New Adult Romance Box Set

by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose

  “And are you going to keep going on tour with Trevor?” I said slowly, trying to figure this guy out. Breathe, Darla, breathe, I told myself. Get through the moment and you'll be OK. Trevor will be back in a minute. Let the man's mom chew him out. Let him come back and say his goodbyes.

  Joe looked completely stumped by that question. “Tour? We're not—we don't do this seriously,” he said, shrugging.

  “You don't?” I said, incredulous. “You realize how much of a following you guys have online?”

  “That's online,” Joe scoffed, waving his hand. He took a sip of his coffee and peered at me as if completely oblivious to the force that those men had become in indie music circles. As our eyes locked, we held the stare for a few seconds longer then we should have and then I broke away because it was weird. Like, really weird. There's no way someone like that would want someone like me.

  You said that about Trevor, a voice whispered in my ear.

  Yeah, another voice said, and he's leaving.

  Joe

  Well, this was awkward. More awkward than walking in on Trevor and Darla naked—or nearly naked. I could see what Trevor saw in her even though this woman was nothing like any of the chicks he normally banged. She was big, curvy, and what people would call full-figured back in my grandmother's generation. In Massachusetts other women our age would call her fat and maybe she was, a little bit —but there was a deep confidence in the way that she moved her body that made her seem more substantial, more present—more there. Like someone who was real and grounded and firm.

  Nobody back home would have given her two looks. Our friends would have just passed her by, so I wondered why Trevor picked her. The more I watched her, and then the more I tried not to watch her, the more I was drawn to something.

  But where the hell was Trevor? This was taking too long and I was sick and tired of being chewed out by his mom. We needed to get on the road so I could get him back at a reasonable enough hour that all of this could just go away. Plus we had finals coming up. I wasn't going to blow my senior year finals and not be able to go to law school in the fall. That would be the biggest fucking nightmare of my life and the fallout from my parents would...well, even Trevor wasn't worth that.

  Something in the way Darla shifted her head made me turn and look, and I saw tears in her eyes. Oh, shit. Of course she was upset. Trevor was that kind of guy that you got upset over. At least, the chicks did. He had this way about him that made people feel bigger, and better, and smarter, and wilder than they really were. Which is exactly why I had to be careful around him—because if I wasn't careful I’d find myself driving six hundred miles through the night to pick him up from one of his crazy schemes.

  Oh. Wait. That's exactly what had just happened to me.

  Instinct made me want to reach out and say the right thing, to comfort her, but what are you supposed to say? “Hey, it was nice meeting the girl Trevor banged last night and uhh...see you...never?” There wasn't a script for this. No professional development class offered by the on-campus career center taught you what to do when your band mate takes too much of your stolen peyote and winds up in a state you've barely heard of with a girl who lives in a potting shed. Or, if there was, my mom and my academic advisor had never signed me up for it.

  Speaking of moms, Trevor's was probably ripping him a new asshole right now. Man, that bitch could scream. Everybody had wondered what happened to Trevor. I still didn't remember. I just woke up passed out in the basement of his house and he was gone. All that was left were his clothes, and thank God he had called me, finally, because lying to his mom had been getting harder and harder.

  Judy had been the one to figure out that he really was gone. His shoes were still there, his clothes, his phone, his wallet, everything, and all that was missing was his acoustic guitar. And Trevor. He and I had eleven hours of driving ahead of us, and I supposed that I would learn the story. It would probably be another Trevor story, some half-assed, half-fiction, half-real yarn that he would spin to make everyone come out looking good and to make his own folly seem amusing.

  He was half Tucker Max and half Jack Kerouac all tied up in a Gordon Gekko bow. Of all the guys I knew and had gone to school with over the years, each one of us groomed for med school, law school, an MBA, and in rare cases a Ph.D., Trevor was the one who had the whole package—but he was also the one with the biggest rebellious streak. Seeing what that looked like now, as we were about to launch fully into our trajectories, was kind of scary.

  Trevor

  Walking out of Darla's little place, I stepped out into the sunlight, feeling the warmth on my skin, making me realize just how crazy the past who the hell knows had been. Had it really only been thirty-six hours since I'd been in my own basement back in Sudborough? Two thirds of that time I had no memory of, and of the rest I remembered every second of. The past twelve hours with Darla like an entire lifetime lived in half a day.

  How could I walk away from that? I felt my gut tighten, my chest swell, muscles in me coming alive that needed to be there, and exercised, and moved, and pushed to some sort of limit. I wanted to go and run a hundred miles, or ride a bike around the country, to swim across a great lake, to do anything but walk away from her.

  A fleeting image of going home with Darla in tow made me laugh, a little too maniacally on the inside. My mom would fall over in a dead faint if I brought someone like her home, and my dad would probably give me an atta boy and then purse his lips with disapproval and pour himself another Seven and Seven when he realized I was serious.

  Besides, she had a life here. Opening up to me last night, cradled in my arms, she'd told me all about what had happened to her and damn, did I feel like a fucking fool. But her life was not mine and mine wasn't hers, so this had to end. I had to leave, right?

  Walking outside, I punched my mother's phone number into my phone and she picked up on the second ring. “That better be you, Trevor,” her sharp voice cut through the glass of the iPhone.

  “No Mom, it's Whitey Bulger.”

  “Ha ha, very funny. If that's your way of telling me that you're a criminal on the run then we have a big problem here, mister.”

  I closed my eyes and felt my balls crawl up into my groin again. “No. No crime, Mom. Other than the crime of not being under your thumb all the time.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?” she snapped back.

  “It means whatever you want it to mean, Mom.”

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I'm just hanging with Joe.” In Ohio.

  A snort came through the phone. It sounds like a fart. “Joe Ross has been lying thorough his teeth to me. I've been talking with his mother and—”

  “And what?” I countered. “She's going to put him to bed early tonight? Ban him from playing with his Nintendo for a week? C'mon, Mom. We're men. With lives.”

  The sharp inhale of a shocked gasp was all I heard for a long moment. “Just come home,” she finally said. Never one to be wishy-washy, the steel in her voice made me grit my teeth. If Mom said jump, I was supposed to say How high? Not Fuck off.

  “I'll get home eventually.”

  “Get home as soon as possible,” she said. “Your dad's really worried about you and so am I.”

  “I know you are.”

  I was supposed to feel some sort of genuine affection and gratitude for the fact that she was worried about me, but right now I was pissed and didn't give a shit what she thought. She always wanted to know exactly where I was and what I was doing. I was a twenty-two-year-old man who was about to go into law school. When did I get to do what I wanted when I wanted and how I wanted?

  I heard whispering and then two voices arguing in the background, Mom popping back in a little louder than she should have been. “OK, honey, so I'll see you. Be home within an hour.”

  Click.

  An hour. Yeah, right. My tongue rolled along the inside of my jawline and I could feel the muscles in my neck tightening, a familiar flash and he
at of anger making the back of my skull go cold and hot, the alternating chill a flag for doing something ridiculously inappropriate.

  That was her phrase: “That's ridiculously inappropriate,” she would say all the time when I was a child. Ridiculously inappropriate. She used it so much I almost named our band Ridiculously Inappropriate. If she'd have allowed us to have a dog it would have been called 'RI'.

  A few deep breaths didn't calm me down. Looking at the outside of Darla's little hovel did. In stark daylight it all looked worse. There was no real grass to speak of on the side of her house and the trailer was actually three or four different tones of a dull gray on the outside, with sections of the aluminum siding dented as if someone had kicked it all around the side, the holes about two feet off the ground, divots in the metal.

  A chicken, a little scrawny creature with red and brown feathers, cackled by. Probably the same one that was chased by a three-legged kitten earlier. Just standing here, letting the breeze float across my angry skin, my hair heavy against my scalp, the trailer park coming to life with people walking by and peering at me in confusion—I took it all in.

  My life on the iPhone—all the contacts, the phone calls, the text messages, the data plan where I downloaded and uploaded an electronic existence—that wasn't real. It had seemed real for so long, back home and at school, that I found myself surprised by how little I cared about all the electronic messages.

  What was real right now was in front of my face, some sort of existential creation that I had conjured in a peyote haze. Whatever had gotten me from Massachusetts to Ohio, buck naked with a guitar and a hat, was more powerful than any edict my mother could hand down, stronger than any song I could sing at some college bar in some fake, plastic suburb of the fake, plastic region of the fake, plastic life that had been carved out for me.

  A deep wellspring of hunger for more, for dirt, for Guinea hens and dented siding, and sunlight, and wind and self possession built up in me like bile stuck in the back of my throat. As I walked back to the shed I saw Joe's car. The car I was supposed to get in in a few minutes and be carried back to my mother, back to finals week, back to my summer internship, and back to that basement sanctuary where, thirty-six hours ago, something deep in me had stripped down to the marrow and functioned on a completely different level, escape my only goal.

  Going back right now would be admitting defeat, to say that the impulse that had brought me here was irrational, that it was the outlier, that it was abnormal. What if that was wrong? What if everything I'd been taught, everything I'd been told, everything that I had been was abnormal and this...this turned out to be the truth?

  I made my way carefully into the trailer, needing a two-minute shower to cleanse my body and my thoughts. Cathy wasn't at the table, which was a relief. Gingerly, I walked down the little hallway into the bathroom, where a quick shower got me back to baseline, even if it didn't really diffuse my anger. Walking out into the door yard, the blinding light of the sun reflected my inner blinding rage.

  As if my hands were possessed by the same spirit that made me find my way here, something outside of me and yet deeply guided by an inner core that knew exactly what it was doing, I popped Joe's hood and started to randomly pull little tubes and wires, yanking not with abandon but with a precision that belied my ignorance about cars. I carefully tucked the little tubes and wires in so that it wouldn't be obvious what I'd just done and then gently closed the latch.

  If I was right, I had just bought myself a few more hours here, my hands doing the dirty work of my inner soul. That I needed to steal a few hours by destroying the one method home pinged through my mind like a bullet ricocheting in an echo chamber.

  Joe shouted, “Hey, Trevor! Come on!”

  A grin tickled my lips but I bit it back. My hands flexed into deep fists that made the small muscles around my knuckles ache. I'm coming alright, I thought, but on my terms.

  Joe

  Trevor saved me from my own thoughts by bounding into this whatever-you-call-it...this purple shed...and saying, “That was unpleasant.”

  “What was that?” Darla said, wiping one tear out of her right eye.

  He ignored her, which I thought was a little brutal, and just looked at me. “I just talked to my mom. She hates me.”

  “No surprise.”

  “She hates you, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah. She says you were lying to her all night.”

  “I was lying to her all night.” Darla blinked hard, over and over, the way you do when you're struggling to contain emotions that are so strong you don't want to display them and be vulnerable. She might consider me a pretentious asshole from Massachusetts but that didn't mean I couldn't understand how hard it was to put up a good front when your heart told you to do anything but.

  “Yeah, she figured that out.”

  “No shit, of course they figured it out, Trevor. They always figure it out and we just lie because that's what we do and they scream at us because that's what they do.”

  “Thanks for taking the heat.”

  “You're welcome. Now get your ass in the car and let's go home.” A sympathetic part of me wanted to reach out and pat Darla's hand or assure her she would be OK after we left. Another part didn't care, and was more worried about our pissed off parents. Finals week was far too close and this rip in the fabric of our lives needed to end. Now.

  I stood up, walked to the threshold and figured I needed to give them a few minutes to say their goodbyes. A hard look at Trevor and I said, “I'll be out in the car. I expect you in a minute.” And then I looked at Darla, her face turned away from me as Trevor stood over her, hands on her shoulders, a soft look on his face that was different from anything I'd ever seen him direct at a chick.

  “Yeah. I'll be out in a minute,” Trevor said absentmindedly.

  Then Darla turned and looked at me and said, “Pleased to meet you, Joe.” She opened her mouth to say something else and then snapped it shut.

  “Likewise,” I answered, nodding, and got the hell out of there to go wait in the car. I knew she was lying—she was anything but pleased when it came to meeting me. She wanted me gone, and I was about to obey her every wish.

  Trevor was the one holding us up.

  Chapter Seven

  Darla

  As Joe walked out, I realized this was the moment. I had to steel myself for it, I had to be strong, I had to make sure I didn't make a fool of myself so I did what I always do and I opened my mouth and I blurted out the stupidest shit possible.

  “I would love to see you again, Trevor,” I said. “The next time you decide to eat a stupid shit amount of a mind-altering substance and travel naked six hundred miles, give me a visit.” Wink. Oh, God. I might as well have said “Y'all come back now, ya hear?” and thrown cornbread at him.

  He smiled gently, his fingers touching my cheekbones, traveling down to the nape of my neck, making me want to blurt out even stupider words, like I love you, like stay, like make babies with me, like take me with you, like write a song about me —and I was damn close to saying all of those things but he just leaned in and shut my mouth up by pressing his against it.

  The kiss wasn't a goodbye kiss. It was more chaste than anything we'd shared over the past handful of hours and that's what finally made me cry because it was less about passion—which we'd had plenty of in handfuls and spurts (no pun intended)—but this was a kiss of sorrow, a kiss of regret, a kiss so sweet and endearing and apologetic and nostalgic that I could feel it ten years ago and ten years hence.

  What was Trevor doing, giving me a kiss like that? Bearing his soul to me with his lips, with his tongue, with fingertips that touched all the crying parts in me, all the aching cells, the mourning skin, the sad, sad heart that beat just for him right now. Everything I felt was so melodramatic and gratuitous and carved out of a Darla that I liked to pretend wasn't there. Trevor made me real. Trevor made me come out. The me that I always imagined was there, undamaged, untouche
d by the years of wondering what if? What if Daddy hadn't died? What if Mama had been OK? What if I'd gone to college? My own what if—thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster—would never be what if I had just driven past the naked rock star by the side of the road?

  I may be stupid and I may make foolish choices but that one...that one I would never regret.

  Trevor's mouth pulled away and his eyes sought mine. “It'll be OK,” he said. “And of all the people in the world and of all the places in the world, Darla,” he leaned over and kissed my forehead and pulled back, that jaunty, sultry grin like warm chocolate. “The next time I decide to escape my own life, naked and ready for anything, I'll make sure I'm headed west.”

  Joe ruined what would have been an absolutely perfect Hallmark moment—if Hallmark had a demented line of cards for shitstorms like this—by thumping through the door and shouting, “My fucking car won't start!”

  Something in Trevor's eyes was a little too mischievous for me to think that this was just a coincidence but I kept my mouth shut. Trevor's eyes widened, real big like a little kid trying to lie, and then he let his muscles relax. It was very intentional, as if he were focused on trying hard not to look like a liar, which I'd been able to spot since I was a little kid.

  “Really? Well, that's weird,” Trevor said.

  “Shit!” Joe said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “Well, why don't you both go look under the hood?” I said. Four eyes lasered in on me as if I had just proposed that they perform a bowel resection.

  “Look under the hood?”

  “Yeah. Just go see. Maybe something's loose or...I don't know.”

  Trevor looked at me, cocked his head and widened his eyes. I don't know what he was trying to communicate but I decided that I would just stop talking because as Mama always said I open my mouth and stupid shit pours out. So, if this was one of those times, then short of having him kiss me into silence, I would have to just do it myself.

  Not the kissing part, but the keeping my mouth shut part, which was a hell of a lot harder than it was for most people. See, I can't even stop talking right now.