Rhodes (The Stone Legacy #6)

1. Rhodes

ONE

Rhodes

The Condition Report: Before any New Orleans restoration begins, someone walks the building and writes down what is actually there. It almost never matches what the people who love the house have been telling each other about it.

Deuce has been locked onto the same table of girls for ten minutes, and now he needs the rest of us to look. Deuce can't enjoy a thing quietly any more than he can run a play without talking about it for three days.

"Corner table. The one in green." He tips his beer at them. He's a wall of a human being who catches for the Loyola baseball team and thinks with his dick. "Tell me that's not the best-looking girl in this bar."

I've been texting with my brother, Ridge, about some dumb fucking meeting he wants me to come to tomorrow evening.

It's something about capital fund allocation that he wants all six of us to decide on, which I couldn't care less about.

And I know whatever it is has already been decided anyway. It's all a formality.

He vacillates between insisting I play an active role in my family's logistics business and focusing on being a college student. Tonight, it seems, he wants me to be a Stone Intermodal executive. That's almost hilarious because I know they won't listen to anything I say anyway.

I put it on the bar face down because, whatever the case, I can deal with it tomorrow.

"Sure, Deuce."

The Boot's loud tonight. It's a Thursday, but it almost feels like a Friday. This is how it is early-semester. Nobody’s got anything due yet, and everyone's excited to be back at school.

"They're not even ours," Nash says. He's got that mournful thing going he gets three beers in. "That's a Tulane table for sure. They don't cross Freret for us."

"That's exactly why God made walking," Deuce says. "Rhodes. Back me up. Green dress."

I glance over barely. I look enough to clock a table of girls, and notice one of them mid-laugh with her back half to us. Her blonde hair nearly touches her ass, tipped back like that. Some guy is leaning in, trying his luck and not getting anywhere.

It's a nice view, I will give him that.

There's a line where the dress stops holding her and starts highlighting her perfect figure, right at the back of her thighs. I shift on the stool and give my jeans a little room, because that's the kind of night it is.

"Yeah, alright," I say, already looking back at my beer. "I'd tap that."

My eyes stay trained on that perfectly round ass. Then she turns around. I look up at her face, and I nearly choke on my beer.

Everything that went south while I was looking at the back of her has nowhere to go now. My fist closes on the bottle.

That isn't just any girl. I've known those blue eyes since she was born. It's the rest of the face I'm not ready for, the way the roundness has come off her cheeks in the last two years and left her with Lizzy's straight nose and flat, unimpressed way of looking at a man while he's still talking

There’s a framed picture at their family property off the coast of Charleston, Oak Moss, of me holding her on the couch beside my dad when she was an infant, and I was still in diapers.

The last time I saw her, I was watching her come apart in the second row of St. Michael's church in Charleston three weeks ago with my hand flat on her brother's shaking back.

Tallulah Maybank.

"Oh, no," I say.

"What?" Deuce says. "You've already tapped that ass, haven't you? Goddammit, Rhodes. Is there any woman in this city you haven't fucked?"

"Fuck, no! She's practically my sister. Dude, get your mind out of the fucking gutter."

"You know her, but do you know her?"

"Shut up, Deuce."

She's clocked me now, and her face moves through the same three stages mine just did, only faster. She says something to the two guys nearly falling over themselves for her attention. One of them whispers something in her ear. The other drops a hand toward the small of her back.

Who are these Neanderthals?

She steps out from under them without so much as looking back and starts across the room straight at me.

"She's coming over here," Deuce says, delighted. "Like a moth to the flame. Come to Daddy."

"That's Cooper's sister, asshole. Put your dick back in your pants."

The grin falls off his face. "That's Coop's sister? Little Tilly? Damn, she's really grown up since the last time I saw her."

"Not so little," Nash adds.

"She's off limits," I tell both of them. "You look at her wrong, you lose the eye. I mean it."

Another girl I don't recognize stops her on the way to us. She makes eye contact with me, but keeps talking to her. I notice she's holding a clear Dixie cup with a clear, fizzy drink and a wedge of lime gone soft on the ice.

Fuck.

"Copy," Deuce says. "Off limits. For the record I thought she was a Tulane girl, not a Maybank."

"Well, she's both."

Nash is running through the facts like this is some complicated concept. "Wait. Cooper Maybank. She just lost her mom—"

"Yeah. She did."

The realization kills whatever the two of them had going. Deuce finds something fascinating in his beer, and Nash turns to say something to a guy behind him, giving me the out.

I take it because the reality of it all is doing something to me I don't want an audience for.

Coop and I have already worked through the awkwardness since the funeral, even though the undercurrent of sadness is still there.

But this is the first time I'm seeing Tallulah.

She brings back the tent behind St. Michael's Church in downtown Charleston and a casket in front of us, and Coop's shoulders hunched in the folding chair beside me while Lizzy is being lowered into the ground.

I still can't make the tense agree in my head. I still can't say she was.

"Rhodes Stone." Tallulah finally breaks away from the other girl as she crosses to me.

She's smiling like it's a normal Thursday night and we always bump into each other at a bar.

I put my face back where it belongs and go to meet her halfway, because I'm not turning her over to Nash and Deuce. "I didn't expect to see you tonight."

We embrace lightly as her drink sloshes on my back. Not even a year out of rehab and she's out drinking. What the fuck?

This is the first time I'm running into her at a bar and not at a family party.

She started college in the same city in the fall, but we might as well still be four states apart.

We've never crossed paths until tonight.

She goes to Tulane, and Cooper and I go to Loyola.

Unless we plan it, which we don't, we don't see each other.

"This is the Loyola bar. You Tulane girls don't come to this side of Freret." I lean down on a round bar table toward her, putting it between us. "What are you doing over on this side?"

"My roommate, who abandoned me the second a guy with a dimple showed up, dragged a few of us over here." She tips her head at the two guys I've already forgotten, still marooned where she left them. "Quality crew you keep over here."

"I don't know those douchebags."

"What are y'all getting into tonight? Maybe my friends and I can join. Then you can protect us from the Loyola douchebags." Her eyes go down to my hand, to the beer, and then back up.

"My friends are all douchebags, too. I would never subject you to that. You don't belong in a bar, anyway."

"Is that so, Dad? Should I be hanging out at the convent on a Thursday night?"

Tallulah should be a sophomore, like her twin sister, Libba, who goes to the College of Charleston.

But she had to take a year off to work through an opioid addiction she developed after a high school ACL injury.

It wasn't her fault, necessarily, but she fell into a dark place.

Cooper writes it off as a combination of dealing with a soccer career-ending injury and her mother's cancer diagnosis that progressed quickly.

She was in deep and had to go to a nine-month inpatient treatment facility in Virginia. She's only been out of rehab since last March, less than a year, so everyone is on high alert.

The Maybanks don't play when it comes to nipping things in the bud.

"Don't be a smart ass. You know what I mean."

"I don't need another babysitter, Rhodes. I'm surrounded by them. I'm a big girl and can take care of myself."

"You know I'm the last person who will micromanage you, Tallulah."

"Mm." She reaches past me, close enough that I get a wave of whatever she's wearing.

It's warm and fresh, like the green dress that hugs her far too tightly.

She picks up the cup she brought over and holds it up between us like evidence at a trial.

"You want to know what I'm drinking, Rhodes?

Will that make you feel better? Go ahead. Ask me."

I want to snatch the cup out of her hand and throw it across the room.

"I didn't say that. You know I'm not like that."

Despite myself, I glance down at her cup. The wedge of lime is soft and dehydrated on the ice, like someone squeezed all of the juice out of it into her drink.

"Club soda. That's all, no vodka. Does that make you happy?"

There's a version of this where I lie, and she would know, and it would be worse. "Slightly."

"Admit it. You thought I was getting wasted, didn't you?"

"Wasted, no. But there was a moment that I did consider what you were drinking."

“A moment.” She pulls the glass back and takes a sip of it, watching me over the rim.

There's no give in her at all. "You know what a moment is when it's your whole family looking at you?

It's an eternity. It's every glass I've ever held at every table I've ever sat at.

My sister does it. My dad does it. Coop does it so hard he pulls a muscle. And now you."

"I barely count."

"You're basically my brother, my only brother's bestie. And I'm pretty sure my mom liked you better than me, anyway." She says it like a joke. Her eyes drop to her cup when she gets to her mom.

"You know that's not true." My stomach rolls. What the fuck is this?

Her mouth is still open on whatever she was going to fire back, and it closes. The edge in her face doesn't disappear so much as loosen.

"Yeah," she says after a second. "God. What is this weather in New Orleans all about? I never know if it's going to be cold or sweltering."

"That's New Orleans late winter for you. Parades start in two weeks, and the whole city is already practically shut down from anything that isn’t Mardi Gras.”

“I have no use for Mardi Gras,” she says, flipping her hair over her shoulder, and the bile comes back. The moment is gone as fast as it opened.

She sets her plastic cup of ice and a sad lime wedge down on the table, and the condensation skates it a half inch across the table like a hockey puck. "You can report back to Coop that I'm alive and hydrated and not doing anything that requires a chaperone. Tell him I said to enjoy Spain."

"He's not gone yet, you know."

"I know. He leaves on Wednesday, which is when I'm moving into his place.

I love him, but he needs to get the hell out of here.

I'm over him looking at me like I'm made of wet paper.

" She pulls a vape out of her bag and takes a drag, blowing down to avoid anyone seeing it.

"Which I'm guessing you share his sentiment, based on our little rendezvous.

It's been lovely, but I have enough babysitters. "

Why did I have to open my mouth about her not belonging in a bar?

"Tallulah."

"Don't." She's already stepping back. "I've had a nice night slumming it on your side of Freret, but on second thought, I've got to go finish packing.

" She looks at me and tilts her head, and something in it isn't entirely an insult, which is worse.

"Enjoy your beer. Enjoy the view. And tell your friend the answer's no. "

She's gone into the crowd before I can decide what my face is doing, green dress swallowed up by a hundred other people, and I stand there with a warm beer and two friends who are very carefully not looking at me.

When I walk back to join them, Deuce claps me on the shoulder.

"So," Deuce says. "You gonna tell me why Coop Maybank's kid sister just walked in here and took ten years off your life?"

"Drop it, Deuce."

He lifts his hands and lets it go, which for Deuce is a minor miracle. Nash is quiet, which is more unlike him, turning his glass in a slow circle on the bar. Then he asks it, not joking for once. "She okay? After the mom thing?"

And that's the question, isn't it? Because everybody in her life has decided the answer is no, that she's fragile, and she needs a chaperone so she doesn't break. And I just realized I'm one of them.

Because one thing Tallulah doesn't realize, even though she's strong as shit. She is fragile. She's been through hell and back the last three years, and this city is relentless.

I stand by what I said, even though I shouldn't have said it. She has no business in a bar in New Orleans less than a year after she got out of rehab.

"Yeah," I tell Nash. I flip my phone over, and the text about the board meeting is right there waiting. I turn it face down again. "She's fine."