“What time is it?”
“Just after nine.”
“Hmm. Give me a sec and I’ll get up, make you coffee. Breakfast, if you like.”
“Sounds good. Take your time.” He braced his head on the palm of his hand, his elbow bent into the pillow beneath him. “Tell me about your parents. About Nick and Gemma.”
My breath stuttered at the sudden demand. “Caleb—”
“You said some things that concern me, Ava. Put my mind at ease.”
I frowned, taken aback by the fact that he was worried about me.
He must have seen the confusion in my expression. “We’ve both made it clear that this is just a physical relationship, and after last night I am more convinced than ever that you’re not one of these women who tells you she’s happy with it just being sex but is angling for more. I get that now. Which means when we talked about being friends, we both meant that too. We can handle it. So I made up my mind that you’re my friend, Ava. And I’m worried about my friend.”
Affection for this man suffused me and I sat up, mirroring his pose, and reached out with my free hand to stroke his chest tenderly. “I’m good, I promise.”
“You aren’t going tae tell me, are you?” He scowled, like he couldn’t believe he wasn’t getting his way.
My amusement over how adorable that was made me pause as I began to ask myself why I couldn’t tell Caleb. Before Nick’s arrival I knew I didn’t want to tell Caleb anything personal because I was afraid revealing myself to him would only deepen my feelings for him. But I was now absolute in my decision to keep things on a friends-with-benefits level. And honestly, after last night, seeing Nick out of the blue like that, it might be nice to vent.
I stared into his searching eyes. “So I can tell you things now without you worrying it means I’m falling for you?”
“Aye.”
“Then I must tell you, Mr. Scott, that you have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.”
His lips twitched. “That wasn’t the kind of thing I was talking about.”
“Wolf eyes.”
“Ava.”
I chuckled, but the sound slowly died when I saw he was serious. Fine. “I really am okay. Nothing happened to me when I was a kid, if that’s what you’re worried about. It came close, but I escaped relatively unscathed.”
“Tell me about it.”
I sighed. “My parents are wannabe hippies. They love material things too much to be true hippies. My great-grandfather was an industrial giant and each generation since has taken care of that inheritance very well. My father has a hefty trust fund and impressive investment portfolio. It allowed us to live in a nice house in a nice neighborhood, and for my parents to not have to work,” I said, hearing the bitterness in my voice. “Growing up with them was exhausting. They were irresponsible about everything but money.
“I didn’t have it so bad. I know that now. I know that there are people out there who had it so much worse growing up. But my parents never treated me like I was their child. I got the same affection and attention that anybody did from them, and it was scarce because they were always living in their own little world. I took care of myself from before I could remember. Learned to make my own breakfast, got myself to school, made dinner when they were too high to make it for me. As I got older they started to have these wild parties at the house. It never even crossed their minds that they were putting their kid in danger by inviting strangers into our home.” I thought back to the night it all got scary.
“I was fourteen when shit got real. One night they had a party and I was in my bedroom, kept awake by the music and laughter. I was sitting by my patio door instead of in my bed when my bedroom door opened and a man appeared.
“I’d sat frozen in fear as he searched the bed for me, his eyes darting around the room until he found me. Then slowly he closed my bedroom door and locked it. I didn’t recognize him. I just knew what he wanted as soon as he started unbuckling his belt.”
I felt Caleb tense and gave him a reassuring but wobbly smile. “I launched myself out the patio doors so fast. Our house was all on one level—a huge sprawling bungalow. I’d used that door many times growing up and I just fled in my pajamas, running through the neighborhood until I got to Nick’s house. He wanted to tell his parents.”
“You should have,” Caleb bit out angrily.
“I wasn’t as scared about being taken away from my parents as I was scared about being taken away from Gem and Nick. They were my family. That became even more apparent when I confronted my parents about what happened and they insisted I must have been mistaken. They didn’t want to hear it. They never wanted to hear anything that would kill their buzz. Anyway, I convinced Nick and Gem not to tell anyone, but Nick was furious. He made me promise that I would stay with either one of them on the nights we knew my parents were having one of their parties. For the most part we could plan ahead and I only had to use that door as an escape a couple more times before I left for college.”
“Only?” Caleb snapped. “For Christ’s sake, Ava, don’t play it down. Your parents were … are negligent arseholes.”
I flinched but I couldn’t argue with him. “Yeah.”
Caleb flopped onto his back, heaving an exasperated sigh. “So what happened with Nick and Gemma?”
“We were all just friends until that night I escaped from the stranger in my room. Nick became my protector. Suddenly he wasn’t just Nick, the boy I grew up with. He was the really cute boy who seemed to care about me best in the world. I had developed an impossible crush on him but hadn’t realized how badly until that night. He was a year older, girls liked him, and I never thought he’d return my feelings. But that night when I’d snuck into his bedroom to stay with him, he told me he loved me.” I almost smiled at the bittersweet memory. “I told him I loved him too and he kissed me. For the first time in a long time I felt safe. But telling Gem was awkward because I didn’t want her to feel like a third wheel. She wasn’t too happy at first, worried about the same thing I thought, but Nick and I never left her out if we could help it.
“It got a little messier as we got older and Nick and I started having sex, something in retrospect we probably did when I was too young. But sex didn’t seem like such a big deal to me.”
“How young?”
“My fifteenth birthday. I know that probably doesn’t sound young to a guy, but I think it’s young.”
He turned his head on his pillow, his expression tender. “It is young. I’d lose my mind if I even thought my sisters had lost their virginity at that age.”
I shrugged sadly. “It was Nick. I thought he was my forever.”
“And Gemma?”
“Was pissed. She definitely felt left out after that. In fact, she promptly went out with the shadiest guy in school and lost her virginity to him in the back of his pickup.” I felt despondent at the memory. “At least with Nick I’d felt loved at the time. I think she secretly blamed me for that decision.” I pushed up into a sitting position, drawing my knees into my chest as I looked down into Caleb’s sympathetic gaze. Not once, when we’d first been on those flights together, would I have ever thought he’d look at me with such tender patience. “Things seemed to normalize, though. We grew close again, and she went back to being my family, like always. Gem more than anyone was my family. I think I always knew in the back of my mind that if something happened between me and Nick I’d still always have her, so I gave her more of me than I gave to anyone.” Tears filled my eyes.
“Ava.” I felt his hand on my knee, reassuring me.
I sucked back the tears, still feeling that pain deep in my chest, like a knife wound no one could heal. “But unbeknownst to me she was in love with Nick. She finally confessed it to him after he proposed to me, realizing that if she didn’t it would soon be too late. She told me later that he admitted that he loved her too; he just hadn’t thought she loved him back in that way. So they started their affair, too afraid at first to tell me.”
Tears slipped down my cheeks before I could stop them. I looked away from Caleb, staring at the window as I struggled to control my emotions. “When I found out, I told her she should have confided in me years ago. That I’d always loved her more than I ever loved Nick when we were kids and if I’d known back then I would have stepped aside before it was too late, before I’d given him everything.” I wiped at the tears running down my face. “She cried so hard when I told her that, but I couldn’t see her pain back then. All I saw was her betrayal. Even if they’d just told me right away, you know, rather than having an affair behind my back. It would have hurt but not nearly so much.” I turned to Caleb, to find his expression dark, fierce. “I always wondered if she knew he’d sleep with me after being with her. Or did he tell her that he wasn’t sleeping with me? Because our sex life never waned in those months they were cheating.” My upper lip curled in disgust. “In fact, I remember afterward, after overanalyzing every little thing about that time, that he seemed insatiable in those months. I thought it was because we were engaged. He couldn’t keep his hands off me. Now I know that he was getting off on it—on having two women. Two best friends.