by Elle Kennedy
By nine o’clock, the storm hasn’t let up. Power at the condo went out around six, so we lit a bunch of candles and ate cold leftover pizza for dinner. Brooks digs up some board games and the three of us settle in the living room to play one. Brenna and Brooks have been bickering all evening, ragging on each other as if they’ve been best friends for years.
When I first walked into the apartment with Brenna at my side, Weston’s jaw scraped the floor. But the thing about Weston is, he doesn’t care what school she attends, who her father is, or what team she roots for. To him, a hot girl is a hot girl, and he’s immediately on board. At least until we get a moment alone. When Brenna disappears into the hall bathroom, Brooks unfolds the Scrabble board and asks, “Does McCarthy know about this?”
“About what?”
“About you and the bombshell in our bathroom.”
“No,” I grudgingly admit.
“Think maybe you should tell him?”
“I probably should, eh?”
Brooks snickers. “Um. Yeah. You told the poor kid to dump ’er and now you guys are together? Savage, bro.”
“We’re not together, and neither were they,” I point out.
“He liked her, though.”
“He’s with that Katherine chick now.” McCarthy is still seeing the girl he met after the semifinals. Which tells me he probably didn’t care about Brenna as much as he cared about hooking up with someone.
“It’s still bro code,” Brooks argues. “I know the team captain card trumps all, but you should do the right thing and let him know.”
“Do the right thing? Since when do you have a conscience?” I ask in amusement.
“I’ve always had a conscience.” He hops off the couch. “I’m grabbing a beer. You want one?”
“Nah.”
“Jensen!” he shouts. “Beer?”
Brenna emerges from the corridor. “Sure. Thanks.” She joins me on the sectional and reaches for her letter tray. “All right, let’s do this thing.”
A few minutes later, the game gets underway. Brooks gathers a few decorative pillows that his mother purchased for us, and sprawls on the floor. He rearranges the wooden squares on his tray. “Yo, lemme go first. I have the best word ever.”
Brenna grins. “Let’s see it, Wordsmith.”
He lays down the word bang.
“That’s the best word ever?” she mocks. “Bang?”
“Yes, because banging is my favorite hobby.”
“Uh-huh, well, in terms of actual points, that word earned you…” She checks the letter values. “Plus the double-word score… Fourteen points.”
Brooks is quick to protest. “That’s great for the first turn.”
“If you think fourteen points is great, then you’ve never played Scrabble with my dad.”
He laughs. “Coach Jensen is a Scrabble Nazi?”
“Oh, he’s nuts about it. He’s the kind of player who puts down those two- or three-letter words on a triple-word score, and the next thing I know he’s beating me by two hundred points.”
“That’s no fun,” Brooks replies. “I play for the words, not the points. Connelly, it’s your turn.”
Extending vertically from his “B,” I add the word butt.
“As in, ‘bubble,’” I explain innocently.
My roommate flips me the bird. “Oh fuck off.”
Brenna grins at us. “What am I missing?”
“He has a bubble butt,” I tell her.
“I have a bubble butt,” he says glumly.
“Oh. Cool?” Brenna’s amused gaze lowers to her tiles. She rearranges a few of them as she tries to come up with a word.
“Do you want to see it?” Brooks offers.
“Not really—”
“Nah, let me show you. Just be honest and tell me what you think of it.”
Brenna glances at me. “Is this for real?”
“Afraid so. His girlfriend pointed out his bubble butt and now he has a complex about it.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Weston objects.
I rephrase. “Fuck buddy?”
“I’ll accept it.” He hops to his feet. “Okay, Jensen. Look at this.”
My idiot roommate shoves his sweatpants down to his ankles, presenting his bare ass to my…girlfriend? Fuck buddy? I honestly can’t fill in that blank.
I see Brenna’s lips quivering in the candlelight, as if she’s trying so hard not to laugh.
“Well?” he demands. “Thoughts.”
Her gaze focuses on his backside. “You’ve got a nice butt, Weston,” she concedes. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
He hauls up his sweats. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. It’s a great ass.”
A grin stretches his face. “Say that again.”
“No.”
That grin shifts to me. “Your girl likes my ass. She’s into me.”
“Nope,” Brenna says cheerfully. “I don’t know where you got ‘I’m into you’ from that, but I can assure you I am not.” She uses one of the “T’s” to put down the word trolley.
“Good one,” I say.
“Thanks, Jakey.”
Brooks flops back onto his pillow mound. “Jakey? Is that what we’re calling you now?” He sounds delighted. “I like it. I’m using it all the time.”
“Sure thing, Brooksy.”
“I take it back. I do not like it.”
“That’s what I thought.”
As the game continues, it’s more competitive than I expect, especially with Brooks in the mix. Our scores are so close it’s impossible to predict the victor. And while I’m having a good time, I’m not giving one hundred percent of my attention to Scrabble. I keep sneaking peeks at Brenna. It’s hard not to. The girl is a smoke show. And I love hearing her laugh. Every time she does, the musical tone makes my heart beat faster.
When Brooks goes to use the john, I move closer to Brenna and slide my hand beneath her sweater.
I’m rewarded with another laugh. “We’re in the middle of a Scrabble game and you decide to stick your hand up my shirt?”
“Yup. Can I leave it here until he gets back?” With a wicked grin, I squeeze her left tit.
“You’re so weird.”
“Nah.”
She snorts. “You can’t always say ‘nah’ to whatever other people say about you.”
“Why not?”
“Because…well…I guess I don’t know why not.” She pauses suddenly, one ear cocked toward the window. “Hey. The thunder stopped.”
“Power’s still not back,” I point out.
“No, really? I thought the candlelight was just setting the ambience for our threesome.”
“We’re having a threesome?!” Brooks exclaims as he bounces back into the room. He looks like an elated little kid. “For real, Connelly? You didn’t want to have a threesome with Kayla but you’ll do it with your girl and—oh dear God, why am I complaining? Shut the fuck up, Brooks,” he scolds himself.
“Kayla?” Brenna echoes.
“His girlfriend.”
“Not my girlfriend.”
“You were going to have a threesome with them?” Brenna narrows her eyes.
“Not at all.” I glance at my roommate. “And make sure Kayla knows that, because I don’t need her ambushing me naked in the kitchen anymore.”
“Oh no, a naked girl in the kitchen! We need to install an alarm system! Someone get us a guard dog!” He gives an exaggerated eye roll. “Anyway. Are we doing this?”
I let him down not so gently. “We’re not having a threesome, now or ever. This new ass-flashing craze of yours is bad enough.”
Brenna’s gaze strays toward the windows again. “I should probably go soon.”
“Wait until the power’s back,” I say gruffly. I don’t like the idea of her being out on the roads. Several traffic lights had been out on our drive home, and I spotted more than one fender-bender.
“What time is it?” she asks. “If I’m going to leave,
it needs to be sooner rather than later.”
I lean forward to check her phone. “It’s almost ten. Maybe you should—” The screen suddenly illuminates with an incoming call, and since I’m looking right at it, I can’t miss the name of the caller.
“Eric’s calling,” I tell her, my tone harsher than I intend.
My peripheral vision catches Brooks grinning at me. Yeah. He knows exactly how I feel about this.
“You’d better get that,” I prompt.
Her expression is suspiciously stricken. She snatches the phone and hits the Ignore button.
“Who’s Eric?” Brooks attempts to sound casual but fails. I’m glad he asked before I did, though, and the wink he gives me reveals it was intentional. I nod back, appreciating the solid.
“Nobody,” she says tightly.
Well, that tells me nothing. Is she seeing somebody else? Does she have a roster of guys she hooks up with, a bench full of McCarthys?
The hot jealousy burning my gut is not a pleasant sensation. I’m a competitive guy, but I’ve never competed for the affections of a woman before. Because no woman has ever chosen another man over me. That sounds pretentious and I don’t care. The idea of Brenna seeing other dudes is not okay with me.
Which creates another first: I’ve never been the one to initiate the are-we-exclusive conversation. How does one even bring that up?
When her phone buzzes with a voice-mail alert, I feel even testier. “Are you going to check that?”
“No need. I know what he wants.”
The unwelcome jealousy burns hotter. “Is that so?”
“Yup. Whose turn is it now?”
“Mine,” Brooks offers. But as he sorts the tiles on his tray, Brenna’s phone rings for a second time.
And then, after she ignores it, a third time.
“Just answer it,” I mutter.
With a heavy breath, she reaches for the phone again. “Eric, hey. I told you I don’t have time for—” Her sentence comes to an abrupt halt. When she speaks again, concern has softened her voice. “What do you mean you don’t know where you are?”
Brooks and I exchange a wary look.
“Slow down, slow down. You’re not making any sense. Where are you?” There’s a long silence. “Okay, stay put,” she finally says, and I swear her voice cracks a little. She blinks rapidly, as if fighting tears. “I’ll be right there.”
26
Jake
“Thank you so much for doing this.”
Brenna’s voice is barely audible, and she’s sitting directly beside me. The rain is nothing more than drizzle now, the brunt of the storm having finally blown past us, but beyond the windshield, several streetlights still aren’t functioning. I’m behind the wheel of the Mercedes, because Brooks had too much to drink. He’s in the backseat, though, after insisting on tagging along.
“I mean it,” she stresses. “You guys didn’t have to come. You could’ve just let me borrow the car.”
I glance over darkly. “Really, and let you drive in a storm—”
“It’s not storming anymore,” she protests.
“—in a storm,” I repeat, “to track down your ex-boyfriend?”
At least that’s what I understood of her objective, when, in a panic, she begged to borrow Brooks’s car. Apparently she dated this Eric dude in high school and now he’s in trouble.
“What kind of trouble is he in, anyway?” I demand.
“I’m not sure.”
I give her a sharp look.
She seems to be grinding her molars. To dust, from the looks of it. “Drugs,” she finally mutters.
“What kind of drugs?” I’m not purposely trying to interrogate her, but I do need to know exactly what we’re walking into.
Rather than respond, she gazes down at her phone to examine the map. Two fingers pinch the screen to zoom in. “Okay, so he said he can see a street sign—Forest something,” she says absently. “He thinks it’s Forest Lane.”
“That narrows it down,” I say sarcastically. “There are probably dozens of Forest Lanes or Streets or Avenues around here.”
She scans the map. “Four,” she corrects. “One is about ten minutes away, the others are upstate. I think it’s probably this one near Nashua. That’s closest to Westlynn.”
I blow out a breath. “So we’re driving to New Hampshire?”
“Is that okay?”
I don’t answer. But I do click on the turn signal and get in the right lane to be ready for the I-93 ramp. “Who is this guy, Brenna?” I grumble. “He sounds sketchy.”
“Super sketchy,” Weston agrees from the backseat.
“I told you, we dated in high school.”
“And this requires you to drop everything and rescue his ass?”
Bitter? Who’s bitter?
“Eric and I went through a lot together. And yes, his life has gone off the rails, but—”
“Off the rails how?” Before she can even answer, I pull over abruptly, flicking on the emergency signal. I draw a loud honk from the motorist who was behind us, but everyone else goes around.
“What are you doing?” she demands.
“I’m not driving another inch until you give us more details. And not only because this feels like a wild goose chase. We need to know what we’re walking into. We’re playing the most important game of the season this weekend, and if you’re taking us to some crack den—”
“He’s not in a crack den.” She rubs her face with both hands, clearly upset. “All right. Let me call him again.”
Seconds later, Sketchy Eric is back on the line.
“Hey, it’s me,” Brenna says gently. “We’re in the car.” She pauses. “Just a couple friends, don’t worry about it. We’re in the car and we’re on our way to come get you, but you need to be more specific about where you are. You said Forest Lane—what else is around you?” She listens for a few beats. “The houses, what do they look like? Okay. Row houses. How did you get there? Do you remember?” A pause. “All right. You were with your friend. Got it, he drove. And he left you there. What did you do there?” Another pause, this one thick with tension. “Okay, you smoked.”
I meet Brooks’s uneasy eyes in the rearview mirror. I hope to God we’re talking about marijuana. Cigarettes would be ideal, but I doubt a pack of Marlboros is responsible for this insanity.
“My map shows a few streets with the word Forest in them. Are you near the coast at all? Did you go toward Marblehead? No? Are you sure?” Brenna suddenly brightens. “Oh, okay, I know where that is. No, I remember Ricky. I can’t recall a Forest Lane, but I definitely remember the neighborhood. Okay. I’ll call you when we’re getting close. Bye.”
She hangs up and says, “Nashua. He’s near our old ’hood, just like I thought.”
We’re facing a forty-minute drive, then. Longer if we encounter more pitch-black intersections on the way.
“I’m gonna crash,” Brooks says. “Wake me when we get there.”
We drive in silence for a good ten minutes before I finally can’t take it anymore. “You’re really not going to tell me about this guy?” I growl at Brenna. “You’re gonna let me walk blindly into whatever fucked-up situation your ex is in?”
“I can’t tell you what the situation is, Jake.” She sounds tired. “I haven’t seen him in a long time. He called recently and asked for money, but I told him no.”
“And yet now we’re going to rescue him.”
“Yes, we are,” she shoots back. “You didn’t hear his voice, okay? He sounded so messed up. What would you do if someone you used to care about called you up in a panic and said he doesn’t know where he is, that he’s cold and he’s wet and lying in some gutter? Would you leave them there? Because I can’t do that.”
“Why? Because you dated in high school? Who is this guy? Eric—Eric who?” My frustration only keeps growing. “Who is he to you?”
“His name’s Eric Royce.”
I wrinkle my forehead, vague recognition floa
ting through my mind. The name is familiar to me. Why do I know that name?
“He was a number one draft pick out of high school,” Brenna continues. “Drafted by Chicago.”
That’s it. “Oh shit,” I say. “What ever happened to that guy?”
She pointedly holds up her phone. “He’s high on meth in some gutter, Jake. That’s what happened to him.”
“Meth?” Brooks straightens up, his nap forgotten. “We’re going to meet a meth head?”
“I don’t know,” she says unhappily. “Last I heard, meth was his drug of choice, but for all I know he could be high on oxy, or drunk off his ass. I honestly don’t know.” She rakes both hands through her hair. “You can drop me off and I’ll deal with it alone. You guys don’t have to be there. Stop two blocks away or something, I’ll walk the rest of the way and then grab an Uber home.”
I stare at her in disbelief. “I am not abandoning you in a fucking meth neighborhood, Brenna.”
“It’s not a meth neighborhood. It’s one town over from where I grew up, and I grew up in a safe, normal town, okay? And yes, every town has the occasional druggie, and in this case that druggie is Ricky Harmon, but I’m just assuming we’re dealing with crystal meth. I don’t actually know for sure, and you freaking out on me isn’t going to miraculously produce any answers.”
A tense silence hangs between us. In the rearview mirror, I see Brooks’s expression soften. He reaches out and squeezes her shoulder. “It’s all good, Jensen. We got your back, ’kay?”
She bites her lip and gives him a grateful look.
I change lanes to pass a truck that’s traveling half the speed limit even though it’s not raining anymore. “So you went out with Eric Royce,” I say roughly.
Her head jerks in a nod.
I remember playing against Royce a few times in high school. He was damn good. “He never went to the NHL,” I muse.
“No.” Sadness hangs in her voice. “His life turned to shit after graduation.”
“Why, though?”
“The short version? He had some emotional issues, and he liked to party. And when he partied, he partied hard.” She hesitates. “Plus, I broke up with him not long after the draft. He didn’t take it well at all.”
