13. Entanglements and Family Matters
ENTANGLEMENTS AND FAMILY MATTERS
We genuinely need to find a better system for our party boats as soon as possible. It’s not that I hate running them, honestly I love being on the water. But spraying sticky cocktails off a vessel and blotting rum punch off my shirt isn’t how I planned to spend my evening.
Including a string of text messages that have me concerned.
David is tying us up at the marina as I finally scroll through them all.
Gavin
No sign of her yet.
Are you still coming?
Tamara cornered me. How do I politely tell her that unless she wants to take my dick all the way back in her throat so she can’t talk, I’m not interested?
I shake my head and laugh at him until I see his last text.
I fucked up.
It’s later than I thought as I look at the time and instead of texting him back, I call him while spraying the deck.
“Hello?” he answers.
“What? Did you wind up taking Tamara back to a private room? She mouthed off so much you lost your boner?” I joke.
“Ben,” he sighs my name, and it’s then I know.
He did the same fucking thing I did, and I can’t even be mad at him.
“She showed up?”
“Yeah, she showed up, looking sad and shit, asking for me to make it all go away. What was I supposed to do?”
Part of me wants to tell him that he should’ve kept his dick in his pants or told her the truth, but that would be unfair of me. I’m the one who got us into this mess, and Gavin is the man she hooked up with at Carlson’s. I’m the one who lied, and in turn I’ve put my brother in a shitty situation.
The worst part is, I don’t regret it. I think about that night with Kate often, and I know it’s wrong, but what makes it worse is I’d probably lie again to end up in the same position.
“I think this might be the most fucked up thing we’ve ever done.”
“You’re not wrong. How much longer will you be at the marina?”
“Probably another forty-five minutes.”
“Alright, well, I think we can both agree that neither one of us can do this again. We only go to Avalon together from here on out so we can tell her the truth, okay?”
I don’t deserve my brother, I really don’t. I started this mess, and yet, he’s taking the blame and not letting me face Kate alone.
“Deal.”
“I’ll see you at home,” he says, and I hang up, and go back to cleaning off the bar tops.
How in the fuck did we end up here?
“Please, Ben,” Penny begs me on the phone. “Lincoln had to go in and deal with some cluster fuck at work and these kids are driving me crazy. The weather is shit and they want to go swimming.”
“Fine,” I groan over the phone, looking at the time. Too damn early for my sister-cousin to be calling me, begging for a helping hand at the pool with my nieces and nephews.
Aiden and Jessa are using the Bahamas house this weekend and Gavin is overseeing construction for the club.
“Meet you there in twenty?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
I put my bathing suit on and grab a T-shirt and a change of clothes, along with a protein bar and a bottle of water as I head over to the gym.
I scan my pass and head right over to the pool, where Penny has one kid on each hip.
“Uncle Benny,” Brynn says, holding out her tiny little arms that I seem to be weak for.
I climb into the pool and take her from my cousin’s arms. Penny gives me a soft look.
“Thanks for coming to help.”
“Why didn’t you just go to Aiden’s?” I ask.
“They’re having some maintenance done while they’re on vacation. Plus, there aren’t any other kids at Aiden’s.”
I glance around the gym pool. There is a kiddie section where multiple mom’s are hanging out playing with their toddlers.
“So why aren’t you in that section?”
Penny grimaces. “Brynn may or may not have said F-U-C-K really loud when we first got here, and the glares I got were borderline lethal. So I’m going to need this set of stuck up bitches to roll out and a new crop of moms to roll in.”
“Bitches,” Brynn repeats, splashing at the water.
Meanwhile, Hudson is in Penny’s arms trying to fist and swallow down the overly chlorine filled drops he catches.
“You should probably stop cursing in front of your little foul-mouthed clone here.”
Penny spins Hudson around in the water, making him giggle, and she looks over at me.
“Speaking of clones, how’s Gavin?”
I wince, covering Brynn’s ears, which she thinks is hilarious as she kicks her feet in the water.
“We might sort of be fucking the same woman and she thinks we’re one person.”
Penny’s mouth gapes open, wet tendrils of her blonde hair sticking to her face.
“Say that again?”
I sigh, swinging Brynn in the water so fast that all she can do is laugh and not pay attention to all the horrible words slipping out of my mouth.
“Gavin hooked up with her months ago. She ran into me at Avalon and assumed I was him. I didn’t correct her.
I was going to tell her the truth and then she ran into Gavin and well, you can imagine what happened.
So, yeah. We’re basically horrible deviants and we made a promise to only go to Avalon together from here on out so the next time we see her we can tell her the truth. ”
Penny blinks at me, until she belts out a laugh that I swear ricochets against the indoor pool walls. She gets glares from the mommy group, but she just rolls her eyes.
“Well. It’s official. You and Gavin are the most twisted of all of us.”
“Hey now. Don’t go that far. Aiden married his dead best friend’s estranged daughter, who calls him daddy. Don’t even get me started on your situation,” I say, glaring at her and her nostrils flare.
“At least Lincoln and I weren’t lying to each other. It was circumstantial how we started. Fate if you will.”
I cover Brynn’s ears again.
“Did you really just say that fucking your adopted cousin in a glory hole was fate?”
“Okay, you know what? We’re not talking about me right now. We’re talking about you and your freak of a twin, and how you’re going to get yourselves out of this mess. I mean, you guys go through women like socks, is it really that big of a deal?”
I can feel my cheeks heat and Penny gapes at me. “No? No?” she repeats it twice like the fact that I care so much is unbelievable. “There must be something in the Carlson genes, maybe your frontal lobes don’t develop until you’re thirty-five instead of twenty-five.”
I glare at her. “It’s just. I mean, of course, I don’t want anything outside of the physical. But she’s perfect for me and Gavin. I want to keep seeing her at Avalon, but I’m not sure if that will be on the table when she knows the truth.”
She moves the baby around and I realize she knows too much, considering she isn’t questioning what that means.
“What did Lincoln tell you?” I ask, and she shrugs, kissing the baby on the cheeks, and he grins.
“Don’t use your baby as a shield. What did that grumpy fuck tell you?”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Brynn says, almost like she’s a motor engine.
“Look what you did,” Penny says, grabbing Brynn and handing me Hudson, who’s far more content to just be held and splash in the water.
This part of the pool is dedicated to swimming. The spot next to us has an aerobics class where geriatrics are using pool noodles for exercise and then the rest are lanes dedicated for swimmers.
I take Hudson in my hands and pretend he’s a shark as we swim over to the edge where Penny is obviously hiding from me and trying to get Brynn to hold the edge and kick her feet.
“Tell your mommy to spill the beans,” I tell Hudson, who splashes his fat little hands against the water.
Oh, to be an infant again, with not a single fucking care in the world. Hudson just worries about playing, eating, and sleeping. He’s truly living the dream.
A flash of black catches my attention, and I put Hudson on my hip as I look over to my right.
It’s a wide-eyed Kate in a black bathing suit, slipping over the edge, staring at me like she’d like to blow my head off with a laser.
“Kate?”
She looks at me, the baby I’m holding, and then Penny.
“You’re her?” Penny says in a shocked tone, which just has Kate scooting the hell out of the pool even faster, not even looking in my direction.
“Fuck,” I hiss, keeping my hold of Hudson as I make my way over to the stairs and chase her.
She’s nearly at the women’s locker room when I grab her arm.
When she turns around, she looks pissed as hell.