Page 58 of Hart Breaker

Now I’m crying harder. “I don’t care if they know. I don’t care anymore if they judged me because I fell in love with an older man. See, I’m going to say his name. Fucking Devon. I loved him, and I shouldn't have. I’m sorry I treated you like shit when I was hurting, and I really want you to stop tiptoeing, even if I say I don’t. That’s not how you are with my brothers and sister, and I don’t want that to be how you are with me.”

“You’re all individuals, Riley Mae.” She smiles softly.

“But they were so much better to you and?—”

“Gonna jump in here and tell you that your brother, Luke, was no piece of cake,” Ava, my sister-in-law, says, and a collection of agreements fills the bus. Ava continues, “Going to add that we don’t get to choose who we love. We don’t choose if they reciprocate or if they don’t. We have zero control over how they choose to treat us, and when we give them a second chance, and they fuck up again, we save our sanity by moving on. Right, Tessa?”

Ava’s father, Lucas, and her stepmother, Tessa, were dating for four years, and their relationship was pretty toxic. They reconnected twenty years later, and they have an amazing relationship now.

“It is.” She chuckles. “But Riley Mae, I’m gonna have to say, Brett is not Lucas, and like Ava, I’m going to add to my spiel. We didn’t see Devon often, but when we did, he was so uncomfortable around us that I’m going to guess we never got to see the real him and what it was that you loved about him.”

“He had a good ass,” Mom says, doing the sign of the cross, and everyone, including me, starts to laugh.

Mom winks and wipes away my tears. Just that little bit of allowed tenderness from her makes my eyes begin to tear up again.

“I’m not finished,” Tessa calls over all the chatter about Devon’s ass. “Hudson Hart? Are you kidding me? What are you doing pushing that boy away? He’s been in lust with your hot little ass since the day he walked into the brewery, and you and the girls were doing your drunk karaoke on Thursday nights.”

“We absolutely have to bring that back,” London adds.

“He’d crush me,” I admit.

“Between the sheets, yeah,” Mom states.

“Mom!” Lauren gasps.

“Lauren!” Mom gasps back. “I have eyes, a working libido, a husband whose body is still rock-hard in every way that counts. I want that for my girls, too. So what?”

“It’s not happeni?—”

“It already did!” Freaking Lauren blurts out.

“I am going to kick your ass, Lo!”

“I knew it!” Mom calls and holds out her hand. I watch in horror as Tessa hands her a hundred-dollar bill.

“You two are freaking awful!” Ava says, laughing hysterically.

“You’re in a world of hurt,” I sneer at Lo.

“Quick, Lauren, spill the tea!” Mags bounces up and down, clapping her hands.

“It all started two years ago …”

Lauren spilled it all right, but the pieces of the story I’ve only admitted to Hudson are mine alone, and I gave them to him. It hits me like a brick to the face that I have no doubt he’ll never tell a soul.

I sit with that for a long time. It’s a peaceful feeling, nothing like anything I’ve felt in other relationships I’ve been in.

My thoughts and realizations often come while I’m zoned out, and there’s always an invisible cloud keeping me in that moment until whatever it is I’m supposed to have learned or realized is embedded. I’m sure it’s the same with most people, but I find it fascinating.

When the cloud lifts, my vision is directed in front of me, and I swear from our private box, I see Beth sitting with Hudson’s family. This spurs me to do a search. It takes a minute to remember his name, but it hits pretty quickly; who could forget the name Ryder Maverick? Me, momentarily, because I’m in a Hart fog.

I find a few links to a story about Ryder hospitalizing some guys from UNLV. One article totally left out that he’d done so defending another student, while others mentioned it but also dove into his troubled past. Apparently, he didn’t have a home for some time.

Ryder was initially charged with attempted murder, but it’s been changed to assault with a deadly weapon, and the article explains that because he’s a trained athlete, the prosecutor is saying his body is a weapon.

This enrages me, and I quickly try to find what charges the two aggressors have, but I find nothing.

But after another search of Ryder’s name, I find that Beth was not overselling him when she said he was phenomenal.

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