13
Elise
“Between the two of us,” Aiden announces, “we’ve come up with the Emotional Support Smoothie.”
He holds out a cold, plastic takeout cup, wet with condensation on the outside, like he’s personally snagged fire from the gods for me and is aware of how cool his gift to me is.
It looks vaguely chocolate flavored and only somewhat frozen. I might have to put it in the freezer for a bit first.
More than anything, it marks just how long I’ve been sitting on the hood of Aiden’s Jeep with Shawn and Laura, not talking. Apparently long enough for the brothers to walk a few blocks and back.
I glance between them. Logan, carrying a few pizza boxes, nods from a few steps behind Aiden, a quiet endorsement of the Emotional Support Smoothie.
I’ve seen them go through this kind of thinking process a number of times, so I’m familiar with the whole logical path that must have gone down between them: Logan posing that they should cheer me up after what happened at the bar, Aiden quickly chiming in with what always makes him feel better—a protein shake with a little chocolate syrup on the top (something he’s come into the kitchen to make a number of times), Logan coaxing the idea into something a little less gym-bro-y.
It’s both heartwarming and heart-breaking.
I feel cared for in a way I need more than anything, and it hurts. These are the people that pretended I didn’t exist for years, who never bothered to meet me. But clearly Shawn’s brothers are caring. I know they are. I’ve seen it. They’ve been my family while I rebuilt my life out here.
Shawn frowns at all of it. I guess he’s not used to me liking his family more than him.
He’s been rubbing my back sporadically between pacing the length of the front porch. I hate that I’ve been letting him. It’s too easy to seek solace in Shawn. I keep trying to remind myself not to.
“Really guys, it’s ok. I’m not traumatized, just a little . . .” I struggle for the right word, but nothing fits. Rattled? Nearly hurled at the sight of that much blood?
I sigh and just take the smoothie out of Aiden’s hand.
Shawn throws a glare at his brother. “Did you ask for almond milk? You can’t give her dairy.”
The sensations that pass over me are weird. Heat rises up my neck and cheeks that he’s telling his brothers I’m lactose intolerant, but a part of me is oddly warmed that he remembered.
He was always better at looking out for my stomach than I was when we were together. I usually just deal with the miserable consequences.
“. . . Where’s everyone else’s emotional support smoothies?”
The boys and Laura exchange a glance between them.
It’s clear they think I’m too much of a wuss to handle seeing gross things. Now that I’m a little less immediately nauseous, I can see that none of them are as bothered as me.
Oh.
“I’ve seen roadkill before,” I say, even though that was a lot worse than any roadkill.
Aiden offers uncertainty, making more eye contact with his brothers than me as he explains, sounding like he’s asking a question. “We used to go hunting . . . ?”
“Our dad used to take us,” Logan says more decisively. “We’re pretty desensitized to it.”
Of course. Rich people are fucking weird as hell. They can’t have normal hobbies.
I sigh and try not to roll my eyes, mostly to contain any embarrassment at being the only one who’s squeamish. “Alright. Well, thank you. I’m gonna let this one firm up in the freezer, it was very thoughtful.”
I take a sip anyway, and taste the banana, dates, and blueberries under the dark chocolate. It’s heavenly, but I know I’ll suffer if I actually try to drink the whole thing.
It does feel a little like handing out treats to a gaggle of puppies that just performed a trick, the way Aiden’s smile breaks out across his face. A little condescending, even. But I can do that much to get them to give me some space.
The two brothers break away to bring their pizza boxes inside the Jeep, the sound of Aiden praising his own genius and Logan reminding him it had been both their ideas echoing off the hallway as I’m left with the one brother I just can’t seem to shake.
I glance to Laura, my planned ride home. “Are we heading out too?”
“Oh. I was gonna join in on pizza night. Did you want to come too, or would you rather we drop you off at your house?”
I would prefer to go home and sleep the rest of this evening off, but the memory of scratches on the cottage door makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand up now that I’ve seen the deer. It makes me unsteady all over again. “Um, I’ll come over for pizza.”
I slide awkwardly off the hood of Aiden’s Jeep, and, before I can even take a step toward the end of the parking lot where Laura’s car is, she tosses her keys at Shawn.
They hit him square in the chest and he catches them, frowning.
“I’ll join the boys in the Jeep,” she says simply, “Shawn, you can drive my car back.”
“Am I not one of the boys?”
“No, but you’re far more sober than I am. You barely touched your drink, and I had two beers before you even got to the Turtle.” She shrugs, feigning wobbliness a moment before she sneaks a grin at me.
That checks out, but I also know Laura can drink most people under the table, even if she doesn’t look like she has the constitution for it. I’m in the middle of doing the math on how many seats are left in the Jeep, when she hauls herself into the cramped back seat and takes the stack of pizza boxes from Logan.
Oh my god. I cannot believe she just did that.
“Do we believe her, or do we think she’s being a little shit?” Shawn asks as we watch the Jeep speed off, and we’re truly left alone together, again. I don’t know how this keeps happening.
And there he goes, grouping me and him together in a single word that makes my teeth clench.
I should be more pissed off at Laura maybe, but I’m exhausted.
“I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. Your family doesn’t know the meaning of the word subtle, and neither do you.”
He sighs and nods and follows me to Laura’s car. “Sorry about that. They’re . . . well, you know. You’ve been here. It’s weird seeing you all together.”
“It is weird. I’m still kind of processing it.”
“I don’t know that it’s ever been normal here. Or them. Or . . .” he glances at me, and then seems to think better of the word us, but I feel it hanging there, unsaid.
We were never normal. We tried to be but just couldn’t hack it, I guess.
I stare at the car as Shawn rounds to the driver’s side. There’s something about the way he moves that makes me remember my dream from the other night. Maybe it’s the part where I’m continuously finding myself stuck with him, and I can’t escape.
I don’t usually buy into the dream interpretation stuff, but it’s the second time I’ve had that dream now.
But really, what is it going to tell me that I don’t already know? That I’m stressed out about work and my ex-husband being back in my life and now I’m afraid of my attraction to him putting my heart in a dangerous position again, and it’s manifesting itself in the image of a wolf chasing me to eat me out?
I feel like it’s all pretty clear. And obvious. There’s literally nothing else it could be.
Maybe I don’t want to look into it, because even if it gives me that kind of clarity, it doesn’t give me a solution. At least, a better one than moving out and starting over anywhere but here.
A few minutes go by in silence after we get in her car. Shawn takes forever adjusting every little thing in her car, from the seat to the rearview mirror, the AC vents. I suspect half of it is just to annoy Laura when she has to drive it next. I hold my Emotional Support Smoothie to my forehead, finding some solace in it after all.
This car has never felt so small, but I guess I’ve never had to compete with Shawn to lean on its center console before.
While my mind is still on that dream, I remember how the beast had smelled. It’s weird how those dreams are so intensely sensory. But Shawn is right next to me right now. I lean a little closer and think I can get away with sniffing him.
Nope, he turns right around and gives me a look. “What was that?”
I shrink back to the other side of my seat, practically pressed against the door. “I, um. Uh. Nothing.”
It’s a deeply guilty and still unsatisfactory answer. Still, Shawn doesn’t press it.
“So. Mystical tit-jobs,” he says, tilting his head and raising an eyebrow at me. “And you told Laura that, of all people.”
I can’t help but laugh a little as I cringe. “If you had a story like that, you’d tell it too.”
“I don’t know that I could admit to falling for a line like that.”
“I was twenty! I thought that was about as good as declarations of love got. And you have no room to judge me, you were the one who said it,” I bluster, but there’s no force or heat behind it.
I watch the smile tug at the corner of his mouth as he keeps his eyes on the road. “I have said every combination of dumb words there is.”
“Yeah, you have.”
A comfortable quiet falls on us, and I can feel the distance between my shoulder and his, buzzing, burning, itching against my mind and heart. I lean through it, taking the easy way out and just letting myself melt into an old habit.
Just one more time.
The warmth coming off him is worth it, and it feels better than sleeping in on a Saturday. I forgot how he was one of those guys whose body just runs hotter than most. I think that’s a thing.
I feel the way he holds the breath in his chest, his whole body tensing up for a moment as I settle my shoulder against his. And then how it all seeps away as he lets a slow breath out.
I think he missed this as much as I did.
“I didn’t mean what I said outside the bar. I can’t actually be mad at you for leaving. Sometimes I wish I could be, but that would be unfair to you. After all the times I . . . never gave you any answers,” he hedges on the tail end of his apology.
“That’s a weird euphemism for ‘snuck out’, but whatever.” I shrug, but there’s no malice in my words. It means a lot that he respects why I had to leave.
“No, not whatever,” Shawn grumbles, and scrubs a hand over his face. His grip on the steering wheel tightens. “I lied to you a lot, and I never told you—”
“I know you were out calling home.”
“What?”
He struggles a moment to keep his eyes on the road, trying to glance at me.
“I knew you weren’t no-contact with them, like you told me. A lot of the time I just had to get up and go to the window. Sometimes you were just outside, talking to your brother or mom or dad on the phone. I felt like I could tell who it was by the tone of your voice sometimes,” I say, a secret I never told him before, I realize.
He’s fallen quiet, processing what I’m saying.
“I know you thought you were protecting my feelings by just keeping in touch with your family when you thought I was asleep. But it sucked that you felt like you had to hide that from me. All of it sucked.”
It wasn’t right to ask him to choose me over his family. But how do you love someone who won’t choose you? He never had, and that had been the first crack in our relationship. A fault in the foundation, really. He never advocated for me to his family the way I needed him to.
Shawn barely moves even to breathe. I watch his throat as he swallows.
“I know I reacted strongly when you showed up . . . and I’m not apologizing for that,” I say slowly, and meet his eyes when he stops at a red light.
He holds my gaze gently and nods a little. I’m surprised he doesn’t push back on it.
“But it is nice to get a chance to talk a little again. Even if it’s just for some closure. But I’m gonna be real, I think everything makes even less sense now that I’ve actually met and know your folks.”
Bringing up the sum of all our problems, the evidence of the end of us, feels I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I can see it in the hard line of his mouth as he nods and doesn’t push back on it.
The light turns green and the way the car jerks forward feels like it says a lot about his mood.
“Who said families were supposed to make sense?” Shawn sighs. “There’s a lot that I still don’t really know how to talk about.”
I guess his family wouldn’t make any more sense than mine did, the way I didn’t really end up close with either of my parents. That desperately wanting a stronger connection only made it more difficult to have one.
I watch the sun start to glare against the clouds, slipping down in the sky. We’re quiet for a long time, and every few seconds I peek at Shawn chewing the inside of his cheek the way he always did when he was deep in thought.
For a moment, I think he’s going to try to tell me something about his family that will offer at least a sliver of clarity.
“I don’t know if you still go hiking much, but you shouldn’t go into the woods for a bit. Since there’s a wild animal out there mauling deer and things,” he says, brow furrowed as he chooses his words, not glancing up at all from the road ahead.
I frown a little. What does that have to do with anything we were talking about?
“If anything ever happened to you,” he says, but doesn’t finish the thought. A muscle tenses in his jaw.
I think about the dreams, the beast I had met in them. There’s no reason to, it’s just a dream. It’s not the same thing as what he’s talking about. But I can’t help but feel he senses its presence out in the woods as keenly as I do. That all of this tension over the wedding, the issues with his family, and my being here manifest together as something with teeth, a low, constant growl in the background that makes your hair stand on end. It stalks, ready to strike, just when we think we’re safe.
Shawn tears his eyes from the road, and when they meet mine, I realize the beast in my dreams has always had his eyes.
“Sure, yeah,” I nod and take a sip of the mostly melted smoothie to distract myself with anything else. It’s already going down uneasily, and I grimace at it. I hold it out to Shawn. “You can have the rest of this.”
His hand grazes mine and the sensation spikes in my middle, an explosion of little wings. Something far worse than lactose intolerance has been churning in my stomach.
Feelings.
Too many to parse through. Every high and every low we ever had, every sweet gesture followed by every problem, every fight and apology and make up.
I should shove away from him, after the number of times I’ve insisted to Laura that I could never let a guy make me feel so alone in a relationship again.
But here I am, ready to melt into his side if it means he’ll put his arms around me and stroke my back and make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world again, even if it won’t last.