Pocket Full of Posies

Chapter Twenty

    I stared at one of my very best friends in shock. “She didn’t really…imply that…did she?”

  Landon paced the living room, furiously raking a hand through his already disheveled hair. He’d been doing quite a bit of pacing. If he’d had it his way, he never would have said one thing about what had happened between him and Marley, but I’d forced it out of him. I mean he told me he was going to call her—he didn’t really expect it to just end like that. I needed details and I sure as shit had demanded them and forced him to come over to my house.

  “Implied it?” Landon finally spoke up. He snorted a laugh. “She did more than imply.”

  I sat cross legged on the couch trying to digest this information. That didn’t really sound like Marley. Although I suppose I didn’t know her very well, but that wasn’t from lack of trying. The thing about Marley was I could see she wanted to open up and let us in. It was kind of frustrating to see her almost do it one minute and then shutting the world out in the next. I could understand her distrust, though. I would, too, if my fiancé had run off with my best friend.

  I never had an easy time making friends; mostly because I didn’t want new ones. Sure, I was nice and social around everyone, but the actual tell-you-all-my-deep-dark-secrets friendships I couldn’t seem to forge. I had the two best friends a girl could ask for. I didn’t need more than them. But Marley was different. I felt drawn to her because she was pretty cool and because I wanted to help her. It was a well-known fact I had a thing about helping people.

  My eyes bugged with misunderstanding. “What, did she like…attack you or something? In McDonalds??”

  Landon looked at me a sharply, a mixture of horror and confusion on his face. “What? No.” He shook his head. “No, nothing like that. She just said that’s all she’s interested in at the time being.”

  I bobbed my head up and down in an exaggerated way. “Ah, gotchya.” The next few minutes past by in silence. I didn’t mind though. It gave me a chance to really study Landon; try to figure out what he really thought about this. It was obvious he was kinda pissed. But, being Landon, he wouldn’t stay like that. In all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him pissed for very long. He felt guilt about things like anger. Like, seriously. How dare he feel angry, right? But that’s just how he was. He internalized everything. Not a lot of people realized just how tender he was. Sure, he could tough it out like any man, but he still had that softness to him he’d always carried as a kid. Sometimes I doubted even his parents knew that about him.

  The thing about Mr. and Mrs. Harrison was they weren’t bad parents; they were just lawyers. Landon and Leland had been put in the most prestigious schools growing up in hopes of grooming them to become lawyers themselves. Their sole purpose in raising their children was lawyers first, parents second. They didn’t realize that was the way of their parenting, but that was definitely how it was. If you asked Landon, he’d deny it until he was blue in the face. I know because I’d pushed him to that point several times. He didn’t want to doubt his family. All he ever wanted was to love them. Oh, there was no doubt the Harrisons loved eachother. They were just a different sort of family that expressed love in different ways.

  The bad thing about the Harrisons was Landon didn’t want to be one—at least not in the way their good name meant for them to be. It would be considered inconceivable for a Harrison to not be a lawyer. Leland was already well on his way. He’d been born a lawyer, though. Everything in his path he questioned. Everything became an argument to him. It was how he survived. He lived and breathed the law.