Act Your Age, Eve Brown

by Talia Hibbert

  Jacob had heard that several thousand times and did not want to hear it from Eve. In fact, if he ever did hear it from Eve—accompanied by one of those pitying wince-smiles as she disappeared into the mist—he was oddly certain he might burn Castell Cottage to the ground.

  “Christ, mate, stop being so bloody awkward and just tell her how you—hang on.” Mont broke off midsentence, his voice fading as he spoke to someone else in the background. “Give me a sec, Tess.”

  “Are you talking to Jacob?” Tessa Montrose’s voice floated down the line.

  “Yes.”

  “Is he having a meltdown?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has that woman hit him with her car again?”

  Mont laughed. “Oh, something like that. Now piss off.”

  “But do you know where my—?”

  “No, I don’t know where your glue gun is, piss off. Sorry, Jake. What was I saying?”

  “I don’t remember,” he lied. “Put Tess on the phone, would you? I want to talk to her.” Something about hearing her voice had given him an idea. An idea about how to make Eve smile, which was a goal he found himself more and more eager to achieve, these days. She made everyone smile so often, so easily—he could do the same for her, couldn’t he?

  He certainly fucking hoped so. She deserved it.

  “You want to talk to Tess? Charming,” Mont said. “Why? You need something fixed?”

  “Just put your sister on the phone and stop asking questions.”

  “Why would I do that when I could keep asking questions and get on your nerves?”

  Jacob muttered an insult and drifted toward the window behind his desk. Eve was in the garden, clearing up the empty wrought-iron tables, looking like one of the meadow flowers with her lavender braids and rose-pink T-shirt. She’d started serving afternoon tea outside when the weather was nice. Her idea. And, God, why did it make him oddly hot and . . . fluffy, inside, when she behaved as if this job, as if this B&B, was her passion, too?

  She walked out from under the shade of an oak and it was like watching the sun rise.

  Her mouth was moving, but Jacob couldn’t hear her—so he balanced the phone between his ear and his shoulder and opened the window. Eve’s voice flooded the room like a glass of ice water on a sweltering day. She was singing “Special Affair,” and the sound of it thrust him back in time to last Sunday. To sweet, silvery darkness and her body beneath him.

  “Tess,” Mont was saying, “I think Jake wants to talk to you. God only knows why.”

  The words barely registered; Jacob was too busy controlling his cock and his thoughts. Reminding himself that there was no way the world would let him keep a woman like Eve. She’d leave in the end. Everyone and everything left, in the end, didn’t they?

  The thought wasn’t entirely accurate, he knew that, but it felt accurate. It felt inescapable.

  “Never mind,” he said out loud. “Never mind. I’ll call Tessa later. Mont, I have to go.”

  “What? Don’t. You’re freaking out about something, aren’t you?”

  “No. Good-bye,” Jacob said, and then he hung up. Down in the garden, Eve looked up as if she’d heard his voice. Her eyes met his as if drawn by some magnetic force. She smiled, and waved, and Jacob—

  Jacob was hit with such soul-deep affection, he actually lost his breath.

  Somehow, he managed to wave awkwardly back. Then he turned away and slumped into the hidden safety of his desk chair. He sat there for God only knew how long, frozen and confused, his chest heaving and his thoughts flying. The sun sank low, and still, he sat. The breeze through the open window turned cool, almost cold, and still, he sat.

  But no matter how long he waited, the feeling didn’t go away.

  Bloody shitting hell. He was in love with her.

  How goddamn inconvenient.

  * * *

  As far as Eve could tell, things between she and Jacob went back to normal after that moment at Lucy’s. Their version of normal, anyway.

  The awkwardness that had muffled their friendship was burned away by the time they’d walked home. They still bickered over breakfast in the mornings, still teased each other over bed making in the afternoons. Jacob started bringing his laptop down to the kitchen, typing away with unnerving focus while she prepared tea and cake for the guests.

  It was only on nights like tonight—a quiet Wednesday evening when she’d gone to her room early, sitting on the creaky sofa bed where she almost never wanked over Jacob—that Eve noticed a slight tension between them. A barely banked heat. Because as soon as they went up to the B&B’s private quarters, he turned rigidly silent.

  He nodded stiffly at her when they crossed paths in the corridor. He responded to her calls of Good night with vague grunts. Eve wanted to decipher those grunts, but she was worried that understanding his whole tight-jawed restraint thing might push her into accidentally seducing him. Mature, adult women did not accidentally seduce their bosses, nor did they obsess over said boss’s grunts like teenagers with a whale-sized crush.

  Mature, adult women focused on introspection and personal growth. And Eve really must be maturing, because tonight, instead of reliving the best head of her life for the thousandth time, she was busy with some personal research.

  Jacob had asked her, last week, Have you ever heard of stimming? and after his explanation, she’d wanted to ask something back. She’d wanted to ask, Is that what I do? Am I stimming right now?

  But she’d also wanted to figure things out for herself.

  So she picked up her tablet, settled back against the cushions, and typed a few words into the search bar. Autism in adults brought up countless hits. She was mildly overwhelmed for a moment, but then she closed her eyes and thought, What would Chloe do?

  Chloe would isolate key, reliable sources. Rather like Jacob. Rather like Dani. The three of them shared a lot of similarities in that regard, but Eve and Jacob shared other similarities—silly ones that probably didn’t mean anything. Yet, those similarities kept nibbling at her brain like insistent little mice with big, sharp teeth.

  Eve clicked on two links: one by the National Health Service, and one by the National Autistic Society. The NHS had an abrupt list of “symptoms”: signs of autism that made her smile because they brought Jacob to mind. The same well-known signs she’d seen in TV characters, the kind that didn’t apply to her in the slightest. She was never taken as blunt or rude. She didn’t find it remotely difficult to express how she felt, and routine had never been her strong suit.

  Then she read the words, Noticing small details, such as patterns or sounds, that others do not.

  Well. That didn’t mean much. Not even if it made her heart jump with nervous recognition. Not even if the thought of having a reason for that slight difference—the difference that had led to her obsession with music—made Eve feel strangely . . . known.

  She ran her tongue over the inside of her teeth and kept reading.

  You may get very anxious about social situations. You may struggle to understand social “rules” or to communicate clearly. You may find it difficult to make friends.

  It can be harder to tell you’re autistic if you’re a woman.

  She could feel her pulse thumping against her throat, which was ridiculous. It wasn’t as if this bothered her—she was smiling, for God’s sake, though she couldn’t explain why. A dawning surprise swept over her, and all she wanted to do was catch it in her hands like a warm, bright star and hold it quietly until she’d absorbed it a bit. Reading this stuff felt like climbing, inch by inch, up to the top of a roller coaster; it stirred a thrill of anticipation in her stomach, along with a hint of fear at the unknown. The giddy, uncertain kind of fear that made a sudden drop all the sweeter.

  Eve switched websites and found a much more personal, detailed approach from the National Autistic Society, one that discussed the benefits of diagnosis and what it all meant. There was a section called Coming to Terms with Your Autism, which Eve found she c
ouldn’t relate to. She’d had to come to terms with the fact that hormonal breakouts weren’t limited to one’s teenage years (horribly unfair, if you asked her), but she didn’t need to come to terms with the signs of autism listed on these websites. She knew very well who she was and who she wasn’t, and she’d already spent a long, difficult time learning to like herself despite those differences. Having a possible reason for them didn’t change much.

  But then, she also couldn’t see herself following the steps on this page that described how to secure a diagnosis. Whereas plenty of other people might want to. So perhaps this was different for everyone.

  No, it almost certainly was.

  Satisfied, Eve locked the tablet and tucked this latest development safely against her heart. She was still ruminating over what she’d found—and painting her toenails, of course, which was the best way to ruminate—when someone knocked on the door an hour later. Jacob. Would she tell him?

  No. Not yet. These thoughts were just hers, for now, until she’d explored them fully.

  That decided, she heaved herself off the sofa, her toes spread for maximum safety and minimum smudges, and waddled over to answer the door.

  It swung open to reveal a disgracefully tall and alarmingly attractive woman with hair like a thunderstorm, or a ’50s lounge singer, or a ’50s lounge singer who was also a thunderstorm. Not Jacob, then. The woman flipped her dark, riotous waves over one broad shoulder and said in a low, throaty voice, “Hi.”

  Eve blinked. Gosh. She’d very nearly blurted out, You’re pretty, like some sort of overwhelmed toddler.

  “We’ve come,” the thunderstorm ’50s singer went on decisively, “to take you out.” By the set of her sharp jaw and the flint in her doe eyes, that was not a request.

  “For God’s sake, Tess, you sound like a hitwoman,” came an irritable voice from the hallway. “Maybe start with the fact that we’re Mont’s sisters.” The goddess was thrust aside by an equally tall, brown woman with razored short hair and narrowed eyes. While the first woman—Tess?—wore a tight gold dress with enough sequins to confuse air traffic (Eve approved), the second wore jeans and a crisp, white shirt that made her look rather dapper. “Hi. I’m Alex Montrose and this is Tessa. You’re Eve, yeah?” She held out a long-fingered hand, and it took Eve a heartbeat to reconnect her brain to her . . . other brain and realize she was supposed to shake.

  “Erm,” she said. “Yes.” She squeezed Alex’s hand limply, murmured, “Enchanté,” then wondered why the bloody hell she’d said such a thing. Oh, well. She was alarmed, she was taken aback, and her toes were still slightly wet. Under such circumstances, she could not be blamed for a little ridiculousness.

  Alex arched her eyebrows, one of which was sharply bisected by a pale scar, before continuing. “We are here to bully you out of the house.”

  “Well,” piped up Tessa, “the B&B.”

  “Which is a house, Tess.”

  “And if I called a camper van a—a car, you’d be horrified.”

  “I wouldn’t give a flying fuck,” Alex said calmly, and somehow sauntered past Eve into the room.

  “Liar,” Tessa said, and flipped her hair some more, and followed. She turned to Eve, who was still standing, slightly dazed, by the door. “Do you like my hair? Roller set. Twenty-four hours and seven different YouTube tutorials! I had to sleep on the rollers. What a nightmare. Anyway, get dressed.”

  “You’re doing this all wrong,” Alex told her. Eve noticed that Alex had made herself comfortable on Jacob’s weight bench, of all things, lying back and propping up one knee, staring at the ceiling with her hands over her stomach. She had a thick, dark scar wrapped all around her wrist like a bracelet.

  “I’m doing it wrong? You’re lying on the furniture,” Tessa said, but by now Eve had noticed their bickering held zero heat. As if they were simply annoying each other for the fun of it. “Now, Eve, I know this is all very sudden, but Jacob told us you urgently needed to socialize, and we are his only friends aside from Mont—”

  “Friends?” Alex snorted.

  Eve found herself suddenly scowling. “Jacob’s only next door, you know. He can probably hear you.”

  “Good,” Alex grinned, raising her voice, at which point Eve realized this was a gentle in-joke, as opposed to actual Jacob-hating, and felt rather silly.

  “Well,” Tessa said thoughtfully, “we’re probably not his only friends. He gets on very well with that older lady who runs the cheese counter at the supermarket and also the man who washes out the wheelie bins, but you know what I mean. He wanted to show you a good time, and he decided we were the best option. Obviously.” She swished the hair again, leaving a trail of hibiscus and coconut in the air, and flashed a rather beguiling smile. “So. Are you in?”

  Was Eve in? At this point, she wasn’t even certain she was conscious. “Erm. I must admit, I’m slightly confused on several counts. Jacob wanted to show me a good time?” Jacob had already shown her a good time. Very effectively. And most enthusiastically, she remembered, her cheeks flushing. More to the point, he wasn’t here to show her a good time now, so what the bloody hell was going on?

  “Well, he’s not a big fan of going out dancing,” Tessa said.

  “Shocker,” Alex interjected.

  “But he thought you might be, and also that you might want to talk to someone other than him, for once, so he told us all about you and we decided you sounded excellent and that we should definitely hang out.”

  Eve’s heart started vibrating, which was alarming, but entirely understandable, all things considered. “He told you all about me? What . . . what did that entail?” She tried to stamp out the tentative pleasure in her voice, but judging by Alex’s smirk, she wasn’t entirely successful.

  “He said,” Alex grinned, “that you were funny, and sweet, and then he had an embolism from being too complimentary and refused to say anything else except, Just be nice to her, Alexandra, or I’ll murder you in your sleep.”

  Eve bit her lip on a smile. First he gave her the mother of all orgasms. Then he brooded himself into a tizzy about it. Now he was trying to make her happy in a predictably cloak-and-dagger fashion. It was all so fucking Jacob she might just pass out.

  For God’s sake, how the hell was she supposed to resist him? She adored him. It was undoubtedly true that mature, sensible women didn’t sleep with their bosses—but it seemed painfully clear, in that moment, that mature, sensible Eves weren’t supposed to let men like Jacob Wayne pass them by.

  So she wouldn’t. She simply wouldn’t. Maybe she’d made bad choices in the past, but she was changing now. Eve was going to follow everything she felt for this man, and if it all ended in tears, she’d simply face the consequences like the grown woman she was.

  Just making that decision lifted a weight from her shoulders. A slow smile spread across her face. She felt the urge to go and throw herself at Jacob right this instant, but first . . .

  Well, first, she was kind of missing her sisters, and the two women in front of her were chaotic enough to fill at least a quarter of that gap.

  “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll go out with you.”

  “Yay!” Tessa clapped her hands, while Alex produced a surprisingly sweet smile. In that moment, with matching dimples in their right cheeks and warm, whiskey eyes, Eve finally cottoned on.

  “Oh! You’re twins!”

  Alex arched an amused eyebrow. “Uh . . . we’re identical. Don’t tell me you only just noticed.”

  “Don’t be annoying, Alex, who cares if she just noticed? Eve, come on, get dressed. I love your hair. We’re going to the pub.”

  “We might go to the pub,” Alex corrected. “We don’t even know if she drinks.”

  “If she doesn’t, she can have lemonade and peanuts. There’s nowhere else interesting to go.”

  “We can grab some Thai food and eat in the park like respectable reprobates.”

  “You think I’m putting vintage Cavalli on grass?” Tessa demanded
.

  “Hold on,” Eve said, “there’s Thai food here?”

  “See?” Alex grinned, triumphant.

  “Eve, no, don’t, don’t be seduced by Thai food.” Tessa came over and put her hands on Eve’s shoulders, at which point Eve finally realized the woman seemed so tall because she was wearing killer heels. But, judging by Alex’s height in shiny, flat brogues, they were also simply very tall regardless. “Listen to me,” Tessa said, low and urgent, as if imparting state secrets of international importance. “We can get Thai food whenever we want. Tonight is our first night of meeting and we’re supposed to become best friends—”

  Alex snorted loudly in the background.

  “Which means either we have to get drunk together, or we have to make terrible decisions together. I am entirely open to either, but the point is we need to go out and make absolute tits of ourselves in order to forge a lasting best friend bond because—”

  “What the hell do you need a lasting best friend bond for?” Alex demanded. “You have a twin.”

  “Because,” Tessa forged on firmly, “all friendships are better in threes, like the three musketeers or Totally Spies, so Alex and I need you, and also because you’re driving Jacob sideways up the wall and off his trolley—I salute you by the way—and also because I saw you at the supermarket three days ago wearing a T-shirt that said UNFUCK YOU, OR WHATEVER and I desperately need to know where it was from.”

  “Well,” Eve said, faintly stunned. “My. Goodness.”

  “I never,” Alex said dryly, “should’ve let you open the rosé.”

  “I, er . . . I don’t receive many instant offers of best friendship,” Eve admitted.

  “Then you really must take this one,” Tessa said reasonably.

  Eve found herself smiling. “Yes, I suppose I must.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mont’s pub, the Rose and Crown, was a cozy mixture of dark wood and green velvet that seemed infinitely suited to the Lake District, and to Montrose himself. Eve spotted him as soon as she entered arm in arm with the twins; he was pouring a glass of gin with a practiced air while chatting to a grizzled customer who looked alarmingly like some sort of biker.