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She stroked my hair back from my face, pulling me down for a kiss. “You’re amazing, Rigby Engman,” she purred, burrowing against my chest. “Now rest up, because after a short nap, I’m going to need to do that all over again.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I laughed, kissing her so hard, there was no doubt that I was claiming her forever.
We might need time, but I knew my endgame. I just needed everyone to get there with me.
ChapterTwenty-Nine
RIVER
Devanand I took our beers out onto the back deck, the baby monitor in my hand. The night was nice, but it was starting to cool down earlier these days and it was already dark. At least it was clear. Dev grabbed the matches, lighting the fire pit that we kept prestacked in the summer.
We were silent for a while, but it was the comfortable silence of two people who’d known each other for so long, it was hard to remember a happy time that didn’t involve the other.
I could remember plenty of unhappy times, though. Eating cereal out of boxes for dinner, my arms too skinny, my belly always hungry. My parents passed out or glazed over on the floor. Bruises on my arms, stains on my clothes.
The day I came home from school and found them both dead on the floor from a bad batch of heroin. There’d been an epidemic of ODs that month as the tainted smack killed off users across the city. The newspaper had been almost happy, despite the loss of life, that there were less users lining the city streets.
They didn’t think about kids like me, who had to be placed in a foster home at ten, angry at a world that didn’t care that my parents were dead. There’d been no one left in the world who gave a damn about ten-year-old River Cooper. At least, until I found Devan and Alana.
Fuck, I missed her.
“Alana would be laughing her ass off about this, don’t you think?”
Devan huffed. “Man, after she got over being jealous that Rigby picked someone who wasn’t her. She had the hugest crush on him.”
It was understandable. Rigby was everything she’d never had. Stability. Loyalty. Kindness. It was the same reason he’d wiggled his way into our hearts, and maybe if I’d swung that way, I’d have had a crush on him too.
“He never saw her like that.” Part of it was out of loyalty to us. We saw her as a little sister, so he saw her as one too. But part of it was that she just wasn’t his type, I think. There was something about Alana that was needy, like she was always trying to fill the hole left from her childhood with something. Hobbies, travel, men. But you couldn’t stuff a bandaid inside a wound and hope it helped. You needed to heal the wound yourself. Alana had never really learned that lesson, and it would be something I’d regret for the rest of my life—that I hadn’t helped her enough.
We were quiet for a little longer, lost in our own thoughts. I didn’t think too hard about what Rigby and Nova were doing upstairs. Because I was jealous. Not that she was with Rig, but that she wasn’t with me. It was a weird line, and if someone had told me two weeks ago that I’d be sharing a woman with my two best friends, I probably would have punched them in the jaw. But it was working, I think.
“Tell me about how things are going with Nova,” I said softly into the night air.
Devan’s lips curled into a smile. “She’s really something. It hurts me to say this, but I think Rigby was right.”
I laughed, because if the trade-off to having Nova was to listen to Rigby gloat about being right forevermore, I could deal with that. “It doesn’t weird you out that Rigby is probably up there fucking her right now?”
He chewed his lower lip. “No. I don’t think so. I wish it was me, but I don’t want to go full primal jealous rage or some shit like that.”
I would never say it to my best friend—the person I loved more than anyone in the world, except Huey now—but I was so fucking relieved. Where my parents had been apathetic to my existence, Devan’s hadn’t been. But not in a good way. His dad had beat him and his mom for as long as he could remember. He’d been violent. Mean. Right up until his mom overdosed on pain pills, and the authorities investigated. Hospital records were checked, and the abuse came to light. Six-year-old Devan went into foster care, and his dad went to prison, where he died of liver failure.
The shit Devan had dealt with in his life made me sick to my fucking stomach, and I knew he tried real hard to not be anything like his old man. He walked away when other men would fight. He was so fucking gentle with women and kids, the elderly. Anyone more vulnerable than him. And he kept a tight lock on his emotions, like he believed deep down that all it’d take was dropping the milk on the kitchen floor one morning to turn him into that raging psychopath.
I knew that Devan would rather cut off both arms than harm anyone. After a ton of therapy, I was fairly sure Devan knew that he wasn’t a ticking time bomb of violence too. But the fear remained, for both of us.
Instead of sharing any of those dark fears, I just raised my beer at him. “Same, man. I wish it was me, but I know my time will come.”
Devan was still shaking his head. “It’s not just the sex, Riv. It’s just being with her… it’s something else. She's so light and full of joy, despite everything. Being with her just makes me happier. She’s like a xanny in human form. I’ve never felt more, I don’t know, content.”
Well, fuck. I’d left this hardass alone with a girl for a week and he was about to write an ode in her honor. I didn’t tease him about it, though; I was so fucking happy he was content.
“Well, here’s to being boyfriends-in-law, I guess.”
I’d resisted the urge to steal Nova from Rigby’s bed that night, and the next. I didn’t want to rush her, and I didn’t want her to think that her only worth to us was if we were fucking. My therapist would’ve been so proud of me.
So instead, I showed her in little ways how glad I was that she was here. I kissed her a lot, because that was quickly becoming an addiction. I made her coffee. Took her for lunch. Held her against me and kissed her temple while we walked Huey around the park. Helped her set up her office space, and watched Huey while she reconnected with her customers and started the huge backlog of requests. She’d come to me when she was ready for more. Until then, I’d wait—no matter how blue my balls were right now.
These couple of days at home between games had been amazing. Sure, we did conditioning every day, hitting up the gym and the trainers, but I was home by lunchtime to spend it with Huey and Nova, and most of the time Rigby too. Dev was back at work, catching up on the meetings he’d put off to spend between Nova’s thighs.
