Page 9 of Cherry Picked
The guy I’ve been in love with for years confirmed that I’ll only ever be a little brother to him.
A spot of casual heartbreak. No big deal.
“I’m fine,” I insisted, low-key darting a glance around the meeting space, just in case Jack happened to be looming nearby. “Just because I’m not talking doesn’t mean I’m upset, Em. Can’t a guy keep himself to himself around here?”
Emma’s inelegant snort brought my attention to the crowd around us. We were surrounded by Little Pippin Hollowans, illustrating the very antithesis of keeping oneself to oneself.
One row ahead of us, Frieda Lower was complaining in a carrying voice, “Can you believe Norm Avery had the audacity to advise me—and I say that with sarcasm, mind—on the best way to irrigate the crop now that my squash are in? I’ll thank him to mind his own danged business, and that’s precisely what I told him…”
Oumar Diallo sat upright beside her, arms folded across his chest, and nodded along, but it wasn’t clear from this angle whether he was agreeing with her or he’d fallen asleep with his eyes open again.
Meanwhile, Letty Hendelmann stage-whispered a warning to her neighbor Fran Driscoll. “Did you know right around daybreak when the sun isjustpeeking around the corner of your big oak tree that someone—not me, obviously, because I’dnever—could see right into your guest room window? I’m just saying you might want to go ahead and hang those curtains Marie said you picked up at the Save-a-Ton back in January…”
“Yeah, no,” my sister whispered, amused. “If you’re looking to mind your own business, I think you were born in the wrong place.”
I dropped into an empty seat next to my brother-in-law, Luke, who greeted me with a grin and an affectionate arm bump. Emma dropped into the seat beside me and turned her body in my direction, ready to continue her inquisition, so I turned toward Luke with a forced smile, hoping I didn’t look as desperate as I felt.
“So! Luke! How’s it going at your place? Tell meallabout the sheep.” I begged him with my mind not to ask about me, or Jack, or hiking, or… anything that would require me to further contemplate this debacle of a day.
“Going great. The new lambs are so cute.” Luke’s eyes went dreamy. “Aiden named them all after comic book characters. If you’re not too busy volunteering with the Nature Scouts this week, you should come by—”
Webb set a hand on his husband’s knee and leaned across his lap. “’Bout time you arrived, Hawk. Jack was asking for you earlier.”
It seemedWebbwas not picking up on my psychic message.
“Oh.” I swallowed hard. “Was he?”
“He said you got hurt during your hike and he was worried.” Webb’s gaze tracked me up and down, looking for signs of injury.
Fortunately, the death blow to my pride and the slow bleed of my smashed-up heart didn’t have visible symptoms.
Despite everything, some hopeful little corner of that mangled organ soared at the knowledge that Jack had been thinking about me—that hecared—before I ruthlessly caught it and dragged it back to Earth.
He cares about you like a brother. That’s all.
“I’m fine,” I said, a little more firmly than necessary. “Really. A few pinecone scratches. But if it had been more,” I couldn’t help adding, “I would have sought medical attention because I’m an experienced hiker andan adult.You know that, right?”
Webb’s eyebrows dipped. “O-kayyy, jeez.” He turned to look at Luke. “Is it just me, or is everyone snappish today? Maybe there was something in the air at Glassy Ridge. First Jack’s biting my head off, now Hawk is cranky.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. There was a low bar to me being “cranky.” The dark underbelly of being a generally happy person was that people in my life didn’t know how to process it on the rare occasions when I displayed any emotion besides cheerfulness. Other people got to be moody all the dang time.
Well, it was my turn now.
Luke ran fingers absently through Webb’s hair. “Want me to teach you about common denominators again, baby? It comes in really handy sometimes.”
Webb’s lips twitched at the tease, and when he leaned into Luke’s touch, I had to look away.
Fuck, I wanted that. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted someone to look at me the way those two looked at each other—with heat and affection and the kind of deep satisfaction that came from knowing you were understood and unconditionally loved.
I wanted my Darcy.
Too bad my idiot heart had set itself on Jack freaking Wyatt, the most obtuse individual in all of Vermont, seven years ago.
Because what he and I had… it was so very close to that. It was the two of us sitting side by side on a rocky outcropping on a winter’s day in comfortable silence, finding patterns in the clouds. It was me and him by the fire pit in his yard, grilling burgers, and planning house projects, and laughing over whether Jack should get a pet (I was heavily teamcat;Jack was heavily teampet rock). It was us working together in the kitchen at the diner while I ate fifty-seven incarnations of a sandwich since Jack was devoted to his farm-to-table seasonal ingredients and adorably finicky about his recipes, and I loved that he trusted me to be his guinea pig.
I’d thought if we could just add a dash of unbridled passion, a little hint of “I can’t wait to get you home, baby,” maybe a dash of “you, me, clothes off,now,”we could turn our friendship into love, just like tweaking a recipe. And that surely, if Jack accepted my proposal to do a little bit of cherry picking, he’d have seen how easy and perfect it could be.
Unnecessarily complicated. Pffft. What about a simple request to take a man’s virginity was unnecessarily complicated?
