I was trying to stuff the last sweater into my overflowing suitcase when there was a knock at my door. I would have ignored it as I had all the other knocks on my door since yesterday’s soccer game truth bomb if it hadn’t also been accompanied by a barrage of text messages.
Sloane: It’s us. Let us in.
Naomi: We come in peace.
Sloane: Hurry up before we make enough noise to alert your grumpy neighbor.
I was not up for company, emotional blackmail, or another round of apologizing.
Naomi: I should add that Knox gave me the master key so we’re coming in no matter what. You might as well make it your choice.
Damn it.
I threw the sweater on the bed and headed for the door.
“Hi,” they said cheerfully when I opened it.
“Hi.”
“Thanks, we will come in,” Sloane announced, giving the door a shove.
“If you’ve come to do battle, I’m all out of energy,” I warned.
I’d spent half the night defrosting frozen vegetables on my chest while listening to guided meditations and trying to will the stress from my body.
“We’re here to tell you that we picked a side,” Naomi said. She was wearing tight-fitting jeans and a silk blouse the color of emeralds. Her hair was curled in loose waves that framed her pretty face.
“A side of what?”
“We’ve given it a lot of thought and we’re Team Lina,” Sloane said. She too was nicely dressed for a casual Sunday afternoon. She was wearing distressed jeans, heels, and a damn good smoky eye. “I wanted to make T-shirts, but Naomi thought it would be better if we just showed up and took you out.”
“Took me out?” I repeated. “Like to murder me?”
“No homicides, I promise,” Naomi said, heading toward my bedroom. “Why is there a packed suitcase in here?”
“Because I can’t carry all my clothes in my hands.”
“You were right not to wait on the T-shirts,” Sloane said, following Naomi into my room.
Naomi started pawing through my suitcase. “This is cute. Oh, and definitely these jeans.”
“Are you robbing me?” I knew Knockemout was a little rough around the edges but this seemed excessive.
“You’re getting dressed and we’re going out for a girls’ plus Stef afternoon, possibly night, depending on how much alcohol and fried food is consumed,” Sloane said, handing me a pair of jeans and a red sweater with a plunging neckline.
“We’re still working on the name,” Naomi added.
“But I wasn’t honest with you. I kept things from you,” I pointed out, wondering if perhaps they’d forgotten my treason.
“Friends give friends the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you had a good reason for not being honest. Or maybe you’ve never had awesome friends like Sloane and me,” Naomi said, tossing me my gigantic cosmetic bag. “Either way, what kind of friends would we be if we left you when you needed us most?”
“So you’re not mad at me?” I asked slowly.
“We’re concerned,” Naomi corrected.
“And we really want more details on you sleeping with Nash,” Sloane added with a playful eyebrow wriggle.
“He’s miserable, by the way,” Naomi said, pointing in the direction of the bathroom.
“His state of misery is none of my business,” I insisted.
He’d knocked on my door twice yesterday after the disaster at the soccer game. The third time, he’d threatened to break it in if I didn’t at least confirm that I was okay.
To save the expense of replacing the door, I’d texted him a succinct I’m fine. Fuck off.
“Hurry up and get ready. We can’t drink all day if we don’t start now,” Sloane said, examining another sweater. “Hey, can I borrow this for my date with Nolan?”
And that was how I ended up at Hellhound, a dingy biker bar, on a Sunday afternoon with Team Lina.
The music was loud. The floor was sticky. The pool tables were all taken. And there were more wallets on chains than off.
“This place still makes me want to use a bucket of Pine-Sol and a pallet of Lysol before sitting down,” Naomi complained as we bellied up to the bar.
Stef grimaced and rolled up the sleeves of his Alexander McQueen sweater before resting his forearms gingerly on the wood. “Well, hello, hot bartender,” he said under his breath.
Joel, the gentlemanly bartender, was tall, muscly, facial hair-y, and decked out in head to toe black. His hair was a mane of silver swept back from his tanned face. “Welcome back, ladies,” he said with a smirk of recognition. “I see you brought a new friend along.”
Naomi introduced Stef.
“What’ll it be? Shots? Liquor? Wine?”
“Shots,” Sloane said.
“Wine?” Naomi asked.
“Definitely wine,” Stef agreed.
Joel’s gray eyes came to me. “I’ll have water.”
“Booooooo!” Naomi and Sloane said together.
Stef frowned at me. “Do you have a head injury?”
“I’ll get started on those drinks. Try not to punch anyone in the meantime,” Joel cautioned mostly me.
“You’re not drinking,” Sloane said.
“Water is a drink.”
“What Sloane means is why are you hydrating instead of being irresponsible and ordering adult beverages?” Naomi said.
“One of us has to drive,” I pointed out.
“One of us has a sexy as hell fiancé ready and waiting to pick up our charmingly intoxicated selves,” Naomi explained.
“Knox didn’t give you shit about coming back here?” I asked.
The last and, well, only time we’d been here had been the day I arrived in town. Knox and Naomi were in the midst of a breakup that neither knucklehead actually wanted. I’d whisked Naomi away from her shift at Honky Tonk and brought her here to the diviest of dive bars.
Sloane had joined us and the day almost ended in a bar fight when some of the dumber, drunker patrons thought they had an actual chance with us.
“That’s why Stef’s here,” Naomi explained.
“He made me promise to send an update every thirty minutes,” Stef said, holding up his phone.
“Is he still mad at me?” I asked, trying to sound like I didn’t care.
“He will be if he finds out you were planning on leaving town without telling any of us,” Naomi said.
This was why I didn’t have friends. Relationships of all kinds were too sticky. Everyone felt they had a right to tell you what you were doing was wrong and give you instructions on how to fix it to their liking.
“I wasn’t leaving town. I was going to move back to the motel and then leave town.”
“As your friend, I can’t in good conscience let you get a roach-borne disease when there’s a perfectly nice, clean apartment available to you,” Naomi insisted.
“I’d rather live with roaches than next door to Nash.”
Joel returned with our drinks. Two shots of God knows what for Sloane, two wineglasses filled to the brim, and a water with a lemon garnish.
Sloane made grabby hands at the shots.
“Thanks, Joel,” I said as he set the water down in front of me.
“You doin’ okay?” he asked me.
“I’m fine.”
“Errrrr!” Sloane, already one shot down, made a loud buzzer noise. “It’s against the law to lie during girls plus Stef afternoon.”
Naomi nodded. “Agreed. Rule number one: No lying. We aren’t here to pretend everything is fine. We’re here to be here for each other. I said here too many times. Now it doesn’t sound like a word. Here. Here?”
“Here.” Sloane tried frowning.
“They been drinking already?” Joel asked me with the arch of a sexy silver eyebrow.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
He wisely filled two more glasses with water and set them in front of my friends before disappearing down the bar.
“Heeeeeere,” Naomi enunciated.
“Oh my God. Fine! I’m not fine,” I admitted.
“It’s about damn time. I was afraid you were going to make us keep going,” Sloane said, picking up her second shot and downing it.
“The first step is admitting you’re a disaster,” Stef said sagely.
“I’m not fine. I am a disaster. Even my family doesn’t know what I do for a living because they can’t handle the thought of me anywhere near even the slightest whiff of danger. If they had any idea how dangerous my job is, they would fly out here, form a protective shield around me, and force me to move home with them.”
My tiny personal audience all watched me over the rims of their glasses.
“And I’m drinking water because I had a heart condition that almost killed me when I was fifteen. I missed out on all the normal teenage things thanks to surgeries and being the weird girl who died in front of an entire stadium of people. It’s fixed now, but I still get PVCs when I’m stressed. And I’m stressed as hell now. Every stupid flutter reminds me what it was like to almost die and then live a suffocating half-life of homeschooling, medical appointments, and overbearing parents who I couldn’t blame for being overbearing because they watched me essentially die on a soccer field.”
“Whoa,” Sloane said.
“More alcohol, Joel,” Naomi begged, holding up her now empty wineglass.
“So excuse me if I don’t tell everyone I meet all the details of my life. I spent enough of it being micromanaged and reminded that I’m not normal and I won’t ever have normal. Until I got here and I met Nashhole.”
“Good one,” Sloane said with an approving nod.
“What happened when you got here and met Nash? Sorry. I mean Nashhole?” Naomi asked, hanging on my every word.
“I took one look at him and his whole wounded, broody thing—”
“By ‘thing,’ do you mean penis?” Stef asked.
“I do not.”
“Stop interrupting her,” Naomi hissed. “You took one look at his wounded, broody not-penis and what?”
“I liked him,” I confessed. “I really liked him. He made me feel like I was special and not in the weird cardiac-arrest-in-front-of-everyone way. He made me feel like he needed me. No one’s ever needed me. They’ve always protected me or babied me or avoided me. God, my parents are trying to book plane tickets just to bully their way into my next cardiology appointment so they can hear my doctor say I’m still fine.”
More drinks appeared in front of Naomi and Sloane. Joel slid a bowl of nuts my way. “Those are fresh out of the bag. No one fingered them up yet,” he assured me.
“Thank you for the unfingered nuts,” I said.
“So Nash came clean—after some berating—about the panic attacks he’s been having and how you helped him,” Naomi said.
“I didn’t take advantage of him,” I insisted.
“Honey, we know. No one thinks that. Not even Nash. He’s a Morgan. They say stupid things when they’re mad. But I have to tell you, it’s nice to see him mad,” Naomi confessed.
“Why?”
“Before you, he wasn’t mad or happy or anything. He was like a photocopy of himself. Just flat, lifeless. And then along came you and you gave him something to care enough about to get mad.”
“I lied to him. I lied to all of you.”
“And now you’ll do better,” Naomi said, as if it were that simple.
“I will?”
“If you want to stay friends you will,” Sloane said. Three shots in and she was already listing to one side like she was on the deck of a ship.
“Friends make friends better. We accept the bad parts, celebrate the good parts, and we don’t torture you for your mistakes,” Naomi said.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t honest with you,” I said softly.
“It kind of makes sense now at least,” Sloane pointed out. “If I had to lie to my parents about everything just to lead a somewhat normal life, I can see how easily that would turn into a habit.”
“I get it,” Naomi said sympathetically. “I did lie to my parents about everything when I first got here because I was trying to protect them from my mess and Tina’s mess.”
“I know the feeling.” I stirred my straw around the water. “I actually let myself start to ask ‘what if?’”
“What if what?” Stef asked.
“What if it worked out with him? What if I stayed here? What if this was the sign I’d been looking for to quit my job and try something new? What if I could actually have normal?”
Naomi and Sloane were staring at me with wide, watery eyes.
“Don’t,” I warned.
“Oh, Lina,” Naomi whispered.
“I know you don’t like to be touched, and I respect that,” Sloane said. “But I think you should know that I’m hugging you in my mind.”
“Okay. No more shots for you,” I decided.
They both continued to stare at me like big doe-eyed, needy cartoon characters. “Make it stop,” I begged Stef.
He shook his head. “There’s only one way to make it stop.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ugh, fine. You can hug me. But don’t spill anything on me.”
“Yay!” Sloane said.
They hugged me from both sides. There, sandwiched between a drunk librarian and a tipsy community relations director, I felt just a little bit better. Stef patted me awkwardly on the head.
“You deserve to be happy and have normal,” Naomi said, pulling back.
“I don’t know what I deserve. Nash hit pretty much every shame and guilt button I have.”
“He dropped a truth bomb on me at one of Waylay’s games earlier this season,” Naomi sympathized.
“Thank God the season’s almost over,” Stef joked.
“You know why honesty is so important to him, don’t you?” Naomi asked me.
I shrugged. “I guess it’s important to everyone.”
“Knox and Nash’s dad is an addict. Duke started using drugs—mostly opioids—after their mom died. Knox said every day with their dad felt like a lie. He’d swear he was sober or promise he’d never use again. He’d commit to picking them up after school or tell them he’d be at their football games. But he just kept letting them down. Over and over again. One lie after another.”
“That sucks,” I admitted. My upbringing had its challenges…you know, like dying in front of all my friends and their families. But that didn’t compare to how Knox and Nash had grown up. “However, unpopular opinion here. You’re not responsible for how you were brought up, but you are responsible for your actions and reactions once you’re an adult.”
“That’s true,” Naomi admitted before guzzling more wine.
“The beautiful woman with the very long legs has a point,” Sloane said. “How tall are you anyway? Let’s measure!”
I nudged her glass of water closer. “Maybe you should give the shots a break.”
“Let’s follow this train of thought,” Stef announced. “You went through a shit time as a teenager, which thanks to puberty is already horrible.”
“Fair.”
“Stick with me here,” he continued. “So you grow up, move away, become fiercely independent, and take a dangerous job. Why?”
“Why?” I repeated. “I guess to prove that I’m strong. That I’m not the same weak, helpless girl I used to be.”
“You are a badass,” Stef agreed.
“To badasses,” Naomi said, hefting her nearly empty wineglass.
“Save the toast, Witty. I’m about to blow your minds,” Stef insisted.
“Blow away,” Sloane said, resting her chin in her hands.
“Who are you proving yourself to?” Stef asked me.
I shrugged. “Everyone?”
Stef pointed at Sloane. “Make the buzzer noise again.”
“Errrrrrrr!”
Half the bar turned to look at us.
“I take it you don’t agree?” I prompted Stef.
“Here comes my brilliance. If your family doesn’t know what you do for a living, they are unaware of your professional badassery. And if your colleagues don’t know about your history, they have no idea how impressive you really are because they don’t know what you had to overcome to get here.”
“What’s your point?”
“The only one left to prove anything to is you. And if you don’t realize what a strong, capable badass you are, you haven’t been paying attention.”
“That felt a little anticlimactic. But he’s not wrong,” Naomi said.
“Not done yet,” Stef said. “I think you aren’t actually trying to prove that you’re a badass. I think you spend all your energy trying to smother any hint of vulnerability.”
“Ooooooh! And Nash makes you feel vulnerable,” Sloane guessed gleefully.
“So you sabotage any chance at real intimacy because you don’t want to be vulnerable again,” Naomi added. “Okay. That was climactic.”
Stef gave a mock bow. “Thank you for appreciating my genius.”
I’d been vulnerable before. Flat on my back on that soccer field. In all those hospital beds. In that operating room. I couldn’t protect myself or save myself. I was at the mercy of other people, my life in their hands.
I shook my head. “Hang on. Vulnerability is weakness. Why would I ever want to be weak again? Back me up here, Joel.”
The bartender’s gaze flicked to me as he sent two shot glasses sliding down the bar to a customer with a pink mohawk.
“Being vulnerable doesn’t mean you’re weak. It means you trust yourself to be strong enough to handle the hurt. It’s actually the purest form of strength.”
Sloane wiggled her fingers at her temples and made an exploding sound. “Mind officially blown,” she slurred.
“That was fuckin’ beautiful, Joel,” the biker with the mohawk said. The man mopped at his eyes with a drink napkin.
I’d spent my entire adult life proving I was invincible, capable, independent. I lived alone, worked alone, took vacations alone. The only way I could get more independent was if I entered into a monogamous relationship with my vibrator. To be told I was taking the coward’s way out didn’t sit well with me.
“Look, I appreciate the super fun game of ‘let’s analyze what’s wrong with Lina.’ But the fact is, every time I have to operate within the bounds of a relationship, whether it’s personal or professional, people get hurt.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t be in a relationship. It just means you’re not good at it,” Naomi said, gesturing with her wine.
“Gee, thanks,” I said dryly.
Naomi held up a finger and drained her glass. “Nobody is good at it at first. No one has a natural talent for being in a relationship. Everyone has to learn how to be good at it. It takes a lot of practice and forgiveness and vulnerability.”
“Shit,” Stef muttered. He stood and squared his shoulders. “If you ladies will excuse me, I need to make a phone call. Mind keeping an eye on them, Joel?”
The bartender threw him a salute.
“It’s not just that I’m bad at relationships,” I said, returning to the original point. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to be free to do what I want. To pursue a life that suits me.”
“I don’t think those things have to be mutually exclusive.”
“Boom!” Sloane said, slapping a hand to the bar. The more she drank, the louder the librarian’s sound effects got.
“I’m not going to find a man out there who’s going to be content following me around, working remotely in shitty motels while I track down stolen goods. And if I did, I probably wouldn’t want him.”
Naomi hiccupped.
“Seriously? You too? Did you guys pregame before you came to get me?” I asked.
She shrugged and grinned. “I made a wrap for lunch and Waylon stole it off my plate when I wasn’t looking. I’m an empty stomach lightweight.”
I slid the bowl of nuts in her direction. “Soak up that alcohol.”
A tall biker with an eye patch and a bandanna sauntered up.
“No,” I said when he opened his mouth.
“You didn’t even know what I was going to say,” he complained.
“No we don’t want a date, a ride, or for you to tell us your penis’s nickname,” I said.
Sloane raised her hand. “Actually, I’d like to know the penis nickname.”
The biker puffed out his chest and hiked up his pants. “It’s Long John Silver…cause it’s pierced. Now, who wants a personal introduction?”
“Happy now?” I asked Sloane.
“I’m both happy and disgusted.”
I turned back to the biker. “Go away unless you want to become part of a therapy session.”
“Hit the road, Spider,” Joel said from behind the bar.
“Try to get a little action and everybody gets pissy,” Spider muttered as he stomped away.
“Wait, I think I was about to make a super smart point,” Naomi said. She scrunched up her nose and, deep in thought, mainlined the rest of her wine. “Aha!”
“Aha!” Sloane echoed.
Naomi wiggled on her stool and cleared her throat. “As I was saying, you’re comparing what you’re doing now to what you could be doing in the future.”
“Um, isn’t that what everyone does?”
“There’s a subtle difference,” she insisted, slurring a little on the word subtle. “But I forget what it is.”
Sloane leaned in on my other side. Well, more like fell into the bar. “What my esteemed colleague is trying to say is that just because you want the freedom to make your own choices doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”
Naomi snapped her fingers in Sloane’s face. “Yes! That! That’s what I forgot. What you do or have and how you feel are two separate constructs. For instance, people will say ‘I want a million dollars,’ but what they really want is to feel financially secure.”
“Okaaaaaaay.” I drew out the word.
“You want to feel like you have the power to make your own decisions. That doesn’t mean that you have to stay an independent bounty hunter lady forever. Or that you have to not find a great guy to have hot sex and takeout dinners in bed with. It just means that you have to find a relationship where you can be yourself and make sure your needs are met.”
“I’m glad you remembered, because that’s a very smart point and you’re very pretty,” Sloane said to Naomi.
“Thank you. I think you make smart pretty too!”
“Aww! Group hug!”
“You guys are abusing your hug privileges,” I complained as they both fell on me again.
“We can’t help it. We’re really proud of you,” Naomi said.
“Want me to spray them down?” Joel offered, holding up the soda hose.
I sighed. “Let them have their moment.”
