“Uh, it’s called Erebus: The Story of a Ship,” I said. “I don’t think I ever caught the fiction bug, but I love stuff like this. It’s about… this will surprise you… a ship. A British ice ship that was found a little further north from here. Well. A lot further north. It’s… probably super boring if you don’t care about boats.”
Don’t bore him to death.
“I did notice your anchor,” Carter said. “And the merman, which was actually incredible. Remind me to get a better look sometime.”
“I’ll show you once we get to the hotel,” I said, struggling not to stumble over every word.
Whatever I’d done to flip a switch in the way Carter looked at me, I hoped I could keep it up.
“Is it yours? I saw more of them in the shop.”
My inner teenager was about to pass out with happiness. “Yeah, it’s one of mine. I like the aesthetic. Plus, merfolk. What’s not to like?”
Carter chuckled, playing with the salt shaker as the waitress came back.
He smiled and thanked her, but his attention swung back to me the moment she was gone.
Don’t read too much into it, he’s just being nice.
I shoved a fry in my mouth to shut my stupid, cynical brain up. What was the harm in letting myself have this? Just for an afternoon?
“Be honest with me,” Carter said, starting in on his own fries. “Does it hurt? Getting a tattoo, I mean?”
“Or is that just, like, some kinda bullshit we let people believe because it makes us seem tough? That what you’re asking?” I teased. I’d answered this question a million times, but I didn’t mind doing it again for Carter.
“I wasn’t gonna put it that way,” Carter said, lips already glossy red from salt and grease. He had fuller, softer-looking lips than he had any right to.
I started in on my burger, contemplating the question. “Depends where you get it, honestly. I have one on my ass that I fell asleep in the middle of. The merman, too, that was actually kinda soothing. But then the top of the anchor, on my ribs, that… that was like someone pouring drain cleaner on me for an hour and a half.”
Carter winced. “Why put yourself through that?” he asked.
“Can’t speak for everyone,” I said. “But for me, it’s about taking ownership of the awful flesh prison I live in. I, umm. I do a lot of work with people who have scars they wanna cover up, and I guess for me it’s a less intense version of that.”
“You mean your scars aren’t visible,” Carter said.
For a handful of seconds, all I could do was blink stupidly at him.
The thought had never occurred to me in those terms before, but he was right. He’d seen right through me in a way I’d never even seen through myself.
“Yeah,” I said, swallowing past a lump in my throat. “Yeah, uh. I guess that is what I mean.”
“Did I say something wrong?” Carter asked, nervous all over again.
No. Nope. I wasn’t losing him now, not when I’d had a taste of what he was like when he was comfortable.
“You said something so right it broke my brain a little to hear,” I said instead.
Whatever we had right now—a budding friendship, maybe—I didn’t want it to go away. I wanted to water it and tend to it and make sure it was getting enough sun to grow into a beautiful flower.
… I was a dork.
But Carter didn’t seem to mind.
Maybe I’d always known he wouldn’t. Maybe that was what I’d liked about him in the first place. When we were in high school, no one had appreciated me being a dork.
“Poor brain,” he said, a tiny smile playing around his lips between bites of food. “We’ll pick up some duct tape in the convenience store on the way out.”
I laughed, relief washing over me after accidentally bearing my soul to someone who was little more than a stranger to me. Carter, inexplicably, didn’t seem to mind.
That crush really wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m mostly held together with duct tape, chewing gum, and wishes,” I said. “So that’s not the worst idea.”
“Eat your lunch,” Carter said, the faintest hint of older brother authority in his tone. His sister was my age, but I’d never really known her well. She’d been in band, and band kids were a law unto themselves.
“Yes, sir,” I sing-songed, wondering how obviously I was glowing with happiness.
If he could tell, he wasn’t giving anything away.
This might not have been the dumbest idea I’d ever had, after all.
5
Carter
Aiden wasn’t anything like I expected. I’d first had that thought in his apartment, but I couldn’t stop thinking it now as I watched him drive, sipping a terrible gas station coffee from time to time, wincing, and then waiting just long enough to forget about the taste before sipping it again.
He was so easy to be around I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. There wasn’t an awkward bone in his body, morass of self-doubt or not.
I shouldn’t have been surprised that he was smarter than he let on. Kieran was the same. Always downplaying his grades, happy to seem to be the cheerful dumb jock who was everyone’s friend and no one’s better.
I didn’t really know Devin—he was only a year younger than Aiden, but that’d meant I’d left high school by the time he started, so we’d hardly crossed paths except around the dinner table when Mrs. Goode had invited me to stay.
Sometimes she’d get a look on her face like she wished I was her son, too. Especially right before I went home.
Especially if we’d been able to hear an argument going on next door while we were eating.
Aiden had heard that too, hadn’t he? I’d never thought about it before, but he’d been right there, sitting between his brothers, listening to everything that was going on. And seeing, too. If he could tell I thought a waitress was cute just by looking at me…
“Do I have something on my face?” Aiden asked, wiping at his mouth as though he’d already decided he must have.
Oops. I’d been staring at him.
“Uh, no,” I said, a pang of guilt making my stomach twinge. “Sorry, I wasn’t looking at you, exactly. Just… staring into the middle distance.”
“Thinking?” Aiden asked.
“I do that sometimes,” I agreed. “Can’t recommend it.”
Aiden laughed. It’d been so long since someone had laughed, genuinely, at one of my jokes that I didn’t know how to handle it.
“Wanna share?” Aiden asked.
Everything about him screamed I’m listening, the same way a bartender or a barber seemed like a good person to agonize too.
That made sense, didn’t it? People sat for tattoos for hours. His bedside—chair-side?—manner would have had to be pretty good by now, or repeat clients would be thin on the ground.
“Just thinking about the past,” I said. “Family wedding, y’know? Hard not to.”
“What’s the groom like?” Aiden asked.
“Honestly? He seems nice. Hallie deserves someone like him. Successful and kind and I think he’s probably fairly attractive. You can tell me when you meet him.”
Aiden snorted. “Straight guys love to pretend they don’t know what’s attractive in a man, huh?”
The way he said it made it sound like a joke, but he was right. What the hell was I trying to protect, here? I was about to pretend to my whole family that I was attracted to men, the least I could do was stop acting like I couldn’t tell what made a man attractive.
“He’s definitely not my type,” I said. “He’s a lawyer.”
Aiden wrinkled his nose.
“In his defense, he’s a human rights lawyer,” I added. “But he’s, y’know…”
“I do not know, and you’re gonna have to spell it out.” Aiden grinned, eyes focused on the road ahead, but every ounce of attention he didn’t need for driving resting squarely on me.
“He’s a suit,” I said, as though I didn’t wear a button-down ev
erywhere, including to the grocery store. “He’s got the jawline of a mid-century poster boy for government bonds and I think he shaves his sideburns with a ruler. I’ve been accused of being a little…”
“Neat?” Aiden offered.
“Neat is probably the nicest way it’s ever been put.” I smiled wryly. “So thank you. I was gonna go with something along the lines of anal. But he’s… different. I like to think when it’s me it’s charmingly quirky, but he seems… a little plastic. Nice, though. Smart. Successful. Does genuinely care about his work. So much hair product.”
“What’s wrong with hair product?” Aiden said, touching a strand of his own hair that’d fallen forward self-consciously.
“Probably nothing, I just have no idea how to use it.”
Aiden glanced at me, eyes wide. “Your hair just does that?” he asked, clearly shocked.
“Does what?”
“The… the thing,” he said, gesturing vaguely again. “With the soft loose curls and the perfect amount of bounce. Do not tell me that every girlfriend you’ve ever had hasn’t played with your hair. Don’t start lying to me now.”
“Uh.”
Well. Looking back, I guess they had…
“It looks so soft,” Aiden said, with an air of awe that sounded like he was having some kind of religious experience.
“I think it’s just like that,” I said, scratching the back of my neck as heat crept up it on the way to my cheeks. “Y’know. Naturally.”
“I hate you.” Aiden shook his head, smiling broadly. He definitely didn’t mean that. “No product?”
“I wash it,” I defended. “Does that count?”
Aiden laughed again. “Unless you’re using some kind of miracle shampoo, no. No, it doesn’t.” He sighed, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “Guess there’s no faking good genes.”
That was maybe the one thing my family had going for it. Good genes.
I would’ve taken less-than-perfect hair and a slightly quieter home life over perfect hair and what I’d had growing up any day. But Aiden didn’t mean it like that. He was just paying me a compliment.
“You don’t look like you use a ton of hair product,” I said. “For what it’s worth.”
“Thank you, that means a lot coming from someone who doesn’t know how to use it,” Aiden said, still grinning.
I liked that I could make him smile.
“This is your turn-off,” I waved at the sign ahead, squinting down at my phone one last time to make sure it matched.
The middle of nowhere was the obvious place to get married for my sister. Making anyone’s life easy wasn’t the kind of thing she did.
Much as I loved her and wanted her to be happy, I couldn’t see why we weren’t doing this in a city somewhere instead of in a place where there was snow banked up to shoulder height on the side of the freeway.
… that might’ve been an exaggeration, but I’d never been a big fan of snow, and my opinion wasn’t improving with more exposure to it.
Aiden drove like he did everything else, as if he’d been born for it. Confidence. Whether he believed me or not, he had enough of it for the both of us.
Kieran really had been right. I probably owed him a text to that effect.
Aiden’s actually pretty cool
Kieran: I know. Having fun?
To my incredible surprise, yeah. Thanks for lending him to me
Kieran: My brother is your brother. Tell him I love him.
Done. Thank you
“Kieran says he loves you,” I reported, tucking my phone back into my pocket.
“I owe him one for convincing you to take me to this. It’s magical,” he said.
Now that we’d turned off the Transcanadienne, it wasn’t long before we were passing snow-covered villages and fields with nothing but white powder as far as the eye could see.
The heating was on in the car, but the sight made me shiver.
“Remember that time we went ice skating?” Aiden asked.
I opened my mouth to say no when the memory hit me at full force. Aiden and Devin running circles around me, Kieran patiently trying to teach me how to balance despite having the motor control of a newborn foal.
And then another memory of falling flat on my ass and Aiden’s grinning face swimming into my vision, offering me a hand up.
Yeah. He was okay. Always had been.
“There’s a reason we only did that once,” I said.
“You were having fun by the end,” Aiden insisted. “Just needed to break out of your shell and relax before you got it.”
He was probably right. I didn’t have a clear or specific memory of that day the way he obviously did, but that was a theme in my life. It took me a while to warm up to things. People. Hobbies.
Snow.
Despite living in upstate New York my whole life, I still hadn’t quite warmed up to snow.
“Yeah,” I agreed after a half-beat too long. “It’s just that the shell’s thick.”
Aiden glanced at me, making the next turn without having to be told, a soft, warm smile on his face.
Something in the pit of my stomach did a backflip.
That… was new.
“You’re talking to a man who’s been wearing his dad’s leather jacket since the day the guy died,” Aiden said. “I know all about shells.”
That was his dad’s jacket?
I didn’t know. I hadn’t known. How could I have?
The Goodes hadn’t moved in next door until after Kieran’s—and Aiden’s, and Devin’s—dad died. I’d never known Mr. Goode.
Kieran never talked about him, either.
“What was your dad like?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t about to set anything off in the minefield I knew I was stepping into right now.
“Tall,” Aiden said. “Or maybe he wasn’t, I dunno, I was twelve years old last time I saw him. Most adults were tall. Kind. Loved my mom more than anything in the world. Carried me around on his shoulders a lot.”
“You miss him,” I said, as though that wasn’t the most obvious thing in the world.
“All the goddamn time.”
Aiden’s fingers tightened around the steering wheel.
Without thinking, I reached out and put a hand on his knee, squeezing tight. He looked at my hand, then at me, then at the road again.
“I’m sorry.”
What else was I meant to say? I might not have gotten along with my family, but my dad was…
I loved my dad, and losing him would’ve broken my heart. All I could imagine right now was tiny twelve-year-old Aiden huddled in his dad’s jacket.
“Don’t be.” Aiden sniffed. “First of all, you’ll make my eyeliner run and then what would your family think?”
I laughed without meaning to, but Aiden brightened up as soon as I did. He didn’t want to have a sad conversation about the things he’d lost any more than I was equipped to handle it.
“Second, I wouldn’t be who I am today if my life was any different. And whatever anyone else thinks, I’m proud of me,” he added. “Dad would be, too.”
“I bet,” I said, squeezing his knee once more before taking my hand away. I wasn’t normally the kind of person who reached out to touch—even people I was sleeping with tended to have to initiate contact—but there was something different about Aiden.
He was so comfortable with himself that it was impossible not to be comfortable around him.
“So we probably should have discussed this more than five minutes before it’s gonna be a problem,” Aiden said. “But how were you planning to explain dating your best friend’s little brother?”
Shit.
I hadn’t been planning to explain it at all. I’d forgotten that it was the kind of thing that needed an explanation.
“Uh.”
Nope. Nothing came to mind.
“Umm.”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Aiden was right. We really should have talked about this earlier.
“I’ll g
o along with whatever you want,” Aiden said. “Drunken New Year’s blowjob included.”
Despite myself, I laughed again. Nothing worried Aiden. I wished I could have his level of calm in the face of stress.
Although, he wasn’t the one about to lie to his parents, was he? It was a little easier for him to be calm.
“I’d want to have been dating you longer than that,” I said. “New Year’s was a week ago.”
“Ooh, so this is a long-term deal,” Aiden said, wriggling in his seat like a cat about to pounce. “Are we in love?”
“I…”
I’m not sure I know what that’s like.
I absolutely couldn’t admit to Aiden that I wasn’t sure I’d ever been in love at all. What would he think of me?
“Would you be comfortable with that?” I asked, finally, hoping that’d be enough to cover up for the fact that I had no idea what I was doing.
Aiden shrugged. “Sure. Takes me about three minutes to fall in love with people, so if we’ve been dating longer than that, it makes sense.”
“Can we tell people we just… clicked while I was hanging out with Kieran?” I asked. That would at least sound like a thing that might happen. My family knew me well enough to know how I met people.
All my previous girlfriends had been friend-of-a-friend deals.
I said all, I meant three.
Mandi for two years before she left me. The longest relationship of my life.
“I probably made the first move,” Aiden said. “You’re shy.”
“Figured that went without saying. I’ve never had a first kiss I wasn’t surprised by. Like, genuinely shocked, didn’t see it coming, just kinda went along with it.”
“Really?” Aiden asked, frowning at the road.
The sun was starting to set already, and I could see the warm glow of the hotel lights ahead. We only had minutes before I had to introduce Aiden as my boyfriend.
“Really,” I said.
Too late to back out now, but honestly? I didn’t want to. I was lucky he wanted to be seen with me at all, even like this.
Everything I’d seen of him—pierced cock included—told me he could have anyone he wanted.
Troublemaker (Goode Boys Book 1) Page 3