Movement over her shoulder caught my attention. Rhett strolled up wearing nothing more than his jeans that were still unbuttoned and paused, looking out at all of us. “Hey, Unc,” he zoned in on Colt, “you think we can install one of those firemen poles or something? AJ thinks I need a second exit.”
Before, when I thought AJ looked like she might puke, it had nothing on the way she looked now. She stood there, shifting her shocked gaze around between all of us, her lips pressed together in a tight line, her eyes wide. Then suddenly she threw her hand up into the air awkwardly, giving a rushed wave before hurrying past us and down the stairs. A few times, I was fearful she might fall, but she made it to the bottom safely and practically ran the second her feet hit the ground.
“Have a good night?” I heard one of the guys ask, and I turned back just as they all stepped around me and into the construction zone. Rhett remained where he was, looking like he’d won the lottery. In a way, he had. AJ, though embarrassed, and I was sure mortified, was one hell of a girl.
“You do understand that you’ll have some groveling to do the next time you see her.” His smile faltered just a small bit. “By the way, do you think she knows that she had her shirt on backwards? And inside out too?”
We shouldn’t have laughed, it all felt so wrong, but come on.
We joined the rest of the guys inside, and shortly after, my dad showed up. Colt, Reed, and my dad spent the rest of the day terrifying Reed on how AJ was gonna bust his balls for embarrassing her the way he had. He seemed confident that he had it covered, but when the guys weren’t looking, I could see he was a little concerned. At one point, I caught him groveling through a few text messages to AJ, and each time she didn’t reply, he grew even more anxious.
***
I’d just finished sanding the last part of the bedroom floor when I gathered the sander and turned around to walk back down the hall. I found Rhett hammering nails into the wainscoting that lined the entire place on the lower half of the walls. He was putting a little more power than necessary behind each swing of his hammer.
“We still on for Friday?” I stepped up to test the waters.
He smacked the last nail sticking out before looking at me with an unreadable expression.
“Trouble in Happy Land?”
He didn’t appear impressed with my sarcasm. I continued to hassle him, and after a while, he lowered the hammer and leaned back against the wall, looking somewhat defeated.
“Harley,” he mumbled.
His first love, a high school sweetheart. The girl who was his first everything and then she broke his heart. Okay, so she didn’t just break it; she disintegrated it, and it took a long time before he was willing to open up again. “She’s back?”
“No. Not physically anyway.” He took in a slow, deep breath. “She sent something in the mail, and when I went inside earlier, Mom told me it was there.” Rhett looked tormented. Just when he’d finally found happiness again, his past found a way to interfere.
“What’d she send?”
He shrugged. “Didn’t look. I guess I just can’t figure out why now.” Him and me both. “When she left, we’d made plans to go to college together. We’d made plans for our lives together. I know things change, I get that now, but she just stopped, ya know?” I felt for the guy. “She quit calling; she quit responding. It all just ended. Now here we are, and, out of the blue, she sends whatever the fuck she sent.”
I could see the anger and the irritation in his eyes, and I looked out through the living room to ensure we were still alone. My father and uncles were still working on the window placements and completely unaware of what Rhett and I were doing.
“Let me ask you something.” I finally turned back to Rhett, finding him staring back at me, waiting for me to continue. “Whatever’s inside that envelope, is it gonna change the way you feel about AJ?”
“No.” There wasn’t even a second of hesitation. “It wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Then you have two ways you can go with this.” I held up one finger, checking off the two routes he could take. “You can open the envelope, or you can throw it away and forget all about it.” It was really that simple, but only he could be the one to decide.
I just hoped he'd made the right one, and in the end, no one would get hurt.
Chapter Four
Mike
“Is he coming?” Terrance, Rhett’s friend from school and also one of the guys on his college baseball team, asked for what felt like the hundredth time. He was already hammered. I’m pretty sure he was when he showed up here at Lucky’s in a taxi with three other guys.
It would seem out of all the guys that joined us for Rhett’s birthday guys’ night, I was the only sober one.
“He’s on his way.” I tucked my phone back into my pocket and turned around toward the bar, holding up my hand to signal the bartender.
“What’ll it be?”
“He’ll have a Heineken.”
I knew that voice. Looking back over my shoulder, I felt like I’d been hit by a freight train when I saw Maddison. Tight jeans hugged her hips and thighs, showing off her long-ass legs even through the material. The silver shirt she wore looked like nothing more than two straps of material crisscrossed and tied together at her back. I
