Almost Just Friends Read online

  His smile was kind and tinged with pain, and her heart ached for him. And he was right. She didn’t listen very well. Or at all.

  “I do accept them,” she said softly. “I mean, Winnie’s . . . amazing. Resilient. She’ll always come out on top, I know it. And as for Gavin, he’s smart, resourceful, charismatic . . . He’s got so much potential. Addiction’s a disease, he didn’t do it on purpose.”

  Cam gave her a small smile. “And here you thought you had nothing to say.”

  SHE WENT LOOKING for Gavin first. She found him in the very kitchen she’d just abandoned. He’d cleaned up the mess and was surrounded by what looked like all the ingredients she’d had in the pantry. “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning and organizing our pantry.” He hadn’t looked at her, but his voice dared her to contradict the our part.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t listen before, but I’m listening now. Please talk to me.”

  “I’m busy right now.”

  Racked with guilt, she got between him and the pantry and met his gaze, which was both hollow and haunted. “Gavin,” she whispered, and wrapped her arms around him. “I’m so sorry. I should’ve known. I hate that I didn’t. You needed me and I wasn’t there for you.”

  “It’s not your fault.” He stood still for a moment, and then sighed and hugged her back. “We’re not big on sharing our feelings. There’s no way you could’ve known.”

  And the dagger just slid in deeper, because Cam was right. She didn’t listen enough. “Gavin.” He pulled back, seeming tense again. Braced for a fight, she realized. “You’re my brother,” she said quietly. “And your life choices are yours to make, and I’ll support you no matter what.”

  He looked at her for a long beat. “I doubt that would still be true if I told you that I fell into my job because I just happened to be good at it, but it got stressful. And then more stressful. And to deal with that stress, my roommate—a pot dealer, by the way—helped me out now and then. But it got a little out of control, because I was already using illegal prescription meds to relax and cope. And then I got the DUI and everything snowballed.”

  “I hate how that all happened to you.”

  “It didn’t happen to me. I did it to myself.” He looked her right in the eyes, not shying away. “I used up all my money for lawyers and rehab. Ran credit cards up too. By the time I got out, my world had imploded, leaving me jobless and just about penniless. And if it helps, Winnie didn’t know any of this either, not until I got out of rehab.” He lifted his hands. “Anyway, so here I am.”

  She drew a deep breath and nodded. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re my brother. You’re home, and being home will help. You’ll get through this, but you won’t be alone.”

  Gavin looked at her, disbelieving.

  “I mean it,” she said.

  “You’re not mad?”

  “Not at you.”

  “We need more flour.” Then he wrapped his arms around her and buried his head against her shoulder. She felt his emotional shudder run through him.

  She hugged him close. “We’ll get more flour.”

  “We need more sugar too,” he said, or at least that’s what she thought he said, muffled against her shirt.

  She swallowed hard. “Whatever you need.”

  “Then I really need a new KitchenAid food processor in candy apple.”

  She snorted through her thick throat.

  “Piper?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What if what I really need is to be here with you and Win for a little bit?” He lifted his head and met her gaze.

  She drew a deep breath as she realized her own hopes and dreams of going off to school were getting further and further away. “Then we’ll all live together again for a little bit.”

  “And if we want to kill each other?”

  “We already do,” she said. “Wanting to kill each other is sort of the definition of being siblings.”

  He hugged her again. “Love you, Pea.”

  His old nickname for her, from the early days when he hadn’t been able to say Piper. He hadn’t used it in so long that just the sound of it was like coming home. It’s enough, she told herself. This life’s enough.

  “Love you more,” she whispered.

  Chapter 14

  “Sorry not sorry.”

  Gavin waited until late that night when the house was dark and silent to sneak out. Back in the days of his wild and crazy and very confused teen years, he’d snuck out a lot. That had involved escaping through his second-story bedroom window, climbing along the ledge to the corner of the house, and shimmying down a tree.

  On those nights, he’d rarely had an agenda. All he’d known was that he’d grown up in a world so far from this one, a wanderlustful, amazing, crazy world in which he’d seen every continent and more cultures than most people knew existed. He’d not known anything different until he’d been sent here after hell had broken loose.

  A hell of his own making that had started and ended in the DRC. There’d been strict rules for him and his sisters there, and a “yard” they’d had to stay within. Going past that into the jungle had been forbidden. In fact, that had been Winnie’s first full sentence when she’d been three years old: “Don’t leave yard.”

  So of course Gavin and his BFF, Arik, had gone into the jungle in the midst of a storm. And they’d walked right into a gang of local drug runners. In the ensuing fight to get away, they’d been separated. Gavin had heard the shots and run until his side hurt. He’d tumbled into the yard. Alone. It’d been hours later, when the storm had been gaining steam by the minute, that Arik’s body had been found.

  The very next day, he and his sisters had been sent home by their parents, who promised to follow shortly.

  They’d died in the flooding from the storm before they could get out.

  To say after all that, that Gavin had been a hard-to-handle kid, one who was angry and grieving and generally pissed off at the entire world, was an understatement. Suddenly his skin had felt several sizes too small, and he’d been crawling up the walls, his brain filled with so much inner turmoil he didn’t see how he could possibly go on.

  So he’d escaped every night, thriving on the illicit freedom. A freedom he’d known he didn’t deserve, not when Arik would never know the same, or Gavin’s parents either. Still, he’d done his best to make sure the world knew he was angry, hurting, and racked with guilt. God, the stupid things he’d done, but he’d been a walking, talking death wish. He’d gone swimming in the lake by moonlight, alone, even in a storm with a three-foot chop. He’d stolen his grandma’s car and hit up the bars around the Cal Poly campus looking for easy, fast hookups.

  His grandma had never caught on to him, and then she’d passed away right in the middle of his assholery.

  Now as a dubious grown-up, he wasn’t still mad at the world. Maybe at himself, but he was slowly getting over it. And he sure as hell wasn’t going out the second-story window. He intended to go out the back door, but he found Winnie in the kitchen. She had the toaster’s parts strewn across the kitchen table. Her phone was propped up against the napkin holder, playing a YouTube video on how to fix a toaster. Sweet Cheeks was asleep in her lap. “What are you doing?”

  “What does it look like?” she asked.

  “Okay, I’ll rephrase. Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “If I did, would I have watched this YouTube video ten times?” She sighed. “Emmitt told me what to do, but I can’t remember all he said.” She met his gaze and frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He headed to the door. “Don’t get electrocuted.”

  “Don’t find trouble.”

  He turned back. “What does that mean?”

  “You’re heading out, right? I thought people in NA aren’t supposed to go out alone.”

  Yeah, and he was also supposed to be working on his steps, making amends. �€