by Erin Wright
Luck was not on his side.
“You know, when you turned down Levi’s marriage proposal.”
Talking about his best friend’s marriage proposal to Georgia while they were both naked and sweaty from making love to each other…it felt wrong on so very many levels. Maybe that’d be enough of an answer to Georgia’s questions, though, and she’d go back to sleep now.
She sat up straighter in bed. “What? What about Levi’s marriage proposal?” The sleepy-eyed look she’d been giving him disappeared and was replaced by total confusion.
He wasn’t so sure that was an improvement.
“You know, when Levi proposed to you…?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I was there for that. What the hell does that have to do with pregnancy?”
“You told him you didn’t want children.” Even as he was explaining the obvious to her, he made himself the solemn vow that in the future, no matter how important he thought a question was, he shouldn’t ask Georgia about it in the middle of the night. She wasn’t one to just let it go and fall back asleep.
In fact…
She was staring at him like he’d quit speaking English on her. “You…I…What?!” she finally yelped. “I told Levi that I didn’t want to have kids?!”
“Maybe?” Based on her reaction, he was thinking that this long-held belief of his was about to get shot down in flames.
She started laughing, but it was a disbelieving laugh, not a this-is-so-funny laugh.
He really didn’t take that as a good sign.
“Men are the strangest creatures,” she muttered to herself as she swung her legs out of bed. “If I’m going to have this conversation at—” she looked at his nightstand clock for herself this time, “—2:51 in the morning, I’m damn well going to have some coffee in me. You’ve bought a coffee pot for your apartment, I’m assuming?” She pushed herself to her feet and started heading for the bedroom door.
“Of course,” he said, hurrying after her. It was the first purchase he’d made. He could sleep on the floor. He couldn’t live without coffee.
Priorities. They were a thing.
He felt weird walking around his house naked, his dick swinging all over the place, so he slipped back and grabbed a pair of basketball shorts and a sweatshirt and put them on before joining her in the kitchenette. She was hunting through the cupboards, looking for the coffee can, and he went to work next to her, helping her get the pot going.
“While we’re waiting for that…” She turned and planted her hands on her gloriously naked hips and then glared at him. “Hold on, not fair,” she said when she spied all of his clothes, and hurried back to the bedroom.
She emerged wearing only a button-up shirt of his which he usually reserved for more formal occasions, leaving her legs bare beneath the soft cotton. He gulped hard and his vision went a little fuzzy around the edges. He thought about sending her back into the bedroom to put on more clothing – preferably a snowsuit if she thought they were going to engage in a serious conversation – but couldn’t quite make himself do it.
Yes, it was torture to see her in one of his shirts, bare legs stretching for a mile beneath it, but it was a glorious torture and so very worth it.
He filled a coffee cup up for her and then jerry-rigged some sweetener by using the milk he’d bought hours before and some brown sugar he’d mistakenly bought from the grocery store. “Brown sugar?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “Were you going to bake some cookies?”
He waved his hand dismissively. “I’ll tell you about it later.” By which he meant absolutely never, upon the pain of death. Going shopping for his own food at the grocery store – yet another thing he’d done for the first time ever in the last two weeks – well, suffice it to say that some mistakes were made.
Best to leave it at that.
He poured himself some coffee in his only other mug, feeling rather proud of himself for having two coffee mugs in his cupboards to use, and followed her to the couch. She curled up, tucking her bare legs underneath her as she sipped at the coffee. Moose did his best not to blow a brain circuit – or two – at the sight as he settled in beside her.
“I don’t know what Levi told you about his proposal, but I’m going to guess that it wasn’t the whole story,” she started. “Either he didn’t understand, or he’s forgotten. Unlike your father, I don’t think Levi would intentionally lie to you. No offense intended,” she added quickly.
“None taken, promise.”
She nodded and settled back a little more against the couch. “You know that Levi and I started dating at the end of our junior year. What you don’t know is that…honestly, I don’t know if I ever really loved him. We had a lot of fun together and he was great in bed – not that I’m gonna talk to you about that – but it was never quite right, and it got less right as time went on. He became…comfortable. One of my closest friends who I also happened to kiss.” She shrugged. “Although I thought he was a terrific guy, I didn’t think he was my forever guy, but there was nothing to drive me away – nothing to force my hand. We were just drifting along.
“So you know that when we went to college – TIG welding for him, Business Administration for me – we obviously ended up at different colleges, which meant that the drift factor went up even further. We weren’t just drifting along – we were drifting apart.” Moose listened, nodding and trying to hide the anxiety he felt at her mention of college. His father had said that college wasn’t necessary for Moose to be able to take over the dealership, and so he’d been left behind in Sawyer as Tennessee, Levi, and Georgia had all left to get their degrees. They’d all come back, thank God, but there was a part of him that still felt…inferior for not having a degree to claim as his.
“Well, Levi never told me this for sure, but my best guess is, with his mom running off when he was just a babe and his dad being…well, the town drunk, honestly, I think Levi wanted to establish a family for himself. Something that couldn’t be taken away from him. Something that didn’t involve his father.”
She chuckled without humor. “I know your dad isn’t exactly stellar father material, but I’ll say it again: I am very glad that he took Levi under his wing and paid for his training like he did. If it’d been up to that pile-of-shit father that he somehow won at birth, he’d still be at home, probably bagging groceries and spending all of his money keeping his father supplied with alcohol. Maybe even on the way to becoming an alcoholic himself.”
She took a sip of her coffee and paused, thoughts skittering past on her face, too fast to capture and examine. He found watching her absolutely fascinating and regretted even blinking, because it meant missing something.
“You know how Levi is,” she finally continued. “So…intense. He wasn’t content to just drift along, and when he felt our relationship begin to really fall apart, he decided to propose to me. I think he thought that it’d bring us back together. A last-ditch attempt to save our relationship, you know? I told him no, of course, because I couldn’t marry him. Not…”
The room was silent. Heartbeat…heartbeat…
“Not when I was in love with his best friend.” She whispered it as she looked over at him and he froze, the coffee cup almost to his mouth but not quite there and he couldn’t breathe or move or think.
She rushed on before he could make his body and brain do something useful again, like work.
“When he proposed, he said it in a funny way. Not, ‘Will you marry me?’ like a normal proposal but ‘Will you be my wife and the mother of my children?’ I’m sure he thought he was being sweet and if it’d been right between us, it would’ve been sweet.
“But I was all of nineteen years old, and the guy I’d drifted along with for years was pushing me to have his children. The guy that I didn’t really even love, not like you should love the person you marry. It freaked me out, I’m not gonna lie. I blurted out the first thing that came to mind: I didn’t want to have kids. So, in retrospect, I can see why he thought, well,
I didn’t want to have kids.”
She let out a small chuckle. “My brain wasn’t operating at full speed at that point, but what I meant was, I didn’t want to have kids when I was 19 years old, and I didn’t want to have kids with him. I didn’t mean that I didn’t want to have children at all.”
She nibbled at her lower lip as she thought through it. “In his defense, I didn’t actually say that, now that I think back on it. It was the last conversation that we had for a very long time, and I’d honestly forgotten all about the specifics until just now.” She shrugged, causing the open collar of his shirt to slide down her bare arm.
Moose gulped, trying to stay focused on what she was saying, and probably not succeeding as well as he should. He wanted to nibble his way up her arm and—
She continued, jerking his attention back to her story. “I knew what I meant, and calling him up to clarify, ‘Hey Levi, when I said I didn’t want to have kids, I really meant I didn’t want them so soon or with you, so…have a great day!’ Well, it didn’t seem like the nicest thing in the world to do. Not to mention that at the base of it, it really didn’t matter. I didn’t think about what he’d tell you, and even if I had, I still wouldn’t have worried about it. After all, you were marrying Tenny.”
She shrugged again, one tantalizing upper arm lifting with the movement before disappearing again under the cover of fabric.
It was quiet for a minute then, as Moose tried to wrap his mind around everything she’d just told him. She did want to have kids.
And, she’d loved him for years.
He wasn’t sure which one of those statements thrilled him more.
“Do you…do you want to have children?” she asked hesitantly. “Just…someday. In the future. With someone. Hypothetically.”
“Yeah, I really do,” he said with a soft smile. “It was the one part about marrying Tennessee that I was excited about. I may not have thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world and the idea of having sex with her left me cold, but I was happy at the thought of being a father myself. I could do it right. I could treat my kids with respect and love, not as lowly paid servants. I want to teach them to work hard and be good citizens of the world, but I think you can do that without the belt and liberal doses of guilt and screaming. I wanted to see if I was right.”
“You…you broke up with Tennessee, not only losing your parents and the dealership, but also believing that with me, you were going to give up the chance to have children, and yet, you still chose me?”
She was staring at him, surprise and shock openly battling for supremacy on her face. Then…
“Why?” she whispered, the disbelief obvious in every ounce of her being.
“Because I’ve always been in love with my best friend’s girlfriend,” he said simply. She sucked in a breath at that. He shrugged, offering up only a pained smile in response. “It didn’t matter because I wasn’t going to be able to choose who I married, and you and him were happy together, and…I just didn’t have a chance. I thought all this time you’d been madly in love with him, and you only broke things off because of the kids’ aspect. I thought you really, really cared about it, enough to break up with the man you desperately loved because of it.”
“Wow.” They stared at each other for a minute, and then a small smile grew into a huge grin which broke out into a howl of laughter. “By the very skin of our teeth,” Georgia finally said as the stunned laughter died down. “If I hadn’t been trapped by that fire and stuck out there with you overnight…”
He reached over and pulled her against his chest, spreading his legs out on the couch and tucking her slim body between them. “Sitting up at Eagle’s Nest with you by my side was…it broke me. For years, I’d been able to ignore the desire I felt every time I looked at you and could convince myself that I had to do my duty. But that night up on the mountain broke through that and no matter what I told myself after that, I couldn’t make myself stop wanting you. I never thought I’d be grateful for a wildfire.”
She laughed weakly against him. “Me either,” she said softly. “I had flashbacks and panic attacks after the fire and I thought for a while there that I’d never get over it. But I didn’t guess that my life would change for the better because of it.”
She put her coffee cup down on the weathered crate and nestled her head into the crook of his neck with a happy sigh. “I want to hear how you ended up here in Franklin,” she mumbled. “Last I knew, your father was yelling at me that you’d never pick the ugly cousin and that he’d cut you off without a penny if you chose me. And then you disappeared.”
He grimaced, glad she wasn’t facing him to see the embarrassment on his face. “Maybe you’re right, about being like my dad.” He shrugged. “I was raised that you take care of the women in your household, and that they absolutely do not work outside of the home. I don’t have anything against your career, of course, but I guess a part of that old-fashioned notion still clung to me. I didn’t want to go to you and ask you to date me if I didn’t even have a place to sleep at night that wasn’t Levi’s lumpy couch,” she chuckled softly at that one, “or a job to go to every day.”
He began running his fingers through her hair, softly stroking down the blonde strands as he talked. “The day that Levi went to work and left me on his couch, I had a lot of thinking to do. A part of me knew that I could go back to Dad, apologize, swallow crow, and still inherit the dealership. Marrying Tennessee…I don’t know if that would’ve ended up being a part of it or not. It would depend on her parents, and of course, Tennessee doesn’t want to marry me any more than I want to marry her.
“But either way, I couldn’t do it. I knew it was time to actually get out on my own. Make my own mistakes. And, like I said, I needed to find a place of my own that wasn’t Levi’s couch. At first, I couldn’t think of what marketable skills I had.”
He paused, the worry he’d felt that day as he mentally reviewed his choices overwhelming him again. A part of him had wondered if his father had pushed him not to get a college degree, knowing that it’d make it harder for Moose to strike out on his own if he ever decided to.
He wouldn’t put it past his father, that was for damn sure. Manipulative to the bitter end.
He took a deep breath and continued. “I’ve worked in a lot of different departments at the dealership, but I wasn’t a licensed anything. I’d have to go to school to become a licensed diesel mechanic; my father owned the only John Deere dealership in the area and I don’t know a damn thing about any other kind of tractor; I didn’t want to move to Boise and lose my chance with you…I spent the whole day spinning my wheels.”
She snuggled against him, sighing happily, and he wondered for a moment if his story was putting her to sleep. He couldn’t see her face very well from this angle. He kept talking and stroking her hair, though, because it was nice to talk to someone else. He’d gotten lonely, living by himself.
If she drooled on him, though, he’d take that as a sign to carry her to bed. And anyway, picking her up in his arms and snuggling her against him as he walked was a nice consolation prize for having to stop talking to her for the night.
“It was Levi’s suggestion, when he got home that evening. We’ve…not been seeing eye to eye recently,” Moose said, choosing his words carefully, “and I was a little worried that the whole couch-crashing thing wouldn’t go over well, but he didn’t utter a single word of complaint about any of it. When he got home after work, I told him what happened – at least the most important parts – and then we began brainstorming on what jobs I could apply for.
“Like I said, it was his idea: I could go to work at the Massey Ferguson dealership here in Franklin. Yeah, maybe it’s not John Deere, but they are tractors and when you get right down to it, the basics are the same. I applied for a salesman job and once the owner realized who my dad was, he hired me on the spot. Apparently, and I know this is going to be hard to believe, but my father is a jackass to the other tractor dealers in
the area,” she chuckled quietly at that, tucked up against his chest, “and the idea of giving my father the middle finger really appealed to the owner of the Massey dealership.”
He didn’t tell her about the heart-to-heart that he’d had with Levi about her. He wasn’t sure if Georgia knew that Levi had been carrying a torch for her all of these years, but it wasn’t Moose’s place to tell her that. Let Levi keep his pride intact.
It hadn’t exactly been a pleasant conversation, and a few punches had been thrown in the middle of it, but in the end, they’d worked things out. You couldn’t be as close as brothers for 17 years, and then let a little thing like unrequited love get in the way. It didn’t hurt that Levi had quite recently found someone else who’d caught his eye…
“In fact,” Moose continued, “the Massey owner even gave me an advance to help me pay the deposit on this apartment and put a little food in the fridge. I didn’t have much in the way of savings, and this whole thing has blown a hole the size of Texas in my wallet. I should be upfront with you, Georgia: I don’t have two nickels to rub together after my ‘shopping spree’ that I did a couple of hours ago. I get my first real paycheck tomorrow, and never have I been more thrilled in my life. I’m finally making decent money. No more minimum wage for me.”
He was running his calloused fingers through her wispy hair, the roughness catching on the strands and then slipping free. It was hypnotizing. Being with her brought him the kind of peace and joy he’d been wanting all his life, but had never been able to find.
“That doesn’t answer the question of why you didn’t tell me what was going on,” she mumbled sleepily. She yawned and then settled back against him. “You make a really nice pillow, by the way,” she added.
“Maybe I’ll add that to my resumé,” he said with a small chuckle. “As for talking to you…well, I was going to. Right after I’d officially established myself here. I know it sounds stupid and in retrospect, it is, but I had it in my head that in order to date someone as successful and amazing as you, I needed my own place and a steady job and a pile of money in the bank account, and then I could come a-courtin’.”
