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.”
“If you fall asleep in the sun with your mouth open, something’s bound to happen. Just feel lucky a bird didn’t poop in it.” Granted, if I’d almost swallowed one and then had to watch it die, I’d be pretty scarred by it.
“And the one that sent me to the emergency room after it tried to blind me?”
“Sunglasses, my dude. Why do you think I have so many pairs?”
In all honesty, he didn’t know that I was a whore when it came to the things, so he couldn’t answer this. I already had three other pairs in Pops’ car, mainly because I kept forgetting I’d put them down in it, though. I just had enough backup pairs in my purse to keep making it possible to do.
“I don’t think they let you wear those in fourth grade, Bex. I don’t remember any other kid wearing them during recess, including you.”
“Look,” I snickered. “You ran into the butterfly—”
“It flew into me.”
“—and it left behind a couple of legs and some wing in your eye because instead of smacking it away from you, you crushed it into your eye.”
“I panicked,” he ground out. “It was instinctual. Plus, my eye was swollen and infected for over a week thanks to that bad bastard.”
It had been. His eye hadn’t reacted well to having the butterfly pieces in it, but it’d been made worse by him using toilet paper and the rough paper towels from the machine in the boys' bathrooms to try and get it out.
“You put those scratches on your cornea yourself.”
“Because I was panicking,” he cried. “I had butterfly body pieces in my damn eye.”
It was incidents like this that’d led to him freaking out whenever he saw a butterfly. By the time he turned thirteen, whenever he saw one, he’d crouch down and shut his eyes tightly with his lips pressed together.
“So,” I drawled, “does this mean we’re not getting a butterfly tattoo?”
His expression was serious as he shook his head, but then it was replaced by a smirk. “What about a Black Widow tattoo?”
“Like the character?” I asked hopefully.
“No, like the spider. Or a Huntsman. Maybe something tropical that’s bright and pretty. Half on you, half on me.”
“You’re such a dick,” I hissed, leaning away from him and looking around the room to make sure there weren’t any. “Why would you say that? Did you see one?”
“No, but do you still leave your open soda can unattended while you do stuff?”
“Never,” I replied solemnly. “You only make that mistake once.”
“I’ll never forget you taking a mouthful and then spitting it out with a Black Widow in it. You were so fucking lucky,” he shook his
