by Shaw, Robin
My insides curled in a tight ball. Sucking in a breath, I ran down the stairs to make Beth some fresh lime juice. That always fixed up my stomach when it got funky. Did Beth know another Hunter? There could be another Hunter in Franklin Parks, but she’d never mentioned him, nor had Jake or Mariska.
“Beth’s not looking too hot,” Bri shouted through the noise of the juicer. “A few bites of the mantecados and half a quart of ice cream did her in.”
I blew out a loud breath. “Half a quart of ice cream would mess me up too.”
A laugh escaped her mouth and I tried to smile at Bri, but I couldn’t. She still looked sad about last night, and I didn’t want her to be self-conscious. When I finished making Beth her lime juice, I handed the glass to Bri. “Give this to Beth. Tell her to drink all of it.”
Bri eyebrows furrowed, but she didn’t say anything else. She brought the drink to Beth.
***
Bethany
Pierce hadn’t come back to Brianna and Gavin’s house yesterday. He’d ignored my messages and calls. When Brianna had asked me if Chase and I had had an argument, I’d broken out into a sweat and told her every detail about meeting Hunter. I’d become less anxious, but I’d been contrite. I was contrite. The long call Brianna and I had had with Mariska and Jake had concluded with a consensus: Chase had known that I’d spoken with Hunter.
Approaching the section of the beach where Chase often occupied, I peered at his beach chair and bag. My slacks were rolled up to my knees. I knew that this was not going to be a frolic in the sand, splashing water type of evening. I’d had no appetite and it was a miracle that the system accepted my entries at work today.
Chase propelled himself underneath the water aggressively. The waves were huge and collided against his solid body. He kept his head low and his speed enabled him to move in the direction he intended.
“Why can’t Hunter keep his hands off of you, Beth?” Chase shouted against the cool, loud air when he came out of the water like a modern-day Adonis. The contemptuous expression in his hazel eyes startled me. He looked like a completely different man. He reminded me of Hunter and the similarity made me feel nauseous.
“It’s not what you think,” I shouted back, a good ten feet from him. “It’s nothing.”
He barked out a cynical chuckle. “Nothing? And what should I think when I read a message that says ‘I’ll keep my hands to myself’?” His voice broke. The coldness slipped away momentarily, but then resurfaced.
“I spoke with him so I could understand why you shut me out.” I fought against the moisture welling up in my eyes.
He snarled. “You put yourself in danger and possibly others because I wouldn’t talk to you within your fucking timetable?”
I clenched my fists at my sides. “Oh, and had it slipped your fucking mind to tell me that Hunter is your twin brother?” I yelled back at him. My face was already wet and my heart constricted in my chest. My ears roared. “Looks like you were gonna tell me that fact, um, like fucking never!” I stalked over to him and pulled Hunter’s business card from inside my blouse pocket. “I fucked up. Big time. Okay? I should’ve told you that I saw him at the dealership in my town. I didn’t. I don’t know why Hunter cut your face. He won’t tell me. But I think he’s torn up about it. And let me take a wild guess…you won’t tell me why he did it either.” I pushed the card to his chest. “Take the card.” He carried it between his fingers. “I won’t be with you if you have one foot in and one foot out of our relationship.”
***
Voices filled the house when I entered. For a moment, I brought my head against the door and prepared myself to be polite and sociable. I had to be cordial with Cassidy. This was her house also.
My satchel hit the floor when I went into the kitchen. Cindy was sitting by the island with her pretty face swollen and filled with tears. She must have lost ten or fifteen pounds since I’d last seen her. First Brianna had cried on Saturday. I’d shed tears like a baby less than an hour ago, and now Cindy looked like she was in complete distress. My first instinct was to comfort her and listen to what had happened, but I fought against it. This wasn’t like the old times.
“I’ll be upstairs,” Aunt Deborah said, and gave me a hug. Nancy acknowledged me with a sympathetic lift of her mouth before she left the kitchen as well. Uncle Anton must have been waiting for Aunt Deborah upstairs. I took in Cindy’s loose ponytail, her sports shirt, and sweats, and I almost gasped. She looked like most of the moms I’d seen in school when I was little. She wasn’t dolled up.
“I knew Anton would take good care of you,” she said through tears.
“Mom,” I said, and Cindy didn’t correct me or look irritated by the word like I thought she would be, “how are you?” Frankly, I didn’t care if she didn’t like the word.
Her dark blue eyes peered into mine. “I’ve had better days.”
“Same here,” I said. “And where’s Mr. Baxter?”
Choking up, Cindy stretched her arms out to me, but as hard as it was for me to see her hurting I stood my ground. She wasn’t the only one hurting, and she hadn’t come back for me, or missed me. Like always, she had someone to release her from her responsibility. It wasn’t Mrs. Muldoon, or Mrs. Landry, or Mrs. Cox now. It’d been Uncle Anton and Aunt Deborah who had been there for me more than she had in a while. I didn’t think Cindy considered how she affected other people. I was happy to be in the same room as her, and in the back of my peanut-sized brain, I hoped that she’d feel compelled to rebuild our relationship. A mother-daughter one. And in this moment I wanted nothing else but to go to Chase. But could I still rely on him when he wouldn’t let me shoulder some of what he’d gone through? Was still going through?
“He’s in Franklin Parks,” she responded faintly.
“With his wife and kids?”
Her forceful blink was all the answer I needed. I picked up my satchel and left Cindy with her broken heart.
***
Pierce came to my cubicle when I was about to start lunch the next day. Strands of his light and dark blond hair fell in his face. I followed him out of the office and into the lobby.
“Noodles.” He swung his arm around me and I linked my arm around his waist. “Bri brought me up to speed this morning on everything. I had no fucking clue that Chase had a twin brother.”
We separated from each other and looked out into the distance at the beautiful clear blue waters. “And that doesn’t get to you? You’re his best friend.”
“Nah, it doesn’t. But I get that you should have known that he had a twin brother.” He sighed and took my hands, swinging them back and forth like when we were kids. “When we became friends, I realized real quick that he wasn’t gonna tell me his life story. And because of that, when Chase said that he wanted to date you, I was afraid that he’d hold out.”
I nodded. “We texted each other good morning. I know we both lashed out yesterday.”
“And you texted Hunter? That’ll lead to another argument between you and Chase. After Hunter manhandled you?”
“I’ve forgiven him for getting a little aggressive. Hunter wasn’t gonna hurt me. He needs to see Chase.”
“But that’s not your problem. That’s Chase’s brother. And if Hunter lays a finger on you one more time or makes any of your hairs on the back of your neck stand, I will knock him back to last Sunday when you met his ass. Chase is my boy and yeah, Hunter is his twin brother. But you mean a lot more to me.”
“Hunter and I are friends.”
“No, you guys aren’t friends.”
“We’re not gonna see eye to eye on this.” I sighed. “You know Cindy showed up at your parents’ house last night,” I said, changing the subject.
He nodded. “She’ll stay at the Paloma.”
“Is that where she was last night?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t seen her at the hotel. Maybe she’s lying low. It would do her some good. She was crying last night because the guy went back
to his family. I know that her feelings were involved, but she’s dickmatized.”
“I swear it’s a fucking affliction. Doesn’t discriminate against age, race, religion, country of origin, or level of intelligence.”
I shoved him playfully. “Speaking of afflictions, you and Mona are friends with benefits again?”
“Nah, we’ve been hooking up with different people,” he answered, and from closely looking at his eyes much like my own, I knew that he was telling me the truth.
“Did you come close to leaving with her, though?”
“I know that we’d thought about it. But we’ve been there, done that for over a decade.”
I grabbed his arm. “Can I take you for a bite to eat?”
“Yeah, but I am paying.”
“We’ll flip a quarter when we get there and see about that. I am driving us in my new car.”
Chapter 16
Chase
For the past two days, I had thought about Beth and Hunter constantly. I knew when I’d seen her face that she hadn’t cheated on me with my brother. She’d thought that I was never going to tell her about him, but I was going to. I didn’t want the love that I’d seen in her eyes for me to be a part of my past too. After we’d made love on Friday, she was going to say that she loved me. Before she was about to verbalize it, I could sense it. While she’d been ambivalent from the very beginning about giving in to her pull towards me, once she gave me a chance, she didn’t give me bits and pieces of who she was, she gave me everything. And I hadn’t been doing that. Which was why I hadn’t wanted her to say that she loved me, because it wouldn’t have been true. How could she love me when she didn’t know what had made me want to live my life differently?
So I was sitting in my car, a block down from Lasting Impressions Tattoo Studio. After I’d received the final stamp of approval from my Mr. Dobbs and began working on the graphic animation, my horrible argument with Beth replayed in my head repeatedly. I’d been such a dirt bag.
Hunter came out of the studio, uninterested in the group of girls that’d passed by him and checked him out. I’d grown oblivious to that sort of attention myself. Shutting my door and locking the car, Hunter instantly spotted me. I’d been aware of him my whole life and he’d been aware of me too. I didn’t think it was a twin thing. I think it was a “there’s another brolic ass dude in my vicinity” kind of thing. Disbelief flashed in his eyes and he gestured me to head a block up from where we were.
We paused in front of a small mom-and-pop café.
“Did Beth tell you where to find me, or was it Jake and Mariska?” Hunter asked as he held the door for me.
“Beth,” I replied, almost growling.
He gave me a stiff smile. “Chase, I wanted her to give you my card.” He pushed the door and went inside. The smell of coffee was out of this world. The cashier’s face brightened and he put two fingers up. I sat down by the last table on the left so I could see the people who came in.
“I wouldn’t have come down to see you otherwise,” I admitted. He nodded and took his place across from me. His face didn’t look sunken in, and his arms were almost bigger than mine for the first time in our lives. He’d been a big guy before, but he hadn’t had my fitness regimen when we were teenagers. The weight he had on now fit his frame much better than the weight he’d lost the last time I’d seen him. “You’re healthy now.”
“That I am,” he sighed, and glanced around the shop, connecting and separating the tips of his fingers together restlessly.
“Why’re you in Miami? Are you in treatment here?” I whispered.
He met my gaze dead on. “I am here because you’re here.”
The cashier, Atagracia, placed two cups of black coffee and creamers on the table and we thanked her. I broke the seal off the creamer and put it in my coffee, along with some sugar. I didn’t want to hear to hear that he was in Miami because I lived here. I wasn’t good for him.
“I was getting calls some weeks back. Was that you?”
“Nah, man. The only reason I’d been able to find your ass among the bunch of other Chase Lovells was because you’re on the football roster on your school’s site.”
“Are you clean?”
“Four years as of last week.” His voice roughened and I looked back up at him. “Not even any alcohol.”
“Congrats, Hunter. For real. That’s great.”
He smirked a little. “No slip-ups, either.” He answered my unvoiced question.
“How’d you do it?” I drank some coffee, feeling like I’d need the caffeine to continue this conversation. I didn’t think I’d see the day when he was in recovery, but I believed him. I wanted to, but he wasn’t proving shit to me. He didn’t have to.
He gave a dry laugh. “It wasn’t a choice in the beginning. I was scoring some blow off the street in Holly Ridge, and the next thing I knew, someone puts a mask over my face and I am restrained.”
“What the fuck? How’d you get to Cali? Was it from the money you stole from me?”
He shook his head. “I snorted that with some people that night. One of the guys I hung out with took all of us first class to his parents’ vacation house there.” He gulped some coffee. “I don’t remember how many days I’d been there, but I went to get some after doing it every night I was there. Chase, the men picked me up and threw my then-bony ass in the back of a van. Straight-up militant. They knew my name, DOB, social, everything. For a month, I was pissed, but fast-forward a year and the residential program worked. To this day I don’t know who did it.”
Hunter sounded so amazed and grateful. He was a little bit like the old Hunter with his mannerisms, but he was a different person. I didn’t even know my own brother. He couldn’t quite take pride in his accomplishment because he was drowning in shame. It was like he wasn’t internalizing that he had a major part in staying clean. Certainly, the residential program he’d been in facilitated his recovery, but Hunter was doing the hard work; keeping himself together in an uncontrolled environment. He could drink alcohol and do coke whenever he wanted to, and yet, he was keeping his head above water.
“I am glad it worked out. That shit isn’t for everyone. It’s a very controversial approach.”
“It is,” he agreed. “The last things I said to you. Man, it wasn’t true.”
“‘Try and stop me again and I’ll kill you. You’re dead to me.’” I repeated the words he’d told me and watched the guilt in his hazel gaze, an emotion he couldn’t convey with the rest of his face.
“It’s been eating me up inside how I left things with you. All the horrible shit I’ve done. I called Mom every year to see how she was doing and she told me to stop calling. Mom and Dad changed their numbers, but I don’t talk to Dad, so…” His gaze fell to his empty cup of coffee. Atagracia took it from him and came back a second later with another cup. “They unlisted the house number, but I still found them. I can’t blame them for wanting nothing to do with me after everything.”
“I haven’t spoken to them either since they kicked me out five years ago.”
He shook his head and threw his hands to the right side of my face. “And I am sorry for the damage I did to your face.”
“Chicks dig this shit.” I squared my shoulders “They think I’ve led a crazy life.”
“But the only female you care about liking your scar is Beth?” A frown puckered up his cheekbones.
“Beth? You’ve been calling my girl Beth like you know her? Are you feeling her?”
Frustration clouded his face. “She said I could call her Beth, and I am not feeling her. I like her. As my friend. I’d planned on seeing how you were doing through her.”
“That pisses me off. She shouldn’t be used so that you can see what I am up to. It’s a privilege to be a part of her life.”
He flashed some teeth. “I am aware. She slapped me on the face when I told her that I cut you.”
“For real?” Pierce hadn’t told me this. Maybe he didn’t know or didn’t think
I should know.
He nodded.
“And what did you do?” I asked gruffly.
“I took it. I deserve worse.”
I smirked. “Did it hurt?’
He rubbed his cheekbone. “For about three minutes.” He sounded impressed.
“That’s my girl,” I said with a smile.
Hunter cleared his throat. “Beth is.” He swigged his coffee. “I am happy you’ve got yourself someone special.”
“Thanks. I am too. And I am really happy that you’re clean and doing what you’ve wanted to do for the longest.” I looked at his tattoo-free arms and the piercings he didn’t have. “Where’s your ink?”
***
I felt like an asshole when I exited this cutesy flower shop in downtown Paloma’s Edge with white and red roses the next morning, but I remembered that other than wearing black, Beth wore white and red a lot. The colors looked great on her. I wanted her to forgive me for how I’d talked to her. I’d spoken with Hunter because I knew that was what Beth wanted me to do, but in the middle of our conversation, I was talking to my brother for me. To fill a void I hadn’t known I had until the shop was going to close. We’d tried most of the locally and international coffee beans they had at the shop. One pastime that we’d learned that we both loved. And I couldn’t fucking help it. I’d had a good time with him.
“Chase!” Brody greeted me with an infectious smile. When it had been hectic and we’d encountered some of the rudest guests here, he kept his chipper tone and upbeat attitude. He looked at the flowers that I placed on top of the counter.
“Hey, Brody. How’ve you been?”
“I am great.” He quirked the side of his face. “Are these for Beth?”
I gesticulated my hands towards the roses. “Yes.”
Brody took the vase of flowers from me. “I’ll give them to her myself.”
“What a wonderful arrangement,” a female voice behind me said.
