Page 8 of Edged
“You’re a kid,” Flynn offered.
I balled the bedding into my hand and stood, tearing the blanket off of him and dropping them onto the floor. He wasn’t wrong that I was the youngest of the lot of us, but they’d never treated me any different than each other, which counted for more than they knew.
I wasn’t arrogant enough to say I was a genius, but on paper…
I was.
I graduated high school at seventeen. Accepted my Bachelor’s degree at twenty. Finished my second Masters before twenty-five. That was when I met Flynn, when I met Rob. When I’d met the rest of Rob’s inner circle—Dalton and Barclay—and back then, for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I knew what it meant to have friends of my own again.
Before them, my self-imposed isolation after sabotaging the only relationship that had ever mattered in my world felt like a life sentence. And I would have been content to carry it out, for all the hurt and harm my actions had caused. But it was impossible to not be swept away by Rob’s charisma or Flynn’s quiet confidence. Barclay was a clown, Dalton was a saint, and I wasn’t sure who I was out of the five, but I felt at home between them.
And that was enough.
“You’re a prick,” Flynn groaned, rolling onto his stomach and burying his face in the pillow. “I bet you have an east-facing guest room in your house too.”
“I also have walls in my house, but this prick is going to go make us some coffee, so be nice.”
Flynn grunted something in response that I didn’t bother to listen to, and I left him to his complaints.
Rob’s house was bright from the sunrise and the lack of drywall, but otherwise quiet. After the racket he and Grayson had created the night before, I didn’t expect either of them to be up for a while, so the frightened gasp that fell out of my mouth when I rounded the corner into the kitchen and found Grayson standing in front of the sink was far less than dignified.
He threw a quick glance at me before turning back toward the stove where his weird little coffee pot lived on the back burner. In the glaring sun, it was impossible for me to not notice the thin rope-shaped bruise angling over the sharp line of Grayson’s shoulder blade or the mouth-shaped love bite on the slope of his neck.
“Good morning,” he said, clearing his throat and keeping his back to me. He wore only a pair of boxer briefs, which led me to believe he hadn’t been expecting kitchen company this early either. “Did you want a coffee?”
“You don’t have to make me coffee.”
“I wasn’t going to.” He stepped to the side, a mug in each hand and a shit-eating grin on his face. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around, Archie.”
I huffed, my eyes closing as the noise turned into a laugh. Rob was going to have his hands full with Grayson, that was for sure. But if anyone, Rob was up for the challenge. Grayson had changed him, and only for the better. It was nice to see him stepping into a better version of himself. Not that Rob was a bad guy—he wasn’t. He was one of my closest and longest-lasting friends, but Grayson had…softened him in a way that I think he needed.
The two of them were a good pair, and it was hard to not be jealous about that.
So I didn’t try.
Instead, I let the dark green jealousy bubble and boil in my veins while I waited for the water in the coffee maker to get warm, and then I let it ooze and wrap around my joints while the coffee brewed. By the time the machine beeped it’s completion at me, I was damn near ready to crawl out of my skin because I knew exactly how Grayson made Rob feel and it had been years since I’d experienced that for myself.
I was intimately familiar with the way tension and desire, when carefully cultivatedordangerously ignored, could turn into something earth-shattering, something life-changing.
Something catastrophic.
That had happened to me once—or twice—depending on how you wanted to count the occurrences, and that was one or two too many times for my liking, so I’d put up safeguards to ensure I didn’t stumble into the same trap a second time.
Owen and Mandy had been a lesson for me about what happened when you let people get close without knowing every possible outcome. The night of my graduation had turned into an escape room, except I’d been absolutely blind to any possible exit short of blowing the walls off the place. It was a mistake I wouldn’t make again.
If I didn’t know every way that something could play out, I didn’t want it. I wasn’t going to open myself up to that kind of disaster ever again. I’d made sure of it by leaving them both behind, deleting phone numbers and changing my grad school acceptance from a local school to one in California. But half a country wasn’t far enough, it seemed.
The memories of them both haunted me more than I’d ever admit.
I hadn’t even told my friends about them because what really was there to say?
“Harvesting the beans yourself?”
Flynn’s sleepy voice from behind me was the second jump scare of the day, and I straightened up, schooling my features in the reflection of the window over the sink before turning and rolling my eyes at him.
“You know he has one of these fancy things.” I waved my hand dismissively toward Grayson’s coffee contraption.
“It’s a moka pot.”
