It was The Wagner Kids — Plus One.
And because of how close Tyler and I were, and how his sister was my best friend in the entire world, I knew I wasn’t supposed to notice those things that I did. I wasn’t supposed to notice his abs, his toned biceps, his perfect chin and lips and hair. I wasn’t supposed to notice the way his skin was sticky with a mixture of sweat and sunscreen, or how his hands were warm where they held me, or how his eyes were so dark they were almost bottomless — unless he was in the sunlight, in which case, they were a brilliant hue of gold.
But I did notice.
I always had.
And I’d never tell.
Tyler’s chocolate eyes searched mine, brows bent together, thick lips parted. They were always a sort of dusty mix between pink and brown, always set in a perpetual preppy boy pout.
Without another word, he pulled me into his bare chest, and I wrapped my arms around him, another wave of sobs ripping through me at the feeling of being hugged.
Of being cared for.
Of being loved.
“Shit, Jaz,” he said on a sigh. “What happened?”
I shook my head, not ready to talk about it yet — even though that was why I had come. I had fled my aunt’s apartment right after my mother pulled out of the parking lot in her old Pontiac, wanting nothing more than to run here and tell Morgan everything. Tyler, too.
But now that I was here, I just wanted to be held.
I just wanted to know that someone wanted me in this world.
Another heavy sigh left Tyler’s chest, and then his hand slipped down to grab mine, and he pulled me down the hallway — three doors down, past one of the many guest rooms and his mother’s sewing room — to his bedroom.
His room was darker than Morgan’s, with blackout curtains and a sea of navy blue and forest green covering the bed spread and walls. Mrs. Wagner had thrown a fit when we painted it so dark the summer after mine and Morgan’s freshman year, but it was what he wanted, and it suited him.
It was dark, quiet, peaceful.
And it smelled like him — like Hollister cologne and sunscreen and sweat.
Like a day at the lake.
My favorite time to sit in his room was the first day of fall, when he’d crack the blinds covering his window as the sun fell over the lake, and he’d build a perfect fire in his fireplace, and the whole room would fill with a soft, golden light. The three of us would sit on his floor with pumpkin-spiced tea and plan our Halloween outfits, and it was a tradition I looked forward to every year.
Presently, I sat numbly on the edge of his unmade bed as he shut the door behind us, and he bent down on the floor in front of me, mouth tugged to one side.
“Morgan’s out shopping with Mom,” he explained. “They were going to go to dinner after, but I can text her if—”
I shook my head. “No, it’s okay.”
“But you’re not.”
My eyes flooded. “No,” I whispered. “I’m not.”
He sighed again, just as heavy and deep, and the pain in that sigh told me that it mattered to him that I wasn’t okay — which mattered to me, more than he would ever know.
“Let me get you some water,” he said, starting to rise, but I reached out for him, clinging to his arm.
“No. Please,” I begged, fighting back more tears. “Just stay.”
His brows furrowed, and he nodded, sitting beside me on his bed and wrapping his arms around me.
There was always something safe about Tyler. I’d felt it the first time we laid eyes on each other, my first day of Bridgechester Prep. I was in a completely new school with kids I’d never met before, feeling about as comfortable as a lobster in a boiling pot of water, but somehow, he’d crashed through the noise. I still remembered the way he had stopped in the hallway, how he’d crooked one corner of his mouth in a smile, how he’d said hi, and asked me to sit with him at lunch.
This, on my first day of high school. This, at a school where none of my friends from the public middle school could afford to attend – where I was only able to attend thanks to my aunt knowing someone who knew someone and writing one hell of a scholarship essay for me. This, right after my mother had left me to live with my aunt, checking herself into rehab.
And for the first time in possibly my entire life, I’d felt safe.
He was always looking out for me and Morgan. When we were kayaking on the lake, he was always on alert, ready to jump in and save either of us if he needed to. When we first learned how to drive, he was always with us, making sure we weren’t distracting each other. When we went to our first high school party, he was there, waiting in the wings to make sure no one drugged our drinks and we didn’t get too drunk to know what we were doing.
Tyler radiated care and safety, and so I leaned into the heat of him, his skin still warm and sticky with sunscreen. He must have been lying out by the pool, or doing his calisthenics in the yard. My hand splayed the area where his rib cage met his abs, and I swallowed at the way they felt — hard muscles covered by soft, bronzed skin.
For the longest time, he just held me there, silently rocking me until my tears had dried up. At some point he handed me a tissue, though I couldn’t be sure when. It was like I was in a dream — or rather, a nightmare.
“Did something happen with James?” Tyler asked after a while, and I didn’t miss the hardness in his voice at the mention of my now-ex-boyfriend. He’d broken up with me a couple weeks ago, right before senior prom, and I’d been devastated.
But that was nothing compared to this.
I shook my head, and Tyler let out an almost-relieved sigh.
“Good,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to fight that little bastard.”
I tried to smile, but failed.
After another long pause, Tyler whispered, “Is it your mom?”
My heart squeezed so violently in my chest that I curled in on myself, and I knew that was an answer in itself. Still, I nodded against his chest, and he held me tighter.
My mother was an addict, and had been my entire life. Of course, I didn’t know it — not really — not until the summer after eighth grade when I found her on the floor of our trailer with a needle in her arm and a dead look in her eyes. Luckily, she was just short of overdosed, and she survived.
But it was the rudest wake-up call of my life.
I didn’t know my father, and according to my mother, she didn’t know him, either. She had been sexually assaulted at a rave party in the summer of ‘94, and I was the product of that night — a constant reminder of the most brutal violation that can happen to a woman.
Part of me wondered if I was the reason she turned to drugs so hard, if seeing me brought back that night of her life every day. My Aunt Laura assured me that her habit had started well before I was even born, but I still wondered.
I moved in with Aunt Laura that summer, not too long after the incident, and my mom had been taking the last four years to work on herself. She went to rehab, got a job, and even managed to rent a house in the next town over — though I still didn’t see her often.
I just need some time to find myself, she’d explained to me the day she’d moved me in to my aunt’s house. And when I do, I’ll come back for you, and we’ll be together again.
Except once she found herself, she also found a new boyfriend — one who lived in Phoenix.
And today, she told me she was moving there to be with him.
I could still hear my aunt screaming at her older sister, begging her to be reasonable, to be responsible, to put her daughter first. It was the loudest I’d ever heard my aunt raise her voice, and yet it was somehow muted in the moment, like it was all a distant memory even before it had actually happened.
I could still see my mother’s tears as she tried to explain herself, looking at me with a mixture of pity and guilt and regret that made for the worst combination. Nothing she could say made it better, no matter how she tried to explain that she was finally happy for the first
time, that she was in a good place, that she wanted to stay there.
No matter what she said, all of it amounted to one thing in my eyes.
She didn’t want me.
She never had.
And I was a fool to believe she’d ever come back for me.
“She left,” I managed to whisper, and Tyler stiffened at the words. I pulled back, looking into his deep brown eyes — eyes that had been the first to truly see me when I’d walked into Bridgechester Prep High School freshman year.
Eyes that had been the first to truly see me. Period.
“She’s gone, Ty. I thought she was coming back for me, but she just…” I sniffed. “She just came to say goodbye.”
Tyler’s nostrils flared, and he reached out for me, cradling my face in his hands as I bit my lip against the urge to cry again.
“Listen to me, Jasmine,” he said, leveling his gaze with me. “Your mother does not define you. You understand me? She’s an idiot for not seeing the amazing daughter she has, for not wanting to get to know you the way our family knows you.” He swallowed. “The way I know you. But that’s on her, okay? That is not on you.”
He let out a long, slow breath, pressing his forehead to mine. My hands wrapped around his wrists where he held me.
“You are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen,” he whispered. “Don’t you ever forget that.”
I nodded, something between a smile and a grimace finding me as two more tears slipped free and fell between us.
Tyler’s thumbs smoothed the skin between my ear and my cheek, his grip tightening at the back of my neck. Through my wet lashes, I watched his lips as he rolled them together, his nose as he let out another long, slow, shaky breath.
Suddenly, the air in his room thickened, heating like the sun itself was inside it.
Another moment stretched between us, and then Tyler slipped his hands farther into my hair, his hands cradling my neck, thumbs still running the length of my jaw. Somewhere in the house, the air conditioning kicked on, the soft hum of it finding my ears but doing nothing to cool the heat in that bedroom. Then, Tyler pulled — just a little, just enough — and my head lifted, our foreheads still touching, but now our noses touched, too.
His hot breath met mine in the center of that space between us, and I blinked several times, eyes still blurry when I found his gaze.
Tyler’s eyes flicked back and forth between mine, then fell to my lips, then slowly crawled back up. He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard in his throat, and something sharp and hot and unfamiliar hit me like a lightning bolt, shooting from the point where his hands touched me all the way down between my legs.
I should pull back.
I should pull away.
This is Tyler.
This is my best friend’s brother.
Each thought came faster and more urgent than the first, but I didn’t have time to listen to them, to act on them.
Because in the next breath, Tyler traced my bottom lip with the pad of his thumb, sucking in a breath at the contact.
And then, he tilted my chin, and lowered his own, and he kissed me.
My chest tightened in a completely new way — not from pain, or from abandonment, but from a yearning desire so deep and demanding that it stole my next breath and every other thought I had. I was completely frozen in his grasp, so focused on the way his warm lips caressed mine that I couldn’t concentrate enough to move a single muscle.
He kissed me slowly, surely, as if he hadn’t had a second guess about it before in his life. And when he pulled back, he waited, watching me carefully, asking for permission to do it again.
I answered with my hands sliding up his chest, over his shoulders, and into his hair, slicking my lips before I pulled him into me and kissed him back.
I kissed him back.
His response was instant, his arms full around me, crushing me into him as he deepened the kiss. A throaty moan came from his chest, and I gasped at the way it shook me to the core.
Oh my God.
I’m kissing my best friend’s brother.
I’m kissing Tyler Wagner.
And I never want to stop.
And just like I hadn’t known that a heart could break the way mine did when my mother left, I didn’t know what it felt like to be touched like that by a boy. Sure, James and I had slept together, but it had been quick and clumsy most of the time, and I’d been mostly lost and confused, assuming that was just what it was like for the girl.
But this… this was something else altogether.
I didn’t know what it was to be wanted so desperately that each kiss felt like a fire searing every inch of skin covering my bones. I didn’t know what it was to tremble and shake, to be lowered back into pillows and sheets with hands so careful and confident that every other thought left my head completely. I didn’t know what it was to feel a mixture of extreme passion and somehow familiar safety all at once, to succumb to something so forbidden, and to love it like nothing I’d ever loved before.
We crossed every line that night — and I went from loving my best friend’s brother in secret to wanting nothing more than to love him out loud.
I lost myself inside that moment, inside that room, inside that night with Tyler.
But of course, that was because I didn’t know what tomorrow would bring.
I didn’t know that the next day, Tyler would ignore me completely, avoiding my eyes in his house and ignoring my texts when I left later that evening.
I didn’t know he would call me three days later and tell me it was all a mistake, that we could never tell anyone, that it could never happen again.
I didn’t know that the first time I felt truly wanted, and truly loved, was all a lie.
But I found out quickly.
I finished the last week of high school with a broken heart — broken from my mother, from Tyler, from my expectations on life — and I walked across the graduation stage in a numb trance.
One week after that, I left my New England hometown on the first day of summer.
I promised myself I’d never go back.
And that I’d never talk to Tyler Wagner again.
June 6th, 2020
7 years later
Outside the car that drove me through the small town of Bridgechester, New Hampshire, nothing had changed.
The colorful colonial houses and small businesses still peppered the brick streets, gold plaques boasting the historic significance of each one along the way. The air that blew through the open windows still smelled like a New England summer — fresh and clean and woodsy, the humid summer heat seeping in and frizzing my long, freshly bleached blonde hair. Bridgechester Prep still had the same mascot, the same crimson and gold lettered signs congratulating the recent graduates, and the same castle-esque brick build.
The town still centered around Lake Tambow, its cool, clear waters drawing tourists from all over during the summer, and the colorful turn of the leaves drawing them in all through the fall.
Outside the car, that town was exactly what it had always been.
But inside the car, there was me.
And I was nothing like the girl who’d left seven years ago.
My chest was tight as the Uber drove through downtown and then out toward the west side, each street and turn so familiar even after all these years. I watched the White Mountains in the distance as we climbed the steep street that led to the long and winding drive I never thought I’d see again, the one that led to the house I swore I’d never step foot inside of after that night.
But after all this time, Morgan was still my best friend.
And last week, she’d called me to tell me she’s getting married.
In two weeks.
I chuckled to myself, because only Morgan would announce a wedding with less than three weeks to plan it.
Of course, she’d given me the title of Maid of Honor, and I knew I’d have my hands full trying to help her pull off a Wagner-worthy wedding in fourteen days. No dou
bt she’d want the very best, and I was thankful that at least the majority of my time would be occupied with wedding tasks.
Because at the root of everything, there was a gnawing pit in my stomach being back in my hometown — one I promised myself I’d never return to.
It’d been easy up until this point — relatively so, anyway. Aunt Laura had always come to visit me in Oakland, assuming that Bridgechester held bad memories for me because of my mom. And that was part of it, though not the most pressing, if I was being honest. Morgan had obliged, too. She loved any excuse to travel to a warmer climate and see the west coast. Of course, she had begged me a few times to come visit her, especially when we were in college, but I’d somehow managed to avoid it.
Until now.
When your best friend is getting married, you do whatever she asks of you — no arguments, no excuses.
I pushed down the selfish part of myself that wanted to throw a tantrum at being back, at the fact that I’d likely be in close contact with the one person I’d spent the last seven years avoiding, reminding myself that this was about Morgan.
And it had been seven years, for Christ’s sake. We were kids, and maybe when I was younger, it had hurt to even think about coming back here. But, I was twenty-five now, a young woman with a promising career and a full life out in California just waiting for me to come back. I could handle being in my hometown for a couple of weeks. I could handle being around the boy who broke my heart when I was a teenager.
Besides, I had a boyfriend now.
A handsome, accomplished, perfect boyfriend.
Tyler Wagner couldn’t affect me anymore.
That was the final thought in my mind when the Uber turned into the long drive of the Wagner house, cruising slowly through the elaborate black-and-gold gate and coming to a stop in front of the large, white columns of their estate.
Ritual: A New Adult College Romance (Palm South University Book 5) Page 28
