12
Ava
The alcohol in my system is clearing out enough that I think I could drive home if I had my truck, but a less sober Ava had decided to catch a ride with the family of her friend-with-benefits, and now I have to figure my way out of this one for her.
It’s not the worst decision I’ve ever made, I decide as I sit up on the kitchen counter. It’s the kind of kitchen that you only see in showrooms and HGTV shows. The last time I was here, I couldn’t stop looking at the house, afraid I might knock something expensive over.
This time, I’m unabashedly watching Logan. His back is to me, so I’ve mostly been admiring his shoulders as he jogs after the fiery soccer ball. It’s pretty dark out, but the light spilling out from the house throws deep shadows that reach into the woods.
The Hayes kids have stopped kicking the ball around, as far as I can tell. They’re just kind of standing around, their postures becoming less relaxed, the occasional irritated voice rising from between them.
Elise closes the oven and turns it off, the savory smell of midnight quiche filling the room. She brings two steaming slices over to me, handing me both. It takes her a couple tries, but she hops up on the counter on the opposite side of the sink, and then I hand hers back to her.
We watch from the window for a minute as Shawn begins a full tilt run at Logan, who catches him around the middle, interrupting whatever tackle his brother had planned and twisting it into reverse.
Shawn lands hard on his back, but his grip is unrelenting, pulling Logan to hit the ground next to him.
“He’s so stupid,” Elise groans.
“Logan?”
“Shawn.” She shakes her head, chews her bottom lip for a moment, then shrugs. “Logan, too, yeah.”
Elise catches my eye, looking way too unconcerned for her husband as the two tussle in the grass. “That’s the family you’re getting yourself into. That’s been like a daily occurrence the last couple weeks.”
“What’s their deal?”
“Oh, y’know. Brothers. They can’t just say they’re sorry and they missed being best friends and they love each other. They have to have a series of elaborate bro-ified rituals.”
“HEY,” Shawn shouts from being pinned in the grass.
“She’s an only child. She wouldn’t get it,” Aiden calls back. Elise waves a choice finger in the window before shutting it.
“How did they even hear us? I couldn’t hear at all what they were arguing about,” I mutter to Elise, because I know we weren’t speaking that loudly.
She shrugs my concern off. “Probably, uh, the wind. Yeah, I think that’s how it works.”
She pushes off the counter, the loose neckline of her shirt slipping down her shoulder, and I catch sight of a huge bite mark.
I only recognize it for what it is because of the number of times I’ve inspected my own, washing it between different bandages and iterations of rabies shots.
“Oh, that looks fresh. What happened?”
Her whole entire face up to her ears turns red. She tucks some of her hair behind her ear, eyes avoiding mine.
“Well, it, um, you see . . .” She hums her way through a few attempts to explain, before she huffs and says, “Shawn’s—”
She realizes, instantly, even that much is a mistake to tell me and turns just a few shades redder, somehow.
“Oh, he’s freaky, gotcha. Yikes, girl. I mean, love that for you,” I blurt out, trying not to grimace. I don’t know that I could allow a man to do that to me. “Whatever you do, don’t show Sophie that. She’s gonna have a field day.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I think I threw fuel on her vampire theory when she saw mine,” I tell her, desperate for any kind of conversational pivot and roll up my sleeve to show the one on my wrist. I peel the bandage off, exposing the punctured skin that’s been slowly moving from scabbed over to purplish scars.
“I got bit by some dog that night after I left the wedding.”
“Vampire theor—hang on, you got bit by a dog? At the wedding?”
“No, afterward.”
I hold mine up next to hers, expecting them to look a little more different than they do. The individual teeth marks don’t match up exactly, but I would have thought a person’s bite would look different from an animal’s. Whatever, I’m clearly no expert.
Elise looks wildly concerned, chewing her bottom lip. “What kind of dog?”
“I dunno, it was dark, I didn’t really see.”
“Huh,” is all she says.
Elise tugs her shirt’s neckline back to normal, covering the bite. She crosses back over to the freshly heated quiche, light wisps of steam still wafting off it, and starts cutting more slices for the others.
“Yeah, and of course my job doesn’t have health insurance, so I’ve been paying out of pocket to get the rabies shots. They fucking hurt, like, extra. It is sooo not like a flu shot.”
She nods and hums to let me know she’s still listening to me as I ramble, but I feel like I’ve maybe made her a little embarrassed by pointing out her bite, because she’s gone real quiet.
I cringe internally, wishing I’d kept my reaction to myself a bit better, trying to think of a way to verbally walk it back without making it worse. I wish I hadn’t said anything.
A small silence falls over us sitting on the counter, watching as the others come back inside. Shawn comes into the kitchen through the side-door, and the first thing he does is gravitate to Elise’s side, as she’s slicing up the quiche.
“You smell like basil,” he murmurs against her shoulder, and I avert my eyes, pretending I’m not in the room.
“I went in the greenhouse to pick a few stems,” she tells him, turning her head to him, eyes crinkling with her smile. Some of her hair slides out of her clip as she continues doling out slices onto plates. He brushes her hair back, holding it out of the way for her.
It’s a little much for me, so I slide off the counter and exit the kitchen, to give the newlyweds some privacy.
The house is so big. And quiet. I have no idea where everyone would have disappeared to. It had felt full to the brim during the wedding, but at this hour of night, the emptiness is cavernous.
It’s not a warm home, where you can kick your shoes off and walk around in your underwear. Although maybe that’s not totally true. I could picture running away from this house barefoot in a sheer nightgown, like one of my gran’s gothic mass market paperbacks.
Only if there’s an overly dramatic candelabra somewhere, I think to myself as I trail down the hallway, poke my head into a room where the door is cracked open.
It’s wall-to-wall paneled in oak, dark and foreboding. Over the fireplace, there’s one of those large, stately family portraits with an ornate frame. It definitely doesn’t help with the ominous air in the room.
I lean back against the large oak desk, looking at the portrait, matching each of the young, somber faces to the brothers.
Aiden’s clearly the smallest child slumped against his mother’s lap, Shawn the gangly teen standing between his mother and father, and Logan the young boy standing in front of his father with a thin, vacant look.
A sliver of moonlight glints off the grooves in the paint strokes and highlights the older man’s hand on Logan’s shoulder, with a tense, controlling grip.
They are sooo not beating the vampire rumors, I think to myself.
There’s a half-full handle of something dark and amber on the desk, without a label but an illegible stamp in a purple wax seal. The cork pulls out easily. I give it a sniff, not sure if I can place what sort of alcohol it is.
“You don’t want to drink that.”
Logan’s voice startles me, and I scramble to clutch the bottle to myself to keep from dropping it. I turn around to see him filling up the doorway, leaning with one of those rolled-up sleeve forearms against the doorjamb, whorishly.
“I don’t?”
“No, because I’ve some IPAs for you. They’re out in the garage, though.”
I put a hand to my chest, a little touched, setting the bottle aside on the desk. I can’t believe he remembered. I’m a little tickled at the thought that he was prepared for the chance I might come over.
Logan moves into the room, threading between me and the leatherbound desk chair. He takes the bottle and presses the cork further down into it and then leans over to pull open one of the deep desk drawers, stowing the bottle away.
I ask, crossing my arms, “You don’t think one a.m. is a little too early in the day to start drinking?”
He pauses to give me a little half-smile, before he closes the bottom desk drawer and stands back up to his full, stomach-tingling height. “That implies you stopped at any point.”
A smile creeps up on me. Elise did pour me a little white wine while heating up the quiche, but he wasn’t around for that.
“I can smell it on you. Chardonnay,” he says, leaning into my personal space, and god, it does something to me. There isn’t a single detail that escapes him, somehow.
I can feel the ghost of his smile against my mouth, hovering just out of reach.
“I hope Elise didn’t grill you at the first available opportunity,” Logan murmurs, looking at me through his downcast lashes.
“I think I turned out a nice medium rare.”
He sighs against my neck, and I give his shoulder a playful push. He sinks into the leather wingback chair behind him, rubbing the heel of his palm into his eye. “I did warn you.”
“It’s fine, she was only a little weird about it. But I think it’s good to have family that’s protective of you like that.”
I take a moment just to admire his rolled-up sleeves, the way the fabric bunches and tightens around the curve of his bicep, the forearm revealed.
The admiration goes to a weird place and makes me wonder to myself if I like forearm hair a normal amount, or if I’m a little too about the way the little dark lines hatch over the muscle.
His fingers tangle with mine, and I get so entranced over the thickness of his wrist, the subtle veining of his strong forearm, then each jagged detail of his knuckles, that I start to wonder if I’m just this into him because I’m ovulating, and then start to count back to whenever I had my last period. It’s been almost three weeks, I think.