wouldn’t let her take care of it by herself, but I’m not what she wants, even if we both know I’m what she needs.
Those guys are easy to please. They want to climb, raft, hike, and be in the middle of mountains. That’s the kind of people I wanted to meet when I had the camp in mind. I love people pushing their limits and enjoying nature.
This afternoon, we rode bikes to where we’re camping so we can leave on an early hike tomorrow morning. Then we’ll rock climb to the spot where we’ll raft down to our next camp where the motorcycles will wait for us to come back here on Sunday and get them back to their life. Andrew is part of the trip as my second, and Jake is the one helping with whatever I need behind the scenes like moving the bikes from one point to another, getting cold beer and food to the campground, making sure everything rolls smoothly if I have any crazy requests or if I run into any problems, which I won’t because I’m not the stupid stoner most people think I am. I will never put someone else’s life in danger. I learned a long time ago that it’s easier to let people talk about you than correct their assumptions. Like with Avery. I never tried to change the image she had of me. If she thinks I’m banging her best friend or her mother, that’s her problem, not mine. I know the truth, Donna and Marybeth know it too, and whatever other people think is not my problem.
“There is a group of obnoxious guys talking about tits, drinking beer, and smoking weed around a campfire, and you’re brooding alone on the side. What’s the matter, little pisser?” I lift my nose up from the map I was studying to see my brother Aaron standing in front of me. With the fire at his back and his almost white beard, he looks like a more handsome version of Santa spending his vacation in hell.
“What are you doing here, Aar?” He sits next to me
and nudges me in the shoulder. He should be at his restaurant and not in the woods tracking me down because he heard, certainly through Andrew, that I wasn’t talking tits and getting high. I turn to my best friend and see him raise his beer in my direction.
“Well, my whole staff is gossiping about how you claimed Avery in front of the whole town and how the kiss that followed was, I quote, ‘the greatest, hottest and most romantic kiss the country has seen.’ And then Adam texted me about your peevish mood last night, so I thought I’d check on you. Those kinds of feelings can be… overwhelming when you’re not used to it.” Aaron doesn’t fuck around with words. Luke loves to drag out conversations to tease me, and Salomé observes, ready to chew my ass out. Aaron doesn’t talk much, but when he does, you’re generally compelled to listen and answer.
“I’m just working, Aar, nothing overwhelming. We kissed, we had sex, we can’t be together. That’s it, that’s all.”
“You had sex? You didn’t fuck? You didn’t ‘Barn’ her? You had sex, and that’s nothing? I call it bullshit, Barn. You’ve been retreating for two days, and it’s not like you.” A man can’t get introspective without having his family examining his shit… At least not in the Gritt family. I sigh, annoyed, and knowing there is no escape.
“I’m going to ask you something,” he continues, ignoring my mood. “Why are you here and not with her?”
“Because I’m working.”
“No. Why are you here,” he taps his index fingers twice on my forehead, “and not with her?” He points at my heart. The men in my family love talking about feelings, but they know I don’t do this shit. They all know I don’t get involved for too long or ever, and I don’t dwell on my emotions. I get high, I play dumb, I laugh, I hide.
“I don’t make promises.” I state, getting back to the map and checking new hiking trails to take in the future.
“So, don’t make any.” He scoffs as if he’s mocking me. He and Luke always did. They’re more like twins, reading each other's minds, having their backs. I’m the man left out. Especially now that Dex and Alane are in the picture. When Luke brought Dex along, my relationship with Luke was great. Aaron and Dex are like kindred spirits, so Luke found himself alone at family reunions, and we bonded. But since Alane, Luke’s best friend when they were teenagers, has been back in our lives, I’m back at being the little fuck-up of a brother.
“Marriage is a promise, Aar.” I shoot him a pointed look over the map. My brother’s eyes slightly widen.
“Marriage, huh? Okay.” He pauses and smiles. “Marriage is not a promise, Barn. It’s a commitment. If you think Ave is the one, after all the ones you went through, you can’t let her go. Don’t settle. Didn’t you learn anything about any of our mistakes? I settled with Jess, and I ended up divorcing her. Luke tried to settle with that guy Bruce just to fall back harder into Dex’s arms, and Chris? He almost married the wrong person before circumstances made him open his eyes and find our sister waiting before him. If she’s your shot at getting a happy ending, believe in your lucky star. And you’re going to believe in it for two people for a while because we all know Avery is not the easiest person to convince. I can still hear the screams coming from the house when she found you in bed with the bride-to-be the morning after the bachelorette party at that first wedding she organized alone. I don’t think she has the best track record with men, and feeling something for you might be terrifying.” I wince, remembering the inconvenient little details that had slipped my mind. Another reason why Ave and I can’t happen.
“How do you know she has feelings?” Aaron raises an eyebrow and smirks at me.
“You really think she’d have had sex with you if she didn’t? Even at the dinner table last Wednesday, I could see how much you disgusted her. I think only Mom and Marybeth believed you two were together. Sexual tension, yes, off the charts. But a relationship? Nah, impossible. So if you ‘had sex,’ he quotes with his fingers. “It means she felt something. And if she felt something, it means she has feelings. That’s easy.” I look at my brother dumbfounded.
“When did you become Dr. Phil?”
“Since I married the woman I loved. I was lucky enough to meet her when I was sixteen and dumb enough to lose her soon after that. I know deep inside, you always wanted to be me, but don’t be as stupid as I once was. I was eighteen, you’re thirty-eight. Man up, Barn.” He stands, taps on the top of my head as if I was five years old again, and leaves. I stay behind a few minutes, digesting what Aaron just told me. It’s easy for him to say shit like that. His hardest moment in life was when he moved to Seattle and left the girl behind. The rest was just his monumental ego blinding his way to his own heart. He’s assuming the same things stand before me. He doesn’t see the fear of not being loved for the loser I really am. He doesn’t get the distress of wondering if I deserve losing everything because of the cruelty of fate. He doesn’t know the agony of knowing you’ll never be half the man your father is. He doesn’t understand the sorrow I feel at the idea of spending my life alone.
Man up, Barn. There is nothing to man up about. Taking a deep breath in, I stand and walk toward the gang. Plucking the joint from Andrew’s hands and getting a beer in my other, I placate a smile on my face and push away the sad and the bad to make room for the rad, as those guys around the fire would say.
“I heard you talking about breasts, guys? Let me tell you about those tits I fucked last week. My dick felt like he was on a waterslide.” I say, sitting close by and sharing the tale of the tits I don’t long to touch anymore. It’s always easier to be who people think you are than to become who you should be. I’ll be the slut as long as I can be, since, I can’t become something else.
15
Avery
Dex Crawford is a strange man.
If you overcome his cold allure and don’t get freaked out by his ‘fuck you’ smile, you can see the kind of man he is. I’ve seen it when he’s around Salomé. He will hang the moon for her. I don’t think he’s even that sweet with Luke. Nevertheless, I’m still wondering why he decided to look over my case and make sure my lawyer was doing everything right.
“I wish you would have talked to me before giving him free rein to paternity rights,” he says, looking over his glasses on the tip of his nose.
I shrug. “What’s done is done.” Dex falls back in his chair but leaves his gaze on me. I do everything to occupy my thoughts. I look at the ceiling, at the pencils on his desk, at the collar of his purple shirt. Everywhere but at his eyes that are trying to suck the life out of me. Dex Crawford might as well be a dementor.
“You had sex with him,” he finally says after a few minutes of silence.
“Well, duh, we have a daughter. I know you’re not interested in women, Dex, but when a man and a woman have sex, sometimes there is a chance of pregnancy.” He shakes his head, and a small smile appears at the corners of his mouth.
“Between the shrugging and the smart retorts, you could be related to my friend Virginia.”
“She’s my cousin,” I deadpan. His brows furrow.
“Good one. But, I wasn’t talking about dickhead Noah. You slept with Barn.”
This family is insane. Salomé already stopped by yesterday, knowing too well her brother wasn’t around all weekend, and she tried to get all the details from me. Then Luke and Alane came by to see if I needed anything. I really believed Aaron and Dex were different from the meddling committee, but I guess I was wrong. I haven’t seen Barnabas since he stole the last of the coffee, and I’m not complaining in the least. Alexis asked where he was all weekend, not understanding why he would sleep in the woods if he had a perfect bed at home, and even asked to sleep in his bed if he wasn’t there. Of course, I told her no, but I still found her trying to enter his bedroom, and I had to explain to her about boundaries and privacy. When I saw her on her knees trying to peek under the door, I lost it. She cried hard, explaining she was only sliding drawings under the door and missing him, and I felt like an ass. So, I
let her draw on my arm, and paid her in Fruit Roll-Ups like Barn would do. I think she drew him at least twenty pictures and wrote him an unnecessary number of secret messages. As I refused to be jealous of my four-year-old, I walked away and let her express herself. Big mistake. She expressed herself on his door, and I spent my Sunday afternoon cleaning off her graffiti with a magic sponge while she was bawling behind me, telling me that I was destroying her art. I know I was living in his space, but Barnabas seemed to be everywhere. What haunted me the most wasn’t his dick, but his words. The loving words he had whispered in my ear, the stupid comments he shared, the nickname he gave me, those were hard to bottle up and get back to a reality where Barnabas wasn’t mine to have. But being with him wouldn’t last—it didn’t with boring men like Noah, why would it with someone like Barnabas—and Alexis would lose one of her favorite people. I also genuinely can’t stand the guy.
“I would prefer you not to come on my chair while you replay every move he made on you.” Dex’s voice drags me out of my thoughts, and I zoom in on him, only to find him smirking at me.
I look at him, confused as to where this conversation is going. “Anyhow, bastard or not, he has every right to see his daughter.”
“I know.”
“Plan a visit now, before it all goes through the judge. It will show your willingness. Do it at the park, or even better, at the farm, but not alone with him. Tell him his wife can come and bring your boyfriend.” He winks before dismissing me.
On my way back home, I think about what Dex told me. Asking Noah to come with Paulette and having Barnabas around isn’t such a bad idea. Alexis would be more comfortable. Having people around would show I’m trying to cooperate, and if he doesn’t pay attention to her, I’ll have someone to prove he doesn’t have any interest in his daughter. But it also means asking Barnabas for yet another favor, and an awkward one if what he said about Paulette is true, and he fucked her.