by A. L. Woods
He stirred sensations in me that I wasn’t sure I had ever experienced before.
Not with Cash, not with anybody.
I had been regretting most of my decisions this evening, but the biggest one—next to breaking my best friend’s heart—was not going home with Sean. If I had, at least I wouldn’t have had to endure Dom’s bullshit for twenty minutes or face the reminder that Cash was, and always would be, a little bitch when it came to doing the right thing. He had sat there and watched the whole thing unfold and had waited until I nearly broke to speak up.
I knew children with more spine.
He finally spoke, shoving his hands in his pockets. “You know what I mean. I know I fucked up back then, and that I’m not good enough for you now.” Leveling his eyes on mine, he added, “But neither is he.”
“Why?” The single word dripped with venom. I quirked an impatient brow at him.
Silence.
It was for the best. I didn’t need him to recite the same monologue I had listened to for ten years. We both knew the answer; he didn’t need me to remind him that he was the one who had fucked our whole relationship up to shit just so he could feel as big as Dom’s ego.
I didn’t hate Cash anymore. I realized he hated himself enough without me having to help him.
“No one will ever be good enough for you, Raquel. Not really.” He hesitated, “You’re just that kind of woman, but we can all die trying.” He leaned forward, brushing my cheek with his lips, his hands steady on my shoulders.
He moved away, his breath warm, the tang of the marijuana still faint on his breath while he lingered opposite me. Indecision settled on his face as he appraised me with woeful eyes. His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat, waiting for a sign that would never come.
I wasn’t inviting him in.
I touched my cheek gingerly, avoiding his gaze, a gnawing void growing in my stomach. He whistled low to himself, masking the rejection for the invitation he was never going to get. My body didn’t prickle with awareness when he left me the way it had when Sean had drawn away.
Cash’s footsteps were soft as they ambulated away from me. “Call me if you need anything, Cherry,” he called over his shoulder just before he disappeared back down the stairs. We both knew I wouldn’t, because something had changed in me that night. Between Penelope’s announcement—the one I had reacted so reprehensibly to—and Sean’s kiss, I realized something perhaps I had known all along.
I didn’t need anybody, not when I had myself.
I waited till I heard the door shut behind him before I unlocked the door of my apartment and stepped inside. With my back pressed against the door, the adrenaline from my fight-or-flight responses finally left me in a whoosh of emotional energy. The stress weakened my legs, my body giving out on me. Sliding to the floor, I ignored the throb that settled in my ass upon contact with the hard parquet.
If I didn’t need anyone, why did it hurt so bad?
I pulled my knees to my chest, my arms circling around them with my forehead pressed to my thighs. Then I did something I hadn’t done in what felt like forever.
I cried.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I woke up in a bad fucking mood.
I had managed to get about four hours of intermittent sleep. I spent the first few restless, unsuccessful hours with eyes wide open, tracking the glow of my alarm clock on my dresser across the room, watching as the LED digits turned from two to three, three to four, and four to five. I listened to the furnace turn on and off, pushing a vortex of warm air into my bedroom that made me sweat. When I wasn’t looking at the clock, I was engaged in a staring contest with my phone, willing the damn thing to vibrate, ring, implode, anything. When I fell asleep somewhere around five-fifteen, I accepted that she wasn’t going to reply to my text asking her to let me know when she got home. She didn’t owe me an explanation, whether I felt I deserved one or not.
I woke up to the sound of birds chirping and blinding sunlight streaming through my parted blinds.
Pathetic fallacy, my ass.
Anticipation fluttered in my chest when I reached for my phone, but it left me as quickly as it had arrived. My messages were empty, the lone sent message hanging there, unanswered and ignored. I had no idea why I was even bothering at this point to hold onto false hope. She had made her choice. I didn’t know who Terry was, or that mean motherfucker Dom who looked like a criminal, or the shadowy figure looming by an old Mercedes who I assumed was “Cash,” yet never dared to cross the distance between us to confront me. He had leaned there, looking aloof but chest puffed out with pride, as if he had won. And I guess in a way, he had. Raquel had left with them, not me—the guy she’d just kissed like her life had depended on it.
The urge to throw up had my throat working, my insides wrenching with warning, mind spinning with all kinds of hypotheticals that I had exhausted hours earlier. Just like that, any hope of having a good day had taken a fucking leave of absence because I was pissed again.
Kicking the sheets back, I lumbered out of bed, my bare feet working the wide plank floors of my bedroom. I dipped into the hallway and noticed Trina’s door was still shut, a line of darkness beneath her door. She’d already been passed out when I got home, for which I was grateful. I wasn’t up for Twenty Questions last night.
The kitchen in my house was a stark contrast from the kitchen at the colonial. Black cabinetry wrapped around the kitchen against the gray hardwood floors, white granite countertops gleaming in the sunlight that poured in from the wide window over the kitchen sink. I was damn near compelled to draw every single curtain, blind, and shutter in this house shut, but I thought better of it. I could probably afford the sobering reminder that not everything in my life was grim, and at least the sun still shone, the world still turned, and life as I knew it carried on.
That was one lesson I had taken from my father’s premature death: Time doesn’t stop, even if you’re standing still.
Moving for the coffeemaker, I popped the lid open, stuffed a new liner inside and engaged in the necessary evil that was my caffeine fix—the intoxicating aroma of coffee hitting an indulgent part of my soul. I had strong feelings about addiction, but my love for a good cup of joe was something I would never even consider foregoing. I liked my two cups a day, three on a particularly bad one. What I consumed in coffee, I tripled in water intake. I was a solid two liters of water a day kind of guy. I took daily multivitamins and exercised regularly despite working a physical labor job. I slept a solid eight hours a night…that is, when I wasn’t losing sleep over a woman who didn’t so much as spare me a passing thought. I had witnessed firsthand what happened when you didn’t take care of your body, what happened when you prioritized unhealthy habits and overindulgence.
I had watched addiction kill my father, who smoked a pack a day for the twenty years I’d had with him. He liked his wine in the evening, and while he never crossed that fine line of alcoholism, he had teased the perimeter of it, and that had been enough to send him to an early grave. His Stage IV lung and liver cancer diagnosis had him wither away within three months.
His death had shattered my ma, and in spite of all her typical Portuguese mother quirks and religious idiosyncrasies that were wasted on my sisters and I that she buried herself in—I don’t think she ever got over it.
Who could blame her? How did you get over a man you had loved for forty years? Hell, I couldn’t forget a woman I had kissed once and had all of four really fucking terrible conversations with. I couldn’t fathom having to exist with a history that spanned decades, that was laden with memories, or the weight of grief on every holiday and birthday like an unshakeable shadow…their absence painfully apparent when doing simple things like grocery shopping or picking paint colors…the stupid arguments you’d never have again over socks that never made it to the hamper, or garbage that didn’t make it to the curb on time. I didn’t know how my ma did it day in and day out, how she managed to find her will to keep going when everyth
ing had been so grim. She never let us see her cry, though we heard her muffled, anguished sobs through her bedroom door at night when she thought we were all asleep. She hastened to get caught up in being busy, absorbing herself in make-work-projects, overextending herself to the point of exhaustion. She didn’t want to think. Thinking meant she had to acknowledge her reality that my dad was never coming back.
Trina entered the room yawning, my dark reverie leaving me at her presence. She slinked to the coffee pot, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, her pink hair sticking out in several directions from her poorly constructed topknot. “How was your night?”
“Shit.” I lifted the carafe from the burner and filled my mug.
“Guess things went awesome with Raquel?”
Unable to muster a response, I dropped my ass onto a stool at the breakfast bar. My sister poured herself a cup of coffee, spooning so much sugar into the mug that I wanted to gag.
“Did she send you packing?” She blew on the steam before taking a small sip. Social cues were wasted on Trina. She didn’t care about the kink in my brow, or the obvious displeasure that had me rolling my lips together.
I was susceptible to the folly of a man, so I spoke against my better judgement. “Worse.” I winced as that swallow worked its way down her throat.
“Did she throw her drink at you?”
At that, I considered tossing my sister’s cup of “coffee” into the sink. I blew out a breath, shaking my head with what TMI detail I was about to offer my sister that I would inevitably regret later.
“She kissed me.”
My sister’s enthusiasm got the better of her, the hot beverage sloshing in the mug when she jerked forward, sending rivulets down her arm. She barely flinched, her glee over my revelation too much for her to bother registering any feeling of pain.
“Wait,” she said, her nose crinkling as she set the mug down on the counter, grabbing a dish towel from the handle of the oven and mopping her arm. “If she kissed you, why do you look like someone hit your dog?”
“She left with someone else.” I probably should have said she left with three guys, except that sounded worse than I wanted it to, and I didn’t want to consider that her leaving with them implied anything…salacious. I would be lying if I hadn’t thought about that, though. Actually, it had been the very source of my lack of sleep.
“Ouch,” Trina said with a playful grimace.
“Tell me about it.”
I took another sip from my mug, squinting at the early morning sun coming through the kitchen window.
“Now what?”
“I texted her, but she didn’t reply.”
“Double ouch.”
I shot her a scowl. “You’re not helping, Trina.” My earlobes warmed as the anger I had attempted to abate started to boil again.
“Sorry. Sheesh. Someone’s cranky this morning.” She rolled her eyes, leaning forward on the countertop with her elbows.
Maybe I should have gone after Raquel, told her not to go with those guys who looked like they’d just broken out of a federal prison.
“Don’t follow me. It’s for your own good, and mine.”
She was cryptic as hell about it. For all I knew, she was at the bottom of the Charles River right now in four different body bags, and that would be entirely on me.
I swept a hand over my face, scratching at the facial hair on my jaw, working the coarse hair back and forth in contemplation.
“I guess that means the kiss wasn’t that great.”
My ego howled with pain at my sister’s low blow that had landed exactly where she wanted. Siblicide was illegal across all fifty states, I reminded myself. I made an ornery sound, glowering at the little brat who shot me a smug smile. “Y’know, you’re more like Ma than you realize,” I said, enjoying the way Trina gaped at me with indignation. “You both have this incredible habit of saying the wrong thing.”
“Hey,” she objected, “I’m just being honest. If the kiss had been better, she would have left with you instead.”
“Which would have never been an option, since you live here for the foreseeable future.”
“I do own noise-canceling headphones, y’know. It’s not like I haven’t overheard you watching porn before, with your room next to mine. And by the way,” she added, her brows pinched together, “the delivery guy and lonely housewife thing is so nineteen ninety-five.”
I didn’t even want to know how my kid sister had gotten so well-versed in pornography tropes. I cradled my head in my hands, a groan of humiliation hitting me.
These were the burdens of living with your kid sister. A man had needs, and I guess that meant I needed to get friendly with the mute button.
“So, now what?” she repeated.
“What do you mean, ‘now what’?” I stood up and went to the half pot of remaining coffee.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Have another cup of coffee and explore a new porn preference.”
“First of all, top up my cup, too,” she said, holding up her index finger, “and second of all,” her middle finger joined in, making a V-shape, “you should ask Pen—”
Nope. I saw where she was going with that one, and it was a terrible idea. “Raquel is definitely the last person Penelope wants to discuss, Trina. Trust me.” I could not see Penelope taking that phone call very well at all.
“Hey Penelope, I know your best friend erupted on you over the most monumental moment in your life, but I’m still trying to pursue her. What do you think?”
Uh-uh.
Trina’s lips jutted forward in a contemplative pout. “Well,” she sipped at the coffee I had just refilled, revulsion quirking her brow. She reached for the sugar, but I beat her to it, taking the jar and placing it on a shelf there was no way in hell she could reach without a chair. I was going to get a wrap on this girl’s sweet tooth. She sent me a knowing sideways glance, a smirk tickling the corners of her mouth.
“Well, what?” I prompted, equally amused as my sister stretched on her toes in an unsuccessful attempt to reach the sugar anyhow.
“Well,” she repeated, her voice straining, toes pressed into hardwood, “You could always just…”
Sweat broke out across her forehead as I awaited the rest of her suggestion.
Which didn’t come. She just continued to struggle to reach the sugar.
“Can you just try to enjoy your coffee without so much sugar?” I snapped.
“Not all of us are monsters who drink black coffee.”
“That’s the way you’re supposed to drink it. That’s the way Dad taught me.”
“And you believed that?” She released a derisive snort, throwing her head back, “Please. I caught him dropping three sugar cubes into his coffee when Ma was out of the room. He gave me twenty bucks when I was ten to keep me quiet.”
My jaw went slack, eyes squinting at my sister, trying to pick out the lie. Her upper lip normally quivered when she was lying, but it was completely still. Twenty bucks? She was cheap, even adjusting for inflation. I wondered what she would keep to herself if I doubled his money. Lord knew I had enough skeletons in my closet that I didn’t need getting back to Ma.
“Can I have the sugar now?” Impatience made her bob her foot against the floor.
“No.”
“You suck,” she scolded, dumping the coffee in the sink out of spite.
What a brat.
“Got any other suggestions, genius?” I probed, rerouting her back to the forefront issue. As the youngest, Trina loved orchestrating trouble, controlling a situation, and having everyone do exactly as she wanted—and for the most part it worked. I was placing stock in her ability to help me contrive some sort of ill-put-together plan that would at least get my foot back in the door.
She blew a breath through her mouth that was hard enough to make her lips vibrate, tilting her head sideways. “Call Raquel? I’m sure there’s an explanation why she went home with someone else.”
I rubbed
my forehead, squeezing my eyes shut. “You’re terrible at this.”
“I got pregnant at twenty by a guy who skipped town,” she said, straightening and throwing her hands upward. “I am not a person to be taking relationship advice from.” She forced out a laugh, but no smile appeared on her lips.
My face softened, seeing what she didn’t want me to. “That has nothing to do with you, y’know.” I caught the somber glint in her eyes when she chuckled softly at her own self-deprecation. “Charlie’s a piece of shit.” I poked her chin with my knuckles.
Trina managed another attempt at a smile, equally unsuccessful. Her brows jumped north as she moved on to the next subject. “Hey, would you mind taking me back to the house today? I need to pick up my other camera lens.”
“Uh,” I hedged, glancing at the time on the oven clock, trying to scrounge up an excuse. Ma’s house on a Saturday was likely to be the scene of a war on dirt, dust, and grime, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be caught in the middle of the salvo.
“Ma might not throw me out if you’re there.” She pressed her palms together in prayer, face filled with feigned optimism.
“She wouldn’t throw you out even if I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t there in August.”
“That was two days after you told her you were pregnant and terminating it. Too soon.”
“Whatever,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Will you take me or not?”
I sighed, not really wanting to go, but recognizing that there was merit to my sister’s concerns. I would go and keep her out of our mother’s grasp and be the decoy instead. Even if it meant being harassed for forty-five minutes over everything from the crew at the job site, my haircut, my weight, and my dating life.
Yippee.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Twenty minutes later, I was pulling the Wrangler into the paved driveway of my childhood home. The farmhouse was tucked onto three acres of land with the nearest neighbor close enough to borrow a cup of sugar, but too far away to hear my parents’ owning my ass when I got into shit as a kid. Eggshell white beaded siding made up the exterior, the gabled roof a depressing shade of gray. Rugs hung over the tailored railings of the farmer’s porch, the warning that it was a Saturday morning and Ma was on her rampage.