A Week with the Best Man

by Ally Blake

  He turned to Harper to find her watching him, eyes wide and gleaming in the moonlight. No wonder. His words had scattered like artillery fire, ready to take out anyone who dared deny the veracity of his speech.

  “You want to know what I do, Harper? While—after years spent keeping this entire town afloat—the Chadwicks finally get to enjoy their well-earned retirement, and Gray—my big, kind, sweet, loving best mate—enjoys the hell out of his blessed life like the trust-fund kid that he is, I run the damn lot.”

  “Cormac, I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Cormac ran a rough hand through his hair.

  What the hell was it about her that made him feel the need to prove himself? To make her believe that he was content, settled and damn well happy? When deep down she made him feel it was time to shed his skin.

  If only he could get her out of his head. If only he could keep his eyes off her. Stop touching her whenever the chance arose, as if making sure she was still there. If only he could pinpoint what it was about her that had swept him up so fast, so hard.

  Then maybe he could figure out which parts of him she’d left untouched, untattered, unchanged, and he could rebuild from there. He’d done it before when he’d been nothing but a shell of a boy. He could do it again.

  “Look,” he said, doing his all to gentle his voice, “I’ve tried to be pleasant. Tried to be welcoming. Tried to be accommodating for your sister’s sake, for the sake of the Chadwicks. But enough is enough, Harper. You’ve had it in for me from the moment you arrived. What I want to know is why.”

  He could all but see the invisible quills popping up all over her skin. Protective measures locking into place. Then, before he even felt her move, she was outside, the car rocking as she slammed the door behind her.

  She turned only to toss his jacket into the back seat, as if shedding him as well, before she paced to the front of the car.

  Her silhouette cut into his view. Moonlight poured over her bare shoulders, glinting off the silken sheen of a dress that hugged her curves like a second skin, turned her movie-siren hair to silver.

  The air around her shimmered with her intense energy. He’d never met anyone who held on as tight. Who was as impossible to crack. So why the hell did he keep trying?

  He gripped the steering wheel as too many emotions to count slammed over him like a series of rogue waves. Went to slam his wrists against it, before stopping himself at the last. Breathing. Temper gentling.

  He kept trying because, while he might not yet trust her, he trusted himself. His instincts were decent. His motives genuine. He would not have been so drawn to her without good reason.

  Cormac alighted from the car, shut the door carefully, walked to her, before hitching himself up onto the tough old bonnet.

  When she finally turned, levelling him with a look, he patted the spot next to him.

  As he’d known she would she held out a beat, before leaning back against the bonnet next to him. Because, strange as it was for such a short acquaintance, he felt as though he knew her. And, knowing her, he only wanted to know more.

  The breeze rustled her hair, sending a waft of her heady scent his way.

  “Harper, I need you to talk to me. Did Lola tell you something about me that doesn’t sit right? Is it something to do with my father? Did you know him back then?” Not that, please let it not be that. “Or was it something at school? Did I not take your causes seriously? Did I hurt your feelings in some way?”

  There. The brisk lift of her shoulders. Harper said nothing, her face a case study in elusive shadows, but with a sinking feeling in his chest Cormac realised that while trying to make light he’d somehow hit the mark.

  What the hell had he done? His last couple of years of school were a blur in his memory. A haze. While things had spiraled out of control at home, he’d become cocooned in his group of friends.

  Never before had he wished he could remember it all. He’d blocked it out deliberately; the shouting, the fights, the bruises, the terror that this time might be the last. The feeling that his soul was trying to burst out of his skin. He knew he’d growled at poor kids who got in his way. Stopped listening when a friend was telling a story. He’d skipped school. Stolen beer. Drunk it while skipping school.

  Somehow, he’d managed to keep it together, enough to look after his mum. Enough to finish with grades and friendships intact. Enough to finally put an end to it.

  But if going back helped him figure out why Harper sometimes looked at him like he had horns, he’d do it.

  “Tell me.”

  “Why? So you can throw it in my face? Been there. Never want to go there again.”

  Battling a chaotic mix of concern and frustration, Cormac crossed his arms, the cotton stretching tight over muscle and bone. His voice was quiet but the intent clear as he said, “Are you just going to leave that there like a little time bomb? Or do you plan to tell me what that’s supposed to mean?”

  She lifted her chin. “It’s nothing.”

  “It sounded pretty specific. Did I cut in front of you in the lunch line? Did you ask me to a school dance and I was already taken?”

  She’d have been such a spitfire back then. Full of hope and promise and snark. Why hadn’t he seen her? Noticed her? Especially if she’d had a crush on him. The very thought of which was messing with his head, big time.

  He’d been a swimming star, part of the “in” group, and he’d had all his features in the right place. He’d seen enough John Hughes movies to understand those ingredients all but ensured that girls would giggle behind their hands as he and his mates walked past.

  And yet knowing that one girl in particular had harboured feelings for him made him feel as if the fabric of his life was being stretched out of shape.

  “Harper, sweetheart. Just tell me.”

  For a moment he thought she hadn’t heard, or was going to refuse him again, but then her voice came to him, soft but clear.

  “It was late in your last year of high school, right before graduation. You must remember the scandal. My family’s scandal.”

  “I promise you I’m not making light, but I remember very little of that time.” He swallowed, knowing there was only one way she’d believe him. “My father... That year was his worst.”

  She glanced his way, her eyes impossible to read in the semi-darkness. And she said, “Mine too. My dad lost everything—every cent we had and then some—in a shady real-estate deal.”

  Harper’s father—Lola’s father—had gone broke? No. Surely he’d have remembered that. Or at least learnt about it since. If the Chadwicks knew they’d have said something, for they’d never held back business talk in front of him. They’d always treated him as if his opinion mattered. Taught him that, armed with knowledge, he could make a difference.

  “It was all over the news,” Harper said. “All over the school. My father lost millions, not only his own money but also that of a number of local mum and dad investors, too.”

  When her gaze swept to his, moonlight glowing at the edges of the dark depths, he found himself holding his breath.

  “It was awful,” she said. “Everyone knew. It was too much for Dad to bear, and he left.”

  “Left.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t understand. You were what, sixteen? Lola younger again. Your mother wasn’t around and he walked out.”

  “And never came back.”

  Her eyes remained focussed on his. Watchful. As if trying to decipher how much he was hiding from her about not remembering. As if he wasn’t the only one who struggled with trust.

  “Wow, you really don’t remember, do you?”

  He shook his head. And once again said, “Tell me.”

  “News spread fast, as it does in this place, and the scavengers arrived the next day to clear us out. I don’t ev
en know who they were. I thought it was the bank, but looking back it couldn’t have been. Loan sharks, perhaps. Worse. We were probably lucky we weren’t cleared out with the stuff.

  “I only managed to fill a couple of backpacks as they took everything. Our furniture. My stereo. Lola’s soft toys. Even the family photographs. I’m sure they had lost money in Dad’s deal, as it was personal.

  “Anyway, I had to find Lola and myself somewhere to sleep. I negotiated with the market on Haynes Street. I already worked there after school and weekends only from that time on I’d do so for use of the vacant space above the store and a grocery allowance.

  “I didn’t realise till we were getting ready for school on the Monday that I’d only packed clothes for Lola. The only clothes were the ones on my back-old jeans and an ancient Bowie T-shirt of my mum’s. I washed them every night. Wore them to school still damp if necessary. One day I was sent home—half-day suspension, no less—because my shirt was too short. Only because it had shrunk from so many washes.”

  “The speech,” he said, under his breath. “The one about sexist uniform policies.”

  She blinked at him, a ghost of a smile flickering across her lush mouth.

  “The shop owner downstairs heard and gave me a bag of hand-me-downs. And they started paying me my wage again as well. Thank goodness, because it meant Lola had money for excursions and birthday parties and dental check-ups. All the while I had to avoid any questions about guardianship.”

  Cormac ran a hand through his mussed-up hair. He’d thought he’d kept his family turmoil under wraps, but where he’d had his friends to protect him, she’d gone through it on her own.

  No wonder she was still so overly concerned about Lola’s welfare—she’d been raising her since she was a kid herself.

  He had questions. But he kept them to himself. She needed to get this out. He waited, and he listened, all the while his gut roiling with anger at her father, and at his town that had made a sixteen-year-old girl negotiate to put a roof over her head.

  All the while dreading the part he’d played in the story she told.

  She held her arms around herself, shaking so hard her teeth rattled.

  “You’re trembling,” he said, sliding off the car to be next to her.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Let me get the jacket.” He made to move and Harper’s hand reached out and grabbed his wrist.

  “Stay.”

  He stayed. He also took her hand in his and held it between his own, rubbing it and blowing hot air over her chilled skin.

  She watched him as she said, “It was a few weeks after. I saw you at that table under the oak tree—”

  “Behind the science block.”

  “Right. You were sitting on the table, feet on the bench, legs jiggling with pent-up energy. You were wearing your Jurassic Fart T-shirt.”

  Cormac grimaced. He didn’t remember much from that year, but he remembered that shirt. If she remembers that much detail, this is going to be bad.

  “You were wild-eyed. Unfocussed. You looked like you wanted to climb out of your skin. I’d never seen you like that before. You looked... You looked how I felt. Your friends, on the other hand, all sat on the grass nearby, joking, lying all over one another, not a care in the world. The fact that none of them saw you, saw how tragic you looked, well, it made me angry. So...”

  She glanced at him then, chin ducked, eyes blinking. First time he’d ever seen her look shy. He moved in a little closer, ran his hand down her forearm and back up again, thawing her out an inch at a time.

  “So I went up to you. And I asked if you were okay. You looked through me like I was some kind of apparition. Then one of the others, a boy—not Gray, Josh—jumped up and loped over. Said something like, ‘What’s up, Addison? Begging for the whales? The spotted owl? Or lunch money?’”

  “What the—?”

  Harper waved it off. As if in the grand scheme of things Josh the douche had barely left a mark. “A place like Blue Moon Bay High you can’t get away with wearing the same clothes every day before it becomes a point of conversation. Then he turned to you and said, ‘What do you reckon, Wharton? Should we give her what she wants?’”

  Cormac’s jaw hardened. “Please tell me I told him where to go.”

  “Not exactly.” Harper’s next breath in was short, sharp; as if the sensation burned. “You looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘She’s nobody. She’s not getting anything from me.’”

  Cormac stilled; his entire body felt like ice, only now it was her warm hand in his keeping him tethered.

  He slid his hand up her arm, and gently tugged her closer. Right into the curve of his body. He waited for her to twist away. Would let her go in an instant if she did. But after a moment she gave in, settling into his side, her head tucked under his chin.

  “I said that?” he asked, his words muffled by her hair.

  She nodded against his shoulder. “Word for word.”

  Cormac closed his eyes and tried to picture the time, the day, the way it might have unfolded. It wasn’t hard. She had recounted it in excruciating detail.

  “Josh wasn’t exactly a friend of mine,” he said, his voice rough. “He was a drifter in the group. He could be a git even at the best of times. And for some reason he always treated me more like competition than a friend.”

  “Tara,” Harper said, her voice a husky whisper.

  Of course.

  Cormac breathed in the scent of her hair, letting his mouth rest against her crown a moment before he said, “If Josh thought you meant something to me, he’d have made your life hell.”

  Harper’s face tilted to his, and she stared hard into his eyes. He wondered what she saw. What she made of him. Then and now. It floored him how much it mattered.

  “But I didn’t mean anything to you,” she said. “And yet... Are you telling me you were trying to protect me? Even so?”

  “If Josh was about to cause trouble, with anyone, taking the fun out of it was always a good way to deflate it.”

  Harper’s deep eyes gleamed in the low light. Her arm rubbed against his chest as she breathed in and out. Her skin, no longer ice-cold, burned him everywhere they touched.

  And then she laughed, the sound closer to a sob. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Before, with a groan, she leant forward, her face falling into her hands.

  Cormac’s hand slid to her back. To the satiny touch of her dress. Beneath the thin fabric he felt the delicate curve of her spine. Felt her every breath.

  He opened his mouth to ask if she was okay, then closed it. She wasn’t okay. It had been clear from the moment she arrived. Only now he knew why.

  She pulled herself upright. Cormac’s hand slid to her hip. He took the chance to pull her closer. She let him. Melting against him as if she no longer had the strength to hold herself up.

  Eventually she said, “My life took a turn that day. I hardened up, my focus becoming a pinpoint of determination. I’d show my mum, I’d show my dad, I’d show you that I wasn’t someone to walk away from, to dismiss. I wasn’t nobody.”

  Cormac had been made to feel worthless in his life. Told by his father on a near daily basis in the end, how disappointing he was, how insignificant, he’d come all too close to letting himself give in and believe it.

  The good people in his life—the Grays, the Adeles, the core gang—had been the reason he’d been able to break free.

  From what he’d gathered she’d not had that. She’d been too busy trying to hold her family together to make friends like his. To think he’d been the one who made her feel small when she’d had no people, no support—he felt as if claws were tearing at his insides.

  “Harper.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me.”

  She heaved in a deep breath and looked up into his eyes, fierce and utterly wond
rous. And something ferocious and unstoppable stampeded through his chest.

  Gray thought her a Hitchcockian ice queen, but Cormac knew better. Harper Addison was pure fire. And that fire of hers had lit something within him, stoking the embers of the slow burn of a life he’d thought was enough. The life he’d thought was exactly as he wanted it to be.

  She’d wrapped an invisible fist around something deep and primal inside of him and yanked him out of complacency without even trying.

  Cormac’s hand travelled slowly up her back, catching on the ribbon at her neck before sliding back down. He saw smoke drift into her eyes—eyes that were wide open, exposed—and felt change in the very vibrations in the air.

  Her crush was not merely a thing of the past.

  His crush, on the other hand, was brand new. And all the more mercurial, unwieldy and unsettling for it.

  He wanted to kiss her, more than he remembered wanting anything in his entire life. It took every gentlemanly bone in his body not to take advantage.

  For there were more things to say.

  “While it doesn’t excuse the way I made you feel that day, will you allow me to give you some context?”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  “It was right around the time you described that I finally convinced Mum to leave my father. I’d spent a rough few months working her up to it, securing a room in a domestic-violence shelter. I took the day off school to drive her there—three hours away to a place he’d never find her. At eighteen, six-feet-two and male, I wasn’t allowed to stay with her which was hard. But she convinced me I had to go home, to graduate with my friends. And I wanted to see the look in his eyes when he realised she was gone.”

  Harper asked, “What happened?”

  “It went as was to be expected.” He lifted a hand to his forehead.

  Her fingers followed, tracing the pale line that slashed through his eyebrow. “Your father did that?”

  And more. Before then, before he’d come home to find his wife gone he’d been lucid enough to make sure the scars would be well hidden. “Broken bottle. He was aiming for my throat. Swing and a near miss.”