They looked at me in unison, both with skeptical expressions.
Jace and Nathan had been best friends since childhood. He and my brother were six years older than me. I’d spent the majority of my preteen years lusting after Jace in secret. In those days, he’d come over to the house all sweaty after football practice, and my hormones would mimic Mexican jumping beans. Whenever he’d so much as talk to me, I’d get weak in the knees. If you looked at my diary entries from back then, there was something about Jace on every other page. Wanting someone and knowing I couldn’t have him had been pure torture. Especially during those last couple of years before Jace went away to college, I was hopelessly lovesick.
And then? He was gone. My twelve-year-old heart had been devastated when Jace moved away to attend school in North Carolina. And he only came home in the summer for the first few years.
He’d stayed away for nine years in total and had only recently moved back home to Florida. I certainly never imagined he’d end up living with us. At twenty-seven, Jace was the boy I remembered lusting after, but even bigger and better. He was a full-fledged man now. And I wasn’t a child anymore. So you can imagine where my head had been lately.
Nathan snapped me out of my thoughts. “You’d better bring the pepper spray with you if your stubborn ass won’t change into something decent.”
“You know I always carry it.”
Sometimes my brother didn’t hold back, but I couldn’t blame him for being protective. I was an adult now, but old habits died hard. Nathan had become my caretaker after our parents were killed during a robbery seven years ago. I was fourteen, and Nathan was twenty when we lost them. Jace had been home from college that summer, working for my dad’s landscaping company. Sadly, he was with my parents when they died. That was still so hard to fathom. To this day, Jace couldn’t talk about it. I knew he suffered from survivor’s guilt. He’d been shot at as well, but he’d gotten lucky. Still, the trauma of having witnessed my parents’ murder had inflicted a different kind of damage—not physical, but it had scarred his soul for life. None of us really talked about what had happened. Our painful past was a ghost that followed us around, one we never acknowledged.
I knew from the police report that my father and Jace had been driving back from a landscaping job. They’d stopped to pick up my mother at the convenience store where she worked. My father had felt like someone was following them from the moment he and Jace left the job site. The man eventually tried to run them off the road before pulling out a gun. My dad had a ton of cash on him, since his landscaping clients typically paid him that way. The investigators believe the man had somehow known about that money, which was why he’d been following their truck. Perhaps he’d been tipped off by someone working for my dad.
According to the report, the victims, Ronald and Elizabeth Spade, had cooperated, handing over the cash, but the man, who was high on drugs, fatally shot my parents anyway. A bullet grazed Jace, but he was unharmed. Based on the description of his vehicle, police later found the man holed up in his apartment. He was shot and killed following a standoff. And that was the end of it. Our lives changed forever, and the innocent, idyllic childhood I’d enjoyed became a memory.
After that summer, Jace never came home again. That was understandable.
Though it had now been seven years since my parents died, I knew I hadn’t properly dealt with that loss. Some mornings, I still woke up expecting my mother and father to be here. If it weren’t for Nathan, I wouldn’t have made it. He did his best to fill the void they left. As miserable as we both were in the beginning, he’d tried to make life as normal as possible—like continuing our tradition of family movie night, even though it was just the two of us now. To this day, we picked one night a month to watch a movie together.
Nathan and I still lived in the neighborhood where we’d grown up in Palm Creek, Florida. After Mom and Dad died, staying in our childhood home had been too painful, so Nathan used the money we’d inherited for a down payment on a house a couple of streets over. Unfortunately, my brother had been recently laid off from his car-sales job and needed some help paying the bills. Around the same time, Jace moved home to temporarily manage his dad’s business. Nathan asked Jace if he would rent out our spare bedroom to help with our mortgage payment. Since Jace was in limbo, waiting to buy property until he knew whether or not he’d be staying in Florida permanently, moving in with us was a good, temporary solution. It benefited everyone. So that’s how we became a party of three.
I turned to my brother. “Can I have a ride to the bar?”
“What’s wrong with your car now?”
“It might be the alternator this time. It’s in the shop again.”
“That piece of shit.”
The old, rust-colored Toyota Corolla I drove constantly gave me trouble. Thankfully, our local mechanic—ironically named “Rusty”—always offered me a good deal. Nathan was convinced Rusty had ulterior motives when it came to me, but I gladly accepted the price break without questioning the reason for it.
“I’m saving up for something else,” I assured him. “Until then, I have to deal with it. Not like I could get any money for that piece of junk if I tried to sell it.”
“Next time, don’t take it to Rusty,” Jace said. “I can try to fix it.”
The idea of Jace shirtless and sweaty under my car wasn’t exactly unpleasant.
“Thanks. I hadn’t thought to ask you. I appreciate the offer.”
“When do you need to be at The Iguana?” Nathan asked.
“I have to leave now. I just need a ride there. Kellianne says she can drive me home.”
He looked over at the clock. “I can’t take you now. Someone’s coming in ten minutes to look at the lawn mower I’m selling. I can take you after, though.”
I frowned. “I’ll miss the beginning if I don’t leave now.”
“Why is that such a big deal?” Nathan asked. “It’s just a bunch of drunk people spewing dumb shit.”
“It’s not dumb. It’s captivating.”
Once a week, The Iguana held their open mic “Pour Your Heart Out” night, and I’d been obsessed with going as of late. Patrons—mostly somewhat drunk ones—were encouraged to get on stage and reveal anything they wanted to a room full of strangers. It could be something they needed to get off their chest, or their deepest, darkest secret. You never knew what you were going to get. Some of the confessions were sad, things I could relate to after years of harboring the pain of my parents’ murder. Other times, it was a sexy secret. Some people held nothing back. It was definitely eighteen-plus. Even though I loved listening to it all, I hadn’t had the guts to get up on stage yet. Someday.
“I can take her,” Jace interrupted.
I inwardly celebrated.
“Thanks, man. I appreciate it,” Nathan said.
Jace stood up from the table and tossed the pistachio shells he’d accumulated on a paper napkin into the trash.
He grabbed his keys from the counter and threw them up in the air. “Let’s go.”
A surge of adrenaline coursed through me as I followed Jace outside to his shiny black pickup truck, parked in our driveway. It was almost 8PM, and the hot Florida air had started to cool down. A warm breeze blew around the palm trees in front of our house. We lived on a quiet street of similar-looking stucco homes. Our house was only one level, but it was pretty big in comparison to the other properties. We had three bedrooms and a large, screened-in pool in the back. Because the homeowners’ association was very strict, all of the houses were kept in good condition. Otherwise, you’d have to pay a fine. Members of the association drove by periodically and would send nastygrams if they so much as noticed the paint chipping. Fortunately, Nathan could fix pretty much anything himself.