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Hayes stroked my hair, whispering soothing sounds. “Hey, hey, it’s going to be okay.”
“I’m so damn scared, Hayes. I never thought I’d have to do this alone.”
He stroked my back and squeezed me tighter. “You’re not alone, Tally. You have Will and Colin, who love you so much that Will threatened to break both my hands—in kind of graphic ways for a pen pusher—if I ever thought of hurting you.” He pulled back a little. “You have me and Jesse for as long as you want us, because we’re one hundred percent Team Tally, you know? And we’ll be Team Baby too.”
“You can’t say that. You barely know me. And Jesse has been my friend for all of a week.”
“We were on the road together for months. I know enough about you to know that if you need me, I’ll be there.” He laughed. “As for Jesse, he sat on my toolbox the first time I met him and spoke to me for three hours. At the end of the day, he said, ‘We’re best friends now,’ like that’s all there was to it. When I tell you that Jesse doesn’t need to know you for long to be a hundred percent behind you, I mean it. You’re already up a week on me, so he’s about ready to give you a kidney.”
I smiled, letting my head rest back on his chest. He smelled good, like cologne and motor oil. He smelled like happiness. I wished I knew what they wanted from me, why they would bother taking all my shit on, but when I’d looked up into his face, his sparkling blue eyes shining down at me, part of me knew.
The part of me that recognized the look in his eyes was deep in my chest, and it thumped a little harder at the possibility that I was reading his expressions right. But I couldn’t take the leap and be wrong. I couldn’t ruin what we had by making it something it wasn’t.
Rejection would break more than my heart. Besides, when I was with Jesse, a long, shutdown part of me woke up too, and I would never, ever come between their friendship.
No, the best thing to do was remain friends with them both. Treat them how I treated Willy and Colin.
“Want to go get some ice cream?” Hayes asked softly, and I nodded, not lifting my head.
Tomorrow, I’d treat them with the same affection as I treated Willy. Today, I’d take the comfort Hayes was so freely offering, and try not to catch feelings that I didn’t deserve.
ELEVEN
JESSE
I was fucked. Head over heels, absolutely fucked. We’d been working on this place for a month now, and the more I worked with her, the more enamored I became with the woman next to me.
Tally held a piece of drywall in place as I screwed it. “What do you think about Benny, after Benny Parsons? It’s unisex, so it could suit either gender.”
I looked down at her and raised an eyebrow. “You wanna call your kid Benny? May as well call it Crystal Meth. Or better, you can call it Dale Earnhardt and be done with it.”
She gave me the finger, but still held the sheet still. It really was good to have an extra set of hands, though I made sure she never lifted anything heavy or climbed any ladders. “Don’t be mean. Both the baby’s parents were NASCAR drivers when it was conceived, so I kind of want to give it a name that’s a nod to my dreams.”
She always sounded so sad when she talked about her racing career, and I hated it. “What about Bobby? There are lots of great Bobbys in NASCAR history. Bobby Labonte. Bobby Allison. Ricky Bobby,” I teased. “It’s unisex too.”
It helped that Hayes had always been a NASCAR fan. He’d been talking to me about iconic drivers for as long as we’d been friends. I’d been so surprised when he left Ryclo over the firing of a random driver, though now I’d met Tally, I could understand. The idea of anyone being cruel to her made me irrationally angry.
If I saw Brick Willtot anytime soon, I was going to punch that fucker in the face.
“Bobby… I like it,” she said, grinning up at me like sunshine personified. And that was the reason I was fucked.
I liked her. The more time I spent around her, the more I liked her. Worst friend ever. Hayes had told me about her breakdown at the car lot, and it would make me the worst kind of asshole to catch feelings for this girl.
Let me list all the ways in which me thinking of Tally romantically was fucked up.
One: my best friend liked her. And I mean, seriously liked her. There was a bro code for this kind of situation, and if I made a move on Tally? Well, it was like breaking the code, then throwing the code into the ocean, where it’d be eaten by the Shark of Treachery and then shat out into tiny little flecks of asshat, which would then be consumed by the Whale of Betrayal.
Two: she was obviously in a vulnerable place. I would be all kinds of scum if I tried to pursue something with her right now, while she was still figuring herself out.
Three: she was about to be someone’s parent, which meant she came as a package deal. I had nothing against babies, but I honestly knew nothing about them. I wasn’t parent material at all. My dad had been gone most of the time with work, and my mom had sent me as far away as possible after her mental breakdown. While logically, I understood that they’d both loved me, that shit left a guy with a little bit of trauma.
Repeating points one to three in my head, I climbed back down the ladder. She held it with one hand, like she could stop it toppling over with her featherlight weight. Once I was on the ground, she stood there, hands on her hips, looking up at the wall we’d just hung.
“It looks beautiful.”
It was unpainted drywall. It was the furthest thing from beautiful in the world, but as I looked at it, it did seem just a little bit nicer somehow.
“You’re beautiful.” It just fell out of my mouth. I slammed my jaw shut so fast, I definitely chipped a tooth, but it was too late. Fuck me.
