A God in Carver (Carver High #1)

by Haven Francis

  “Meet me outside when you’re ready,” I tell Summer who is busy talking to her friends.

  When I’m outside I call Tatum. I just gave her a talk about how I would always be there for her even if she went back to Nash and at the very least I need to thank her for what she did.

  “Hey, how’d it go?” she says when she picks up.

  “How do you think it went? I can’t believe you did that for me. You have some serious balls. Thank you.”

  “So all is forgiven?” she asks, hopefully.

  “It would appear that way. And I think it’s probably safe for you to leave your house without getting lynched.”

  She laughs, “I don’t think I want to take any chances. Although, I might have to. Wes was here when I got home so I’m hiding out in my room going a little stir crazy. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with her. You’d think she would have learned her lesson by now – the guy is a total asshole.”

  I let out a sarcastic bark before I can think to stop it. “I tried to catch you before you left so I could thank you. But you were… busy.”

  “Nash? You saw that and you just left me there to fend him off on my own? God, what a prick. I mean, he was at that dinner with her and then he chases me down, pins me against my truck and shoves his tongue down my throat. He’s missing some brain cells. More than I thought.”

  The fact that her words make me extremely happy is concerning. “Sorry. I didn’t realize that it was a one sided kiss. I would have intervened had I known.”

  “You’re missing some brain cells too, Eastman, if you think I would voluntarily be kissing that kid. But you don’t have to worry about me. I have strong knee caps.”

  I cringe at that. “God, that’s so cruel.”

  “He deserved it. Anyway, I’m glad tonight was a success. If you need a place to stay you know you can come over after Cafferty’s party.”

  “Do you want me to? I mean, do you think Wes is gonna spend the night?”

  “Probably, but I can handle it. You don’t have to protect me from her men anymore. I’m just saying, if you need a place….”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks Tatum.”

  “No problem. I’ll talk to you later.”

  The line goes dead and I put my phone away as I see Summer and her friends coming out of the restaurant. “You ready?” She asks me with a bright smile.

  “Yep,” I tell her reluctantly while managing to smile and wrap my arm around her.

  I hold her hand as I drive to Colby’s. She talks the whole way about how she knew Tatum would do the right thing and how everything with the team and my family will go back to normal.

  Nothing feels normal though. Sitting in this car with her doesn’t feel normal anymore. I feel like a different person and my old life doesn’t feel normal anymore.

  I park the car and she turns her body so she’s looking at me. I look at her too and I can see the sadness in her eyes even though she’s smiling. “Is this where you want to be?” she asks me.

  “It’s been a long two days. My face and my body are both aching, I’m mentally drained. Where I really want to be is in my bed sleeping, but that’s not an option.”

  “That’s not really what I meant, Brandon. Is this where you want to be, here with me, or would you rather be with Tatum?”

  I stare at her, grateful that the car is dark and I can’t quite make out the sadness that I know is displayed on her face. And I hope she can’t see my guilt. But I am guilty and I don’t know how to tell her that so I remain silent.

  She reaches out her hand and cups my face, tentatively running her thumb over my lip. “There’s something inside of me that’s convinced that the two of you belong together, Brandon. Just hearing the two of you talk about each other tonight…. I don’t know. And after the last couple of days you’ve had, you should have been a sad mess tonight but you seem happier than ever. I can’t help but think it’s because you spent the day with Tatum. That she’s the reason you finally seem happy again. This is the last time I’m gonna say this and I need you to be honest with me. If there is even a chance that I’m right I need to know. It’s only fair to me.”

  I take her hand from my face and wrap it up in my own. God, I don’t want to say these words to her, but she’s right. I’ve already gone too far with Tatum, physically and emotionally, and she deserves to know. “I love you, Summer. I’ve loved you for so long. I’m gonna love you forever.”

  “I know,” she tells me, a tear falling from her eye that I brush away.

  I’m a coward so I look down, staring at my hands before I say, “I kissed her last night. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I don’t know how it happened, but it did. It was a huge mistake and I know that. I never meant to do that to you. I never wanted to hurt you. I was angry and confused and the game and my dad and that damn article… we were fighting, we were yelling at each other, I didn’t mean for it to go there … I don’t know what the hell happened.”

  She’s silent and I finally look up at her. Her head is ducked and she’s shaking it and, oh God, it hurts so bad. How could I have hurt her? Why the fuck did I do this to her. “Summer, I’m sorry,” I plead, grasping onto her face and bringing her eyes to mine. “It didn’t mean anything…”

  “Brandon, stop,” she whispers. “Just stop. You’re lying to yourself and you’re lying to me. Of course it meant something. You love her, you always have.”

  I shake my head, denying it, but she might be right. All I know is that I need to be honest with her. More than anything, she needs to know where we stand. “I don’t know how I feel about Tatum. I do love her and part of me always has. It was good for me to be in that house with her and her family today. It made me remember parts of myself that I let go of when I moved away from there. It made me feel whole in some way. And I don’t know what that means. If I’m being honest with you and with myself then I would say that, yes, it scares me because there is a possibility that the way I feel about her is wrong. I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know, Brandon, and as much as I wish that I could give you everything you need, I don’t know if I can. But if there’s a chance that she could… I want you to find out. I don’t want you to keep wondering if she’s the girl you love. I can’t keep living like this. I need you to let me go.”

  The sharp pain of reality slices through me just like it did when she said these words to me before. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not losing me. I’ll always be here. Even if I’m not the girl that was meant for you, I’ll always be here.”

  I shake my head at her. “How can you do that? How can you be so understanding and selfless? After what I did to you…”

  “I’m not being selfless. I want all of you Brandon, I’m not gonna settle for part of you knowing that another part of you belongs to her. Yes, this is gonna hurt like hell. If it’s her that you love it will damn near kill me. But I’ll be okay. I’ll recover and if it’s not you, then someday I’ll find a man who loves me the way I believe you love her.” She leans in and kisses me tenderly and I hold tight to her. When she pushes out of my arms, I let her go. She wipes her tears away and then steps out of my car.

  As I watch her go part of me feels like the world is ending and part of me feels like it’s just beginning.

  31

  After Summer left me all I wanted to do was chase after her and tell her she was wrong, that she was the only girl I loved, but I knew that was wrong. I knew it was unfair to do that to her. But it hurt like hell watching her go.

  I called Tatum to let her know what had happened and to make sure that she was okay in that house with that asshole because I knew that I couldn’t go to her either.

  With my house, Tatum’s house and Coach Mason’s house all out of the question I ended up driving my pathetic ass over to the Carter’s house and hanging out with Nate and Nick.

  Nash didn’t get home until this morning. When he saw me he acted like I had never left in the first place. Like
he never turned his back on me.

  When he grabs a case of beer and a couple of fishing rods and tells me, “Let’s go,” I figure it’s a better option than sitting on this couch and moping over the girls that I feel like I’ve lost.

  We sit on the shore, our poles on the ground beside us, the bobbers floating in the water as we stare at them. “You know, it’s not gonna kill you to get drunk once during football season. We don’t have a game for five days,” he says, holding out a beer.

  I take it out of desperation. Maybe I’ll get so drunk I’ll pass out. God knows I didn’t sleep at all last night. I crack it open and pour it down my throat. “That a boy,” Nash says, laughing.

  We sit in silence for a while before Nash says, “I heard about you and Summer.”

  “Oh yeah? What’d you hear?”

  “That she broke up with you. What the hell is that about?”

  “I don’t know… things are just strange right now.”

  “She looked pretty messed up about it last night. I felt kind of bad for her.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “Fine. I’ve been meaning to tell you… you look like shit today. What the hell happened to your face?”

  “Roger wasn’t happy about the way the game went on Friday.”

  “Jesus, your dad did that to you? I guess that explains why you’re back on my couch. Damn, you had a hell of a night, first Summer breaks up with you and then your dad kicks your ass.”

  “He kicked my ass on Friday. Tally put some shit on my face to cover it up before last night’s dinner.”

  “Tally? As in Tatum’s sister?”

  “Yeah,” I tell him.

  “Were you hanging out at her place yesterday?”

  “I spent the night on Friday and, yeah, hung out with them most of Saturday.”

  “What the hell is that about?” he asks, the anger clear in his voice.

  “Nothing. I got kicked out of my house, my face looked about a hundred times worse than it does now, I couldn’t show up at Coach Mason’s like this, all of my friends wanted to kill me, obviously Summer’s house was not an option, so I went to Tatum’s. I had some shit I needed to get off my chest so I killed two birds with one stone.”

  “Where’d you sleep?”

  “In her bed.”

  “What the hell, man. Are you kidding me? You fucking slept with my girl?”

  I laugh at him. “Yeah, I slept with her… like closed my eyes and went to sleep. Not all of us need to have sex just because were in bed with a girl. As you know, she’s got a queen size. There was plenty of space between us. And I hate to tell you this, Nash, but I don’t think she’s your girl anymore.”

  “She’ll always be mine and I swear to God if you even think about going there with her I’ll make what your dad did to you feel like a stubbed toe.”

  I stare at his angry face with disbelief. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, Nash, but you don’t get to tell me, or her, what to do. You lost that privilege when you fucked Jolee. That was brilliant, by the way, bringing her as your date last night and then thinking you had the right to force yourself on Tatum. She’s never going back to you, man. If you care about her at all you should probably just let her go.”

  “Why? So you can have her?”

  “So that she can move on and try to be happy again, asshole. What you did to her killed her and it’s selfish of you to keep trying to get her to go back to you especially when you don’t seem to have any problem moving on from her. Or enough respect for what you had with her to take a break for a few days from fucking Jolee.”

  “You’re always the good guy, aren’t you? You’re always the nice guy. The one who gets to judge the rest of us. You have no idea what Tatum and I have. You have no idea how much I love her.”

  “I know you love her, Nash. But I think you know that you’re never gonna be able to be faithful to anyone and that she deserves better than you.”

  “You think you’re the guy she deserves?”

  “I think I care about her and I’ve hurt her too many times because I was trying to protect you. I think I want her to be happy. And no, I don’t think I’m the guy she deserves, I just think she deserves to be let go by you so she can figure out what she wants.”

  Nash turns from me and shakes his head. “I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t think I can accept the fact that she’s never coming back to me. I shouldn’t have forced her to commit to me. If I hadn’t done that then the shit I did with Jolee wouldn’t have even bothered her.”

  I stare at him. I stare at him and I try, like I have hundreds of times before, to understand him. “Don’t you think that’s a problem? The way she was turning a blind eye to all of the things you were doing with all of those girls when she wasn’t around? What does that say about her? That she was willing to let you do that? That you were the only guy she was messing around with even though you were taking full advantage of the open relationship you had?”

  “What does it say about her?” he asks through his laughter. “That she’s the coolest girl I’ve ever known. That I had a sweet thing going and I shouldn’t have ever changed it.”

  “It’s sad that after all of these years you don’t really know her.”

  “And I suppose you do?”

  “Yeah, Nash, I do. She let you get away with all of that shit because she loved you and she didn’t want to lose you. She grew up watching her mom and Tally being submissive, letting guys treat them like shit, depending on some douche bag to make them feel like they were worth something. That’s what Tatum knows – that self-worth, for a woman, is based on whether she is desirable or not. Hell, I mean according to her, women can’t even get work in this town unless they are good looking enough.

  “And you know what else she knows? That every time Trish fell in love and moved a guy into her house he would immediately start treating her like shit, leaving her alone on Friday nights, drinking themselves into a stupor, yelling at her mom, beating her mom, telling her mom she was a no good whore. You saw all of that just like I did. But you don’t get it. You treated her exactly how she knew men treated women. She knew that if she took things to the next level with you, you would start treating her like shit. But she loved you enough to give you a chance. So congratulations, asshole, you proved her right.”

  He’s silenced for a minute. Hopefully he’s considering what I said for once. “You think too damn much, you know that? That’s all a bunch of bullshit. If she hadn’t left me, if I hadn’t believed she was gone forever, I wouldn’t have cheated on her. I love her.”

  “I know that you love her. I know you regret what you did to her. But I think you need to be honest with yourself and admit that commitment is not in the cards for you right now. That you would choose freedom over a lifetime with her. And that’s okay, Nash. But it’s not okay to keep her on that leash where she never has a chance to move on from you and find a guy who is willing to make her a priority. It’s not okay to keep her for yourself when you’re not willing to give yourself only to her. She deserves more than that.”

  Nash has his hands clasped behind his head. He’s not saying anything but his body is shaking. “I don’t want to lose her,” he finally whispers.

  “You don’t have to lose her, man. She’ll come around. She’ll forgive you. But unless what you really want is only her for the rest of your life, you have to let that part of her go.”

  His shoulders are shaking harder now. The sounds coming out of his body are painful, like he’s fighting the truth. “Why do I have to be this way? Why can’t I just love her right and treat her good and not need all those other women?”

  I reach over and grab tight to his shoulder. “You’re eighteen. You’ve been with her since you guys were twelve. It’s normal to want something new and different. To explore your options. To be free. It’s who you are, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it’s not who she is. She needs stability. She needs someone she can count on to n
ever let her down.

  “You’ve been there for her when no one else was. You’ve made her happier than anyone else could. You can be the guy who she can count on to never let her down, but not as her boyfriend; that guy will always disappoint her. But you, the guy who has always been her friend and has always loved her will never let her down. You can be that guy for her again.”

  He sits up and runs his palms over his eyes. “Sometimes I wish you were just like my brother and Reggie and the rest of the assholes that I call my friends. That you would tell me it’s okay to be a selfish asshole. You and Tatum… you guys always gotta call me out.”

  “It’s not like you ever listen to either of us.”

  “I do listen to you. The two of you are the only ones who make me want to be a better man. To do the right thing. I’m gonna do the right thing.”

  32

  All I can think about is Brandon. I miss him, which is probably stupid. When he called me after the banquet to tell me what had happened between him and Summer, hope sprang up in me for a moment before I promptly forced myself to tamp it down. He didn’t say I was the reason she broke up with him, but based on what Presley had told me I had to assume it was. The fact that he chose not to come back to my house last night and that he hasn’t called at all leaves me with no option but to face the facts. What Summer did devastated him and made him realize that she’s the one he loves. Which should make me happy. Despite what happened between me and Brandon, it’s clear that Summer is the girl he belongs with. And she deserves him. I shouldn’t have even been entertaining the idea that something beyond a friendship was in the cards for me and Brandon.

  But I miss him. A lot. And I just hope that I can go back to being friends with him and not let my feelings get in the way.

  When my shift is over, for once, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go home and see asshole Wes lounging on our couch. I don’t want to go home to my dark, lonely room and my bed that will still smell like Brandon. I don’t want to think about going to school tomorrow. About seeing Brandon with Summer and Nash with Jolee or whatever girl he’s moved onto.