“Because you’re not,” Jake continued. “You never have been. I’ve been half in love with her since the fourth grade.”
Holy shit. The whole table went still, and I wasn’t the only one staring at Jake.
“Yes, I’m damn aware of what I just said,” he continued without looking away from Bubba. “I’ve been in love with her almost as long. Longer than you or Arch has been around. I wouldn’t have looked twice at another girl, if I’d thought there was a hope in hell she’d ever look at me the way she looks at me right now.”
Bubba looked away first, dropping his chin to his chest and staring down at his hands as he gripped the back of his empty chair. “How does it end, then? You let her date everyone until you steal her away?”
“I don’t care.”
I shifted in my chair and looked at him, and I wasn’t alone. Coop leaned forward. “What?”
“I don’t care how it ends,” Jake said, lifting his beer as he looked from Bubba to Coop and then finally to me. “I don’t care that you were her first. I care only that you made it good for her. I don’t care that Coop wants her.” He looked at Coop. “I think it’s hot when you kiss her.” Finally, he went back to Bubba. “I don’t even care that you asked her to Homecoming, or that you sang to her in the cafeteria. I care that it put that dopey smile on her face. I care that we have right now. Tomorrow. The day after that. I’m going to make every single one of them worth it. The only thing I care about is that she’s happy. Thatwemake her happy? Fine.”
Holy shit twice.
Staring at Jake, Bubba blinked hard. “Just like that?”
“Just like that,” Jake said easily. “I won’t let any of you hurt her. Ever. You wanna talk shit about her or fuck with her, I’m going to fuck you up.” He gestured with his nearly empty beer bottle at Bubba. “Pure and simple. We made those rules for a reason, Bubba. The points thing—it was a stupid fucking game we got off on, but it meant nothing. Telling her? That means we hurt her. Fine, I’ll take my lumps for that, but it should have been something we all agreed on to tell her, not you trying to sabotage us.”
“I swear,” Bubba said. “I wasn’t trying to sabotage you…” He dragged the chair out. “This has all gotten so fucking confusing. I want her like I want my next breath, but…I don’t want to fight with you guys. I don’t want to hurt her. Dad said…” He swallowed.
“Your dad said what?” I demanded. Jake had filled me in on some of it.
“He said that Frankie’s showing a lot of classic signs for emotional and physical abuse,” Coop supplied. “The need for hugs, the fact that she’s never once rejected us for putting an arm around her. A desperate need for approval and that standing up for herself is hard, especially if we push back. It takes a lot of courage for her to do that. Her mom…her mom’s never been the best. But she’s gotten worse, and now I know for a fact she’s hitting her. I used to suspect, but Friday clinched it.”
Friday—when Frankie showed up with the red mark on her face.
“Dad’s worried that she doesn’t have the emotional security to wrestle with all of this and that we’re going to tear her apart,” Bubba admitted. “He didn’t say it quite like that, but on Saturday, after I left, when…after I woke up and realized she was curled up sound asleep between Coop and Jake, and I wanted to punch both your heads in because it should be me up there…I went with Dad to Dallas. I was—I am a little messed up about all of this.”
No surprise flickered on Coop’s face. So he really had known. Bubba had told him.
“While we were there, we went to this center where they have groups for teens in abusive situations. We sat in the back and listened to their stories as they shared them… a lot of stuff just clicked. Then there was this one girl…” Bubba’s gaze took on a distant look. “She talked about the day she tried to kill herself. Because she thought no one cared. Broke up with the only guy she thought did and…I can’t stand the thought of it being Frankie, and I hate myself a little bit right now because I’m not as fine with all of this as I thought I was.”
“Have you asked yourself why?” Coop asked quietly, and I drained my beer. Rising, I left them in silence as I went for another. This really was a hard liquor night.
Fuck, the idea of Frankie being so despondent or alone she wanted to kill herself? Fuck no.
“Because the day I kissed her in our pool,” Bubba said quietly. “She was so surprised and then so delighted. It was everything I thought it would be…but she said she’d never, and I didn’t want to rush her. Rush us. Rush anything. I wanted to savor it. The time. Every other time, it’s been…”
“A quick fuck,” I admitted. “Get in, get out, tap that, move on.”
Bubba grimaced. “She’s not that.”
“No,” Jake told him. “She’s so much more.”
“Then you guys…” Bubba rubbed a hand over his face and winced. I almost winced in sympathy. ‘Cause fuck that looked like it hurt. “You guys just went for it. There she was all sandwiched between you two, and I’m asking myself—what the fuck am I doing? I’m just going to end up making this worse. When she chooses…”
“Stop obsessing about that,” I told him.
“I have to,” Bubba said. “She showed up at the house today, after school. It’s Tuesday, and even after everything, she still came over.”
Jake straightened. “And?”
“And I told her you got arrested, and then I told her why we fought.” Misery hung all over him. “She asked me if the problem was the fact she was dating all of you too, or if I just didn’t want to date her.”
I popped the lid off the bottle of cold beer and sighed. “I’m almost fucking afraid to ask what you said.”
“I told her I didn’t know.”