The Summer Deal

by Jill Shalvis

  Brynn came toward her. “You know, my moms have far more love to give than they have children. Feel free to take some of it. You’d be doing me a favor. They’re . . . a lot.”

  “Hey, we heard that!” came Olive’s disembodied voice. “And we’re not smothering in the least! Also, can you ask Kinsey where she got her heels? They’re fabulous.”

  Kinsey blinked at Brynn. “Are they right outside the door?”

  “That or they still have the kid monitor in here somewhere.”

  Kinsey was . . . boggled. Still staring at Brynn, she said, “I buy my shoes online at a discount outlet. They’re still ridiculously priced, but I search the internet for coupons and wait for the four-for-the-price-of-three sales.”

  “Nice,” Olive said. “I’ll need the website when you get a chance, honey.”

  “Oh, and dinner’s ready,” Raina said. “I set the table for four.”

  Brynn looked at Kinsey. “I warned you not to come in. It’s not my fault now—this is all on you. Let’s go.”

  Which was how Kinsey found herself seated at the dining room table, where there were napkins—stolen from Taco Bell, but still—and everyone sat at the same time and ate together, talking, laughing, and talking some more.

  The food was amazing. “I want to marry your enchiladas,” she told Raina.

  Brynn’s mom smiled sweetly. “Everyone does. Do you cook?”

  Kinsey laughed. “My culinary talents run in the direction of ordering takeout.”

  They all laughed, and then Raina dished out small tins to each of the three of them.

  Olive and Brynn stared at theirs with twin expressions of dread.

  “What is it?” Kinsey asked.

  “It’s my summer dry-skin balm,” Raina said. “Olive and Brynn have really dry skin, and I didn’t want to leave you out. It’ll fix you right up.”

  Kinsey opened the salve, smelled it, and coughed. Yow.

  “Never smell it,” Olive whispered.

  When Raina moved into the kitchen to clear some dishes, Kinsey leaned into Brynn. “The salve smells like dirt.”

  “It’s turmeric. Just smile and bear it.”

  Raina came back, and everyone smiled at her. Somehow they started telling stories. Olive told them about the time Brynn’s grandma got arrested for trying to bring CBD oil onto a plane and ended up as a headline: Granny Arrested at LAX for Carrying Illegal Substances. “I had to drive to LA in the middle of the night and bail her out,” Olive said.

  Raina shook her head. “You know I can beat that. Remember the year Brynn called from summer camp, sobbing because someone had taken her wubbie?”

  “Yes,” Olive said. “You got in your car and headed right up there.”

  “Yes, and as you know, halfway there, I got stopped by a cop for speeding. When I told him I was racing to summer camp to save a traumatized child, he said I was a nice grandma and should have a nice day.” She lifted her chin. “So I told him I was no one’s grandma, that I was in fact thirty-five years old, and he laughed.”

  “Because you were forty-five,” Olive said.

  “Forty!” Raina shot back.

  “Right, and those five years were so important to you that you threw your soda at him and got arrested for assaulting an officer, and then resisting arrest.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t listen to me!”

  Brynn turned to Kinsey and gave her a look that said, Still think my life is all put together?

  Yes, she did. She was smiling. In fact, her face hurt from smiling. She was still smiling when after dinner Brynn walked her out.

  “You’re coming home with me, right?” Kinsey asked her.

  “No.”

  Her smile faded. “So then why did I sit through dinner?”

  “Because you liked my mom’s enchiladas so much you moaned while eating them, and then nearly licked your plate. Plus, you laughed your ass off.”

  Yeah, she had. At least until she’d realized that she’d been the bully at summer camp who’d stolen Brynn’s . . . “wubbie,” which had been a very old, ragged stuffed teddy bear. Her stomach still hurt thinking about it. “Look, about summer camp—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine.” Because neither did Kinsey. “But here’s the thing. If I don’t bring you back, Eli and Max are probably going to change the locks on me.”

  Brynn huffed out a dramatic sigh. “Well, I wouldn’t want you out on the streets.”

  Kinsey paused and took a good look at her, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. “Hold on. You had every intention of agreeing to come back. You just wanted to see me beg. You need out of this house as badly as I need you in Eli’s.”

  Brynn grimaced. “Maybe.”

  Kinsey laughed. “You know what? You actually suck less than most people.”

  “Good to know.”

  “And . . .” Kinsey said, giving her a “let’s hear it” gesture.

  “And what?”

  “And I suck less than most people too,” Kinsey said.

  “No, actually you suck way more than most people.”

  Kinsey thought about it and nodded. “Yeah, probably. But you’re still going to come back, right?”

  Raina opened the front door and smiled at them. “This weekend I’m making another batch of enchiladas. I’ll expect both of you and your other two roommates as well.” She beamed. “And, Kinsey, bring your parents, too.”

  Kinsey looked at Brynn.

  Brynn shrugged.

  Okay, so Kinsey was on her own with this. “That all sounds nice,” she said carefully. “But it’s just my mom and she’s usually busy, very busy.”

  Raina brushed this off with a sound that said, Don’t be silly. “Who’s too busy to meet their daughter’s new roommate? Oh, and don’t worry about bringing anything, we’ve got it all covered.” She smiled. “I’m so excited to meet all of Brynn’s new peeps.”

  “Brynn asked you not to say ‘peeps’ anymore,” Olive called out from the living room.

  “She knows what I mean. Don’t you?” Raina asked Kinsey, looking at her with eyes that were far sharper than her easy smile let on.

  She was definitely being summed up, and normally she wouldn’t give a single crap about what people thought of her. But she found herself nodding.

  “So you’ll come?” Raina asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And bring everyone?”

  “I’ll invite them,” Kinsey said. “Whether they come or not is up to them.”

  “Tell them I make the world’s best enchiladas. Tell her, Brynn.”

  Brynn smiled with love and affection, not even a little embarrassed that her mom was basically bribing Kinsey to be Brynn’s friend. “It’s true,” Brynn said. “You do make the world’s best enchiladas.”

  Raina beamed. “Good girl.” And then the front door shut.

  Kinsey looked at Brynn. “Wow.”

  Brynn narrowed her gaze. “Wow what?”

  Kinsey lifted her hands. “Nothing.”

  They both stared at each other, and for the first time in a long time, Kinsey wanted something, and she wanted it bad too. She couldn’t have said why or how, but she wanted Brynn in her life, and hell, she also wanted her moms. “I’ll come if you do,” she said softly.

  Brynn nodded. “Then we have a deal.”

  It was what Kinsey had wanted, but . . . “That seemed too easy.”

  “Trust issues much?”

  Kinsey blew out a breath. “Just tell me. You’ve got a stipulation, I can feel it.”

  “Actually, no. I don’t.”

  “Everyone’s got a stipulation.”

  “Fine,” Brynn said. “I get that your health issues are your own business, but if we’re going to really be friends, then you have to let me in a little. Tell me things.”

  Like the fact that you’re my sister? “Such as . . . ?” she asked carefully.

  “Such as, what’s the trick to getting the kids at school to love me as much as
they do you?”

  Kinsey felt herself go warm with the unexpected compliment. “You just have to be real.”

  Brynn met her gaze. “You should try that with me sometime. When you do, I’ll know you meant it about being friends.”

  Normally when people were snippy with Kinsey, she wrote them off. She was the only one allowed to be bitchy, because, hello, look at her damn life. But something weird happened with every prickly response Brynn gave. Kinsey’s tension lessoned. It was like Brynn was the perfect antidote. Dammit. “You’re a very strange woman.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  Kinsey drove home, still a little stunned that she’d actually—hopefully—talked Brynn into coming back. Her sister was different from anyone she’d known, which left her feeling a little off-kilter and confused. She had no idea why, but she liked bickering with her. And laughing with her.

  Oh, boy. Please don’t let it be that sister thing Eli had always told her was there. Because that would mean Eli was right about something, just like he almost always was.

  But whatever was happening with her and Brynn, it felt . . . sibling-like. She’d seen it with Eli and Max. Yeah, they were brothers, but they were also more. They argued, they fought—hell, just two weeks ago Max had pushed Eli through the hallway wall. But they’d made up, laughed, and then had played a video game, all within a ten-minute span. Then Max had taped up a huge poster of the beach over the hole in the wall, the one Eli told him he had to fix before summer was over.

  They were so annoying, and yet . . . and yet she wanted that. Desperately. And she wanted it with Brynn, even though she didn’t deserve it.

  Chapter 14

  From fourteen-year-old Kinsey’s summer camp journal:

  Dear Journal,

  Do you know how sucky it is to find out your best friend got his first kiss before you did? Yeah. And of course Eli kissed Brynn, and he smiled for the rest of the night.

  Annoying.

  So I went after my own first kiss. His name is Jack and it took me almost all damn week to get his attention by completely ignoring him. But in the moment, I got sick and almost puked on his shoes.

  I mean, I missed. But not by a lot, and he was really grossed out. Now he’s ignoring me.

  I hate everything. I’d list it all out, but I’m too tired.

  Also, I’m tossing you in the lake.

  Good-bye, Journal.

  BRYNN DIDN’T LEAVE her moms’ house when Kinsey did. She needed a minute.

  Or a bunch of minutes.

  So she and her moms spent the next few hours marathoning Bachelor in Paradise. When Brynn’s eyelids got too heavy, she knew it was time to go.

  “Here, baby.” Raina had packed her up a bunch of leftovers.

  Olive handed over her duffel bag.

  “Are you guys giving me the bum’s rush out?” she asked, amused.

  They exchanged a look that had Brynn putting hands on hips. “Okay, spit it out. What are you up to?”

  “Nothing,” Raina said. “We just really think you should go back.”

  “So you don’t want me here?”

  “No,” Olive said gently, reaching for her. “Well, yes. We want you here, but we also want what’s best for you.”

  “And that’s being back in Wildstone,” Raina said. “We’re so happy you’re back, you have no idea. But . . .”

  “But we think you’ll be happier at the house with your friends,” Olive finished.

  Except they weren’t her friends, not really. She didn’t know what they were yet. Well, okay, she adored Max like she would a younger brother. As for how she felt for Eli . . . well, that was distinctly un-brother-like. Kinsey she mostly wanted to strangle. But she looked into her moms’ sweet, hopeful faces and it was like being a kid all over again.

  All they’d ever wanted for her was to be happy and safe. Except the only time she’d been those things had been when she was here, in this house. But as she’d always done, she simply hugged them tight and said as she always did, “I’m happy, I’m fine, you don’t have to worry about me.”

  Then she kissed them good night and drove back to Eli’s place. Which, she supposed, for now at least, was hers as well.

  ELI SHUFFLED THE deck and dealt. It was midnight. He, Deck, and Max had gone surfing, and they now sat on porch chairs around a makeshift coffee table of an old wooden surfboard laid flat on two stumps of wood.

  They were playing Cards Against Humanity. Or at least their version of it, which involved betting cash.

  Eli tossed down a card. All three men looked at it.

  “What do old people smell like?” Deck read out loud. “Heh.” He tossed one of his cards down.

  Max grimaced and read it out loud. “The ball-slapping sex your parents are having right now.”

  Eli winced.

  Deck grinned. “Once in a while, it pays to have dead parents.”

  At the sound of soft footsteps, they all turned toward the stairs. No one.

  Then came Brynn’s voice: “And once in a while, it pays to have a place to live where you don’t have to know if your parents are having sex, ball-slapping or otherwise.”

  Eli quickly craned his neck and found her standing just outside of the reach of the porch’s light, and felt relief go through him. “Hey.”

  “Hey, yourself,” she said, coming up the steps and into the light. She was wearing her strappy denim sundress and white sneakers, her hair piled on top of her head.

  Just looking at her stirred something deep inside him, and it wasn’t anything as simple as hunger or affection. But what had him standing and reaching for her duffel bag was the sheer exhaustion and stress on her face. He shouldered her bag and smiled at her. “Want to play a round?”

  He got a very small smile in return. “Of drunken Cards Against Humanity?”

  “Hey,” Max said. “And also, only one of us is drunk.” Max pointed to himself. He shot Brynn a welcoming smile as he shuffled the cards. “You in, sweetness? Got plenty of beer.”

  “Another time.”

  “Don’t blame you.” Deck tossed down his entire hand and stood. “I’ve gotta hit the road.” He nodded to Brynn. “Good to see you back,” he said quietly, and with a gentle tug on her ponytail and a genuine smile, he vanished into the night.

  Brynn watched him go. “So he sleeps with Kinsey, but doesn’t sleep with her?”

  Max shook his head. “Don’t even try to understand it. It’ll just give you a headache. I’m actually thinking of enrolling the both of them in an English as a second language class.” He stood too and stretched. “The waves wore me out tonight. This guy”—he pointed to Eli—“kicked my ass out there. I’m going in.” He gave Brynn a quick hug. “Don’t you kids do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  “There’s nothing you wouldn’t do,” Eli said.

  “Exactly.” And with a laugh, he was gone.

  Eli looked at Brynn. “Seems like this is our time. Late at night.”

  “I want to know how sick Kinsey really is.”

  Okay, so she wasn’t feeling playful. “She didn’t tell you?”

  “Come on. You’ve met her. After I found the meds, she told me she had transplant rejection, not much more. She wouldn’t even if the sky was falling.”

  He took in the seriousness of her gaze and cursed Kinsey for being so closemouthed and secretive. Not to mention difficult. But he was done playing by her rules. She needed this, needed her sister, whether she wanted to admit it or not.

  And he thought maybe Brynn needed Kinsey too.

  “She was born with chronic renal disease. She got a transplant when she was fifteen, but the kidney’s slowly failing.”

  Brynn stared at him for a long beat. “That’s why you guys stopped coming to summer camp that year. She got sick.”

  He nodded. “She had a hard time with the recovery and several bad infections, and I didn’t want to go away, because she needed me. We didn’t know until later that it probably was because the kidney was fa
r from an ideal match. She’s back on dialysis, which means sitting still for four hours, three times a week. We all rotate sitting with her so she doesn’t lose it. The rejection disorder is low grade. She’s not in immediate danger of it failing, but it gives her flu-like symptoms, stuff like fatigue and a faint nausea.”

  “And grumpiness and irritability.”

  Eli gave a small smile. “Nope, those are all Kinsey. Just a special bonus for the people she cares most about.”

  Brynn stared at him some more, still looking upset. But instead of telling him how awful Kinsey had been to her, which he knew was true, she took the conversation in a direction that surprised him.

  “You’re a good friend,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but she’s a good friend right back. She’s fiercely loyal and protective of the people in her life. When she joked that we were platonic life mates, she meant it. She’s as much a sister to me as Max’s a brother.”

  “And you take care of both of them.”

  Uncomfortable with that, he changed the subject. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  “You knew I’d come. You sent Kinsey to apologize.”

  “Did she actually apologize?”

  That got him a small smile. “Almost,” she said. “Also, side question. You think I’ve got a good ass?”

  He stared at her. “Sorry. She’s got a strange sense of humor.”

  “Yeah. But just for the record, I think you’ve got a good ass too.”

  Eli felt a smile crease his face, and she pointed at him.

  “But don’t tell your ass, okay? Because I don’t know how I feel about the rest of you yet, and I’ve got no idea what to do with it.”

  “Understood,” he said, and then paused. “Would it help if I told you I know exactly what I want to do with you?”

  “Stop.” She gave a short laugh. “Actually, no. To be honest, I know what I want to do to the rest of you too. But . . .”

  “I know.” He ran a finger along the side of her face, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “There’s no pressure here, Brynn.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s just great.” She groaned and surprised him by dropping her forehead onto his chest. “Because I work really great under no pressure. There are parts of me already working under no pressure as I speak.”