Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

“Same as ever,” he says darkly. “Hasn’t seen Rusty in weeks. I arrange for her to have a weekend, she cancels two days before and then chews me out for keeping her from her daughter.”

Crystal, Rusty’s mother, is not a good parent. She’s also not a good person.

“Sorry,” I say.

Daniel just shrugs.

“It’s neither new nor surprising,” he says. “Can I help with dinner or should I stay out of the way?”

I grab a head of garlic and toss it to him.

“Chop that,” I say.Chapter Twenty-SixViolet“What about roses?” I ask, trailing after Adeline. “I like roses.”

She gives me an are-you-crazy look over her shoulder.

“No,” she says definitively. “Roses are hard. They’re very picky and bugs love them.”

“Ranunculus?” I ask.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hydrangea?”

“Those come from huge bushes,” she says, and stops.

We’re at Manny’s Farm Store and Nursery on Monday afternoon, thirty minutes outside Sprucevale, wandering through the wide outdoor aisles, looking at all the plants on display. I volunteered to help Adeline with a flower bed project she’s doing, and she’s helping me find something that will make the front of my ugly trailer look halfway decent.

“You’ve gotta think smaller,” she says, stopping in front of a table. “Most of the stuff in wedding bouquets is hard to grow. Here, what do you think of geraniums?”

They’re bright red with dark green leaves, short, and look kind of like a kid’s drawing of a flower.

“Okay,” I say.

“They’re not fancy, but they’re hard to kill,” she says. “They’ll do well in pots, so you can take them with you when you move.”

“Whenever that is,” I say.

I checked the listing on the lake cottage again this morning, which I do a couple of times a week. It’s still active. It’s been up for nearly a year, and no one’s bought it.

I should probably stop checking until I’m ready to actually move on it, because at this point if someone else buys it, I think I might cry. I’ve gotten very attached to a house I’ve never even visited.

“I had to spend five thousand dollars fixing the roof last winter,” I say sourly as I pick up some geraniums and examine them. “I told you that, right?”

“Yeah, that’s the worst,” she says. “I hate when you spend money on something like that. It’s not even fun. If you have to spend five grand on something, you should at least enjoy it a little bit.”

“I guess I enjoy not being rained on,” I admit. “But it sucked, and that’s five thousand dollars I can’t put toward a new place.”

Adeline is well-acquainted with my housing woes, and nods along with me.

“How about those?” she asks, pointing. “African violets. Also hard to kill.”

“Am I that irresponsible?” I ask, and she laughs.

“Only sometimes,” she says. “Did you ask Eli about the maid of honor yet?”

“Will my answer determine which flowers you let me buy?”

“It probably should,” she says.

“He didn’t,” I say. “And also I slept with him.”

“Unlike the maid of honor,” she says, grinning.

I sigh.

“I told you so,” Adeline says. “People get into elevators together all the time and don’t have sex.”

“But she was touching him!” I protest. “He made that face at me, and I think she was grabbing his butt —”

“Don’t worry, I love you even though you’re crazy,” she says, cutting me off and handing me a geranium. “Was the sex a direct result of you asking? Was it like, ‘Hey, did you bang this chick?’ ‘No.’ ‘Take me right now!’”

She’s grinning. I’m blushing.

“I never said take me right now,” I tell her. “And there were more steps to it than that.”

“Well, I don’t have to be at work until seven,” she says. “Come on, your foray into mature adulthood has earned you a look at the begonias while you tell me what it’s like to boink a Loveless.”

I give Adeline the rundown while she decides which flowers I’m equipped to handle. I can’t tell whether her flower choices are made based on the story I’m telling her, but they might be.

“…so we just decided to be friends with benefits,” I conclude.

“Are you friends?” she asks, one eyebrow raised.

“I don’t know. We’re something,” I say, leaning against the cart and looking down at the flowers inside: a few easy ones for me, and then the pretty, dramatic ones for Adeline’s flower bed. Apparently she’s earned the difficult flowers, presumably by being incredibly mature.

“We obviously can’t date,” I say, still looking down. “You need to at least like someone to date them, right?”

“Usually,” she says.

“And I don’t like him, and he definitely doesn’t like me, but we have a lot of chemistry —”

“Bowchicka.”

“— so why not just do the part that works and not the part that doesn’t?”

She brushes her hands against each other, getting dirt off.

“If we dated we’d just get attached and hurt each other sooner or later,” I say, still defending myself. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a conversation that didn’t end with one of us angry. You can’t date someone like that, it’s ridiculous.”