Mauli’s eyes widened in horror, the brown pools glittering darkly with it. “No, you really shouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” I knew the fallout would be massive. I knew I was likely to lose Kole’s trust, if not my best friend entirely. But his trust in me was already misplaced when it came to Elyse.
If I came clean, maybe our friendship would stand a chance. A small one, but a chance nonetheless. If Kole were to find out from someone else, which seemed inevitable now that Elyse was on the island with us, things would get much, much worse.
Mauli looked at me like I’d grown about four more heads and all of them were completely stupid. “Do you have a sister, bro?”
My brows tugged together. “No, why?”
He huffed out a breath, cursing underneath it. “I do.”
“What?” I spat out, trying to recall Mauli mentioning a sister. I was ninety-nine percent sure he hadn’t.
Lips turning down, he shrugged. “We’re not close. She lives in Florida with our aunt. She’s going to school there.”
“Okay.” I knew he was getting at something, but I wasn’t sure what.
Reaching over, he lifted my sunglasses from my eyes and looked right into them. “I might not be that close to her anymore, but telling her brother is the last thing you should be doing.”
I yanked his hand away from the metal rod of my glasses and slid them back over my eyes, leaning my head onto the chair. “I know it’s not ideal, but she’s a grown woman. She makes her own decisions. He doesn’t need to like them, but at least he knows me. He knows I’m not the type to fuck around. If I tell him now, it’ll be on my own terms.”
“Didn’t we talk about this before?” He arched a brow. “Telling him something that would hurt him to clear your own conscience is selfish.”
“What?” I closed my eyes and released a heavy breath. “And sleeping with his sister isn’t?”
“The last thing he wants or needs to know is who’s sleeping with his sister,” Mauli said. “Trust me. No dude wants to know that. Even when your sister gets married, you still want to believe the fucking stork delivered her babies to her doorstep.”
Head still leaning back against the chair, I turned to face him. “So you wouldn’t want to know who’s sleeping with your sister?”
“Fuck no.” He shook his head emphatically. “My sister’s apparently been with some guy for almost a year. I don’t even download the email attachments with pictures of him. That’s my baby sister, dude. No one should be diddling her.”
“Diddling her?” I scoffed, chucking despite the seriousness of the conversation.
He rolled his eyes. “Fucking her. Making love to her. Putting his whoopee stick in the ham wallet.” He shuddered, shaking out his hands. “No matter how you want to say it, my little sister shouldn’t be involved.”
“Wait.” I lowered my glasses and gave him a pointed look. “His whoopee stick in the ham wallet. Isn’t that from a song?”
He shrugged and shook out his black curls. “So what? The point is that all of those things come down to some unworthy prick sticking his tool into my sister. I’m not an idiot. I know she’s probably going to do it one day before she’s sixty, but I don’t want to know about that shit. Let alone call the prick who’s sticking his tool into her my best fucking friend. Leave it be, bro. Leave it be.”
I drew in a shuddering breath. “When you put it like that, I don’t know what to do. Telling him has to be better than not telling him. I’m not this guy, man. She’s not just some girl I’ve fucked that I can forget about.”
“Why not?” he repeated my earlier question. “Have you been celibate since the last time you saw her?”
I scoffed. “Of course, I haven’t fucking been celibate.”
“You’ve stayed away from all those girls after, haven’t you?” He did have a point there, but Elyse wasn’t like those girls.
There was something about being with her that was downright addictive, something that set her apart from everyone else for me. I still wasn’t thinking about marrying her or anything, but I couldn’t just walk out.
“Fucking someone you meet while on leave or getting it on with a local who’s only after something temporary isn’t the same thing,” I said. “Kole deserves to know about this.”
“No, he—” Mauli’s fishing rod jerked and he leaped to his feet. “I’ve got one. I told you I was a fucking fisherman.”
He hoisted his rod out of its holder, and less than a minute later, the line went slack. Mauli sighed but shrugged as he tossed me a glance over his shoulder. “Must have been a shark. That’s the only thing that could get away from the Maul-man.”
I shook my head but didn’t argue. He could have this one. I’d been enough of a downer on this trip already.
Besides, I was a shark in my own right, wasn’t I? Circling around my best friend’s little sister while he didn’t suspect a thing. The ripples were already there. Kole just hadn’t seen them yet.
I hated to think about what he might do when he finally did.
Chapter 20
Elyse
“I love how loud it can get in here,” I said to Alice as we watched children rushing to grab crayons and paper for an activity. The daycare always seemed to be a cacophony of laughter and yelling and the excited chatter of little voices.
Alice made a show of blocking her ears with her fingers, a wide grin on her lips. “What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the tiny dictators announcing their next plots against us.”
I rolled my eyes but couldn’t stop the laughter from boiling out of me. “If you hate them so much, why are you still here?”
She unplugged her ears and dropped her hands to her sides, shrugging with a glint of humor in her eyes. “I think it’s Stockholm Syndrome. They got to me, and now I think I want them. Need them, even.”
Laughing, I put a hand on my hip. “So you’re telling me they’re forcing you to be here?”
She nodded solemnly. “They won’t let me go. You should get out now, while you still can.”
My eyes swept across the brightly colored room, taking in the smiling children and their shouts of delight. “I think it’s too late for me already.”
“Don’t be fooled by their cute exteriors,” she warned. “They really are tiny dictators. You could be in the bathroom, and as soon as they want something, wham. You have to do what they want. Your own needs mean nothing to them, nor does what you want. It’s all about them. They’ve got all the power.”
“You sound like a tired mother of five,” I said. “We get to give them back at the end of the day, remember?”
“Exactly.” She nodded enthusiastically. “Can you imagine being with them twenty-four seven? I love them to bits, but that’s a lot of time you have to be with them.”
“I think it’s worth it.” I scanned the room again, a contented sound escaping from my throat. “It has to be worth it. Why else would people keep having them?”
“Stockholm Syndrome,” she whispered, eyes widening dramatically. “I’m telling you, it’s a thing.”
I laughed, lightly shaking my head. “I’m taking it you don’t want any of your own one day, then.”
Alice raised both of her eyebrows at me. “Nope. They might be mighty cute and all, but they chain a person down like nothing else does. I couldn’t do it.”
I was opening my mouth to reply when I felt a small hand on my thigh. “Ms. Elyse? I think I need help.”
My eyes dropped to meet the round chocolate orbs of one of the shyest girls in the class. She wore pitch-black pigtails with a tiny pink dress, her touch on my leg soft and hesitant. I smiled down at her, winding my hand through one pigtail on instinct.
“I think I can manage helping,” I said. “What do you need help with?”
“Ms. Alice said we had to draw a dream.” The girl, Connie’s, lower lip quivered. “I don’t know how to draw a fairy.”
Alice gave me a pointed look. She’d meant they had to draw a d
ream of what they wanted to become, but she hadn’t exactly clarified, and Connie had every right to want to become a fairy anyway. That was the beauty of childhood: you got to believe in whatever you wanted to.
Squatting to my haunches, I smiled at Connie. “Sure, sweetheart. I can help you draw a fairy. You have to draw a regular person. Then we’ll add a magnificent pair of wings.”
“They have to be lime green,” Connie said, “with some purple flecked through them.”
I matched her serious expressions. “Of course. What else?”
A grin touched her thin lips as she reached for my hand. “I’ll show you, but you have to keep it to yourself.”
I mimed zipping and locking my lips, then made a show of gesturing for her to precede me. She tugged at my hand, and when I glanced back at Alice, she waved me off with her fingers and mouthed “have fun.”
I intended to have fun. Half the reason I’d always wanted to work with kids was because I believed that working with them would allow me to get back in touch with my own inner child. Everyone wanted to do it, wanted to get silly and happy again, to see and love all the little things and get excited about a bird taking flight.
But only people who worked with children and got to see that delight every day really got to do it, to share in that joy and really relive it every day of their lives.
I knew that there was a bunch of admin that went along with it since technically, I was still the adult in the room. But I also got to experience the childlike wonder, the magic in the world that most adults never noticed anymore. I could deal with the admin and whatever else came my way for that.
Connie sat me down on the rubber mats with her, gesturing wildly to her paper. She’d selected pink, silver, purple, and blue crayons. I squeezed her shoulder. “Those are really good choices in colors. Do you need me to get you any other ones?”
She brought a hand to her chin and tapped it with a finger, critically surveying her options. “We might need green for the wings.”
“Right. I can do that.” I smiled and didn’t even have to move to reach another container off the shelf, lifting it off and sifting through to find several shades of green. One reminded me distinctly of Jordan’s eyes, so I left it in there and only offered Connie the others.
“See anything you like?” I presented her with a fistful of crayons in my hand.
She rifled through them, plucking the darkest green one out of my open palm despite having said she wanted the wings to be bright. I didn’t question her. This was her dream, after all. “This one will be okay.”
“Let’s get to work then, maestro.” I crossed my legs and sat down beside her, offering my advice whenever she asked for it and suggestions when I thought she might need them.
Connie was exceedingly sweet. She almost always smiled, and when other kids came and grabbed one of her crayons, she just nodded and made peace with its loss.
Whenever that happened, which was often, she would ask me to see the container with the spare crayons in it again and would choose a similar shade to the one she’d lost. I didn’t need a degree in child care or psychology to know that she wasn’t one to sweat the small stuff.
She was resilient, resourceful, and really quite funny once she climbed out of her shell. As she threw her little head back and laughed, blowing some glitter we’d sprinkled over a patch of glue, my own lips spread into a smile.
If I ever had a daughter, I’d want mine to be just like her. But I didn’t waste any more time thinking about it. There was a lot of time left before I had to start worrying about that.
Connie ended up making a pretty decent picture by lunchtime and she beamed with pride when I told her I’d put it up on the wall.
Alice was waiting for me by the door when it was time for our break. “I recognize the symptoms, you know? You’re broody. You’re thinking of them like they’re yours.”
Unable to deny it, I simply shrugged. “Connie’s a good kid. I’d have been proud if she was mine.”
“But she’s not yours,” Alice said, winking with one eye filled with amusement and her lips in their perpetual upturn. “Thank God for that. Kids are a real ball and chain. You can’t go anywhere after dark. It’s like being a vampire, but in reverse.”
Although I chuckled at what she said, I still shook my head. “I don’t think of it like that. I think anyone blessed with a child is a lucky person. Regardless of how the child comes into your life, parenthood is a huge blessing. I don’t think having to mostly stay in is such a big sacrifice in the face of that.”
“Oh, God.” Alice clapped her hand over her face. “You’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.”
I laughed. “No, I’ve always felt like that. A child should be a parent’s greatest gift, not an option they get to take up or give up.”
Alice’s humor fled her eyes. “I’ve touched a nerve. You know I’m only messing around with you, right?”
“Right.” I smiled, though the thought of having a missing father I’d never known still stung. “I just think that when I become a parent, my kid will come first. I don’t have any fucks to give about going out and all that. I’d be perfectly happy crawling into bed beside that little body every night.”
“You know you’re not supposed to sleep with them, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t care about any of that new-agey stuff or the theories about them. When I become a mom, I’ll do what’s right for me, my baby, and, if he’s there, her father.”
Alice paused as she opened the fridge. “You keep saying ‘when’ you become a parent, not ‘if.’ You got any plans I don’t know about?”
“Nope.” Kids were something I wanted in the very far-off future, not now. It didn’t mean that I hadn’t thought about it at all, though. I didn’t have any plans really, just opinions. “One day, I hope to be someone’s mom. I’m happy to be here with other people’s kids in the meantime.”
Alice turned from the fridge and gave me a critical onceover. When her eyes met mine again, she shook her head. “You’re way too beautiful to have a kid. A child will destroy your body and your life. Surely, you can’t want that.”
Surprised laughter came out of me as I swatted her shoulder. “That’s not true. A body can be gotten back, and a life is only enriched by a child.”
She wagged her eyebrows at me. “I’m assuming things have gotten a lot more serious with Mr. I Don’t Know About, then?”
My eyes rounded. I hadn’t even been thinking about Jordan when I’d been talking about the possibility about having a child in the future. I had to admit that I thought about him all the time, but we didn’t have a future together.
As much as I might have liked to plan for one eventually, it just wasn’t us.
Jordan and I had explosive sex, great chemistry, and could walk out of the bedroom and be best friends, but we were nothing more than that. Whatever that might be.
Fuck buddies, I thought it was called. We fucked and we were buddies. It seemed simple enough. Unfortunately, my insides twisted at the thought of it.
“It’s become more complicated,” I finally confessed to Alice. “I’m not saying I want his babies. I’m just saying that things have changed since I told you I didn’t really know what was going on between us.”
Fine. Okay. So I still didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I knew it was more than a quick fuck to work each other out of our systems.
Alice’s mouth turned down in sympathy. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I shook my head. “There’s nothing to talk about just yet.”
There really wasn’t. Nothing tangible had changed between us, yet it felt like everything had. Still, I couldn’t talk to Alice about it before I’d talked to Jordan.
She lifted a brow, exhaling a deep breath and flipping her hair on a laugh. “Fine. I’ll just have to get you drunk one night and get it out of you. Challenge accepted.”
“There was no challenge,” I started to object when we were interrupted by the ringing of my
phone.
I fished it out of my pocket and smiled when I saw it was my brother. “Hey, if it isn’t the almighty Lieutenant Commander. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Kole chuckled. “I texted you last night. Don’t pretend like I’m a stranger. Anyway, do you have any plans for tomorrow?”
“What?” I joked. “The transplant is supposed to have plans on a Saturday?”
He ignored my attempt at humor and became chirpy. “Excellent. I want to take you out.”
“Great,” I said, a smile on my lips. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t really know,” he replied, then cupped the receiver to say something to someone before he came back, sounding distracted. “You, me, and Jordan will figure it out, though. He’s coming too. It’ll be fun, sis. I promise.”
Fun? I closed my eyes and dragged in a fortifying breath. I didn’t think spending time with Jordan and my brother at the same time would ever be fun. Not when I wanted to kiss Jordan’s face off and Kole would rip it off if he knew.
Damn it.
Why the hell hadn’t I just stayed away from Jordan again?
Chapter 21
Jordan
When the knock finally came at my front door, I gritted my teeth and braced myself for action. Showtime.
After my talk with Mauli, I had decided to shelve telling Kole the truth for now. I still felt like one giant turd for doing it, but Mauli had convinced me that it was for the best to keep my relationship with Elyse a secret.
Although I knew he was going to be hurt if he ever found out, I wanted to save him that pain if I could. Telling the truth just so I wouldn’t have to live with the guilt anymore wasn’t exactly why I had wanted to do it, but I could see why Mauli said it would be selfish of me to come clean so I wouldn’t have to carry that burden anymore.
But it also meant that I was going have to be careful with Kole and Elyse today. Having to act natural and nonchalant about Elyse when I was with Kole was nothing new though, so I’d simply have to continue putting on the same act I’d been putting on for years.
Have Your Way With Me Page 13
