Smiling at him, I took a mouthful of beer and thought it over. Help was cheaper, and it also added extra sentimentality to the place. I liked the idea of that.
“Okay, so we’ll make a list of what we can all do, then I’ll get bids for other stuff.”
Rolling the bottle between his hands, he focused the full weight of his stare on me. “Have you thought about when you’re going to move in here?”
“Yes,” I replied immediately, then backtracked. “No. I mean, yes, I have, but at the same time, no, I haven’t.”
Raising his eyebrows, he smiled wryly at me. “That sounds like a whole lotta mess going on inside your puny brain.”
Here’s the thing, I had a small crush on Logan when we were kids. It wasn’t the type where I doodled hearts and wrote Mrs. Richards out, but I got a thrill spending time with him. I thought we had a special bond, something that meant something to both of us, but he’d been paid to make me feel like that.
It wasn’t that my crush had broken my heart after it all came out, it was that something special to me had been a total lie. So why was he being so nice to me now?
I wanted to believe in him and his offer to help, but I just didn’t trust his motives for it all.
Leaning forward in the seat he’d taken on one of the armchairs, and bracing his elbows on his thighs, he tipped his bottle at me with a frown. “That looks like some heavy thinking going on over there. Want to talk about it?”
No.
Yes.
No, definitely, no.
But did my brain listen? “Why are you being so nice and doing all of this? Last time it was money, what are you getting this time?”
He flinched visibly and dropped his head to look at his feet. “Bex, I never looked at the money I was getting as payment for spending time with you. I admitted to myself back then that I loved doing it and I was always looking for stuff we could do together so that I could spend even more time with you. Hell,” he straightened to look at me as he threw his arm out, “I spent more of the money on shit we did together than anything else. That’s why I did it even though I told myself to avoid you.”
Looking to the side, I had to concede on his point. “We did do a lot of stuff together.”
“It paid for gas for us to go places, entry to the waterpark, food at the diner, snacks, going to the movies. Every day when I got home from school after dropping you off, I’d look up new releases at the movie theater or announcements for shit happening near us so that I could spend time with you.”
Narrowing my eyes at him, I pointed out, “I always tried to pay, but you’d either put the money back in my bag or point-blank tell me no.”
“Because it was my job to pay, Bex,” he thumped his chest lightly with his fist, grimacing when he must have hit what I knew were bruises from today because he’d told me about it earlier.
“Which made no sense because you were dating Renna.”
Groaning, he placed the bottle on the floor and lifted the glasses so he could tiredly rub his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we talk about that part of this another time? Please?”
Rubbing my lips together, I nodded, forgetting he couldn’t see me with his hands over his eyes until he moved them and looked at me expectantly. “Yeah, that’s probably wise.”
“Bex, please don’t think that I didn’t care about you or that it was a hardship spending time with you because that’s so far from the truth. I never meant to hurt you, and it’s eaten away at me every day that I did. When you cut me out and then left town, it felt like part of me had just disappeared and it was my own damned fault. Having you back now makes me feel whole again.”
I could understand that because I felt the same way.
I was staring out the glass doors at the garden, thinking about what he’d said and wondering how we could move forward when he moved and sat down next to me.
“It’s going to take time to earn back your trust and even a little of what we had before, but I really want to work on getting us there. Do you?” He blew out a breath when I nodded at him. “Okay, how about we work on the problems like Renna a chunk at a time. We start with us,” he motioned between the two of us, “and trust and whatever other shit comes with that. Then, when we hit a stage where it’s not so tense and awkward, we tackle something else from the past until it’s all been dealt with.”
“I think that’s a good idea.” Then, I snickered and asked, “Once we hit the end stage, do we go out and get best friend t-shirts, bracelets, and shit like that?”
Pursing his lips, he thought about it. “What about bestie tattoos?”
Squealing, I clapped my hands dramatically. “I know, we’ll both get half of a butterfly on our wrists so when we put them together, they make it complete.”
Here’s a cool fact about Logan Richards that few people knew. Growing up, he had quite a few bad encounters with butterflies that’d left him with a bit of a phobia.
“That’s mean,” he hissed. “You know damn well those fuckers hate me more than even Doyle does.”