Friends with Benefits (Friend Zone Series Book 3)

by Nicole Blanchard

  I finished pulling on my shirt and sat next to her. Her flame-bright hair fanned over her pillow. I brushed it back to reveal her face and kissed her soft, pink lips. “I have to. The girls will be up soon, and I have practice.”

  “Play hooky and get back into bed with me.” Her hand dipped under my shirt, her nails scratching lightly up and down my back, making me groan, and testing my resolve.

  Maybe it had occurred to me on at least one occasion that the friends-with-benefits gig was good for me, too. A girlfriend during the most crucial season of my life would complicate things, and distract me from my ultimate goal. And Ember Stevens was, if nothing else, the sexiest kind of distraction.

  “I wish I could, angel. But unless you ever want to see me again, I should probably go. Coach will make me run bleachers for days if my ass is a minute late again.” My body heated as I recalled a moment last month when I’d slept in barely ten minutes because I’d woken up to my alarm and wanted to spend a few more moments with her. My legs had been sore for a week because of all the running.

  “I’ll give you a deep tissue massage if he makes you run. I know you like those.”

  I let her draw me down for another kiss, despite my better judgment. Common sense didn’t seem to work quite right when it came to her. Heat licked along my nerves, settled low in my gut. I gave serious consideration to calling in sick—a little running never killed anybody.

  She shifted, and the sheet slipped down her body accidentally-on-purpose. My muscles went tight at the sight of her pert, rose-tipped breasts and flat belly. I wanted my head in between her shapely thighs and my mouth on her heat until she was as wound up as she constantly made me.

  I couldn’t remember a time since we’d been neighbors when I hadn’t wanted to be right where I was now. Couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t wanted her.

  Which is exactly why I pulled back, letting the cool air chilling the room rush between us. Get it together, Wilder. Keep your game face on.

  She doesn’t need the pressure. Keep it light, simple. Focus.

  “Next time,” I promised.

  Her sigh was petulant, but she said, “Alright. See you Wednesday?”

  That should give me enough time to clear my head and give me some perspective. Her classes and twenty-four-hour shifts were honestly a godsend. Spending too much time in her bed, wrapped up in her, made me think stupid things. Like wondering what it’d be like to have something more.

  Clarity and space. That’s what I needed. Not another morning waking up next to the woman who made me think I could find a woman who’d make me as happy as my parents were.

  “See you Wednesday,” I repeated.

  I was already looking forward to it.

  The door closed behind me with a soft click, and I padded down the short hallway to the living room, where I stumbled to a halt. The twins were perched on the couch, their faces ablaze in a glow of bright pink as they stared, rapt, at My Little Pony on the television. They both glanced over at the same time, noted my presence like it was a daily occurrence, then turned back to the TV. I mean, it was practically a daily occurrence, but they weren’t supposed to know that.

  My huff of indignation caught in my throat. We thought we were so clever, having me sneak in after they went to sleep and slip out before they woke up. Clearly, our best-laid plans had been stymied by a pair of munchkins. They didn’t seem to be as caught off guard and continued watching TV while I wondered if I should wake Ember up or not.

  “Morning,” Tillie said before I came up with an answer. She yawned and glanced over at me as the show moved to a commercial. Molly merely smiled, then shoved her face in her sister’s arm.

  They were too precious for words sometimes. Ember had done such a good job protecting them from her parents’ bullshit. “What are you doing up?” I asked and crossed to ruffle their silken hair.

  “Waiting for Emmy.”

  “Do me a favor?” I asked. Tillie nodded, and Molly peered out with interest. “Don’t tell your sister you saw me.”

  “Like a secret?” Tillie asked. At my nod, she said, “We’re not supposed to keep secrets.”

  Too damn smart. “Well, I won’t get you in trouble. Don’t go too hard on your sister today.”

  “‘Kay. We won’t.”

  I’d have to talk to her about them later. They saw us sleeping together that one time before, but I knew Ember didn’t want them to jump to the wrong conclusions. She’d done her best to shield them both from her mom and dad, and she didn’t want to fuck it all up now that they were finally settling into their new routine.

  I kissed both of their heads. Ember was going to ream me when she found out they saw me leaving after all our careful planning, but we’d handle it. I had no doubt she would try to pump the brakes on our little arrangement, but that wasn’t gonna happen either.

  She might be a distraction, but maybe, for once in my life, a distraction was what I needed.

  “You okay?”

  I hated that question with an intensity that couldn’t be described.

  That’s all anyone asked me last year.

  Coaches.

  Teammates.

  Doctors.

  Physical therapists.

  My parents.

  My recruiters.

  The answer to that question—if it ever needed to be asked—was an unequivocal no.

  No one would ever be okay watching their dreams swirl down the drain. No one would ever be okay watching all their hard work turn into a big, fat fucking waste. I sure as hell wasn’t.

  But that wasn’t going to happen to me again.

  I had worked too hard.

  I had wanted it too much.

  But that didn’t mean I could fully ignore the pain in my shoulder when it seared through me like an arrow. I could barely contain the grimace as I tried to control my breathing and moderate my expression so no one could read it. It didn’t fool Alex, who jogged to the mound after my wild pitch. Alex, the one man who knew my game better than I did.

  I glanced around to the coaches, who were too busy discussing batting strategy to notice one practice pitch gone awry. If they heard one whisper of an injury, they’d be on my case for more physical therapy, and I wasn’t fucking gonna let that happen. Physical therapy equaled bench time. And my ass has seen enough bench time to last me the rest of my career.

  I belonged on the mound, and I wasn’t going to let anything stop me from making sure I stayed there.

  Alex stopped when he got close enough to whisper. “Is it your arm?”

  The arm in question ached from somewhere deep inside like it did when I had worked it for too long. Fatigue and overuse roused a ghost pain from the torn tissue, but that was all. I simply hadn’t stretched enough.

  I leveled Alex with a look that had him lifting his hands in a defensive position. “I’m fine. If you fuckin’ ask me that again, though, you won’t be. I’m gonna warm up some more and send in McGuire to practice for a bit.”

  Alex nodded, but I could feel his gaze on me from time to time as I threw practice pitches with a freshman catcher and then did some deep stretching exercises I’d learned from my physical therapist, a big, brawny guy named Ted who used to be a big, badass Army Ranger once upon a time.

  After a half-hour, my arm felt loose enough to throw again, and I returned to the mound. I practiced the rest of the day without any complications, but Alex’s concern was infectious. Dammit, this is why I didn’t like anyone asking me if I was okay. People start asking it enough, and you start wondering if maybe you’re not.

  After practice, I gave myself time in the jetted tub and alternated soaking my shoulder and icing it with a big-ass bag of ice from the machines in the locker rooms specifically for injuries. The shoulder didn’t bother me aside from the one throw, but I didn’t want to take any chances. There was too much riding on this season.

  Like my life.

  “Wilder!” Coach Taylor yelled.

  “Yeah, Coach, in here.�
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  He rounded the corner, jerking to a stop when he found me in the tub. “Good. You should keep resting that shoulder when you’re not practicing. We don’t want you to strain it any more than you have to.”

  “Alright, Coach.”

  “You were looking good out there today. I just wanted to tell you to keep it up. Although, if you’re ever late to a practice again, I won’t be pleased.”

  “No, Coach.”

  “I know women can be a pretty temptation, but I want you to keep focused until the end of the season. March is going to come quickly, and you don’t need any distractions. You hear me?”

  Sometimes, I wondered if the man had a sixth sense. Then again, he spent most of his waking hours living and breathing the game, coaching, and coaxing his players to their best. It was no wonder he knew us better than we knew ourselves.

  “You got it, Coach.”

  He narrowed his eyes at my words. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, kid. I know you’ve got that girl of yours.”

  See? Knows everything, I swear. Alex once said he thought Coach Taylor might have bugged our cribs and shit with cameras and tapped our phones, but I had brushed him off at the time. Now that I came to think of it, though, there was no other explanation.

  “I’m not going to tell you how to live your life,” he continued, “but this is the most important season of your career. I need you focused to win, but you need to focus to succeed. You understand?”

  “Yeah, Coach, I understand.”

  He narrowed his eyes even further. Sometimes, I thought they’d up and disappear into his skull. “I mean it. I’m not distracted. I’m focused one-hundred percent.”

  There was a pause while he studied my face. Seeming to be satisfied with whatever truth he divined from my expression, he gave a decisive nod. “Well, alright, then. I’ll see you at weight training this afternoon. And don’t be late.”

  It was almost comforting how predictable he could be, even when his mind-reading crap creeped the shit out of me.

  But he wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t afford to be distracted, much as I liked the woman doing the distracting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ember

  “But I don’t want to go to the grocey store,” Tillie complained, dragging her feet and making me grit my teeth. “I want to stay home and watch princess movies.”

  I gave myself three long, deep breaths before I answered. After a long shift and an even longer day of classes, the last thing I wanted to do was drag the girls to a busy store and spend another endless hour slogging through the aisles with them running around me like a pack of snarling werewolves. But our pantry was looking sparse, and the social worker was due for a visit, so I had no other choice.

  “Grocery store,” I corrected. Feeling calmer, I brushed her hair away from her face. “I would rather watch princess movies, too, sweetheart. But if we don’t get groceries, we’re gonna have to eat your sister for dinner.” I dug my finger into Tillie’s neck and was rewarded with a giggle.

  “We can’t eat Molly,” Tillie protested once her giggles subsided. “She wouldn’t taste very good. Besides, I’d rather have beef stew.”

  Taking both of their hands, I said, “Beef stew sounds good, but let’s see how it goes.”

  “Beef stew, beef stew, beef stew,” they chanted as I guided them inside the sliding doors. Their laughter was a welcome respite from the cranky mess they’d both been in since I had picked them up from Tripp’s mother’s house. I couldn’t blame them. I’d been cranky, too.

  My mother’s voice had been in my head all day during classes. Telling me how irresponsible I was being, giving up being with the girls to further my education. I could be working to provide them with a better life instead of wasting time at school. It didn’t make sense, I knew that intellectually, but the guilt was very real. It had been a tight ball in my stomach each day I left the girls.

  The only time I could ignore it was when I was with Tripp.

  Hell.

  Nothing about my life was simple right now.

  Nothing about my life made sense.

  Except the girls.

  And…perhaps not so surprisingly, Tripp, in a weird way.

  But maybe weird was exactly what I needed when everything was going down the drain.

  Maybe he was exactly what I needed.

  I shook my head and focused on gathering the items on my shopping list. Milk, eggs, bread. The basics. I couldn’t afford much more, at least not until the social worker came through with the government assistance I had been able to apply for—at least temporarily—until we got everything sorted legally. Which was another thing on my never-ending to-do list.

  The thought of getting food stamps and WIC didn’t fill me with pride, but there was nothing I wouldn’t do for my sisters, and we had to eat. As soon as I finished my paramedic’s program in May, I’d be able to apply for the paramedic’s position at work, which would nearly double my salary and give the girls and me some cushion room instead of working paycheck-to-paycheck, like I was right now. Maybe if I also applied for custody, there’d be some sort of benefits, but I didn’t want to think about that too closely either.

  The thought of being the twinkies’ legal guardian scared the crap out of me. For one thing, it was a lifetime commitment in a way that being their sister wasn’t. For another, it meant choosing to kick my mom out of my life—and by extension theirs—in a more permanent way than I’d ever done.

  Change might be necessary, but it didn’t come easy.

  I filled my basket with the necessities and caved on the beef stew for dinner to appease the monsters. As I was weighing my options for the meat selection, I sighed and chose the more expensive one. The girls needed to eat, and I needed leftovers for lunches. I’d simply have to ask work for more hours or find another area to skimp on.

  I placed the stew meat in the buggy and looked up. There was nothing in sight save for the small pile of groceries, which I hoped would stretch to last a few days, maybe even until my next paycheck. The girls weren’t hovering by the cart where I’d left them.

  They were nowhere to be found.

  I didn’t panic—at first. I generally didn’t panic when it came to emergency situations. You’d think I would because of the sheer amount of anxiety that plagued me on a day-to-day basis, but when it mattered, really mattered, my brain hyper-focused on everything around me. It almost slowed the world down so that I could process the information I was receiving.

  The meat aisle was barren except for me. It was a weekday afternoon, so most people were probably still at work or school. There were no displays in the aisle for them to hide behind, and the only door was to the butcher, which only opened from the inside.

  “Girls?” I called out, almost hesitantly at first. Afraid that if I voiced my fears, it would breathe life to them. “Molly? Tillie?”

  When they didn’t appear, I felt the first whispers of panic. Surely, they were just playing hide-and-seek. If I wasn’t so freaking worried, I’d be annoyed. Except the girls knew better than to run off when we were in public. We’d had the stranger-danger conversation on more than one occasion.

  I couldn’t breathe. The thought of them being taken…No. I wasn’t going to think about that. Images of my mother stalking us and taking the twins out of spite ran through my head as I abandoned the cart and began dashing to each aisle, finding each one empty.

  “Molly! Tillie!”

  I heard a giggle and thought I had imagined it. Spinning around, I followed the sound to the dairy aisle, where the girls were hiding behind a stack of milk crates. My brain didn’t process their mischievous grins or cheeks pink with laughter.

  “Ta-da!” Tillie shouted. “You found us. We were playing hide-and-seek.”

  I fell to my knees in front of them, my heart in my throat. It would make sense to yell at them and berate them for running off in a public place, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was so grateful they were safe that it obliterated
any anger I may have felt that they were playing games.

  “Emmy?” Molly asked. “Why are you crying?”

  “You scared me. I thought you were lost.” Or worse. But I didn’t say that out loud for fear of scaring them, too. “Haven’t I told you not to run off when we’re in the grocery store? It’s not safe.”

  “We wanted to make you laugh. You’ve been so busy lately that we thought you’d think it was fun,” Tillie said, tears in her eyes.

  “Oh, babies,” I choked out. God, sometimes it felt like I couldn’t ever do anything right. Was it even fair to them to keep them with me? Would they be better off with a real family, even if that meant they weren’t with me?

  One thing at a time.

  At the moment, that was all I could handle.

  “I’m hungry,” Molly whispered, her lips wobbling. “Can we go home?”

  Swallowing hard, I took their hands in mine and led them back to our buggy. “Sure, we can. Let’s finish shopping, and we’ll go home, and I’ll make my favorite sisters some beef stew. Deal?”

  The two of them climbed up in the buggy and stared up at me with identical smiles. “Deal,” they both said at the same time.

  I finished my shopping with their chatter in the background. Having them back didn’t assuage the fear clutching my heart.

  Because I realized how easy it would be to lose them.

  While the twins played in the bath, I tidied up from dinner, moving on autopilot. I packed away the leftovers into containers for their lunches, loaded the dishwasher, and wiped down the counters. Big Bang Theory played in the background, even though I’d watched all the episodes at least a thousand times. I didn’t care how many times Charlie and Layla made fun of me for watching the same movies and shows over and over: it was one of the only things that gave me comfort.

  At least the people in the shows never let me down. Sure, one may get canceled, or an actor or actress might leave, but I could roll back to season one at any time and relive all of my favorite memories. They didn’t abandon or neglect me as my family did.