“Oh jeez. That’s rough.”
“He got most of it back, but … yup. Needless to say, he’s not rolling out the welcome mat for her anytime soon.”
“Do you want to see her?” I ask carefully.
Shelley is a sore spot for Evan and his brother, and always has been. Whereas I was relieved to finally be freed from the standoff of my failed relationship with my mom, I’ve spent years watching Evan get his hopes up that one day his mother will come to her senses and love him, then have them utterly devastated. I don’t share his faith.
“I don’t want to be made a fool of again,” he confesses. He sounds bleak, exhausted. “I know how I look. Cooper thinks I’m an idiot, that I don’t get it. I do, though. I understand what he does, but I can’t help that I don’t want to miss the one time she might mean it. Maybe that sounds stupid.”
“It doesn’t,” I assure him. Naïve, maybe. Wishful, yes. Both qualities I’ve never put much stock in. But not stupid.
“It’d be different if it weren’t just Coop and me, I think. If our dad was still around.” He glances at me with a sad smile. “I mean if he wasn’t an asshole. And if we had a bunch of brothers and sisters.”
“My mom had too many damn kids,” I interject. “Trust me, that didn’t make her a better person. I guess having my brothers around helped me to not feel so lonely in that house, but nothing fixes it when you know your mom doesn’t give a damn about you.”
It’s strange how saying those words out loud—saying my mother didn’t give a damn about me—brings comfort rather than heartache. I told myself a long time ago I didn’t need her love or approval or attention. That I wouldn’t waste my breath on someone who couldn’t be bothered. And I kept telling myself that until I believed it, entirely and without hesitation. Now that she’s dead, I don’t miss the wasted years or regret all the times I saved myself the grief of trying. The best gift we give ourselves is respecting our needs first. Because no one else will.
“You wouldn’t want a big family?” Evan asks. “Your own, someday?”
I pause in thought, considering all the times one of my brothers walked into the bathroom to take a dump while I was in the shower. The times I came home to one of them in my bed with a girl because another one locked them out of their own room. And then on the flipside: my older brothers all piling in the car to teach me to drive because my dad by then couldn’t take the stress of it. Teaching me to play pool and shoot darts. How to drink and throw a punch. They’re a bunch of stinking, disgusting brutes. But they’re my brutes.
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Although I don’t particularly want to think about making that big family—when I imagine what the six of us must have done to my mother’s vag, I blame her a little less for her casual animosity toward us. “Not anytime soon, though.”
“I do,” he says. “Want a big family, I mean. I’d even be the stay-at-home dad. Do the diapers and make lunches and all that.”
“Right.” I snort out a laugh at the image of Evan standing in the front yard with two arms full of tiny naked children while the house burns behind him. “Find yourself a sugar momma whose uterus isn’t entirely shriveled to sawdust yet.”
He shrugs. “What the hell else am I doing, you know? Let’s be honest, I tripped and fell into the business with Levi. I didn’t really do much to earn that, except mostly show up on time to work. Cooper’s got the plans and ambition. Getting his furniture business going and whatnot. So why not be the guy who stays home with the kids?”
“I really wouldn’t have figured you for the type.” Evan’s never been interested in what’s expected of him—in all the ways society tells us to get a job, get married, have kids, and die with a mortgage we can’t afford and generational credit card debt. “Guess I thought you always had a plan to hop on your bike one day and set out on the open road or whatever cliché shit.”
“That’s a vacation, not a life. I love the small-town beach life. Where everyone knows everyone. It’s a good place to raise a family.”
Yet there’s uncertainty lingering in his voice. “But?”
“But what the hell do I know about being a father, right? Given my role models, I’d probably permanently scar my kids too.”
I sit up to meet Evan’s eyes. In his flippant dismissals I hear his pain, the years of trauma buried under bravado. Beating himself up for what’s been done to him because there’s no one else around to take the blame.
“You’d be a good dad,” I say softly.
Another shrug. “Eh. Maybe I wouldn’t entirely ruin them.”
“You’d have to be more than just the fun dad, though,” I remind him as he tugs me back down. I rest my head on his chest and drape my leg over his hip. “Learn discipline. Can’t have your kids ending up like us.”
“The horror.” He kisses the top of my head.
Even after we’ve closed our eyes, we still mutter about this or that late into the night, until our words become further apart and eventually we drift to sleep. Naked under the stars.
CHAPTER 14
GENEVIEVE
The sun creeps in slowly at first, then all at once, an explosion of light prying my eyelids open. I wake up with sand in my butt, and I can’t even blame a hangover. Because it’s him. It’s always him.
Still naked on the ground from the night before, I haul myself up to fish for my clothes. I find my phone half buried and my underwear hanging out of the pocket of Evan’s jeans. There are a dozen missed calls and texts from my dad and Shane asking where the hell I am. I’m more than an hour late for work, and judging by their increasingly worried messages, they’re about ready to send out a search party and start calling hospitals.
Evan is still asleep on the blanket. I’ve got hell waiting for me at the shop, but still I can’t tear my gaze away from him. The long lines of his body, tan and strong. Memories of last night skitter across my limbs like a flurry of tiny sparks. I’d do it all again, pick up right where we left off and to hell with responsibilities and obligations.
And that’s the problem.
He rolls over, exposing his back, and I realize for the first time what was too dark to see last night. On his lower back, just above his right hip and tucked in among his other tattoos, there’s an illustration of a small beach cove with two distinctive palm trees bent from hurricanes and crisscrossing each other. Identical to the ones behind me. It’s our spot. Our one perfect place on earth.
Which only makes this harder.
Evan stirs as I’m wrapping my hair in a bun and digging my keys out of the sand. “Hey,” he mumbles, adorably drowsy.
“I’m late,” I tell him.
He jerks upright with a concerned expression. “What’s wrong?”
It’s only when I rub my eyes that I realize my vision’s blurry with tears. I inhale deeply, exhaling a feeble sputter of air that makes me feel a bit wobbly. “This was a mistake.”
“Wait. Hold on.” He grabs his pants and shakes them out to start getting dressed, a hurried panic evident in his movements. “What’s happened?”