Thick & Thin (Thin Love Book 3)

by Eden Butler

  Ransom: Bye week. I’m in town until Friday. Lunch?

  Aly: We’re getting a jump on competition. Busy all week.

  I thought that was all I’d get. She had a life. She had responsibilities and I wasn’t part of any of that anymore. Expecting her to accommodate me was stupid and selfish. But just when I’d almost convinced myself that she’d forgotten me, forgotten that she loved me once, Aly sent another message, one that hinted I wasn’t completely out of her thoughts.

  Aly: Everything alright?

  It would be senseless to tell her the truth. She’d seen my reaction when she looked my way tonight. She knew me, knew that I was shit at keeping my emotions to myself. But telling her that, admitting it, would only make her feel bad.

  Hell, I’ve always been selfish when it came to Aly.

  Ransom: No. I miss you. I want to see you.

  It was a full four minutes before she responded. If I knew Aly, she took that long to weigh her thoughts, trying to figure out which ones she should keep to herself. Which ones she didn’t mind me knowing.

  Aly: Maybe we can have lunch Tuesday between practice.

  It was a good thing she couldn’t see me. My smile was wide, ridiculous and if she saw it, she’d call me a smug asshole. I closed my eyes, more relieved than I had a right to be and tried to weigh my own thoughts. They bordered on stupid. Reminding myself that she wouldn’t want me there, in her small condo, was harder than it should have been. Still, not thinking about anything but that driving urge to see her, just for a second, took away my rational thought. It made me stupid and senseless.

  Ransom: I can come to you now…just to talk.

  My chest felt tight and my heartbeat went a little fast as I waited for her response. If I went there to see her, how long would I stay? Would I be able to keep from touching her? Would she let me kiss her this time instead of taking something that wasn’t mine anymore? Jesus, my thoughts were wild and random and impossible to keep focus on. The seconds lengthened, stretched along with that stupid grin on my face until my phone alerted again and I read her message.

  Aly: I’m not home.

  She wouldn’t be, would she? It took a minute and the control I had on my patience broke, nearly severed as the grip on my phone tightened. I could have cracked the screen. I could have flung the damn thing into the lake because I’d gone blind with jealously. Aly had gotten engaged tonight. Why the hell would she be at home in that tiny thousand square foot condo when her man, heap big lawyer, according to my mom, probably had a sick ass place in the best part of the city? He looked like the sort that would spoil her, as much as Aly would let him.

  “I’m a fucking idiot.” There was no one awake to argue with me, though I doubted anyone would. I’d let her walk away and though my folks and siblings had maintained they had my back, I got the feeling that they hadn’t been happy with me for four years. Hell, I hadn’t been happy with myself.

  It took a few minutes, but I was finally able to collect myself, stop the internal whining long enough to respond to Aly.

  Ransom: No big. Tuesday at two. I’ll pick you up.

  My phone clattered against the wrought iron table and I didn’t bother checking if I’d managed to keep the screen crack free. It didn’t matter to me. Instead, I picked up my half empty bottle of Abita and downed it, closing my eyes when the breeze slapped against my face. I tried like hell to keep my mind clear of imagining what Aly was doing, but it was no good. My thoughts were focused, my imagination vivid and I hated myself for what came into my head—Aly’s laughter. Ethan touching her, holding her. Worst of all: her falling asleep next to him, tucked against his chest. My brain wouldn’t venture to anything more than that. I couldn’t take a visual of them naked, of Ethan’s face hidden against her beautiful skin, her fingers tugging on his hair.

  To me, it wasn’t worse to imagine them fucking.

  In love was worse.

  Aly loving someone who wasn’t me and meaning it with her heart.

  “Fuck.”

  The Adirondack chair across from me skidded against the patio and toppled onto its side when I kicked it and for a second, I forgot that I wasn’t in my Miami condo, that it was pushing two a.m.

  It took minutes, maybe it was hours, but that glass door leading inside slid open and my mother approached, her hair mussed but pulled back into a low bun and one of my father’s oversized Clayborn-Prosper University—our alma mater where my father ran the defensive line—hoodies draped over her tiny frame.

  “You trying to wake everyone up?” But she didn’t appear to be angry, and even as she scooted next to me, moving my legs so she could sit at the end of the lounge chair, her movements were calm and relaxed. It was an effort—to steady her irritation so that I wouldn’t know just how pissed off or happy she was, whatever her mood was at that moment.

  “I’m sorry.” I wiped my face, slumping into my chair again and Mom pulled her legs up, covering her knees with the hoodie so that only the bottoms of her cotton sleep pants and the purple on her toe nails were visible.

  She didn’t speak at first, but touched my wrist, giving it a squeeze as though she knew I needed the silence. “She doesn’t love him.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Because I know it’s true.” Mom took a breath, then exhaled, a long, slow motion, releasing whatever she tried so effortlessly to keep from me, moving from her chest with her breath. One glance at her pale skin and the sunken cast of her large eyes and I noticed for the first time since I’d landed back in New Orleans just how tired she looked.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Mom. What’s up?”

  Mom wouldn’t hold back; we had always been there for each other. Mine had been the ear she’d bent from the time I was six, when talking to her best friend Mark or his boyfriend Johnny about the stresses of our lives back then wouldn’t suffice. There wasn’t much she didn’t tell me and though she swore she didn’t want to hear all the details, there wasn’t much I’d ever kept from her. But that was the way of a single parent life. My father hadn’t had a clue that Mom had been pregnant when she left New Orleans all those years ago. He hadn’t sought her out and sometimes I wondered, all these years later, if we all hadn’t been in the same marketplace when I was fifteen, if Kona hadn’t seen me—the boy who looked so much like him—walking away from Mom, if he ever would have discovered the secret she’d kept from him all those years.

  But Kona had found out about me and the years of constant worry and struggle had been wiped clear, displaced in my parents’ reunion and their desperate effort to make up for the time they’d missed. Still, that hadn’t ever stopped Mom from talking to me when things were overwhelming, when she needed my comfort, my pathetic advice. It seemed she still did, and when I nudged her leg, a silent attempt to get her talking, she stopped hesitating.

  “Getting the label off the ground is more trouble than it’s worth and I’m slammed between writing songs for Cass, getting the buzz out about him, dealing with your brother and sister and trying to find out what Kona…” She waved her hand, the sentence dropping off with a shake of her head, as though there were too many complaints and she didn’t know which was most important.

  Her label, Wildcat Records, was a dream some twenty years in the making. She’d established herself first as a song writer, then a producer with very little help from anyone. Sometimes I thought that my mother’s gritty determination would enable her to tilt the world if she got the urge. Founding an indie record label would be nothing to someone as driven as she was. But my mother was also an involved wife and mother. She didn’t want to miss a thing, and I sometimes wondered how she did it. How could any woman raise a family and maintain a career without letting something go a miss? Women really were the stronger sex, no matter what any misogynistic chest thumper might claim.

  Her struggles had started again with the founding of th
e label and the discovery of her first real artist, Cass Colson, a wiry cowboy type from Arkansas who had talent, so Mom said. I hadn’t met the guy, but he was all my mother could talk about when she’d discovered him singing like a thousand other wannabe artists around Jackson Square with a cowboy hat on the ground filling with quarters and ones and fives. She’d be the expert, I supposed.

  She stretched her shoulders, eyes shut tight as she inhaled one long breath through her nose. “Never mind all the stuff I don’t have time for and you…” She stopped talking, rubbing her neck when I relaxed against the back of the chair. “You look defeated.”

  “Maybe because I am.”

  “No, honey, you’re not.” She moved closer, pushing my leg to the side so she could sit next to me, forgetting her own troubles with one long look over my face. “This isn’t just Aly.” She paused, looking down at her hands before she looked back at me and the worry was right there in her features. “She wasn’t wrong.” Mom touched my face, shaking her head as she watched me. “I worry too, you know, about the concussions, there have been so many, honey. It bothers me, the potential of you being permanently damaged. But you know, Ransom, that’s not the main reason Aly left.”

  “Mom, this isn’t…this is so complicated.”

  She ignored me, taking her hand from my face. “You’re good at so many other things. You can play, you can write, hell, come work with me, get into the other family business. You writing and producing with me, the label would thrive so quickly.” When I only stared, uninterested in what was another attempt at getting me to give up my spot on the Dolphins’ defensive line, Mom exhaled, curling her hands together before she continued, switching subjects quickly. “Aly loves you. You love her. But you both are God awful at realizing something damn important.”

  “Like?” “Like love isn’t all it takes to build a life together.” I didn’t like her tone just then, or how she glanced from the house behind us, then out toward that dark lake. “You need honesty and trust and, Ransom, everything has to be equal.” When she looked at me, her bright blue eyes glistened against the moonlight. “You love someone, you have to trust them enough to be at your side, not at your back.”

  “I never did that shit to her.”

  A small smile then, and Mom tilted her head as though she wanted a good look at me. “You didn’t know you were doing it, baby. You were so focused on making that shadow of yours bigger than the one your father cast that you forgot Aly needed a partner. She needed you to see her as an equal. What did she do in Miami while you were off all over the country playing ball?”

  “Mom…”

  My protest died with one shake of her head. “Who do you think has listened to her for the past four years? Who do you think has listened to her cry about how lonely she was? Kinda hard for Leann to do that from Florida.” She was right. Leann might have been Mom’s cousin, but she was also the first person to help Aly out when she left her father’s claustrophobic home at seventeen. Leann offered her an apartment and a job at the dance studio she owned. More than that, it was Leann who encouraged Aly. With Leann and her family moving to Orlando, and Aly returning to New Orleans, Mom seemed to be the only person Aly could turn to. And why wouldn’t she? They were close. Aly was family to my mother. “She came back here, honey, and we were all she had.”

  “I know that and I didn’t think…” I was unable to scrub away the quick flash of Aly on that stage or the lingering feel of her lips against mine when I stole a kiss tonight. “I didn’t mean to do any of that to her.”

  “Doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  I sat back, gripping the arm of my chair to keep my temper in check. Mom had a way of calling me out when I was wrong. That was what mothers were supposed to do. Didn’t mean I had to like it. “You saying I should roll over and show my belly? You think I should leave her alone?”

  “Is that what you want?” Her voice was even, like she knew the answer but wanted to at least give the impression that I had a damn clue about anything.

  “Mom, I want her.” I nodded toward the ring on her finger. “I want another damn Riley-Hale love story.”

  And just like that, my mother’s shoulders dropped and she scooted back along the leg rest, as though something I said had put her on edge. When she sat up, her body arranged itself in sharp lines even as she lifted her chin to watch the lake around us and the soothing ripple of the current as it licked against the shore. “There are no rose colored glasses in this house, Ransom. You should know that.”

  “Where is that coming from?”

  She took a minute, sighing. There was no use in me badgering her. When Mom wanted to elaborate, she would without me having to ask. “Nowhere important.” She recovered quickly, shaking her head as though she hoped her stray thoughts would knock themselves clear. “Relationships, especially those that last, are hard damn work. Sometimes you give and give and sometimes you get to take, but baby, it has to be equal. At the end of the day, if it’s not equal, it breaks apart.”

  I’d never meant for that to happen. Aly wasn’t the type of woman to be pushed aside and I never had meant to, not really. We both did well in college. She even took extra classes, doubling up her credit hours so we could graduate together. And my decision heading into the Draft came after many hours of long discussions of where we wanted to be. It had nothing to do with any selfish agendas I had. It was always about the both of us. But I was man enough to admit it hadn’t stayed that way. We got busy. Jesus, doesn’t everyone? But the injuries, the resulting fights, the distance, started when we moved to Miami and got so busy and didn’t make time for each other.

  “Mom, what do I do?”

  If I lived another hundred years as Keira Riley-Hale’s son, I still wouldn’t be able to guess what she thought when she looked at me the way she had then. There was steel in her eyes; a determined set in her features that was both reprimand and comfort as impossible as that sounds. She loved me with a fierceness I’d never understand, but my mom wasn’t afraid to make me angry or tell me when I needed to stop being an asshole. “You want her, you show her. You be the ear she needs and you put her first for once, Ransom.” Her hands had warmed up and I squeezed her fingers back when she held onto my wrist. “Don’t be a nuisance and don’t try to break up what she’s got with Ethan.”

  “I should just let her be with him?”

  Her shrug was easy, a little distant, but I knew what she was getting at. “That’s not your choice, baby. It’s hers.” That grip Mom had on my wrist tightened, bringing my gaze back to her face. “You just need to let her figure out that you’re the one she wants and you need to show her that she’s the one you want.”

  Mom’s kiss came quick, but sure, her warm lips on my forehead before she left me out on that patio to think about my new agenda and how I’d execute it.

  As the glass door slid shut, I glanced down at my cell, nodding to myself when I noticed the reply I was too pissed to read before my mother’s approach.

  Aly: Two is good. See you then, shoushou.

  Shoushou. Sweetie.

  My shoushou, she used to say. Had said, in fact, right beyond this patio, in that pool house across from me. The building was small, simple, like most things my parents created on this property. The soft gray ship lap surrounded the wood framed building, meant to welcome, to warm and it had that night. It had every night that Aly led me away from our family onto one of the small metal framed beds, right into the soft, crisp white linen bedding.

  She’d take me down every time with little fight from me.

  That small building stared back at me across the slow trickle of pool water lit up like fireflies under the water’s surface. I swear it stared. Taunted me. Reminded me of how long it had been since that last night alone with Aly at my parent’s lake house. Five years ago. My twenty-third birthday.

  It was the last night she called me shoushou. Aly had been too irritated at me after that. There had been too many arguments for sweet pet names.


  Tristian had finished his degree a full semester early, wrapping up his hard work during the half-semester that summer. My birthday and my favorite clunk headed cousin’s achievement was excuse enough to bring Leann and her family back from Florida and give my parents a reason to bring out the liquor and order up several pounds of boiled crawfish—the perfect Louisiana delicacy.

  Tristian ate up the attention we shared together that day and I was happy for it. My cousin deserved the props for working so hard when his college basketball career had ended. There would be no NBA for Tristian and he was fine about it. Later, he’d go on to spend his post-undergrad years doubling up in med school and making time for me only when there was a break in semesters. He’d always worked harder than me.

  The crawfish, potatoes and small cobs of corn were perfectly spiced. The Abita was ice cold and our family and friends had travelled from all over to celebrate the day with us.

  It was as it should have been—the hint of Zatarain’s spicy crab boil in the air, the selfish, sporadic breeze from the lake lifting off the water and onto the patio, music nearly as loud as the laughter coming from us all and at the center, my beautiful woman decked out in a green bikini wet from her infrequent dips in the pool. I’d watched her for hours, lounging on a chair, beer lazily held in my loose grip resting on my knee as Aly laughed with our family, teased my little brother and sister, ribbed Tristian for his inability to keep a woman. She was on her game—the social butterfly who’d ripped free from that introvert’s chrysalis she’d kept herself in when we first met.

  My gaze never left her as she moved around the party, patiently waiting for me. We’d been together so long I knew her game, how she liked to play. That day had been no different. A flick of her glance in my direction. The slow, lazy gaze of her eyes watching me, taking in the sweat dampening my thin Dolphins t-shirt and the raging hard-on straining against my shorts as I watched her. I’d wanted her badly. Hell, I always would, but that day as the crawfish shells and half-eaten corn cobs were cleared away and the wet newspaper and empty beer bottles were stuffed in the trash and recycling bin, I’d slipped from the crowd, bidding those still moderately sober good night before I moved to the pool house.