Chapter 26: Evan
EVAN
Weeks later, I lie in my bed while Gen is getting dressed. It’s past noon, the two of us having slept in after staying up late with Mac and Cooper in a Mario Kart death match that damn near came to blows. Girls are such sore losers.
“I told you I should have gone home last night,” she grumbles.
“You see how screwed up this is,” I answer, watching as she shimmies a tiny pair of cutoff shorts up her long, tan legs. I’m still here with a semi and she’s running off to
him
.
“And if you’d let me go home last night, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” She ties her hair up in a ponytail and walks over to sift through the sheets for her phone.
“Stay.”
Gen lifts her head to glare at me. “Stop it.”
“I’m serious. Blow him off and let me go down on you instead.”
“Isn’t your Little Brother coming over for a barbecue today?”
“Yeah, in like an hour. Think of all the orgasms I can give you until then.”
She finds her phone tucked under my back and snatches it.
I blink innocently. “How’d that get there?”
Gen rolls her eyes before straightening
up and hunting for her shirt. “You knew this was the deal. Stop acting like I changed the rules.”
The deal being that for the last several weeks, Gen and I have been going at it like it’s the end of the world, while she’s still dating Deputy Dumbfuck. Now she’s jumping out of my bed and right into his car. How is this happening?
“Guess I thought there may have been some implied amendments to that deal after you begged me to spank you last night, but sure.”
She pauses, after pulling her top on, to direct a frown my way. “And if you want to keep those spanking privileges, mind your mouth.”
For no good reason, an unbidden image of her going down on the dweeb in his cruiser flashes behind my eyes. My dick goes soft as I shake the thought. This is why I don’t ask. Very little could stop me from running up on him at the gas station and flicking a lit match his way.
And yet … “Are you sleeping with him?” I find myself blurting out.
Gen looks at me, tilting her head with sympathy as she comes to sit on the edge of the bed. She brushes her lips over mine in a fleeting caress. “No.”
At least there’s that.
“We haven’t even kissed.”
Relief floods my chest. “So then what are you getting out of it?”
With a frustrated sigh, she stands and grabs her keys from the nightstand. “Let’s not, okay?”
“I’m serious.” I sit up. “What are you getting out of it?”
She doesn’t answer, and that’s when I realize she doesn’t have to. I already
know
the answer. We both do. There’s only one reason she’s continuing to date Harrison despite the fact
they haven’t so much as kissed—it’s her way of keeping that final bit of distance between us. Keeping me at arm’s length.
Now I’m the one sighing in frustration. “What’s it going to take to make this official between us? I’m done messing around.”
“Done, huh?”
“You know what I mean.” I know this chick well enough to understand an ultimatum is the quickest way to drive her away. And that’s the last thing I want to do.
We might’ve had a rocky start when she first moved back to the Bay, but the path is smooth now. It’s as if all the bad parts of us, the fighting and jealousy and chasing highs—it’s morphed into something else. Something softer. Don’t get me wrong, the passion’s still there. The soul-deep need to be together, to lay ourselves completely bare and raw, is stronger than ever. But there’s something different about us now. About her. About me.
“I want us back together for real,” I tell her. “What’s the holdup?”
Gen leans against my dresser and stares at the floor. The summer’s almost over, and still this question hangs between us. All this time I thought we were of the same mind, moving in the same direction—together. Now, every second she spends deciding what not to say, the fracture gets wider.
“You still don’t trust me,” I answer for her. My tone is grim.
“I do trust you.”
“Not enough.” Frustration jams in my throat. “What do I have to do to prove myself?”
“It’s hard,” she says, anguish drawing lines across her face. “I have a lifetime of instinct about you that says there’s no way Evan Hartley gave himself a complete personality makeover in one summer. Yeah, you didn’t chase Randall off with an ax and you’re not getting wasted every night, but I guess I’m still hesitant to believe you’ve
changed. Feels too easy.”
“Has it occurred to you there’s something more important to me in this room than drinking and fighting?”
“I know you want this to work.” Most of the agitation leaves her voice. “But you’re not the only one I have doubts about. Every day I question whether I can trust myself. How much I’ve really changed. Put the two of us back together, and maybe we realize this condition is temporary and we end up right back in our old roles.”
I go to her, holding her. Because right here, the two of us, is the only thing that’s ever made sense to me. And whatever she tells herself, I know she feels it too.
“Trust me, baby. Give us a chance to be good for each other. How am I ever going to convince you we can if you won’t try?”
Her phone buzzes in her pocket. She gives me a contrite shrug as I release her to answer it.
“Trina,” she says, wrinkling her forehead.
I haven’t heard that name in a while. Trina went to high school with us, though she was more a friend of the girls in our crew than of Cooper or me. If I remember right, she moved not long after graduation. But her and Gen used to be tight. Two peas in a chaos pod.
“She’s in town for the weekend,” she reads aloud. “Wants to grab a drink.” Gen swipes her finger across the screen to delete the text, then shoves the phone back in her pocket.
“You should go.”
She lets out a sarcastic laugh. “Pass. Last time she came home for a visit, I got piss-drunk and stormed into Deputy Randall’s house in the middle of the night to scream at his wife about what a creep she married.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
An idea springs to my
mind. “Go anyway.”
Her skeptical gaze says there’d better be more to that suggestion. And as I roll it over in my head, the plan starts to make more sense. Maybe the thing she needs to finally trust herself is the only thing she fears more than me. The thing that drove her out of town in the first place.
“Treat it as a test,” I explain. “If you can behave yourself around the girl who once slipped acid to the girls’ volleyball coach in the middle of a match, I’d say you conquered your demons.”
Sure, it might be a little hairbrained, but I’m desperate here. One way or another, I need to get Gen on my side. The longer we stay trapped in relationship limbo, the more she gets used to the idea of us not being a couple. And the further away she slips.
“A test,” she echoes dubiously.
I nod. “The final exam to your journey of reform. Show yourself you can spend an evening with Trina and not burn anything down.”
Hesitation lingers on her gorgeous face, but at least she’s not shooting down the idea outright. “I’ll think on it,” she finally says. Then, to my chagrin, she heads out my bedroom door. “Talk to you later. Harrison’s waiting.”
Riley shows up around one o’clock with a rack of marinated ribs and another homemade pie courtesy of Aunt Liz. God bless that woman. I lead him out to the back deck, my mouth watering as I inhale the aroma of meat and pastry. My two favorite things.
“How’s your week been?” I ask him as we prep the barbecue.
He shrugs. “Meh.”
“You looking forward to school starting in a few weeks?”
“What do you think?”
I grin. “You’re right. Dumb question.”
I always hated it too, watching with dread as the calendar neared closer and closer to September.
“But,” he says, brightening slightly, “Hailey’s family is coming back and they’ll be here till Labor Day.”
“Hailey … That’s the girl whose number you got at Big Molly’s, right?” Riley went out with her a few times over the summer, but every time I asked for details, he’d clammed up.
Today, he’s a bit more forthcoming. “Yeah. We’ve been texting since she went back home.” He shoves his hands in the pockets of his board shorts, then removes them and starts fidgeting with a pair of metal tongs.
“What’s going on? You’re acting all bouncy.”
“Bouncy?”
“Fidgety. Whatever. Are you nervous about seeing her, is that it?”
“Sorta?”
“But you guys have already gone out before,” I remind him. “What’s there to be nervous about?”
“We played mini golf and went to the movies a couple times. Oh, and ice cream on the boardwalk. So, like, four times. But we never—” He stops abruptly.
I narrow my eyes at him, but he avoids my gaze. He’s antsy again, now pretending to check the temperature on the barbecue like some grilling expert, when we both know he’s never grilled anything a day in his life.
“You never what?” Then it dawns on me. I stifle a curse. “Aw man, nope, don’t tell me. I don’t need to hear about how you’re planning on having sex. Your aunt would murder—”
“Jeez!” he yelps. “We’re not having sex, you idiot.”
I’m swamped with relief, although a tad intrigued by the genuine shock on his face, as if he can’t fathom the idea
of sleeping with the chick. Riley’s fourteen, the age I lost my virginity, but I suppose not everyone is an early bloomer like I was.
“I just wanna kiss her,” he adds, the confession coming out as an embarrassed mumble.
“Oh.
Oh.
Okay.” Kissing? I can handle a chat about kissing. There’s no way Aunt Liz can be mad at me for that, right? “Well. Judging by your tomato face, I take it you’ve never done it before?”
He awkwardly jerks his head from side to side, a reluctant
no
.
“Dude, you don’t need to be embarrassed. Lots of guys your age haven’t kissed anyone.” I lean against the railing of the deck, slanting my head. “So what do you want to know? How much tongue is too much tongue? Whether to grab her boobs when you do it?”
He squawks out a laugh, but some of the blush has left his face. Relaxing, he wanders over to stand beside me. The mouth-watering smell of the ribs cooking on the grill floats toward us.
“I’m just, like, not sure how to go for it. Like, do I say something beforehand?” He rubs his forehead with the back of his hand. “What if I lean in and she’s not ready for it, and our heads smash together and I break her nose?”
I choke down a laugh, because I know he wouldn’t appreciate being laughed at during such a sensitive topic. “I’m almost certain that won’t happen. But yeah, you don’t want to just go for it while she’s mid-sentence or anything. There’s a thing called consent. So, read the moment, you know? Wait for a lull in the conversation, gauge her expression and look for the signals.”
“What signals?”
“Like, if she’s licking her lips, it usually means she’s thinking about kissing you. If she’s staring at your mouth, also a good sign. Actually, that’s the way in,” I tell him, pushing away from the railing and heading for the cooler near the door. “Alright, listen up. This
is what you gotta do.”
He trails after me, accepting the soda I hand him. For myself I get a beer, twisting off the cap and tossing it in the plastic bucket on the deck. I return to the wooden railing and hop up to sit atop it.
“So at the end of the date,” I continue, “or in the middle, or whenever you gather up the courage to do it, this is what you do—you stare at her lips. For like five seconds.”
Riley sputters out a laugh. “That’s so creepy!”
“It’s really not. Stare at her lips until she gets all awkward and says,
why are you looking at me like that?
Or some variation of that question.” When he opens his mouth to protest, I interject, “Trust me, she’ll say it. And when she does, you say,
because I really want to kiss you right now—can I?
So now she’s prepared, right? And based on her response, you go from there.”
“What if her response is no?”
“Then you handle the rejection like a man, tell her you had a great summer with her, and wish her luck on her future endeavors.”
I can’t help but marvel at the sheer maturity I’m exuding. If only Gen were here to see it.
“But for what it’s worth, a chick doesn’t go out with someone four times if she’s not interested,” I assure him.
“Truth,” Cooper’s voice echoes from the sliding door. “For once, my brother’s not talking out of his ass.”
Riley’s gaze snaps to the door. His jaw falling open, he glances at Cooper, then me, then Coop again, and finally me. “Holy shit, you didn’t tell me you guys were identical,” he accuses.
I roll my eyes. “I said we were twins. Figured you’d extrapolate from there.”
Grinning, Coop extends a hand toward my Little Brother. “Hey, I’m Cooper. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
Riley’s still blinking like an owl, astounded at our twinship. “Wow. It’s scary how alike you look. If you weren’t wearing different clothes, I don’t think I’d be able to
tell you apart.”
“Not many people can,” I say with a shrug.
“What about girls? Like, your girlfriends? Did they ever get you guys mixed up?” He’s utterly fascinated.
“Sometimes,” Coop answers as he grabs a beer for himself. He strides toward the barbecue, lifts the lid, and groans happily. “Oh man, those ribs look amazing.” He turns back to Riley. “Serious girlfriends usually know the difference, though. My girl says she can tell us apart by our footsteps.”
“I don’t believe that for a second,” I crack, sipping my beer. Yes, Mac can tell us apart, but from the sounds we make while we walk? I call bullshit.
Coop flashes a smug smile. “It’s true.”
Beyond his shoulder, I glimpse Mac through the open sliding doors. She just entered the kitchen and is removing items from the fridge. Then she starts preparing a sandwich at the counter, her back to us.
I slide off the railing. “I request permission to test that theory.”
Cooper follows my gaze, smirks, and nods magnanimously. “Go for it.”
Utilizing the stealth mode I’d perfected after years of sneaking in and out of houses and girls’ bedrooms, I creep into the kitchen. Mac is focused on arranging cheese slices on her bread, singing softly to herself. Only when I’m close enough that she won’t have much time to turn around, I walk normally and come up behind her.
Wrapping both hands around her waist, I nuzzle her neck and speak in my perfect, uncanny Cooper voice. “Hey, babe, your ass looks good enough to eat in those shorts.”
An outraged cry fills the kitchen as she spins around and tries to knee me in the groin. “What the fuck, Evan! Why?”
Luckily, I capture her knee with both hands before it connects with the family jewels. Then I dart backward and raise my hands in surrender. From the deck, loud
laughter greets my ears.
“Told you!” Cooper calls out.
“What is
wrong
with you!” Mac huffs.
“It was just an experiment,” I protest, keeping my distance. “Question, though. How did you know it was me?”
“Your footsteps,” she growls. “You walk like it’s a game.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Evan, please get out of my sight before I punch you in your stupid face.”
I go back outside with a defeated sag to my shoulders. “She says I walk like it’s a game,” I inform my brother, who nods as if that makes any goddamn sense.
Riley, as usual, is in hysterics. Seems like all I do is make this kid bust out in laughter.
But maybe that’s a good thing.
It ends up being a good day. Good food, good company, good everything. Even Cooper is in high spirits. He doesn’t get on my case about Gen or whatever else disappoints him about me, not even once. He’s, dare I say it, downright chipper. He and Mac face off against me and Riley in a game of beach volleyball, and when Liz comes to pick Riley up around four o’clock, he looks bummed to leave.
But in my life, “good” is a fleeting concept. Which is why I’m not surprised when later, while I’m on the beach with Mac and Cooper watching Daisy chase seagulls, I’m faced with a new dilemma.
Shelley’s blowing up my phone about random stuff in between trying to set up another date. I usually don’t spend much time on my phone, so answering the barrage of texts has Cooper eyeing me in suspicion. Normally I’d just turn it off and ignore the messages until later, but I’ve found Shelley gets impatient. If I don’t answer, she goes into a panic spiral, thinking I’ve
blown her off. I’m worried she might impulsively drive out here, and I can’t have that.
It’s still weird, spending time with her like a normal mom-and-son duo. Talking about our days and pop culture. All the while delicately trying to avoid mention of Cooper to stave off the inevitable question of when he might join us at one of our meetups. I hate lying to my brother, but Cooper’s a long way from ready to know about any of this.
Playing with Daisy, he shouts something at me about pizza for dinner. I nod absently, while Shelley is telling me there’s a stray cat hanging around outside her work, and she’s gotten it in her head she’s going to take it home. Which makes me think she probably should have had to practice with a pet before having twins, but what the hell do I know?
A chewed-up, sandy tennis ball suddenly lands in my lap. Then a blur of golden fur is flying at my face. Daisy barrels into me to snatch the ball before running away again.
“Hey! What the hell?” I sputter.
Cooper stands over me, all puffed up and bothered. “You talking to Gen?”
Not this again. “No. Fuck off.”
“You’ve been hunched over that thing ever since Riley left. Who is it?”
“Since when do you care?”
“Leave him alone,” shouts Mac, who’s still tossing the ball with Daisy at the tide line.
Cooper does the opposite—he yanks the phone from my hand. Instantly, I’m on my feet, wrestling him for it.
“Why are you such a drama queen?” I get one hand on the phone before he sweeps my leg and we end up rolling around in the sand.
“Grow up,” Cooper grunts back. He
digs his elbow into my kidney, still reaching for the phone while we toss around. “What are you hiding?”
“Come on, quit it.” Mac stands over us now with Daisy barking like she’s waiting to get tagged in.
Fed up, I throw sand in his face and climb to my feet, brushing myself off. I shrug in response to Mac’s looks of exasperation.
“He started it.”
She rolls her eyes.
“You’re up to something.” Shaking sand out of his hair, Cooper stands up and snarls at me like he’s ready for round two. “What is it?”
“Eat shit.”
“Quit it, will you?” Mac, ever the peacemaker, utterly fails to get through to him. “You’re both being ridiculous.”
I don’t particularly care that Coop’s suspicious or annoyed. It’s whatever. But he’s got this perpetual sense of entitlement to know and have an opinion on everything I do—and I’m so over it. Over him acting out his hang-ups on me. My twin brother playing a poor approximation of a father I never asked for.
“Can we move on?” Mac says in frustration, glancing between the two of us. “Please?”
But it’s too late now. I’m pissed, and the only thing that will make me feel better is rubbing it in his self-righteous face. “It’s Shelley.”
Cooper comes up short. His face is expressionless for a moment, as if he isn’t sure he heard me right. Then he smirks, shaking his head. “Right.”
I throw my phone at him.
He looks at the screen, then at me. All humor and disbelief has been replaced by cold, quiet rage. “Your brain fall out of your head?”
“She’s getting better.”
“Jesus Christ, Evan. You get how
stupid you sound?”
Rather than answer, I glance at Mac. “This is why I didn’t tell him.”
When I turn back, Cooper’s up in my face, all but standing on my toes. “That woman was ready to run off with our life savings and you just, what, go crawling back to Mommy the first chance you get?”
I set my jaw and back away from him. “I didn’t ask you to like it. She’s my mother. And I’m not kidding—she’s making a real effort, man. She has a steady job, her own apartment. She enrolled in beauty school to get her hairdressing certificate. Hasn’t had so much as a sip of booze in months.”
“Months? You’ve been doing this behind my back for
months
? And you actually believe her crap?”
I swallow a tired sigh. “She’s trying, Coop.”
“You’re pathetic.” When he spits out the words, it’s like he’s had them sitting in his mouth for twenty years. “The time for getting over your mommy issues was when you stopped sleeping with a night-light.”
“Dude, I’m not the one flying off the handle at the mention of her.”
“Look at what you’re doing.” He advances on me, and I take another step back, only because I was just praising my self-restraint to Gen earlier. “One drunk, deadbeat woman walks out on you, so you go fall in love with another one. Man, you can’t hang on to either one of them, and you never will.”
My fist itches to put a dent in Cooper’s face. He can say what he wants about our mother. He’s earned his anger the honest way. But no one talks like that about Gen while I’m around.
“Because you’re my blood, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” I tell him, my voice tight with restraint. “But if you feel like you got too many teeth in your mouth, go ahead and
try that shit again.”
“Hey, hey.” Mac wedges herself between us and manages to walk Coop back a couple paces, though his glare still says he’s thinking about my offer. “Both of you take it down a notch.” She puts both hands on Cooper’s chest until he drops his gaze to hers. A few breaths later, she’s got his attention. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but maybe give Evan the benefit of the doubt.”
“We tried that last time.” He flicks his gaze to me. “How’d that turn out?”
“Okay,” she says quietly. “But this is now. If Evan says Shelley’s making an effort, why not trust him? You could go have a look for yourself. If you’d be open to meeting her.”
He tears away from Mac. “Oh, fuck off. Both of you. This ganging up stuff isn’t cute most of the time, but about this?” Cooper levels Mac with a withering glare. “Mind your goddamn business.”
At that, he storms off, marching back up to the house.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time he’s lost his cool over Shelley, and it’s not likely to be the last. Mac has more experience with his tantrums than she should. Which is to say, she isn’t fazed.
“I’ll work on him,” she promises me with a sad smile before going after him.
Well. No one walked away bloody. We might call that a success, under the circumstances.
I don’t hold out much hope for Mac’s mission, though. Cooper’s been burned one too many times, so I can’t say his reaction is entirely unwarranted. In our family history, Shelley’s done more wrong than right, the worst of it practiced on Coop, as he was always the one trying to protect me from her latest betrayal. His self-imposed, older-by-three-minutes big brother complex insisted it was his job to shield me from the awful truth: that our mom was unreliable at best and downright malicious
at worst.
So I get it. Because now it feels like I’ve betrayed him, thrown all the brothering back in his face to take her side. But the thing is, while he reached his tolerance for her a long time ago, I’ve still got some left. And I have to believe people can change. I
need
to believe it.
Otherwise, what the hell am I doing with my life?