I held the key. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you seems insufficient.”
“I never meant to keep it forever. And I can’t think of anyone else who could love that Jeep as much as I do but you.”
“Well, for lack of anything better to say…thank you.” I sniffled.
He stood up. “I…I better go before I start something we can’t finish.”
I laughed. “I literally just thought that exact thing. Why do you think I got off your lap?” I stood up, and we faced each other, holding hands. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I don’t want to.”
“But you have to.” I had to suck it up. Try to make it easier for him. I touched his jaw, leaned in for one last kiss. “Until we meet again, Rhys Frost.”
“Until we meet again, Torie Goode.”
He touched my lips with two fingers, and then turned away. Strode to the gangway, carrying his shirt and shoes. Stopped on the dock, shrugged into his shirt, stuffed his feet bare into the shoes, stuck his socks into his pocket, and kept going. He didn’t look back until he was at the truck. A wave. Blew a kiss. And then he was gone.
I sat in lonely, saddened silence for a long, long time.
Eventually, Lexie came out. “Hey, you,” she said, kissing the top of my head as she sat down. There was a little coffee left, and she pointed to it. “Can I have some of this?”
I nodded. “It was Harlow’s, but I’m sure she’d be okay with that.”
“Oh.” She poured the rest into a mug. “Where is she?”
“Back upstairs, I think.”
“Ooh, it’s a little cold. But still coffee.” She looked around, then back at me. “You’re just sitting here alone?”
“Harlow was here, then Rhys. But now Rhys is gone.”
“Oh? Where’d he go?”
“Home.”
That got her full attention. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. I liked him.”
“Me too,” I whispered. “But like isn’t the right L-word.”
She sighed. “I guess I thought he felt the same way.”
“He does.”
She blinked into a silence. “Then I’m confused.”
“He has to go back to sort out his life. He owns a company and property back in New Haven. He can’t just…say fuck it and stay here.”
“Oh. So…he’s coming back?”
“Someday, hopefully.”
“Do you have plans to stay in touch?”
I sniffled. “I dunno. We didn’t discuss that. Maybe. Probably. Maybe not. I don’t fucking know. Talking to him may be harder than just…not.” I held up the Jeep key. “He gave me the Jeep.”
“No shit. The big red pimped-out classic in Mom’s lot?”
I nodded. “That one.”
“No shit. That thing is cool as hell. He just…gave it to you?”
“He sure did.”
Lexie set her mug down and twisted to face me. “Are you okay? You don’t seem okay.”
“I’m not. But I will be. I miss him. But he has things to figure out, and so do I.” I tried to brighten. “Plus, you’re getting married!”
She grinned. “When you said you’d find your own way here, I had no clue it would lead to all this.”
“Me either,” I said, laughing. “So. Where are you and Myles going on your honeymoon?”
“We’re not. We spent like two months in a hut on a remote Indonesian island owned by a billionaire friend of one of Myles’s friends. So now we’re getting married. We just did the honeymoon part first, is all.”
I snickered. “I wonder what you two did for two months alone in a hut in the middle of nowhere.”
“A lot of that. I mean, a lot a lot.” A pause. “We also talked. About…um. Some things in my past that…that kept me messed up for a long, long time.”
I held her eyes. “I see. And is this why you got so worked about my virginity?”
She nodded. “The short, simple version of a very long, painful story is that I was sexually abused by my voice teacher for several years.” She shrugged, clear-eyed, but still obviously affected by the telling. “He, uhhh…he was my first and my only sexual experience until I moved away for college. So…yeah. I just…I wanted your first time to be a different experience than mine.”
“It will be,” I said.
She stared at me. “Wait. You and Rhys didn’t fuck?”
I bobbed my head side to side. “No. Not really. We did other things, and I was going to, but then it was obvious we were falling for each other and if I’d slept with him and he had to leave I’d be even more upset. I’m still technically a virgin, in that I haven’t had sexual intercourse yet. And I won’t, not until I can share that with Rhys.”
“What if—”
“I’m not entertaining any negative what-if scenarios, Lex. I’m a virgin. I’m in love with Rhys. I can’t be with him right now. All that being true, I have no interest in thinking about what I would do in some fictional or hypothetical future that doesn’t involve Rhys. For right now, I just want to figure out what my life looks like.”
She nodded. “I respect that.” A silence, and then she smirked at me. “How do you feel about going dress shopping?”
I sighed. “I hate wearing dresses. Are you going to make me wear some stupid frilly bullshit that makes me look like I’m wearing a tea cozy?”
Lexie leaned toward me, fake angry disbelief on her face. “Have you ever fucking met me?”
I laughed. “Good point.”
She wiggled her eyebrows. “Now that you’re here, and you got here on your own, you have no choice but let me spoil you with Myles’s money.”
I stared at her. “I’m afraid to ask what that means.”
“It means you, Mom, Cassie, Charlie, Poppy—if she ever gets her ass here—and all the other women of the Badd clan, are boarding a jet Myles has chartered for us, and we’re flying to LA where he’s hired an A-list glam squad to give us all makeovers, followed by forty-eight hours at an exclusive spa resort for massages and all that spa shit, then a designer with an Italian name I can’t pronounce is going to put us each in dresses that cost more than some houses. And then, once we’re all done getting the ever-loving hell pampered out of us, we fly back here for the wedding.”
“Really?”
“Would I make up something like that?”
“It sounds like a fairy tale.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I love Myles for who he is, and I’d love him if he was broke and homeless. But him being who he is does have its perks. Which includes him dropping a couple hundred grand like it’s nothing so all my girls can get pampered in style.”
“He’s that rich?”
She snorted. “Babe. He invests eighty percent of his earnings and lives exclusively off of a single endorsement stream. He owns entire buildings in Dallas, Nashville, and Manhattan, has stock in several super successful companies, and owns the rights and royalties to all his music, which he publishes himself under his own record company.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh yeah, it’s like that. My man is set.”
I laughed. “Your man. Never thought I’d hear you say that.”
She didn’t laugh. “Wanna hear something even more shocking? I’m his woman. There’s not a single thing he could ask of me that I wouldn’t do for him—except be with anyone else or share him.”
“Wow. It’s like that?”
She nodded. “Just like that. For life.”
“How does it feel?”
“To be in a relationship like that? To be his, and him be mine?”
“Yeah. That,” I whispered.
“Awesome. Scary as hell, but worth it.” She blinked hard, and my tough as nails, never-cries sister was crying. “He saved me. Rescued me from me. From a destructive, toxic, dead-end life. I’m in therapy, Tor. Every week, for an hour, I video conference with a therapist in San Francisco about being the victim of long-term sexual abuse, and it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.” She tilted her head. “Well, the b
est-best thing I’ve ever done was jerk off Myles backstage at that festival. Because I’ve not spent a day apart from him since, and I never will, but therapy is making me a better person, helping me finally and truly heal from years of trauma.”
“Years?” I asked.
“Yes, years. But it’s over, and there’s no point rehashing it. If you have specific questions, I’ll answer them, but I’d honestly just as soon let it lie. You know about it now, and you know I’m getting treated for it.”
I touched her arm. “Thank you for sharing. There’s nothing I need to know that you’ve not told me. I’m just glad you’re finding your way to okay.”
She hugged me. “Awesome. Now let’s go have Papa Lucas make us breakfast. He makes the best spinach and cream cheese omelets I’ve ever had.”
“Papa Lucas? Mama Livvie? It’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, it’s family.” She laughed. “Okay, it’s a little weird. But it’s family, and families are weird.”
The next twenty-four hours were a whirlwind. The guys were in frenzy of macho packing—apparently they were going on some hunting, whiskey drinking, gun shooting, manly-man version of our girls’ trip, and thus everyone in the entire clan was running around like crazy people, trading clothes and gear, making arrangements, figuring out where kids were going and who was watching whom and when, and figuring who was managing the bars and…I was exhausted just watching it all.
And, in the middle of it all, Poppy showed up.
With a boyfriend.
Poppy…god, I’d missed her. She was more amazing than ever—she’d reached her full height by tenth grade, and had spent the past few years flowering into her adult body…which, unfairly, meant her boobs got bigger, her ass rounder yet somehow tighter, her waist narrower, her cheekbones even more perfect. And, of course, living in New York had given her a distinctly Bohemian fashion sense that just fit her perfectly.
Case in point: she and her boyfriend—whose name, I shit you not, was Errol, because even her boyfriend was over-the-top cool—showed up in a vintage VW Westfalia camper van. Poppy descended from the driver’s seat wearing a long, loose, flowy, bohemian skirt, a peasant blouse showing a nearly-but-not-quite obscene amount of cleavage, a thick black leather belt, and knee-high black boots. Her hair was nearly as long as mine, but thick and feathered in natural waves and layers, worn loose under a floppy fedora-type hat. Huge gold hoop earrings, a diamond stud in her left nostril, and, ohhh shit, Mom was gonna freak—nipple piercings, obvious through the front of her shirt, because apparently she didn’t believe in bras either, even though her tatas were way too big for that to be practical or comfortable.
Oh my god, Poppy, you freak.
I was the first to see her, being the only one with nothing to do but sit outside Badd’s Bar and Grille and sip soda water and watch various members of the clan fly in and out looking for something or someone—Badd’s was ground zero, apparently, where all the luggage for those of us going to LA, and the guys going up into the bush, was being held.
Poppy saw me, and burst into a run, pawing her hat off her head and slamming into me for a hug. “God, Torie, I don’t know how I’ve lived without you these last couple years,” she whispered in my ear.
I clung as tightly to her as she was me. “I know, right? Why did we think it was a good idea to be apart?”
“I had this whole stupid I’m gonna go to an Ivy League university like Charlie thing going on.” She sounded so derisive, self-deprecating. “What an idiot I was.”
“So now you’re…what?”
She laughed. “I don’t know! Not going to Columbia anymore, at least. I officially withdrew a couple months ago.” She pulled away, held me by the shoulders at arm’s length. “Let me look at you.”
She did just that, looked me up and down. Then, with a giddy grin, she tapped the underside of my boobs.
“Torie, you have titties!”
I rolled my eyes and whacked her hands away. “Shut up. I just grew them, like, last year and I’m very sensitive about them, so be nice.” I reached out and flicked the bead of her nipple piercing. “Yours got even bigger…and pierced. You know Mom is going to shit puppies, right?”
“They did get bigger, didn’t they? It’s because I put on the freshman fifteen, except it was more freshman twenty, and most of it went to my tits and ass.”
“Right, because life isn’t fair and you suck.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, you try lugging these monstrosities around all day,” she drawled, cupping the objects in question. “Why are we still talking about our boobs? Come on, let me introduce you to Errol.”
“I’d gladly lug those around for a day, just to see what it’s like,” I said, following her back toward the VW van, which was parked down the street.
“Save you the trouble—tie a pair of sandbags to your chest, fill them with ten pounds of Jell-O each, and make them freakishly sensitive to everything.”
“And you pierced them…why?”
She leaned close to me. “I was lit, and it sounded like a good idea at the time.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And then I met Errol, and it turns out it was a great idea.” She shivered, a meaningful expression on her face. “The things he can do with his mouth? Oh man.”
“Poppy!”
She laughed. “What? I’m an adult.”
“Barely.”
“I’m over the age of consent, I’m legally an adult, and I’ve been on my own as long as you have.” She gestured, and the passenger side door opened, and a veritable angel of the Lord himself appeared.
If angels had colorful tattoos, blond hair in a surfer man-bun, scruffy stubble, and the most piercing blue eyes known to mankind, that is.
God, he was hot. I mean, I’m in love with Rhys and all, but damn. The eyes, the stubble, the man-bun, the stubble, the tattoos? He wore board shorts like he’d been born in them, flip flops, a tank-top, and what looked like a necklace made of shark teeth.
He had an air of confidence, like he’d seen the worst life could throw at him, handled it, and then said let’s go chill at the beach.
Poppy took his hand, twined her fingers in his. “Errol, this is my next oldest and possibly favorite sister, Torie. Torie, this is Errol.”
When he grinned at me and shook my hand, the charming brilliance of grin threatened the integrity of the sun itself. Clearly, Poppy did not mess around with her choice in men.
“Hey,” he said, in a thick Australian or New Zealand accent. “Nice to meet ya, finally. Pop’s talked my ear off about her four cool-as-hell sisters.”
Pop? That was cozy.
I widened my eyes at Poppy, because he had a sexy accent, too? I mean, come on.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you,” I said to Errol, “although I can’t say I’ve heard anything about you other than that you were coming with Poppy to the wedding.”
“Yeah, we’re kind of new at whatever this is, so she’s playing it kinda close to the vest, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded. “I do. My own we’re-not-sure-what-we-are situation just went back to Connecticut yesterday, so I’m still sort of reeling from that myself.”
Poppy rubbed my arm. “I talked to Mom yesterday to fill her in on our ETA, and she said your…whatever…Rhys? Is that right? Went back to New Haven and you’re sort of broken up over it, so be gentle.”
I laughed. “Being gentle would have been her letting me fill you on it myself, but it’s good to know Mom hasn’t changed that much. She wouldn’t be Mom if she didn’t meddle and interfere with the best possible motives.”
Poppy tilted her head. “What do you mean, Mom hasn’t changed that much? How much has she changed, and how?”
I laughed. “Oh, just wait. You’ll see.”
“That’s ominous.”
I shook my head, still laughing. “It’s not ominous. She’s just…a new and improved Mom, shall we say. Different, but good. It just takes some getting used to.”
“What
do you mean?”
“It wouldn’t do any good to tell you. Just brace yourself. Things here in Alaska are…pretty crazy.”
Poppy, Errol, and I walked together back to the bar.
“Mom said something about a trip somewhere?” Poppy said, as we entered the bar.
“Yeah, to LA, on a private jet. Lexie’s fiancé is springing for us to get makeovers by a Hollywood A-list glam squad, two days at a spa resort, and dresses by some Italian designer, tailored for each of us.”
Poppy’s eyes widened. “I know he’s, like, Myles North, but…really?”
“Apparently.”
“Have you met him? What’s he like?”
Before I could answer that question I saw a man behind the bar—one of the Badd men, although I was still figuring out who was who; what with all the testosterone and badassery and insane looks, it was hard keeping them straight. I think this one was the former SEAL. His name started with a Z, I think.
He smiled at us as we sat at the bar. “Hey, all. Torie, you I know. You two are new, which means you’re Mama Livvie’s youngest, Poppy, and her friend.” He extended his hand, and they both shook it. “I’m Zane, one of the owners.”
“I’m Poppy,” my sister affirmed. “And this is Errol.”
Errol greeted Zane, and then the burly bartender slapped his palms on the bar. “Well, we’re closed to the public for the day, which means I’m allowed to assume you’re all twenty-one.”
Errol raised his hand. “I mean, I’m actually twenty-four.”
Poppy assumed an innocent expression. “I have a license saying I’m twenty-one.”
I glared at her. “You do not.”
She shrugged. “A friend of friend is a professional forger for some mysterious organization. It’s all very hush-hush, and I had to pose in some rather risqué outfits for his personal collection.”
I stared at her. “I feel like I may have missed some things about your life in New York.”
“Our girl is quite the adventurous type, Pop is,” Errol said. “When I met her, she was hitchhiking on the highway in the middle of Missouri.”
A Real Goode Time Page 27
