Nina picks at her paper napkin, turning it into confetti. “She did.”
I draw in a slow inhale through my nose and try to calm down. My fight isn’t really with Nina or Tyler. It’s with Maggie. With my family. With the way they see me. They way I’ll never be what they want me to be.
It’s a fight I can’t win.
If I’m not a good Catholic boy headed for the altar, I’m trash.
I exhale. At least I’ve got reason on my side. “Does being with someone for three years sound commitment avoidant?”
“Well, no, but—” Nina breaks off.
“But what?” I press.
She glances at Tyler, and I catch his near imperceptible nod. Nina looks back at me. “Maggie said any girl who fell for you would end up with her heart broken.” Nina straightens, her brow hardening in a way I’ve never seen. “We don’t want that for Stella.”
“Stella’s not—”
But I stop. Because what I was about to say was Stella’s not falling for me. And for too many reasons, I don’t want to say that.
The army of reasons feels like ants crawling over my skin.
Because if my defense is Stella’s not falling for me, then am I admitting that if she did, she’d be in danger of heartbreak?
An image of Zoe in her baggy clothes and tired eyes assaults me.
It’s not a giant leap to picture Stella looking at me that same way. The thought guts me.
And how did we even get here? I shouldn’t be saying anything to them about us. It’s not theirs. It’s hers. It’s mine.
Ours.
But there’s something else that makes me bite my tongue. If I say Stella’s not falling for me out loud, will that make it true?
Pen’s always going on about speaking things into being. How we create our own realities.
Shit. I don’t want to say it. Because I don’t want to risk making it true.
And that scares the fuck out of me.
The drive home is mere minutes but time seems to crawl like the continental drift.
When we get back to the house, it smells like rosemary and roasted garlic. Homey. Soothing. Laughter from the kitchen tells me Stella, Maisy, and Pen are having dinner.
I can’t go in there. My head’s a mess.
Instead, I take the back hallway to the foyer and go up to my room. And, yes, when I pass the door to the living room, it feels like a tractor field tries to grab me and pull me in. I resist the pull, but memories of last night still grab hold.
I carry them upstairs and flop on my bed, my head on fire.
Stella’s not falling for me. Of course, she’s not.
It’s too soon. We’ve only known each other a little over a month.
Besides, she’s way too careful for that.
Tyler and Nina are just looking out for her. And why wouldn’t they? They love her. Who doesn’t? She’s amazing.
She takes care of everyone. In a short time, she’s made all of us feel at home. Made Nina feel safe. Made Livy feel seen and heard. Given Pen the freedom to express herself.
With scary as shit window crows and a truly terrifying trio of yard witches.
Hell, she’s made us into a family.
No wonder Nina and Tyler are worried about me fucking this up.
And dammit all if they haven’t gotten me worried too.
I shove myself off the bed and pace my room.
I dig my phone out of my back pocket and check the time. Nearly seven. Bear is probably doing the whole dinner-bathtime-bedtime routine with his babies, but screw him. I jab his contact and press the phone to my ear.
“Yo,” he answers, and when I hear splashing in the background, I know I’ve nailed it.
“What you up to?” I ask as a courtesy. One that is beyond gracious since it’s half his fault I’m all torn up. After all, he had to go and marry Maggie and give her reign over his life and somehow mine.
“Giving Grayson a bath. What’s up? You sound pissed.”
“Das a bad wowd, Daddy,” I hear Grayson warn.
I sniff a laugh. “Where’s your lovely wife?”
Bear hesitates. “Um… judging from the way your tone is bleeding sarcasm, I’m not sure I wanna tell you.”
I sigh. Am I that easy to read? I take a deep breath and check my emotions.
“Seriously. Is she sitting right there? Because we need to talk.”
“Naw, man. She’s nursing Lola,” Bear says, now sounding concerned. “What’s wrong?”
Checking my emotions doesn’t do a whole lot of good because when I open my mouth, I unload. “Your wife needs to stay in her lane.”
“Aww, shit,” Bear grumbles low. “What’d she do now?”
I fill him in on the warning she gave Nina and the fact that it got back to me.
Bear stops me. “Wait. Wait. I’m confused. I thought you weren’t into her. You were just trying to help her get distance from her bad boyfriend.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
Pause.
“Then why are you worried about Maggie steering her away if she’s not in your sights?”
Damn. I see I’m trapped now.
“Because,” I flounder, defensive.
Bear doesn’t miss it. His antennae go up. “Because why?”
I say nothing.
“Oh,” Bear says, like he’s solving a mystery. “The brunette.”
“Huh?”
My brother chuckles. “Oh man, you are so predictable.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
His chuckle turns into a full-on belly laugh. “Maggie knows you so well.”
“Bear,” I growl. “You’re lucky I’m not over there, or I’d drown you in Grayson’s bath water.”
He seems to find this equally hilarious.
“Maggie told me she was worried about you and that poor girl until she saw your—ahem—” Bear affects a cough “—landlady.”
I can’t help myself. “Her name is Stella,” I grit through my teeth.
“Oooh,” he purrs into a chuckle. “Okay, bro.”
“And thanks to your wife,” I practically growl, “my roommates think I’m some kind of villain.”
Bear scoffs. “I’m sure Maggie didn’t call you a villain.”
His patronizing tone chafes, leaving me feeling petty.
“She said any woman who went for me would get her heart broken.”
I hear my brother groan. “Look, try to see it from her perspective—”
“Her perspective? What kind of perspective could she possibly have? She’s not involved.” My words are clipped, angry. “Zoe and I wanted different things. I broke it off. End of story.”
“Hey—” The word is laced with warning. It takes a lot to rile my older brother. He’s the gentle giant of our family. But I’ve cracked his composure. “Lark, take your head out of your ass for a minute and give Maggie some credit. Her perspective is the one that’s aimed at your battered roommate.”
I don’t know what I expected him to say, but I’ll admit, it wasn’t that.
Bear gives it to me. “You call her over there to help this girl who’s being stalked and threatened by her ex and is just about as scared and vulnerable as she could be.”
I’ve got no argument with this, so I keep my mouth shut.
“Mags knows women like this. A guy like you stepping up to help her in her moment of need?”
“What do you mean, a guy like me?”
Bear scoffs again. “Take a look in the mirror, little brother.”
I snort.
“You know you’re a handsome devil. Of course, you do,” he throws out casually. “You look just like me.”
I bark a laugh, but Bear gets serious.
“Think about it, Lark. From where your friend sits, your armor looks pretty shiny. Might make it hard to see much else. And someone like that needs to be seeing clearly.”
Some of the fight goes out of me. Some. “But I told Maggie we were just friends.”
&
nbsp; “Yeah, and Maggie probably said what she said to that girl to make sure it stayed that way.”
I don’t want to admit it, but I guess I can see where Maggie might have been coming from. Still, the explanation doesn’t feel like enough.
It’s embarrassing to straight up ask it, but I want a clear answer. “So, you’re saying Maggie doesn’t really think I’m careless with women’s hearts?”
The silence that follows is too long for my liking.
“Lark, is this really about what Maggie thinks?” Bear asks, his voice smoothing out in a way that makes me nervous. “Or is it more about what you think?
And fuck all if my brother isn’t right.
Chapter Twenty
STELLA
“Well, Mercury is in retrograde.”
This is Pen’s response after listening to me vent for ten minutes. It’s not what I want to hear.
“What does that even mean?” I snap.
Her look goes sour. She jerks the twine knot she’s tying with extra vigor. “I’ve explained this already.”
I slap a homemade Halloween rice krispy treat down on a fresh sheet of parchment. “Maybe I wasn’t listening,” I mumble, feeling more than a little snotty.
Pen silently stews. We each wrap two treats and set them aside on the kitchen counter. Forcefully.
It’s early afternoon on Halloween, and our plans for tonight are somewhere between traditional Halloween for Maisy’s sake and Pagan weirdness for Pen. The rice krispy treats are a compromise. Pen wanted to hand out apples to our trick-or-treaters. A traditional harvest food. Maisy wanted candy. Pen suggested candy apples. Maisy countered with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
I suggested rice krispy treats, and they both agreed—Maisy because what kid doesn’t like rice krispy treats, and Pen because she reasoned that since rice is harvested in the fall it was just as suitable as apples.
I slap down another treat and roll my eyes. “Okay. Fine. I’m listening now.”
Pen exhales through her nose. I have no doubt that she’d breathe fire if she could. “As Mercury appears to move away from Earth, things go pear-shaped. Especially in relationships and with communication.”
I don’t want to admit how relevant this seems. Relationships and communication going pear-shaped, that is.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see how Mercury moving away would mean that Lark doesn’t touch me for over a week.”
“Mercury doesn’t really move away,” Pen explains. “It just appears to move away.”
I scowl at her. “So it’s just an optical illusion?”
She nods at me like I’m a five-year-old.
I add crazy eyes to my scowl. “And people believe that a planetary optical illusion fucks up their shit?”
Pen glares down her nose at me. “Do. Not. Dismiss. Mercury in Retrograde,” she scolds. “Don’t you remember when I was seeing Janika Smalls? And we were supposed to meet up at the Feed N Seed for the Cedryl Ballou and the Zydeco Trendsetters’ show?”
I freeze because Janika Smalls is a sore spot for Pen. I know the story, but now that it’s come up, I have to just let it play out. Pen needs to exorcise the memory.
Again.
“I sent her a text to say I was running late because my car wouldn’t start, and I wasn’t gonna walk by myself to Grant Street at ten o’clock at night. I hit SEND!” She practically yells. “But Janika never got the message. And by the time I got my battery changed, she’d triple-texted me asking where the hell I was? And me? I never heard even one of those texts.”
Pen is working herself up. Building up steam like a teakettle on the boil.
She waves a hand in the air and shimmies her shoulders from side to side, nearly turning this drama into an interpretive dance. “And what do I find when I walk into the Feed & Seed? But Janika pressing some girl from Fightingville against one of the wooden posts, kissing her into next May and sliding a hand under her skirt.”
“I know—”
“Classic Mercury in Retrograde consequences. Transportation interference. Miscommunication. Relationship drama.” She counts them off on her long fingers. “An astrological trifecta.”
I nod and hold my tongue long enough for Pen to get over her recollection of Janika Smalls and the Retrograde Regrets. I package and tie off two more rice crispy treats. When I’m fairly confident she won’t cat claw me, I speak up.
“Be that as it may,” I say evenly, “it doesn’t really explain that Lark was practically knocking down walls to get into my pants at night and steal kisses in the daytime, and now it’s like there’s some kind of force field around him,” I complain. “Seriously. No touching in over a week.”
“What happens when you touch him?”
My face falls. “I’ve stopped.”
“Why?”
I swallow because saying it out loud hurts more than I want it to. “Because when I do, he jumps like I’ve rubbed him with poison ivy.”
The worst thing happens then. Pen’s face goes soft with sympathy. And that makes the hurt hurt even more.
“Oh, Stella.”
I hold up a hand and shake my head tightly. Pen gets it and wipes away her softness in a blink.
“You asked him what’s going on?”
I roll my eyes in answer.
“Of course you didn’t,” she mutters. “It’s Mercury in Retrograde.”
“What am I supposed to say?” I toss down a rice krispy treat in exasperation. “Hey, you made me come the other night, and now you’re social distancing. What gives?”
Pen shrugs. “It’s a start.”
I snort. “Believe it or not, I do have some dignity. Grrrr!” I ball my hands into fists. “This is why I shouldn’t let my guard down. No guy is ever worth these… these…”
“Feelings?” Pen supplies.
I am not ready to admit to having feelings for Lark.
Shit.
Shit.
I have feelings for Lark.
And not just the sexy Let’s-dry-hump-on-my-grandmother’s-couch feelings.
These are more like the fluttery-achy-this-must-be-organ-failure feelings.
“Shit.” My voice cracks, and that pisses me off even more. I power through the tightness in my throat to complain. “I don’t have time for this.”
Pen’s already dropped the treat she’s wrapping. She leans in and sweeps me up in her long arms. I huff a tearful laugh because hugging Pen is always such a mismatch of height and limbs and boney angles.
And still, it feels like family.
I’ve had this hug to retreat to for more than a dozen years, and that alone is enough to allow me to take a full breath and stop beating myself up for just a minute.
“Honey, you say you don’t have time for this,” she says with a gentle scold. “I say there’s so little you have that’s just for you, you better make the time while it’s still there to make.”
A part of me wants to pull back and give her the evil eye, but I’m not ready to let go yet.
“Are you trying to tell me I’m getting old?”
She snickers. “No, sweetie. I’m trying to tell you that after Maisy was born, you gave yourself maybe fifteen minutes of fun.” She squeezes me tighter. “That fifteen went down to nothing after Tyler got hurt.”
I untangle from her. “You think this is fun?”
She laughs, and in spite of myself, I laugh too, but my throat tightens again.
“I think it could be if you stop being a Virgo and go talk to the man you can’t take your eyes off of.”
My shoulders sag. “Is it that obvious?” Ignore the fact that I’m not a Virgo. I’m an Aries, but Pen is probably making some kind of insult I don’t understand and don’t want to understand.
“Mmm hmmm,” Pen says on a nod. “But don’t worry. He may be keeping his hands to himself, but his eyes are still all over you.”
I jerk back then. “What? Are you serious?”
Pen raises her right hand. “May all the magic turn against me
if I’m lying.”
Holy shit. Pen is not lying. She’s not even embellishing.
“Tell me more.”
She rolls her eyes but does it smiling. “Girl, he tracks your every move. When you’re not in the room, he asks where you are. He even pumped Maisy for information the other night when you went to lie down with a headache.”
My hand flies to my mouth. Behind it, I utter, “I thought—I thought that he’d succeeded in getting down my pants only to figure out I wasn’t worth any more effort.”
My best friend’s glower is a little frightening. “Stella Jane Mouton, you did not just say that.”
I’d like to, but I don’t deny it. “Think about my track record. My longest relationship outside of high school was with Brody, and look how that turned out.”
Pen sets her fists on her hips, still glaring thunderbolts. “You know I love you to my very core, but you’re about to hear some unadulterated truth, my dear.”
I actually flinch.
“What if I don’t wanna hear it?”
“That’s too flippin’ bad,” she spits. “You have never—and I mean never—put yourself out there, Stella.”
I blink like she’s speaking in tongues. “What? O-Of course I have. I’ve dated. I’ve let you set me up. I’ve even tried online—“
“No.” She holds up her long-fingered hand in my face. “That’s not putting yourself out there. In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never once taken an emotional risk. Not with any man. Not once.”
“I—“ But that one syllable is all I get.
“Brody Michot?” she trills with a face like she’s chugged apple cider vinegar. “Please don’t pretend you ever thought you could have anything real with him.”
I open my mouth to protest, but this time nothing comes out. Maisy’s father never surprised me. Not even when he bolted as soon as shit got real. As soon as it wasn’t fun.
When he left, it pissed me off, but it didn’t break my heart.
Not even a little.
What does that say about me?
I frown at Pen. “What does that say about me?”
She clasps her hands behind her back and gives me a coy look. “What do you think that says about you?”
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