Page 2 of Never the Best

Four months ago, Josie became pregnant with my baby. I'd had no choice but to propose to her, and we got engaged. Hell, the engagement party was in a week.

I'd known Josie all my life. We grew up together, and since she ended her engagement with Dylan Rafferty a year ago, she'd become part of my friends' circle, and one night, when I'd had too much to drink, we had sex. That led to us casually dating,andI knocked her up. Before she crossed the twelve-week mark, though, she’d had a miscarriage. I'd been traveling and found out by text from my mother because Josie had been so distraught.

My first thought had been about the innocentchild we'd lost, and it wasn't until I saw Josie back home did I wished I'd waited to propose to her, as my Aunt Hattie had suggested. But Josie had told everyone and their mother, especially mine, that she was knocked up, and there was no way around that. A part of me wondered if she'd trapped me. A part of me wondered if she'd even been pregnant and thenconvenientlylost the baby. That thought made me feel like the seventeen-year-old prick I used to be. I wasn'tthatboy anymore. Also, Josie had been so devastated that I'd pushed the thought out of my head. I couldn't break off my engagement to a woman who had been expecting my baby and had cried for days after she lost the pregnancy. So, I let the status quo remain. We were now going to have an opulent engagement party and get married in a year.

I ran a hand through my hair and closed my eyes.

I'd always wanted to marry for love like my friend Royal recently had.

Royal Legere had married his best friend's sister after what had seemed like an untenable and unending courtship. He was happy with Nevaeh, and as I’d stood with Noah, Nevaeh's brother, as co-best man, I'd wondered if I'd be lucky enough to find the love of my life. Now, I knew that would never happen. I'd marry Josie and have the kind of marriage that so many men around me did—the kind Gary had entered with his father's business partner's daughter, Dixie May. The way Sage had been with the man her parents had deemed "appropriate"—the one she eventually had to divorce after ending up in the emergency room following yet another fight that turnedphysical.

The sad thing about my situation was that I’d always known I didn’t want what my parents had—a marriage based on what was suitable for the family.

George and Dolores Vanderbilt had a cold relationship, communicating only to discuss logistics around their appearances in society. That would now be my life, my marriage.

I didn’t want that, I silently screamed inside my head. I wanted…moreout of life. I wanted a partner, a lover, a friend—someone who I trusted with myself. With Josie, it was all surface. The sex had beenokay. The first drunken night hadn't been memorable, as they never are. After that, it had been missionary all the way.

But I hadn’t been planning to marry her, so I didn’t care. But now we were engaged, and we were not compatible in bed. Josie wanted the lights out and to think about goddamn England while I fucked her. She didn't participate. She didn't make love. She faked her orgasms. She did what she had to do to make me think I was a great lover—but I wasn't an idiot, and I knew that Josie wasn't interested in sex, at least not with me. And that was fine. I just didn't want her to be my wife. I liked sex. I enjoyed it. I'd had a lot of it—but since Josie, the whole fucking thing, pun intended, was a barren wasteland.

"Why don't you join Belle?" Royal suggested when I'd told him that I was going to lose my mind being engaged to a woman who thought her duty was to be a serviceable hole for me.

Belle was a sex club in Savannah that no one talked about,but everyone knew about. A journalist had recently written a scandalous story about a senator who'd been a regular member.

Beau Bodine had been a member until he'd gotten married—for love. If that man could fall in love, that meant it was possible for anyone.

"I don't want to have sex with strangers. I want to have good sex with my spouse."

"Then I suggest you change your spouse," Royal advised.

He didn't like Josie. Hell, none of the people I considered true friends did. Damn it,Ididn't even like Josie.

"You know I can't do that," I muttered.

The Vances, Josie’s family, and Vanderbilts shared deeply-rooted business ties that spanned generations, intertwined through land holdings, real estate ventures, and joint investments. The Vances, known for their real estate development firm, had often partnered with the Vanderbilts to transform Savannah’s historic properties into modern, lucrative ventures. It was a relationship built on old Southern alliances—equal parts mutual benefit and social expectation. This marriage was going to cement that alliance. My father and hers were fucking ecstatic.

"I don't get it, Rhett." Royal shook his head. "You're a grown-ass man; live your life on your own terms."

That was easier said than done, though, Royalhaddone it. He'd walked away from his family and only continued to have contact because of his grandmother. Once she passed, he'd stopped having anything to do with the Hilton Head Legeres. But I couldn't do that. Family was important to me.My parents, my sister, and everyone expected me to behave like a Vanderbilt, and I had no choice.

Since I wasn’t getting any sleep, I got out of bed and decided to go for an early run. The air outside was heavy with the faint scent of azaleas and jasmine, the first signs of Savannah waking from winter. The pale blush of dawn was just beginning to bleed into the dark sky, and the streets were still quiet, save for the occasional hum of a distant car or the rhythmic chirp of crickets that hadn’t yet surrendered to the coming day.

I lived in the historic district, in the kind of house that tourists liked to snap pictures of—the one that made you think of long-dead cotton barons and gala balls under gaslit chandeliers. It was old-money Savannah through and through, with Greek Revival columns and wrought-iron railings that seemed too delicate to hold up under the weight of their age. The house had been in my family for generations, and though I owned it now, it felt more like a museum I was tasked with maintaining than a home. I grew up in this house, and when I was ready to find a place of my own, my father suggested I live here. My parents had moved to live on an expansive estate in the countryside in Richmond Hill, where we went to celebrate the holidays, as we'd have a full house with aunts and uncles and cousins. Their estate had an old plantation-style home and acres of land, including stables, a small lake, and even the remnants of old rice fields and outbuildings. I fucking hated that place almost as much as I hated the house I lived in.

As I turned off my street and headedtoward Forsyth Park, the cobblestones beneath my feet felt slick with dew. The sprawling trees arched above me, their limbs heavy with foliage that swayed gently in the early morning breeze. The park was quiet at this hour, save for the occasional dog walker or a vendor setting up to sell fresh-cut flowers from a cart.

I fell into an easy rhythm, the steady slap of my sneakers against the pavement merged with the soft murmur of a world slowly waking up. Running usually cleared my head, but not today. My thoughts kept looping back to Pearl as they always did after the dream. Or was it a nightmare?

I hadn’t meant to, but my route took me toward my Aunt Hattie’s property on the edge of town. Harriet “Hattie” Odum’s home was sprawling, old plantation-style, and surrounded by acres of land she’d somehow managed to keep intact despite all the encroachments of modern development. It felt a little frozen in time, like out of a Flannery O’Connor story.

Since Pearl returned to Savannah, she was staying in a small cottage just beyond the line of camellias that bordered the estate. It was small, tucked back near the garden where Aunt Hattie’s roses would bloom in a riot of color later in the season. It was embraced by a wraparound porch with a couple of wicker chairs, a swing, and pale blue shutters the color of the Savannah River on a bright, sunny day. I didn’t slow down, but my eyes lingered, as did my thoughts.

I found it remarkable that she was closer to Aunt Hattie than I was, despite Pearl living in California for several years. Pearl left Savannah after high school and studied at Stanford.

No one blamed me for shaming her—everyone accused her of trying to fuck above her station, not societally, since the Beaumonts were as old and wealthy as the Vanderbilts—no, it was because of how she looked. The plump, dull girl deserved to be used for a bet. That had shamed me even more. Aunt Hattie hadn't been reticent in telling me what a terrible human being she thought I was. But I'd been a young buck then and had not paid much attention to my crazy aunt. However, what I did stained my life—and me. I carried it with me like my own scarlet letter, carved into my soul. Now, fifteen years had passed, and the guilt was steady, my need for redemption growing just as firmly. And since Pearl was back in Savannah, I wanted nothing more than to make right the wrongs I'd done her.

I could only do that if she talked to me, which she didn't. I'd tried, and she'd given me a blank look, said nothing, and extricated herself from my presence. Pearl had always had a spine of steel, and I had nothing but regret for what I did while high on youth and arrogance. Unlike me, she wasn't going to submit to familial pressure. She’d once told me, when I'd been wooing her for that dumb bet, that she didn’t want any part of the Savannah society we’d grown up in. She’d said it with a fire in her eyes, a rare defiance that had fascinated me.

"All that legacy nonsense,” she’d said, sitting cross-legged on the edge of the dock at her family’s summer house by the river where we used to meet up, where ultimately she'd given me her virginity. “It’s not a legacy, Rhett—it’s just an excuse tocling to a rotten past. You can call it Southern tradition if you want, but that doesn’t make it any less dark.”

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