Page 5 of Almost Yours

“What did I do to be cursed with a house full of men that swear like sailors?” Juniper mumbled, brushing past the both of them to check on the oven. Gavin watched her walk off and then waved for Noah to follow him. While his relationship with Noah had changed over the years—he still loved his big brother, but they weren’t as close anymore—he’d been there for him through it all. Noah had been the one who bought him a bus ticket to go back home after he found Nia with that blonde.

They stepped into the hallway outside the kitchen and Gavin let out a heavy sigh. “Nia’s in town.” Noah’s eyes widened, but didn’t say anything. “She’s working with Frankie, Milo’s girlfriend,” Gavin said, rubbing a hand over his face. “I saw her at their Christmas party the other night.”

“Ah, fuck. Please tell me you didn’t doanything.”

Gavin narrowed his eyes and pushed his shoulders back. “I ignored her, if that’s what you mean.”

“The fuck, Gav?”

“I was caught off guard, okay! I didn’t even know she was here or that she knew my friends. Got some fresh air, talked to the boys and then I just…”

Noah groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Youjustignored her and spent the whole evening pretending like she didn’t exist?”

“Pretty much. She pretended like she didn’t know me, so I did the same thing.”

“That sounds healthy.”

Gavin flipped Noah off and shook his head. “Seeing her again brings back memories I’d pushed out of my head a long time ago. I don’t know how I can be around her without wanting to say something awful to her.”

“Hopefully that’s the last time you’ll have to be around her.”

“Be around who?” a voice asked from the front of the house. The brothers turned to find Simon, the third Rhodes boy, walking into the house with Arlo, his one-year-old, strapped to his chest. “Who are you two gossiping about?”

“Nia’s back.”

“Oh fuck.” Simon glanced at Gavin with his eyes comically wide and then back at Noah who just nodded. “Shit, Gav, that’s…unpleasant.”

“Thank you both for yourveryhelpful contributions to my dilemma.”

“What dilemma?” another voice asked from around the corner and Gavin groaned. Graham, the second eldest, walked towards them, running a hand through his thick, dark hair as he glanced between the brothers.

Noah winced. “Maybe you should wait until Spence is also here.”

“I’m here,” Spencer announced as he stepped through the kitchen door. Gavin looked at his four big brothers and sighed heavily. While he’d kept the whole Nia thing a secret for a long time from Spencer, he’d finally spilled the truth after one too many shots of fire whiskey. Spencer had been pissed, but he’d come around eventually and he’d tried to understand what Gavin needed. After that day, none of them had talked about Nia or the Disaster of Summer 2010, because it was too much.

“I’m going to say this once, I’m not looking for advice or tips,” Gavin told his brothers, looking each of them in the eye. “Nia is in town. Actually, she goes byGinnynow. She lives in Wildes and works with Milo’s girlfriend. I saw her at a Christmas party two nights ago and it’s messed me up.”

His brothers exchanged looks, but Gavin noticed that Spencer was the only one who didn’t react the way he thought he would.I will deal withthatanother day. Blowing out a heavy breath, he dragged a hand through his hair. “I don’t want to talk about it any further, please don’t bring it up again.”

Then he walked into the kitchen to help his mother.

* * *

For years after that fateful summer, Gavin tried to date and move on. He let his friends set him up, he even let hismotherset him up with the daughters of her friends. None of them stuck. At first, he thought it was because he was heartbroken and comparing everyone to Nia. But then he realized that it was simply because he would fall in love with those women and they would discard him like yesterday’s trash. And he wasnotready for that again.

The craziest part of all of this was that he couldn’t really blame Nia for what she did, because they’d never talked about the future. He’d planned dates, told her things about himself so few people knew. Gavin even took her to the arcade, primarily his safe space, and introduced her to the world ofMortal Kombat. In his mind, they were together and it was going to go the distance. Gavin recalled a conversation where he vaguely mentioned them being a couple and how she was the only one in his life. At the time, he believed that was a clear message of his commitment. Looking back now, Nia hadn’t really said anything in response. She’d kissed him, they’d stripped each other naked and had the quietest and hottest sex of their summer.

Her sexuality—she’d referred to it as ‘fluid’ early one morning after another romp in the boathouse—had been fascinating to him. His best friends were straight, all the people he met along the way were straight, so it was something new that he had to understand about the woman he loved. Gavin appreciated the fact that Nia was still learning about herself, but he didn’t even think that in all of that, he might be part of the experiment.

It dawned on him only when he got to college.

Like his father and brothers, Gavin believed that he wanted to be a veterinarian. Rescuing animals, saving them and getting them back on their feet was all he’d known growing up. But it became pretty clear to him early on that he couldn’t ever open an animal up and stitch them back together. Nothing to do with blood or guts, everything to do with hurting an animal further. So, Gavin dropped out and took a year off before reapplying to study business management as a back-up. If he’d chosen to be a dropout for the rest of his life, his mother would have had something to say about it.

Despite all of this, Gavin lived a large college life. He partied hard, studied just as hard. He met tons of people, hooked up with most of them too. One of those people happened to be a girl from a town he’d never heard of—she was still figuring out who she was and who she liked. Not that he knew all of that when they were fucking in her dorm room. The next morning, after kicking him to the floor, she told him that he was one of many experiments she was conducting on campus to ‘find herself’.

Doing the walk of shame back to his dorm, Gavin realized that Nia had probably used him as an experiment too. Just to find out if she liked dick. Or maybe to find out if she likedhisdick. Either way, it sent him down a spiral.

It took a whole year for Gavin to build up the courage to tell Spencer that he and Nia had been secretly hooking up behind his back. Spencer didn’t speak to him for a week, then punched him for taking advantage of his best friend and finally apologized on Nia’s behalf for his broken heart.

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