First Love: A Superbundle Boxed Set of Seven New Adult Romances (27 page)

You would think that living with a group of people who were part of a band that had regular nighttime gigs would offer plenty of opportunities to sleep during the days, but more often than not, sleep eluded me. The band was only part of our schedule; four people in and out of a small apartment where my bed was the couch meant sleeping was only possible if I poured concrete in my ears.

Even silence wouldn’t have let me sleep while Amy still hadn’t responded to my texts. Two days of radio silence. I guess in the bigger scheme of things two days wasn’t that bad. But other than saying Amy wasn’t feeling well, and then telling me to mind my own business, Darla was uncharacteristically quiet about Amy, not giving me anything. Stalking Amy’s apartment was an option, but one that left a sour taste in my mouth. Definitely not my style. My style was giving up, though. I wasn’t going to do that again. Insanity is thinking you can do the same thing over and over and get a different result, they say.

This time I wasn’t giving up, I was giving her space.

If Amy needed some time and space then I’d give it to her. If she was pulling my heart strings to jerk me around as revenge for what happened four years ago, that was (a little bit) fine as well.

As long as we ended up together.

Amy

Blocking out the world and watching the old
Pride and Prejudice
—the one with Colin Firth—was so much easier than facing that large, round, yellow thing in the sky. Dr. Alex had told me to go home and rest and heal, and I was finally doing exactly that.

And if he hadn’t actually prescribed a pint of Late Night Snack ice cream, I could still consider it medicine. Ben & Jerry’s should be tax deductible.

No one with a soul would disagree.

I watched Elizabeth watching Mr. Darcy come back from his swim in the pond. There is something so perfect about the way he stops short, how her breath catches—and how neither can actually reveal their feelings. Their true passion.

That deep, inner yearning that makes you fuck a phone.

Sam had texted and called and I wanted to answer but—Elizabeth! Mr. Darcy!
Hellloooo?
Sam could wait. Why deal with messy real-life relationships when I could watch other people squirm in fictional ones?

So. Much. Easier to ignore real people for now. I was already ignoring Mom and Evan. Ignoring
everyone
was my answer.

Besides. Sam had made me wait for years. He could survive a couple of days.

In a poignant moment of incredible unfairness, I’d found my sex toys within thirty minutes of coming home from seeing Evan. I reached into a box labeled “Bathroom” for my hot water bottle, so I could curl up in bed and sleep off those two days. When I lifted the red, rubber bottle there they were, lined up so elegantly, like little soldiers ready to be assigned to their duty stations. Clit. Ass. Vagina. Nipple.

You guys were AWOL when I needed you most
, I thought, cursing them.
Fuckers
.

My phone rang. Mom again. I shut the phone off and dug in to my ice cream. How many times could she try? A rancid smell permeated the room as I bent over from the futon and put my phone on the little end table on the floor.

Oh. That was me. When was my last shower? Probably I should shower.

The pint was nearly empty so I finished it off and jumped in the shower, dispatching with the necessities quickly. Clean clothes helped lend a fresher perspective to what I hoped would be a better day than yesterday.

Time for a cup of coffee and some—

Bang bang bang
. That wasn’t just any knock. Someone was seriously wailing on my door. I jumped and bleated some weird sort of noise.

“Amy! I know you’re in there!”

“
Mom?”

Sam

She isn’t answering my texts.
My finger hovered over the send button after typing that. How much should I share with Darla? How out there should I put myself? I closed my eyes and hit Send anyhow, not caring any more. Sick with worry and feeling stupid, I just needed to know what the hell was going on.

Darla wrote back,
I’m sure she’s just busy
.

Busy. Yeah.
K, thanks
, I wrote back, hit send, and then shoved my phone in my pocket. We’re all busy, aren’t we? Me and Amy. Busy.

If I just went to her apartment and knocked and found her there, would she freak? Crossing that line—from being ignored electronically to showing up in the flesh—seemed both perfectly normal and freakishly obsessive. In an age where people texted pictures of their lunch fries and checked in at every store or movie theater, having Amy go “dead” online and by phone like this was creepy.

I didn’t want to up the creep factor, though, by intruding where I wasn’t wanted.

Wanting, though, is exactly what she said she...uh...wanted. Mixed signals were never fun, and Amy was sending them like SETI trying to reach extraterrestrial life.

Creepy to go to Amy’s apartment and check on her?
I texted Darla.

No answer.

My whole body went tense and my hands tapped as much as they could on every surface possible in the apartment. I’d already spent hours banging out a new song. Drums, coffee, long walks and cold showers—done, done, done and more than done.

One option left.

Amy.

Amy

“What are you doing here?” I sputtered as Mom just barged right in as if she owned the place. “I didn’t raise you to live like this,” she scolded, picking up an empty Chinese food container and throwing it in the garbage. “I knew something was wrong.” A quick look around made it clear I wasn’t exactly Martha Fucking Stewart, but neither was the apartment at
Hoarders
level.

Yet.

“Nothing’s
wrong
.”

She jolted slightly and I couldn’t blame her. My voice made me jump out of my own skin. I hadn’t spoken aloud, other that talking to the movies I’d watched, in two days. Gravel and bitterness poured out of my mouth.

“Then why aren’t you answering my calls?”

“Because Evan is an asshole and you let him drive my car.”

Her eyes narrowed. Mom looked like an older version of me, with about the same kind of body, and smaller, more almond-shaped, eyes. Her forehead was higher and her hair perfectly straight. Dad had been gone for so long I only knew him from photographs. I had a touch of him in my face, but Evan had most of his genes.

In more ways than one.

Dad was an addict; that was yet another of Mom’s dirty little secrets, another I’d kept all these years. He’d skipped out when I was five and Evan was one and no one knew where he was.

“Don’t talk about Evan like that. He’s struggling, and we all have our struggles.” She made a strange sniffing noise and hoisted her heavy purse up her shoulder. “You should understand that.”

Empty words. A few days ago I’d have jumped like a Golden retriever puppy all over that one and at least politely aimed to please, but this time cold silence hung in the air like an angry fog.

“Are you here to talk about who is repairing my car?” That was all she’d get out of me.

She blinked and made a nervous sound in her throat. Her arms wrapped around her waist as if she were chilled and it made me realize how human she was. Mom was just as prone to mistakes and misjudgments as anyone else. Being forty-seven didn’t make her somehow wiser or give her a better handle on life.

It just made her older.

“I’ll see to the car. Evan was hit by some crazy driver who—”

“They’re always crazy drivers. Ever notice that? And all his bosses are assholes, and he never has more than two beers, and he has you completely snowed, Mom.”

She hadn’t come here to check on me.

She’d come here to force me to comply with her lie.

Because that lie was her reality. Some part of her needed—on a pathological level—to believe that Evan really was good and clean and trying so hard. That he wasn’t like our Dad, and that she wasn’t a failure.

All this time I’d thought I could be some sort of goody-two-shoes balance that would neutralize what Evan did, but Mom didn’t want that.

At all.

The idea that Evan was anything other than pure of heart was anathema to her entire being. And nothing I did would change that.

“I’m not going to dignify that with an answer,” she said, and a balloon filled with injustice inside me, the one that puffed up every time Evan did something that that turned the spotlight on him—it deflated. As if someone had torn a tiny pinhole in it, the deflation was slow and steady. No outrageous POP! No flying debris.

Just the steady exhale of resignation.

“You don’t have to, Mom,” I answered.
You aren’t capable.

Taking that as some sort of surrender, she went in for the kill. An expectation that I would feel guilty laced her next words. “I have more than enough on my plate, you know, with Evan and these trumped up drug felony charges—”

“Felony?” Holy shit. What had Evan done?

“Yes—can you believe it? All he did was give his friend a ride to a soccer game and the kid left a baggie of something in the car, and then...” Prattling on, Mom’s one-woman act went on, her stage presence impeccable, the act maturing as the years went on and while the words changed, the play never did.

Evan had been dealing. That was obvious.

And now that he was eighteen, the legal system would treat him very differently. The panic in Mom had sharpened, and now I understood.

Her baby had met an immutable force.

The law.

No hoverparenting, no called-in favors, no cajoling or wheedling or pleading would get Evan out of what Evan had gotten in to.

Two wide eyes stared as I realized I’d zoned out. Expectation painted Mom’s face, the thick eyeliner around her eyes so ragged. Heavy. Old.

“You understand?” she asked.

“Understand?”

Irritation infused her words. “You weren’t listening! Amy, you need to take out more loans for the rest of grad school. I need to use the fund for Evan’s defense team.”

“Defense team.” Now I just repeated her last words.

“Yes. If we hire the right lawyers, I think we can plead this down or beat it. But with a $10,000 retainer and then more billable hours, this will....” The fund. We called our college money “the fund.” Mom had saved an equal amount for each of us, and I’d gotten decent scholarships for undergrad, leaving a lot of money in mine—making my library science master’s degree possible.

“Wait—but what’s left of my half of the fund is for my grad school,” I said slowly, the implication of what she was saying crystallizing in my head.

“I thought you’d say that,” she said with a prissy expression. “You can’t be selfish like this. Not now. I can’t be asked to choose between my kids.”

Oh, you chose long ago
.

“And that’s the only money that we have for Evan’s defense. His original half isn’t enough to cover the basic lawyer’s fee—we need more.”

Practically speaking, my first semester was covered. A tightness in my chest bloomed and closed, a well-worn pattern that meant my body was going in to fight or flight mode. Living away from home had made the physical sensation go away, but Mom’s proximity and the monumental unfairness of this rooted itself in my body and made me unable to speak.

Because this really was unspeakable.

Knock knock knock
.

We both flinched and stared at the door. A rush of outrage took me out of my frozen contemplation and I found my voice. “You brought Evan here?”

“No!” she protested.

Knock knock knock
.

I crossed the room and looked through the peephole.

Two very familiar green eyes topped with copper waves stood inches away.

Sam

Nerves almost got the better of me. Slipping in her apartment building might be a bad idea, but I didn’t want to have any artificial barriers. If she was home and didn’t want to see me, fine—she could just say it to my face.

The alternative—that she was hurt, or sick, or something had gone wrong—worried me much more. The knock on her door held more urgency than I’d intended, and the shuffle of sounds near the thick wooden threshold filled me with relief. Amy was there and alive.

Exhaling, I ran through what I’d intended to say as the click of locks unlocking rattled out into the hallway. All the words disappeared when I saw her, her hair darker than normal and slightly wet, her grey yoga pants curving in the right places and a pink v-neck showing enough breast to make my mind shove relief away and make room for far more carnal thoughts.

“Hi,” I said. Brilliant, dude. Nominate me for an Oscar for best screenplay.

“Um, hi.” She was nervous and twitchy, in an uncomfortable way, but it had nothing to do with me.

“Is someone there, Amy?” an older woman asked, her voice tight and angry.

“Hang on, Mom.” Amy stepped into the hall and shut the door behind her, walking into my space so fast I couldn’t move quickly enough, our bodies brushing against each other. She smelled like vanilla and coconut. Good enough to eat.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called or texted,” she whispered, avoiding eye contact. “It’s just—”

The door swung open, sending a rush of air over us, making the ends of Amy’s hair fly up. “Who’s this?” her mom demanded, peering at me, a polite smile on her face. She looked at my face then at Amy, whose cheeks burned.

You couldn’t have cut the tension with a knife.

You’d have needed a chainsaw.

“I’m Sam, “I answered, reaching out to shake my hand. “Sam Hinton.”

Our palms met and she pumped once, then halted, her polite smile turning into a quizzical frown. “Sam...the same Sam who...” Letting go of my hand, she turned to Amy and raised her eyebrows.

Amy nodded and reached out to take my hand, her fingers interlacing with mine. A grounded warmth flooded me, arms tensing out of a protective instinct, my body moving unconsciously closer to Amy. This had not been a mistake. Coming here was the right thing to do.

“Same Sam,” Amy said, smiling at her mother with such ferocious enthusiasm she might have been auditioning for
Mean Girls
.