Page 4 of Inseverable (Carolina Beach)

I try to smile, knowing Becca needs my reassurance. But I can’t quite manage this time. “You know I’ve always talked about going and serving. Ever since I was little.”

“So you’re telling me, if he’d stayed faithful and been a real man instead of a little bitch—if you’d agreed to marry him like he kept talking about—that you still would have signed up to join the Corps? Come on, Trin. Finding him fucking Blakeney was like a pen being slapped in your hand, forcing you to sign on that dotted line.”

“No, it wasn’t,” I insist.

I don’t want tonight to be about the bad things of the past. Not with the five of us together after too many months apart. But here we are, focusing on things I’ve tried hard to forget. “Becks, as much as I thought I loved Hunter, and as much as I believed that he wanted to marry me, I realize now we never would have worked out. I’m going into the Peace Corps, exactly like I’ve always planned. But knowing who he is—who hereallyis—he wouldn’t have waited for me, and he sure as anything wouldn’t have joined up just to be with me.”

Even through her sunglasses, I can tell Becca’s eyes are narrowing. “He’s still a douche head, and so is she.”

“I won’t argue with you about that,” I tell her. My head falls against the seat rest. Do you want to know something about Becca? She’s sweeter than maple syrup and about as kind as people get. Until you hurt someone she loves. I’m among the lucky few she loves. But it’s because she loves me, that she reacts the way she does.

She pushes her sunglasses up to her head, pegging me with enough disappointment to make me ache. “When do you leave?” she asks.

“September. But I won’t know my placement for another few weeks.” I answer so softly, I’m not sure if she hears, but her tensing posture assures me she does. “Daddy used his connections at the UN and arranged it so I’d have time to take my boards and have one last summer here with all of you.”

“So from Princeton to the Peace Corps. From rich kid, to just another volunteer."She sighs in that way she does when she’s trying not to cry. “Nice,” she says, not that she means it.

My attention falls to our hands and to how hard she’s holding me. “It’s the right thing to do, Becks,” I tell her.

“Helping peopleisthe right thing to do. Signing up for twenty-five months with no way out, that’s above and beyond.” She shakes her head. “Hunter and Blakeney are assholes for what they did to you.”

They are. But she needs to know that’s not why I applied. “Becks, it’s time to grow up and move forward, and to do the things we’ve always planned.”

“What if I don’t want to?” Her voice splinters and tears glisten her eyes. “What if none of us do? I don’t want life to go on without the five of us together—you, me, Sean, Mason, and Hale—especially you, Trin.”

Like me, she wishes she could stop time, and that somehow things could be different. But somethings can’t be helped, and this is one of them.

Her parents and mine had offered to send us backpacking across Europe, but we chose to come back here. Back home to spend one last summer doing what we loved, and to pretend to be forever young, forever free of life’s demands, forever friends. As I look to my pseudo sister, I swallow hard and hope that the latter stays true.

Tears trickle down her cheeks, causing my eyes to sting. But Becks doesn’t need me crying with her. Right now, she needs my strength, and maybe a little of my humor.

“Trin,Becks!” Sean hollers from the deck. “What the hell? We’ve got shots waiting and horny women who can’t wait to have a piece of me.”

“Sorry!” I yell, hopping out of the jeep. “Becca dared me to spell my name across her belly with my tongue and I couldn’t refuse.”

Instead of taking it for the joke it is, Sean freezes. “No, shit,” he says.

Becca doubles over, practically falling out of the driver’s side seat. I hurry around to steady her and lead her forward. Sean continues to stare at us, his eyes clouded with whatever dirty thoughts are swimming through his mind as we stumble into Your Mother’s.

My laughter fades as I look to where the rustic blue double doors open up to the rear deck. But I’m not staring at Hale as he points to his raised shot glass filled to the rim, or at Mason who’s smiling politely at the women admiring his muscles. And my, I barely notice Sean shooting past us.

I’m too busy gaping at the smoking hot bartender with the Army Ranger tat inked to an arm as thick as my thigh.

Holy Baby Jesus in a manger sleeping on a bed of hay.

“Hmm,” Becca says in a purr. She leans in close to whisper in my ear. “Who do we have here?”

Brown strands of wavy hair spill around his strong features and startling light eyes, and a thin beard lines a jaw I could probably pound horseshoes on. If I knew anything about horseshoes. Or horses. Or, pardon me, what was my name again?

Not to be rude, or inappropriate—I do have morals, after all—but that tight blue shirt stretching across his broad chest is one pec flex shy of ripping in half. Or me ripping it in half when I straddle him.

“You want to straddle him?” Becca asks, a delighted gleam fixing on her face.

I look at her, realizing I spoke out loud. “No?”

She busts out laughing. This time, she’s the one dragging me forward. “Come on, Trin. Time to have fun.”

We stroll toward the hot guy. Or as I call him, ‘my future baby daddy’ because for the first time in too long I’m looking—we’re talking full-out gawking—at a man. He has my attention and whether he means to or not he’s not letting go.

---