“As if I would do anything dangerous,” Evan said.
“Coming from the detective, that means nothing to me,” I told him, waiting to see any kind of reaction, but I didn’t get one. I went back to composing our tent, and when no one thought I was looking, I stole a glance at my brothers who shared a knowing look.
They were hiding something from me even though we never hid anything else from one another, we were that close, and that really pissed me off.
What could be such a big deal that they felt like they needed to keep secrets?
There was no more room for dishonesty in my life. I was going to find out what they were hiding, and I hoped it didn’t ruin the relationship between us because without my brothers, I wasn’t too sure where I’d be, who I’d be, or what the hell I would do in life.
I really hoped they were smarter than that.
If anyone knew the consequences of a lie, it was me.
Chapter Three
Luna
Most people, when they moved, got their own place because living with your parents was the ultimate loser stamp when you were an adult. It made someone look pathetic like they couldn’t get their life together, but I didn’t care what anyone else thought. My give a damn got busted a long damn time ago when it came to what people thought of me.
I knew the truth.
I lived with my parents because my family needed me. I was their only daughter. Dad was sick, and mom was run ragged from working so much. Plus this was a good chance for me to spend time with my dad because if the cancer beat him, then this time was precious. There was the added bonus of saving money too, but I was going to help out as much as I could.
The drive from Boston to Camden last night was surreal. It was a place I never thought I’d find myself again. When Ethan passed the city limits sign of Camden and the high school came to view, I knew in my gut nothing had changed. Everything looked the same.
Even my room.
I always had the basement of the house so I could come and go as I pleased. It was only light outside when I got I got home last night, but my parents were already asleep, and I didn’t want to wake them. Not when mom worked so hard and dad was ill.
When Ethan parked the moving truck last night, I had made sure to say thank you, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and jumped out to run to the basement door because being alone with him wasn’t a good idea. When I unlocked the door, I waved, and he got into his brother’s truck. I watched the red taillights disappear.
And now here I was, standing in the middle of the basement at five in the morning since I couldn’t sleep and decided to make some coffee.
Everything looked the same. For the most part.
There was a small kitchenette, but with updated stainless-steel appliances and a new, small kitchen island that was more of a small square chopping block with storage underneath. The carpet had been removed and replaced with hardwood, and the old floral pattern couch had been exchanged for a leather sectional and a large flat screen tv. I’d bet anything it was for dad to watch his football games.
But the one thing that hadn’t changed at all, not even a little bit, was my bedroom. While the coffee brewed, I walked into my room again and flipped on the light, the past staring directly in my face. Light pink walls blinded me, along with posters of Zac Efron. My comforter was purple, and my bed frame was silver, adding to the shine and glitter of the girliness of the room. Pictures of me, London, and Oliver lined my dresser, and a photo collage hung on the wall of us too.
With a deep breath, I took a step forward, my foot sinking into the soft carpet, and I sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the gurgle of the coffee pot, and the air kicking on. It would be one of the lasts nights the air was on. Autumn was here, and that meant cold weather and snow.
My pink and purple butterfly lamp was still sitting on the nightstand next to my bed, and I flipped it on, illuminating the spread stained-glass wings. “God, this room needs a makeover,” I mumbled to myself. It was like pink and purple threw up in here. I sighed when I stared at the drawer that held all my secrets, all the things I made myself forget, all the memories I wanted to erase from my mind sat in that drawer, and I wanted to look in it, I really did.
Because then I’d see his face. But then I’d get sad and angry, and I’d cry, and I wouldn’t give Easton Moore any more of my tears. He didn’t deserve them. So I laid back on the bed, ignoring the impulse to open that drawer just like I did in high school and closed my eyes. I took a meditating breath, and when I opened them I almost screamed when my eyes locked onto a shirtless Zac Efron on my ceiling.
Sonofabitch, I forgot that was there.
I covered my mouth and laughed until my belly hurt. Why was he on my ceiling? I was such a weirdo in high school. If I remembered correctly, I stood on my tiptoes on the bed every night and kissed him goodnight.
Zac Efron, my first kiss.
And probably my last.
Ugh, I didn’t want to get into how pathetic I was. Easton had made me close in on myself, and I ended up trusting no guy, and I didn’t give myself a chance too either. They were all a disappointment, and I was better off without them.
Which meant I was a virgin because I had severe trust issues.
With a pitiful groan, I rolled out of bed and shut off the light. This room needed a renovation before I moved in. I refused to be reminded of the past every day while I slept. I lived in Camden now. I was in the past, and the only way to move forward was to change for the better. I closed the door behind me and cursed when I saw another damn poster on the front of my door of Zac.
I had an obsession when I was a teenager; why didn’t anyone tell me? “I’ll deal with you later, Zac. I’m sorry, but it’s time for us to part ways. You’ll understand.” Great. Now I was talking to him as if he were real. Here I was, a teen all over again. I spun on my heel, hastily walked into the kitchen, grabbed a mug from the cabinet, and poured the aromatic java. I brought my nose to the rim and inhaled, feeling better already.
“Shit!” I squeaked when Zac’s face was on the front of my mug. A picture of him from High School Musical. “Oh, you have got to be kidding me. You’re freaking everywhere.” I reached into the cabinet and searched for a new mug, any mug that didn’t have his face on it, and my hands wrapped around something oddly shaped.
The handle was bumpy, yet the finish itself was smooth. I pulled it out, and my heart leaped in my throat when I noticed it was the mug Easton made for me when we were twelve. We had signed up for this pottery class, and I ended up getting the chickenpox and couldn’t go to the lesson.
In sloppy letters, it said, ‘Feel better, best friend’. The letters were all different shapes and sizes, and the cup itself was this really ugly green color, but even to this day, no matter how much I hated him, this was my favorite mug.
I placed it in the cabinet and pushed it all the way back so it would never see the light of day again, then grabbed a plain white mug, poured the coffee from my Zac Efron cup into the new one, and tossed Zac into the trash.
“Sorry, but there is just too much of you around right now,” I slammed the lid of the trashcan down and meandered into the living room to plop on the couch. I barely had the first sip when my mom and dad’s voice resounded off the walls upstairs.
“James, she is here! Baby? My sweet Luna, where are you?” My mom called out for me, and I grinned. I might be twenty-five, but I was a momma girl’s through and through.
“She is probably sleeping, Tessa. Good lord, you’ll wake the neighbors with that loud mouth of yours.”
I snorted from dad’s words. He wasn’t wrong.
“Oh, you better watch yourself, James Nightingale. I will withhold sexual favors.”
I spat up a little of my coffee and gagged. Okay, I didn’t need to hear that. My parents didn’t have sex. I was delivered by a stork. It was the only way I was able to be here. The thought kept me sane because who wanted to think of their parents being sexually active?
; Gross.
My mom giggled, “James, stop it. We aren’t alone.”
“Okay, I’m here! You guys can go back to bed and stop… feeling up one another,” I yelled from where I sat, and my mom’s heavy footsteps pounded against the floor as she hurried to me.
“Luna?” The old wooden stairs creaked and moaned as my mom came down the steps.
I set my mug on the coffee table and ran around the couch just as her foot made it to the floor. I wrapped her small frame in a tight hug, and tears burned my eyes. It had been too long since I had seen her, and now that I was here, I knew that living in Boston was the wrong thing to do. I shouldn’t have ever left.
I ran for the wrong reasons when I should have stayed for the right ones.
“Where is my Star?” My dad called out after me, his loud feet pounding on the steps like a giant. He never called me Luna. He thought it was funny to call me a star that surrounded the moon. I loved it and I never wanted it to change. It was our thing and it meant everything to me.
“I’m right here,” I said, still keeping a tight hold on mom. She was so small and skinny, always had been. If I ever wanted to know what I would look like when I aged, all I would have to do is look at my mom.
We were practically twins, except she had a bit more gray in her brown curly hair and wrinkles on her face. While she had brown eyes, I had inherited my dad’s green eyes, the only thing that told the world we were related in some way.
“There’s my girl,” he said, yanking me away from my mom’s arms.
I buried my nose in his chest and inhaled, tears stinging my eyes when I felt how much skinnier he was. He smelled sick, not like the usual bar of soap, but like a hospital. I tightened my arms around him, and the first tear fell.
“Oh, I’ll be alright, sweetie. I’ll be alright,” he comforted me when I should have been the one comforting him.
“You don’t feel like it,” I said, wiping my nose on the front of his shirt.
He leaned back. “Did you just wipe your nose on me?” His smile was telling, reminding him of all the times I did that as a child if I had to guess.
“No?” I grinned, and his big hands came up and wiped my tears away. He was the only man in my life that never disappointed me.
“It’s so good to have you home, honey,” my mom said, running her fingers through my hair. “You look too skinny. Were you eating in Boston? That’s okay; I’ll fix that. I’ll make some breakfast, come on.”
“I ate,” I weakly argued because my diet consisted of cereal and noodles. What were even vegetables?
Dad chuckled. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go upstairs, and you can tell us all about this last year.”
With his hand in the middle of my back, he guided me up the steps, and for the first time since I dreaded coming back to Camden, I finally felt at home.
And that was something Easton could never take away from me. He was just a boy, he wasn’t my entire life, and now that I was here with my mom and dad, I realized just how short life could be.
Tomorrow, I’d go to Lowe’s and pick up some supplies to redecorate my room and start living again.
“Hey, dad?” I asked as we made our way to the top of the stairs.
He wheezed, leaning against the wall after shutting the door to the basement.
“Dad! Are you ok?”
“Fine, just need a minute to catch my breath. I’m alright; I’m alright. Stop fussing.” He pushed off the wall with his foot and beads of sweat shined on his forehead when mom turned on the kitchen light.
“You don’t look alright.”
“It’s the medication,” he said.
Right. It couldn’t be the cancer making him feel like crap.
Tears threatened my eyes again, and the thought of living life without my dad seemed more real every second I was at home. His skin was clammy, and his cheeks sunken in, but he hadn’t lost his hair yet. It was only a matter of time though.
“What did you need, sweetie?” he asked just as a coughing fit hit him and mom rushed to get him a glass of water. When she set the glass down in front of him, she petted his back with long strokes, and he sighed before taking a long gulp of the icy liquid. “That’s better.”
“I was going to ask if you wanted to go to Lowe’s to help me with a project. I wanted to redo my room. I don’t want to push you though.”
“Are you kidding?” He lit up like a Christmas tree. “I’d love to go and help you with your room. That Zac needs to go. He drives me nuts,” he grumbled. “But your mother wouldn’t let me take down the posters.”
“Oh, James. They are just posters,” my mom said with a roll of her eyes and a tilt of her lips.
“They are fantasies, and my little girl can’t get those until she is twenty-five, thirty even!”
I giggled. “Dad, I am twenty-five.”
He slammed his head on the table and groaned. “Crap. I’m screwed.”
“So? Project? Me and you? Mom too, if she wants.”
“Oh, no. I don’t do things that like. You and I can go have a spa day, honey. I’ll bring you drinks and such.”
Mom never was the type of woman that liked doing work like that.
“Looks like it’s just you and me dad.”
“You can count on it, my little star.”
I sat down next to him and laced our hands together. He had to be okay.
He had to be.
Chapter Four
Easton
“Come on; we have been meaning to build a cabin up there where we camp. Let’s just go price the lumber,” Ethan said as he walked into the kitchen with a towel wrapped around his waist. He stole the apple in my hand and took a bite out of it before tossing it to me again.
“Really?” I said, throwing it back at him, and he barely had time to catch it before it smacked against his chest.
He bit into the apple again, and I grabbed another one from the bowl. “I have my shift at two. If we go, it has to be quick. I’m on a twenty-four-hour shift today.”
“Damn, I wonder whose cat you will be rescuing this time,” he said.
“Shut the fuck up, asshole. You’re on shift tomorrow. I’ll make sure to tell the guys to make you cook.”
“Aw man, come on. You know I can’t cook.”
“Aw, little Ethan pouting? Ethan want his binky?” I spoke to him as if he were a baby.
“Man, fuck you.” He flipped me off as he disappeared down the hall and closed the door to the guest room.
I took a bite of the apple, the juices flowing into my mouth and dripping down my chin as I chewed. All morning I thought of ways to get a hold of Luna. I was going to beg her parents, plead with them that I wanted to make things right with their daughter.
If her father didn’t slam the door in my face first.
Yeah, winning her affection was going to be hard enough, but her parents? That just might be a lost cause. Her mom was nice to me, but her dad was protective of his little girl, and I respected that. I hurt her deeply, and they were the ones that had to deal with it. At least, I assumed they were.
“You ready? We need to get going,” I yelled after my brother when the clock read eleven. I didn’t have much time, and if I walked in there and he was shaving his damn chest hair with my razor again, I was going to kick his ass.
Again.
“I’m coming, don’t get your thong in a twist,” Ethan laughed at his own joke as he came out of the hallway.
“You aren’t funny.”
“I’m hilarious,” he said, snagging his keys off the hook. “Ready? After I’ll drop you off at work.”
“Sounds like a plan.” My black duffel bag full of snacks and a change of clothes sat on the plastic tabletop. Yeah, plastic. None of us had invested in any household items at any of our apartments, and I took that as another sign that it was because we were waiting on something more.
The Hampton mansion. It was going up for auction in a few weeks, and I needed to talk to my brothers about it. I had bout f
ifty-grand saved up in the bank, nothing special for a house that size, but maybe if all of us came together, we would have a chance at buying it.
I locked my teeth in the apple and, with one hand, picked up the bag while the other scooped up my thermos filled with coffee, well, more creamer than coffee, but everyone had their vices, right?
“Let’s go,” I mumbled around the red apple between my lips, no doubt Ethan couldn’t understand a word coming out of my mouth, but he got the gist of what I meant since he kept walking out the door.
The day was beautiful, a bit of overcast, but I smelled it in the troublesome breeze that a storm was coming. The clouds slowly gathered, and the temperature was dropping. Snow would fall in the next day or so, and that usually meant a lot of car accidents.
I might be a busy man at the firehouse if the weather had anything to say about it.
I tossed my bag in the bed of the truck and climbed into the passenger seat. The diesel engine grumbled to life, a puff of black smoke ebbed and flowed out of the exhaust, and Ethan pulled out of the driveway, leaving my apartment behind as we drove down Ellicott St.
As I looked out the window, I noticed the leaves swaying from the wind blowing, and the slight overcast kept darkening the further we drove into town. My heart sped up as it always did when we passed the ranch style home on the right surrounded by pastures of land.
Luna’s parent’s house.
And there, in the front yard, was the old oak tree where I said I would always be there for her.
I broke my vow.
It wasn’t a real marriage, but as I grew up, my love for her grew while her hate for me bloomed. I should have protected her like I said I would.
Looked like no one was home, which wasn’t shocking since her mom worked at the hospital, and her dad retired from practicing law because he had cancer. It was terrible that James had Leukemia, but he was a strong man, and I knew he would beat it. What shocked me was that with the diagnosis, Luna hadn’t come home.
Lying Hearts Page 3
