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“And telling her, what? That makes you not an asshole?” Jake dared him.
“No,” Bubba sighed, and shook his head. “It makes me worse.”
“Bubba,” Coop said before Jake or I could say anything else. “What did you hope to accomplish? Break all of us up? Look better to her? Sink all of us? What?”
That was a damn good question. Bubba stared at Coop. “We talked about this.”
“Yeah,” Coop said, his tone still mild and relaxed. “We did. They didn’t. I think they need to hear it. Because on the surface, it looks like you wanted to stab all of us in the back because you were jealous.”
Coop was not wrong.
“I don—” Bubba edited himself with a grimace, then drained his soda before he shoved his chair back and stood. There was no mistaking the wince as he turned away, then dropped his can in the recycle bin before pulling out another cold one. “I wanted a clean slate. I wanted her to know the whole score—no pun intended—because I don’t think she understands all of this.”
“All of what?” I asked. “Us? Sex? Dating? Life?”
Turning, Bubba faced me and focused on me. Fine. Bring it. “You fucked her, Arch.”
“I was there,” I said without an ounce of repentance in me. “You’re not going to make me feel bad for that.” It had been beautiful. It still was. I couldn’t wait to be with her again. Most of the girls had bored the shit out of me.
Frankie was not most girls.
“So did Jake.”
“Careful, Bubba, Coop’s right—your jealousy is showing.” He crumpled the paper that had wrapped his burger and shoved it in the bag before he took another swig of beer.
When he looked at Coop, I waited to see where the hell he was going with this. “You came close—I’m pretty sure, even if you won’t admit it.”
“None of your business,” Coop said easily. “Just like what she does with Jake and Arch isn’t your business.”
“It’s about her.”
“Yes, Bubba,” Coop told him evenly. “It is about her. The only one making it a competition right now is you, because you seem to be acting like a sore loser.”
Damn. That barb struck.
“You know that’s not what I’m talking about…”
“Then stop beating around the damn bush,” I snapped. “I fucked her. Jake fucked her. Coop’s dying to fuck her, and if you weren’t so busy lying to yourself and being pissed at us, you’d admit you want to fuck her, too. But youdidn’tbecause you wanted to do things a certain way, and none of us played by a rule you didn’t bother to add to the list.”
Not that I ever would have. The sheer fact she’d said yes to me had been one of the most blissful moments in my life. I’d wanted her from day one. I’d settled for not pursuing it when she never seemed interested. But she was damn precious to me, and he wasn’t going to turn this into some ugly thing.
Gripping the back of the chair, Bubba met my glare. “Then I’ll stop beating around the bush. How does this end?” He looked at us in turn. “Seriously, how does it end? We all sleep with her. We all keep dating her. Then graduation comes and what? We move to college together and keep doing this? What happens when she picks? Or worse—just isn’t interested anymore and meets someone else?”
Rage flashed through me at the idea. No fucking way was anyoneelsemoving in on Frankie. “That’s not happening.”
“You can’t know that,” Bubba said. “You can’t. We didn’t even know she wanted to date until she met the French guy.”
“We never asked her directly either,” Coop said. “We all just assumed.”
Wasn’t that a kick in the nuts ‘cause Coop wasn’t wrong about that. In my defense, I didn’t have moves in 9thgrade. Spending all that time with her—I thought she got it. Then she just never responded the way I would have expected.
“We made sure no one else asked her either,” Jake said quietly. “We were the assholes, Bubba. We were. When she finally admitted what she wanted, yes, I leapt. So did you. So did Archie. Coop was a little slow…”
“Hey,” Coop protested, and for a moment, some of the tension cracked and I almost smiled as Bubba huffed a laugh.
“You leaptfirst,” Jake pointed out. “She didn’t know how to tell us, and we apparently sucked at letting her know how we felt. But was there a doubt in your mind?” He locked gazes with Bubba, their matching bruises giving them both a gruesome kind of focus. “Did you really think you were the only one who cared about her?”
Not wanted to fuck her. But cared.
