Crave (The Gibson Boys 3)

“Yeah.”

“Okay,” she says, her eyes lit up with excitement. “And it’s the same for Fish Girl. She’s swimming in this vast ocean that comprises like three-quarters of the world and can’t see all these ah-mazing fish she encounters every day because she’s still all obsessed with Reef Boy.”

“Look, Em …”

She shakes her head. “You want what you can’t have. It’s basic human nature.”

My gaze drops to the glass of wine, and I contemplate guzzling it. It certainly couldn’t make me more confused or sick to my stomach.

Not everything she’s saying is resonating. I don’t want Mach just because I can’t have him. I want him because he’s so threaded in my life—in who I am and how I got to be this person—that I can’t imagine not having him. Or not wanting him.

“Maybe I have to accept I won’t have him like I want him,” I say, testing the idea out loud. “Maybe I need to …”

“Maybe you need to take the pressure off it. Stop ‘being on a diet’,” she says, using air quotes. “You stress constantly about your relationship with Machlan—how it’s defined. What it is. What it isn’t. Maybe you just need to let it be.”

“Let it be, huh?”

“Yes,” she says, grinning. “Let it be. Let it be whatever it is. Give it the organic room to just develop into a great friendship or an intense hatred or a friends with benefits or maybe just mutual acquaintances. You’ll never know what it can be if you don’t stop trying to shove it into one of the two boxes you’ve already decided it has to go in.”

I gulp, my mind processing this too quickly. Everything kind of jumbles together as if I did drink the wine, but at the same time, it seems clear. And possibly logical.

“I almost kissed him today,” I say. I toss it out there as though it’ll change her mind. She only laughs.

“I’m sure you did. The two of you together is like watching two people have sex without the sex.”

“That’s gross.” I stand, stretching my arms overhead. “I need to get going.”

“You got somewhere to be?”

“Yeah. Bed.”

She yawns, getting to her feet too. “I’m tired myself and that bottle of wine didn’t help.”

I pull her into a quick hug before heading toward the gate at the side of the house. I wave. I might even respond to something she says offhandedly as I walk away. I’m not sure. All I do know is that I have to figure out if I can just be friends with Machlan Gibson or if that’s a recipe for disaster.

Fourteen

Hadley

I slide my toothbrush over my teeth.

The sky is a hazy mass of grays. Buckets of rain aren’t pouring from the sky, and the wind doesn’t sound like it’s two seconds from ripping the stairs off the front of the apartment either. Both were constants all night as I lay on the bed and listened to the weather be as contrary as my feelings.

By the time the rain switched to a drizzle and I finally drifted to sleep, I had worried myself into an emotional coma. Now that it’s morning, or early afternoon if the clock isn’t lying, a sort of peace blankets me. I have no solution to my predicament. There isn’t some grand plan to wrench my heart out of Machlan’s hands. But there does seem to be a confidence that I’ll figure it out and that feels good.

That feels like me.

I spit, rinse, and spit again.

Plucking the toothbrush back in the coffee cup next to the window, I think through a highlight reel of my relationship with Mach. The only consistency throughout the years is that there was always pressure.

Pressure not to be together from Cross.

Pressure to be together as a result of our choices.

Pressure not to be together because things were too hard, and then pressure to be together because it really felt like our final shot.

“Maybe Emily’s right,” I say. “Maybe I just need to let it work itself out.”

The words barely get past my lips before my palm hits my forehead. It sounds so simple to say those words. It seems so easy in concept. But giving up control when it comes to this particular situation is so crazy hard for me.

It’s too important. I’m too vulnerable. There’s too much on the line.

“Ugh.” My stomach rumbles, reminding me I haven’t eaten since the three bites I had of Emily’s frozen lasagna last night. I head to the couch to grab my purse when my phone rings from the table.

I ignored two texts from Samuel last night and one call that could be classified as early morning. Grabbing the device, I sit on the edge of the bed and answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Hadley.”

I wait for a flutter of butterflies or at least a semblance of familiarity at hearing his voice, but nothing changes inside me. I might as well be talking to Cross or Peck.