Summer Heat: A Steamy Romance Boxed Set

by Carly Phillips

  “Yeah well, I didn’t know what it would lead to,” she says and her voice trembles as she slips on a pair of underwear and sweatpants.

  I’m not sure I want to know the answer, but I have to ask. “So if you could go back?”

  Addison’s quiet at my question and I walk toward her although her back is still to me. “If you could go back, you’d still be with him?” Her hesitation makes my muscles tighten. My fist clenches as a tic in my jaw spasms.

  I’ve been kidding myself to think otherwise. Of course she’d be with him and not me. My breathing comes in ragged as she answers.

  “If he were here now--” she starts to say, but I cut her off.

  “He’s not, and he never will be.” The anger simmers. Everything that’s been pushed down for so long rises up quickly. All the years of control and denial.

  The hate that my brother was taken from me. And the pain of knowing it was my fault and that I’ve never told a soul. I could tell her now. But I never would. It’s too late to confess.

  Addison turns to face me with wide eyes. “Don’t say that.”

  Maybe it’s the denial, the guilt that plagues me. But I sneer at her, “You think it’s easy for me? You got over his death far easier than I did.”

  I don’t see the slap coming until the sting greets my cheek. My hand instinctively moves to where she’s struck me. I flex my jaw and feel the burn radiate down the side of my face.

  Her beautiful countenance is bright red with anger and her eyes are narrowed. I’ve never seen her this full of rage. Never.

  Her hands tremble as she yells at me.

  “You don’t know how many nights his death haunted me!”

  I do.

  Her voice wavers and I know she’s on the verge of tears. The kind that paralyze you because they’re so overwhelming. But instead of giving in to grief, she screams at me.

  “You don’t know how I blamed myself to the point where I begged God to just kill me and let me take his place.” She takes each breath in heavily.

  I do.

  Adrenaline rushes through my blood. The hate, the shame, and the unrelenting guilt surge within me. And I can’t say anything back. I can’t have this conversation with her.

  When I don’t say anything, when I feel myself shutting down, she snaps. “Fuck you,” she tries to yell at me but her voice cracks as she grabs her bag and storms out of the room.

  She doesn’t have her shoes on and she’s not wearing a bra under my shirt.

  “You’re not leaving?” It’s meant to be a statement but the question is there in the undertone. All because I said she got over his death easier than I did? It’s a fact. I fucking know it is.

  “Yes, I am,” she snaps as she turns around just as I walk up behind her. I have to halt my pace and take half a step back as she cranes her neck to bite out, “How dare you tell me that it was easy for me.”

  “You don’t know-” I try to tell her that she has no idea how well I relate to her pain, but she doesn’t let me finish.

  “Leave me alone.”

  She angrily brushes under her eyes as she quickly descends the stairs with me right behind her. The front door is right there and she makes a beeline for it.

  She’s out of her fucking mind if she thinks I’m letting her leave here like this. “Addison. Wait a fucking minute.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” she yells back and tries to whip open the door. My palm hits it first, slamming it back shut.

  “You’re not leaving like this,” I warn her. My muscles are coiled, but it’s the fear making me wound so tight. She’s leaving. And she’s not coming back.

  I can feel it in every inch of me.

  “Yes, I am,” she replies, though with shaken confidence.

  “The fuck you are.” My words are pushed through clenched teeth.

  “If you respect me in any sense of the word, you will let me leave. Right now.”

  “Addison, don’t do that.”

  “I mean it, Daniel. I need to be alone right now.”

  “I want to be there for you.” I don’t know how true the words are until I’ve said them. And oh, how fucking ironic they are.

  “Well, you can’t.” She shuts me down.

  Her green eyes stare up at me and all I can see is the same look she’d give Tyler when he was being clingy. The look that so obviously said she needed time and that she was overwhelmed. I get it now why he always hovered.

  I’m afraid if I let her go now, she’s never coming back. I can’t lose her. Not again.

  “I’m coming by tonight.” I give her the only compromise I’m capable of.

  I lower my arm but she doesn’t respond. With a swift tug she pulls the door open and walks out, bare feet and all.

  I stand in the doorway and watch her reach in her bag for flip-flops then put them on at the corner of the street.

  She keeps looking over her shoulder, maybe to see if I’m coming for her.

  And I am. She knows better than to think otherwise.

  But I’ll let her get a head start.

  ***

  Five years ago

  He hovers. Constantly hovering.

  We all know why. It’s so fucking obvious every time he brings her around.

  She’s waiting to run.

  She’s cute and sweet, but there’s something about her that makes it almost painfully apparent that a kid like Tyler could never hold on to her. It would take a man to keep that cute little ass.

  Just thinking that as I stand in the kitchen, watching the two of them in the dining room makes me feel like a pervert. She’s only sixteen, although her curves make her look like more of a woman and less of a girl.

  He gives her little touches as they sit next to each other watching something on his laptop. Her laugh makes him smile.

  He’s foolish to think she’ll stay with him. Girls like that don’t stay with men like us. He can keep pretending if he wants to. He can keep bringing her home and cuddling up with her because he doesn’t know how easy it is for people to shove you away.

  She’ll shove, she’ll push, she’ll leave. And I can’t blame her.

  Her shoulders shake as she laughs and leans into him. His broad smile grows and like the kid he is, he wraps his arm around her shoulders.

  The smile dies when Addison leans forward and away.

  He doesn’t know she needs space.

  It’s not his fault though. Tyler has a lot to learn. Hard life lessons.

  Like the ones I’ve had to endure.

  Cancer took our mother and left us a bitter father who likes the belt a little too much. Not to mention a pile of bills that a single person couldn’t possibly afford. It’s taken years to turn my father’s small-time dealing into a thriving business. Years of destroying what little life I had left.

  “Let’s not,” I hear Addison say and when I look up her eyes are on me. Caught in her gaze, I hold her there, but it doesn’t last long. Tyler’s always there to reclaim her attention.

  A sense of loss runs through me, followed by disgust.

  I haven’t been a good person in so long, maybe I’ve forgotten how. Or maybe I never was a good person to begin with.

  “You and Carter going out tonight?” my father asks as he interrupts the view I have of Tyler and his girlfriend.

  It’s only ever Carter and me. Never my other brothers. We’re the oldest, after all. The ones who need to pick up my father’s slack. The ones who pay these bills and make the business what it is.

  We’re the ones who have to shoulder the burden. And really it’s Carter’s hard work and brutal business tactics that make any of this possible. It sure as fuck isn’t my father. He’s good at hiding his pain. But every time he remembers my mother, I know he copes with a different addiction. One that makes using that belt easier.

  Only ever for Carter and me though.

  “Yeah,” I tell him and wait for him to hint that he wants us to bring some of the supply back for his personal use. Friday ma
rks four years since our mother’s been gone and I know a relapse is coming. He’ll disappear for days, maybe even weeks. It was worse when she first passed. I guess I should be grateful that he’s better now than he was then.

  “Be careful coming home. I heard there’s a patrol on the east side so maybe come up the back way after you get the shipment.”

  A second passes and then another before I nod.

  Some days I wonder if he cares for me anymore. He was always a hard man. But when Mom passed, he was nothing but angry. The years have maybe changed him to be less full of hate. But it doesn’t mean he has anything in him to take its place.

  I give him another nod and look past him as the sound of Tyler and Addison getting up from the table catches my attention.

  My father glances over his shoulder in the direction I’m staring and then turns back to me. He only shakes his head and makes to leave, but I hear him mutter, “She isn’t yours.”

  I hate him even more in this moment. Because he’s right.

  The sad, pretty girl doesn’t belong to me.

  No matter how much I think she’d take my pain away.

  Chapter 15

  Addison

  I wonder what the girl I used to be would think of me.

  The girl who still had both her parents and a life worth living for.

  I think she’d make up excuses for my poor behavior. She’d say I was sad, but she has no idea how pathetic I am.

  Grief isn’t static. It’s not a point on a chart where you can say, “Here, at this time, I grieved.” Because grief doesn’t know time. It comes and goes as it pleases, then small things taunt it back into your life. The memories haunt you forever and carry the grief with them. Yes, grief is carried. That’s a good way to put it.

  I pull a pillow on the sofa into my lap and stare at the television screen although my eyes are puffy and sore and I don’t even know what’s on.

  Playing with the small zipper on the side of the pillow absently, I think about what happened. How it all unraveled.

  I think it started with his scar, the past being brought up. But just like scars, some of our past will never leave us. The old wounds were showing. That’s what it was really about.

  I always knew Daniel was broken in ways Tyler wasn’t. But I didn’t know about his father. I didn’t know any of that. I don’t even know if Tyler knew.

  But what happened between Daniel and me, that … I don’t even have a word for it. It was like a light switch being turned off. Everything was fine, better than fine. Then darkness was abrupt and sudden, with no way to escape.

  My eyes dart to the screen as a commercial appears and its volume is louder than whatever show or movie was playing. I sniffle as I flick the TV off and look at my phone again.

  I’m sorry. Daniel messaged me earlier and I do believe he is, but I don’t know if that will be enough. My happy little bubble of lust has been popped and the self-awareness isn’t pretty.

  I’m sorry too. It’s all I can say back to him and he reads it. But there’s nothing left for either of us to say now. I wonder if this will be the end of us.

  We can’t have a conversation about the bad things that have happened. That’s the simple truth. It’s awkward, tense. And we can’t escape the moments coming up in conversation. There’s no way getting around that.

  It’s easy to blame it on my past. On things I had no control over and things I can’t change.

  It’s a lot like what I did when I left Dixon Falls. But really I was running, just like I had been since the day my parents died. Tyler was a distraction, a pleasant one that made me feel something other than the agonizing loneliness that had turned me bitter.

  And then there was Daniel. He left me breathless and wanting, and that’s a hard temptation to run away from.

  I’m woman enough to admit that.

  So sure, I can blame it on our past.

  It’s easy to blame it on grief, but it’s still a lie. It’s because neither of us can talk about what happened.

  I startle at the vibration of the phone on the coffee table.

  My heart beats hard with each passing second; all the while a long-lost voice in the back of my head begs me to answer a simple question. What am I doing?

  Or maybe the right question is, What did I expect?

  My gaze drifts across each photo on the far wall of the living room and it stops on three. Each of the photos meant something more when I took them. There are a little more than a dozen in total. Each photographed in a moment of time when I knew I was changing.

  I keep them hung up because they look pretty from a distance; the pictures themselves are pleasant and invoke warm feelings.

  More than that, the photos are a timeline of moments I never want to forget. I refuse to let myself forget.

  But the three I keep staring at are so relevant to how I feel in this moment.

  The first photo was taken at my parents’ grave. Just a simple picture really, small forget-me-nots that had sprouted in the early spring. There was a thin layer of snow on the ground, but they’d already pushed through the hard dirt and bloomed. Maybe they knew I was coming and wanted to make sure I saw them.

  In the photo you can’t even tell they’ve bloomed on graves. The photo is cropped short and close. But I’ll always remember that the flowers were on my parents’ grave.

  Tyler was with me when I took it. It wasn’t the first, second or even the third time we’d gone out. But it was the first time I’d cried in such a long time and the one friend I’d met and trusted was there to witness it. I thought I was being sly asking him to drive to a cemetery hours away. Back to where I’d grown up. I hadn’t been there in so long, but on that day when Tyler said we could go anywhere, I told him about the angel statue at the front of a cemetery I’d once seen that would be perfect for the photography project.

  I didn’t tell him that my parents were buried there, but he found out shortly after we arrived.

  Part of me will forever be his for how he handled that day. For letting me cry and holding me. For not forcing me to talk, but being there when I was ready to.

  Like I said, I never deserved him.

  The second is a picture of the first place I’d rented after I ran away from Dixon Falls. I went from place to place, spending every cent I’d gathered over the years and not staying anywhere any longer than I had to. Until I found this farm cottage in the UK and met Rae.

  She’s such the opposite of me in every way. And she reminded me of Tyler. The happiness and kindness, the fact that she never stopped smiling and joking. Some people just do that to you … and because of it, I stayed. For a long time.

  She’s the one who took me to the bar in Leeds where I kissed another boy for the first time after Tyler’s death.

  She’s the one who showed me how to really market my photography and introduced me to a gallery owner. She made me want to stay in that little cottage I’d rented for much longer than I’d planned. But feeling so happy and having everything be too easy felt wrong. It was wrong that I could move on and it made me feel like what had happened in the past was right, when I knew without a doubt that it wasn’t.

  It would never be right and that realization made me see Tyler everywhere all over again. I needed to leave. It was okay to remember, but it wasn’t okay to forget. And I did leave. Each place I stopped at was closer and closer to Dixon Falls. At first I didn’t realize it. But when I picked this university, I was keenly aware that I’d only be hours away.

  The third picture is only a silhouette I took in Paris.

  I don’t know the people.

  It’s the shadows of four men standing outside of a church with a deep sunset behind them.

  From a distance, all I could see were the Cross boys. And I took picture after picture, snapping away as quickly as I could. As if they’d vanish if I stopped. I wanted them back badly. I wanted them to forgive me and tell me it was alright. After all, they were the only family I had for a long time and just like
my parents, I lost them.

  That picture hurts the most. Because there should be five people in the shot. And because when the men did leave the hilltop behind the church and come closer, they weren’t the Cross boys and I knew in that moment I’d never see them again. Daniel was never going to show up for me to stare at from a distance. It would never be them, no matter how much I prayed for it to happen.

  Three pretty pictures, mixed in with the others. All hues of indigo, my favorite color, and all seemingly serene and beautiful. But each a memory of something that’s made me the person I am.

  My phone vibrates with the reminder of the most recent message. It’s Daniel, of course. Come over.

  I need to work, I text him and snort at his immediate response. No you don’t.

  I do, in fact, need to work. I could easily work at his place. That’s what I’ve been doing and I actually enjoy it. I love it when he kisses my shoulder and tells me what he thinks of the photo I’m working on. He makes me feel less alone and he understands how I see the pictures and why they mean so much to me.

  I want to apologize.

  You did and I get it, I tell him even though it makes the ache in my chest that much deeper.

  Please, just give me another chance.

  Please is another word I’m not used to hearing from Daniel and as much as I want to give in, I need a little time.

  I really do have to work. We can meet up next week. As I press send, I realize I’m caving in. Simply prolonging what is sure to end. But then I remember the men by the church. If I could go back in time and make them stand there forever so I’d never have to face the fact that they weren’t the Crosses, I would.

  It hurts deep in my chest. Denial is a damning thing.

  And that’s what this is, isn’t it? Just a futile attempt to deny that we could ever exist without our past tearing us apart.

  The phone sits there silent, indicating no new message from him although I know he sees my response. Picking up a tissue from the coffee table, I dry my nose and pick myself up off the sofa.

  Life doesn’t wait for you. That’s something I’ve learned well.