Page 31 of Good Guy Gabe

I look back down at Joss, at her pleading eyes and faint frown, at the flush in her cheeks that might not be purely pleasure.

Thisismy chance to prove myself, but not to my teammates. To her.

I kiss her gently as I slide into her, my mouth absorbing her quiet whimper. If this is what she wants, this is what I’ll gladly give her. I’ll give her the entire world.

On the other side of the wall, Blaise yells, “You guys want gyros? I’m ordering gyros!”

Chapter 14

Joss

EVERY SPRING,I plant early-blooming annuals along the walkway to the barn, and in the fall, I replace them with mums. In December, I uproot them and move them back behind my barn. The field attracts bees from the apiary a few blocks away and showcases a whole array of colors and varieties, whatever I can get from the local nurseries and hardware stores. Many have been gifted to me from patrons who love my mum field as much as I do.

This year, I left the relative safety of Camden to visit Wilmington shops and even took a day trip out to Wren in Salem to hit up the nurseries there for mums in Juggernauts ruby and saffron. Not just to show my support for Gabe, either. Foolishly, I thought this was an opportunity to show Wilmington I still love it.

But Wilmington does not love me. I was plagued by vandals the first few years after Brian’s self-deletion, and they’ve returned with my return to Wilmington.

The lush gold mum in my hand is an easy fix. It lays next to the hole I carved into the earth a week ago for it, and all it takes is righting it, packing soil around it, and patting dirt off its petals. But the nearly-ruby neighbor isn’t so lucky, split in half, its flowers stomped on, so I pass it off to Rose.

She sets it in the wheelbarrow that’s getting stacked high with destroyed mums while Iris hands me a fresh pumpkin-colored one to replace it with. I pinch my lips tightly closed and chastise myself for threatening to shed a tear over a wrong-colored mum.

“My son was telling me about these nets they’ve been putting over their winter squashes to keep the deer off them,” Iris says. “I could ask him to throw some over the flowers? Maybe he could rig something that you could put over them at night.”

I look up from where I’m scooping out the hole to make room for the bigger mum and offer her a helpless chuckle. When I first started my quilting streams out of the barn, it wasn’t anything but a way to pass the time and make friends with people outside of Wilmington. Instead of Jocelyn Page, Miss Alabama, or Jocelyn Edgars, wife of the devil himself, I could be Joss Page, just some girl. I made funny, trendy patterns, made enough money selling them online that I wouldn’t starve to death. That would have been my future if Rose hadn’t recognized me and emailed me to ask if, since we were in the same town, I’d be willing to teach her best friend to quilt.

Cora talked me into monetizing my tutorials, but Iris and Rose are the reason I was brave enough to open a shop and offer my space for classes. And they’ve been dodging church for the last five years by claiming they’re busy doing charity work, but really? They have the keys to the barn and show up with the sun to quilt. This was the first Sunday in a long time they had to wake me with the unfortunate news I’d been vandalized.

“I think the culprits are smarter than deer,” I tell Iris.

Rose runs her eyes down the row. Sixty mums ripped out of the earth. Some tossed to the side but others torn apart. There’s one thrown far enough away that the cheeky, self-effacing side of me wants to give Blaise one of the casualties to see if he could throw it that far.

“Doesn’t look that way to me,” Rose says with a huff.

I want to say something to calm the situation, a reminder that we’ve been through this enough times and always survived or that it’s never gotten worse than this or kids are going to be kids, but I don’t have it in me this morning. It’s a cool October morning, but I’m sweating my butt off. I was actually looking forward to going to today’s game after the last two were away.

I didn’t even have the heart to tell Gabe I’m bailing on the game. I texted Blaise instead, with the thought that I didn’t want to upset Gabe before the game but didn’t want to worry him if he notices I’m not with the other wives and girlfriends. They’re having a bonfire at the Jug House tonight; I’m just going to shower up after I finish this and head over there early, maybe crawl into his bed to make up for missing the game.

If I finish. By ten a.m., I’m not even halfway down one side, and already I’m exhausted.

Iris squeezes my shoulder with deceptively strong fingers. She’s the frailer of the duo, but she throws around king-sized high-loft quilts with the best of them. She’s also far more even-tempered than Rose. She gets it. I just want to fix my mums, curl up in my room for a couple hours, hand stitch some binding so I feel productive, and then have a quiet night with Gabe.

A quiet night of sex. He’s gotten really good at that.

“Why don’t I get the next one, dear?” Iris offers, and I have to lunge up to stop her from kneeling down. I don’t know if we’d ever get her up again.

“No, no, it’s okay. At least I’m off today.”

“You certainly are not off today!”

I groan, not needing to look to know Cora’s barreling down the path. Now that fall’s here, she’s traded out her sandals for ankle boots, stylish even in jeans and the Briggs jersey.

I make skirts out of scrap material with ten extra inches on the waistband to prepare for my inevitable future.

“Were you going to hide this from me?” she shouts.

I only turn around then because I can hear both anger and fear in her voice, and I immediately feel guilty. It’s to Cora that I need to say, “It’s just kids being kids. But it’s Sunday, not like I can get someone else to come out and clean—”

“It’s not kids being kids, you know this!” Cora rakes her fingers through her hair, but she pays four figures to fly up to New York for the perfect layered, wavy balayage, so it lands itself right back where it was. “Did you call the police?”

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