Page 4 of Avenged

Jersey

LOVE HURTS

“Love wounds and marks

Any heart not tough or strong enough

To take a lot of pain.”

Performed by Nazareth

Written by Boudleaux Bryant

I wasn’t sure how I’d ended up at Travis’s house, with his friends, helping him unpack. I mean, I certainly had offered my services and followed him to the house in my barely running Civic earlier that morning. But I still wasn’t sure what had prompted me to offer him my help to begin with. It wasn’t like he needed it. He had Dawson and his friends, Mac and Georgie. The three muscled men were more than capable of moving the belongings Travis and Dawson had brought with them. They’d proven it all day by lifting the majority of the boxes and furniture, leaving Georgie and me with setting things to rights the best we could without actually unpacking for them.

I knew part of me had offered because I secretly adored the little cottage. I’d walked by it a million times and wanted to see what it looked like inside. I wanted a peek at the tiny backyard garden that could rival Mandy’s Neverland-like one. And while I did love the art déco chandelier, brass fixtures, and gorgeous crown molding of the place, the real reason I was there had nothing to do with wood or metal or gardens.

Instead, it had everything to do with the man who was standing beside his friends and expressing his opinions on film and comic books in a way that pulled at pieces inside of me. Pieces I rarely showed anymore. Pieces buried under responsibility, and shame, and loss. I’d once loved to talk about those things with my small group of friends. The tiny group that had gotten me through the loss of my mother only to abandon me with the crimes of my father.

The truth was, I’d been acting bizarrely ever since Travis had arrived at Mandy and Leena’s. And I wasn’t the only one who’d been acting out of character. Violet had been, too. The brothers seemed to have cast a strange spell on my sister and me. It was a good thing they were moving out.

“Knock, knock.” Mandy’s voice drifted into the house from the open front door.

You could barely see her short, bright-red hair and her smiling face over the stack of pizza boxes she was carrying. Next to her, Leena was holding plastic bags that swung against her signature billowy dress that was the epitome of the flower child she was. Her gray hair was wound up into a messy bun that was almost as playful as Leena herself.

My heart skipped a beat when I realized that behind the two women was my exuberant, beautiful sister. She was sixteen going on thirty, and it scared me that men were so easily attracted to her not only for her purple eyes and icy blonde hair but also for her large personality. I didn’t know how to protect her from the attention or from the heartache that was sure to follow.

Violet was looking backward to where Dawson was coming up behind them with more takeout boxes. Her eyes were sparkling at him. Eyes that were wearing makeup she rarely wore. Just as her blonde hair streaked with purple was in long curls she only spent time doing once in a blue moon. She’d made herself up for him, and I realized, with a sigh, the puppy love she felt for the twenty-two-year-old, broody soul wasn’t going to go away just because he no longer resided with us.

“Mandy, Leena, what have you done?” Travis asked, hands on his hips. He looked like a father scolding a child. It was both amusing and heart snagging.

“We knew you wouldn’t have stopped for food, so we thought we’d bring a little house-warming gift,” Mandy responded.

“You didn’t need to do this,” Truck said, taking the pizza boxes from her hand.

“Need and want are totally different things,” Leena said, and God, wasn’t that the truth. But it was just like these two incredible women to think of others and what they needed. They’d been helping Violet and me for longer than I liked to think about. The debt I owed them was too great to ever be repaid.

“We haven’t unpacked the kitchen,” Truck protested. “Let me see if I can dig out the plates.”

“We brought paper plates,” Violet said, waving a plastic bag.

Mandy and Leena helped Travis open the food boxes on the kitchen counter while Violet put the tableware on the counter-height pub table we’d moved in that morning. Dawson went to the fridge and started passing out beers and Cokes to go with the pizza and pasta from Nate’s, the Italian place down the street that was a town favorite.

Dawson started to hand a beer to Violet, and she would have grabbed it if I hadn’t intercepted. “She’s sixteen, remember,” I said, meeting his eyes with mine, the warning clear. Dawson saw it and looked away.

“I always forget that,” he said and gave her a Coke instead.

“God, it’s not like I’ve never had a beer before.” Violet rolled her eyes at me and then sat at the table across from Dawson.

“When exactly did you have a beer?” I asked her.

“When I was at Jada’s party,” she told me. Jada was her friend from the online high school Violet had just graduated from. Jada was two years older and had been homeschooled after being kicked out of every public and private high school her wealthy parents had sent her to. While she’d made some bad choices in her past, her heart was always in the right place.

“One beer isn’t going to kill me. Lighten up,” Violet said.

She was right. But with our family history, it was better we abstained.

“You telling me you never had a beer at a party in high school?” Dawson asked me.

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