A Love Like Ours

Chapter 13

I could've killed Jeff.

Literally strangled him, strung him up, and let him dangle there until his last breath. Of all the things he could've suggested, all the ways we all could've spent time together, he chose a barbecue at his.

So, that we could all hang out, have some food... and swim in his giant, in-ground pool.

In bathing suits.

"Who wants a burger?" he asked, waiting by the door to the house donning nothing but his red, white, and blue swim trunks and an apron.

"Me!" Glenne shouted, raising her hand from where she lay in her lounge chair, already soaking up the sun's rays.

"Me too," Jenna said, her long, lean body stretched out beside Glenne.

"I'll have one of everything," Niall said from his seat at the table across from me.

Julian got up from just beside me. "I'll help you, man."

"Maddie, Harry, you guys want one, too?" Jeff asked.

She'd barely looked at me in the half hour since we'd arrived. Maybe because Jenna was already here when she got here.

Yet another reason Jeff deserved to die.

"Sure," Madelyn said, trying to smile a little. I was probably the only one who could tell that it didn't work.

I was also painfully aware that she was still fully clothed, still wearing the pale blue top that left her shoulders completely bare—which put it in my head that she might not be wearing a bra—and the pair of jean shorts which rose up high on her waist. For which I was grateful, obviously. Or should've been grateful. It meant I didn't have to see miles and miles of her bare skin. Wouldn't be reminded of what lay under the spare bits of coverage a bikini would provide. Wouldn't be tortured by the sight of her in one of my favorite states of dress: mostly naked.

And besides that, being here at the height of the afternoon, getting ready for a barbecue with Madelyn sitting across from me, only brought me back to that first time meeting her family. The first instance we'd spent any real time together after we'd actually gotten to know each other (well enough that I already knew I was falling for her) and how overwhelmed I'd been at the prospect of having to impress not just her mother and father, but her brothers and aunts and uncles and cousins as well. How nervous I'd been that being who I was would somehow jeopardize all of it. How insanely attracted to her I already was, and how seeing her body like that for the first time had driven me crazy.

In front of her whole family and her two older brothers, no less.

I still got a chuckle out of the way they'd accepted me. The way they'd taken me upstairs with them, leaving me to think they'd do nothing but threaten me if I did anything to hurt their sister. Instead, they rifled through their drawers, still full despite the fact that they'd both moved out of their parents' house, and held up different pairs of swimming trunks for me to choose from.

"Dude," Will had said. "Don't do that to yourself."

I held onto the white shorts with the rubber ducks on them. "Do what?"

Mark only laughed. "Let him wear what he wants."

Will's stare went from me to the shorts and back again. "Whatever. It's your funeral."

I laughed then, amused that he thought something as inconsequential as swimming trunks could have that much of an effect on my life or his life or anyone else's life.

"So," Mark said, flopping down on the bed and eyeing me with a bit of a smirk. "You and my sister..."

He left it at that, and I readied myself for the onslaught of warnings and threats and thinly veiled hostility that I was sure Madelyn's older brothers were about to deliver.