Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe Book 1)

I’m mortified. Completely, completely, totally, utterly mortified. The edges of my vision went black as soon as he said it: because he wanted to.

My chest went tight. My breathing fell out of pace. I think I had a panic attack. I think he tried to help me… I pushed him away, I think? I think I scratched him when I fought him not to touch me.

I don’t really remember. It all feels like a weird bad dream now. I remember I sat at the other end of the boat, as far away from him as I could ’til we were back to shore.

I sat in the front passenger seat of the car on the ride home. It pulled up to the hotel and I remember that BJ called my name as I threw the car door open and ran from him as fast as I could.

My eyes felt like they were bleeding, my heart felt like it was going to bottom out.

And it’s with those eyes and this air of absolute brokenness that I burst into the room.

Tom’s on the balcony. Red wine—he likes red, I like white. BJ just will drink whatever I like to drink but Tom just gets one of each.

He takes one look at me and in two steps crosses the distance. His brows are furrowed, his eyes are bright with a concern that’s too much kindness for me right now. It’s like, the eye contact version of a kind stranger with an excellent fringe asking if you’re okay in the middle of the Cartier store a fortnight after your boyfriend cheats on you and you start crying uncontrollably and hysterically and so you can’t even answer Emma Thompson, so she just hugs you and pets your hair—that’s kind of how Tom looks at me now.

That but more. He’s worried about me, I can tell. He’s sad for me, he wants to hurt BJ. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. He needs to make me better.

And in retrospect, when I’ll look back at this moment some time from now, this is when I’ll mark it—write it down, dog-ear the moment in my mind that this—right here, is when the molecular structure of who Tom England is to me will begin to change.

Not soon at dinner when he’ll nearly fight BJ, not when he steps in front of me, shielding me from the boy who broke and breaks and keeps breaking my unlearnable, untrainable heart, not later tonight when I’ll pull him back into our hotel room with rushy hands and a mind eager to forget and have sex with him, but here, now, with his eyes on me like that, spotting the cracks in my finish before I do, preempting them with his hands on my face, trying to hold me together but he can’t.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he says, trying to stop me from crying. “What happened?” I give no answer, just tears. “Magnolia?” he asks but I don’t answer again so he holds me. While I cry over another man. Not man—boy. BJ’s no man. He really is just a boy.

Tom pulls away, looking for my eyes. He uses both his thumbs to windscreen-wiper my tears away. He grimaces. “Date didn’t go as planned?” I muster a shake of the head and he just nods as he folds me into himself—puts himself on me like a cloak, holding me against himself until the trembling in my chest stops.

There are things I should say.

I owe him more information, but I don’t want to give it to him for fear of what it says about me—how expendable I am to even the person who I thought loved me more than everyone else.

Because he wanted to.

Tom shakes his head. “I told you he was a fucking idiot.” I nod. “He made you this sad?” he says. It’s not really a question, more just an utterance. An acceptance of truth that he doesn’t really understand and frankly, neither do I.

“I’ll put him in the ground if you want me to.”

“I want you to,” I tell him, deadpan.

He chuckles and then I sniff a laugh and the way he looks at me, the smile he gives—and maybe for him, if I were able to pick it, able to read his mind in all the ways that I can’t—I’d imagine that this is when I begin to be something else to him—at least in a way he’s conscious of it.

The smile goes across his whole face and crinkles up, but it’s why he gives me the smile he does that gets me, it’s how happy he is to have made me okay for a second. I can see in him this expanding need to make things better for me, to pluck me out of all the bad in my life. I saw a fleck of it in him that day with my father but here it is now, flowering into some kind of fullness, growing past a preference into a necessity. If he’s to be fully okay, now I am too.

It’s a peculiar and wordless shift that happens between us, which is undefinable and unchartered to me.

Do I have feelings for this man? Or has he just been elevated to #1 safest place? Can those two things be mutually exclusive? I don’t know. I don’t know whether I do; I don’t know if they can. I do know though, that I feel safer in his arms than I do out of them.

And I know that he smells like a Sunday morning. Slow, easy, uncomplicated. Like fresh coffee. New towels and a light-flooded room. Oak moss, patchouli, bergamot, lavender. And if Tom smells like a Sunday morning, then BJ smells like a Saturday night spent in the emergency room—don’t think of BJ—and I just would love not to be in the emergency room anymore.

He nods his head towards the door. “I’ll buy you a drink?”

I give him a small smile. “Buy me several.”

We head down to the bar, have a few drinks. Not too many, just enough to take the edge off and at this point I have a lot of edges.

There’s an ease between me and Tom that I’ve grown fond of.

There’s an ease between me and BJ too—don’t think about BJ—but it’s different now because the ease is all tainted with infidelities and broken trust and hearts and years of resentment and a willow tree we don’t speak about.

“So,” Tom says, nods his chin at me, “did you kiss him?”

I frown at him, shaking my head. “No.”

He sniffs a laugh, incredulous. “No?”

My mouth twitches into an almost-smile. “We can’t… kiss,” I tell him.

Tom squints at me, intrigued and maybe a bit miffed. But we can’t. Me and Beej, we’re all bridled passion and conscious choices, trying to preserve the tiny bit of us we still have left. We’re wild horses running down a cliff face. There’s no cantering, no gentle trot into love. We are The Man from Snowy River galloping down that cliff face, tumbling towards the inevitable. We can’t go slow. The weight of us is too heavy. Gravity calls us, conspires against us…

“Bit of a Pringles situation?” he asks. I look over at him quizzically. “Once you pop, you can’t stop?” Tom offers and I laugh.

And once again, he’s pleased that I do.

We stay there for an hour or so, and as we’re walking out of the bar, BJ rounds the corner.

Henry and Christian with him. Hen looks tense.

BJ’s drunk, I can tell it by his face before I can smell it on his breath—which I can.

He sneers as he shakes his head at me. “Classic.”

I look away from him, ignoring him.

“We go sideways for a second and a half and you fuck off running to someone else—”

“Easy,” Christian whispers softly to his friend, but Beej just glares at him.

“She’s not though, is she, England?” BJ glances at Tom, who just shakes his head.

“You seem like you’ve had a bit, man—why don’t you just go for a walk,” Tom tells him.

BJ shakes his head, nostrils flaring a bit as he frowns. “Don’t want to go for a walk—I want to talk about how easy Parks isn’t—”

He hasn’t even said anything yet and I already feel like I’ve been slapped.

“She doesn’t put out—” BJ starts.

“—Stop,” Tom tells him.

Beej ignores him. “She’s a fucking handful. She’s a brat—”

“Stop,” Tom says again, squaring his shoulders up.

“She doesn’t know what the fuck she wants—” Beej keeps going.

“I told you to stop.” Tom shakes his head, jaw tight and I get a nervous feeling in my stomach.

“She’s childish, selfish—”

And then Tom shoves him. It’s a big shove. Beej stumbles a bit, but he’s happy he has a reason to let his hands do the talking so he lunges at Tom, but Christian’s pulling BJ back and Henry gets up in his face. “What the fuck are you doing, man?”

BJ shakes his head and breaks free, rushing up to me, pointing a finger. “What the fuck are you doing, Parks?”

Our faces are close. Not 10 cm between us I don’t think. He’s still wearing the shirt he was wearing when I slipped my hand beneath it in the car at the start of the day before he fucked it up again. Because he wanted to?

I shrug my shoulders lightly, keeping our faces close. “Oh, I’m just doing what I want,” I tell him with a little nod. The tone in which I say this surprises me. It’s so capricious, it’s cutting. I lock eyes with the boy I love and hate. “I want to be here. I want to be on a date with Tom, this is what I want—”

BJ’s jaw goes tight and his eyes look wounded as he shakes his head. “You’re full of shit,” he spits and then I push his face away from mine with my hand.

“Get the fuck out of my face.”

He grabs my wrists and holds them tight and I don’t want him to let them go because I’m scared of what happens when he does. “Oh, is that what you want now?” he yells, and we’re devolving.

Everyone around us can see it. The wheels are falling off. We’ve gone like this before once or twice, when we’re at our worst. When I found out about Taura. When he found out about Christian. When all that’s left of loving each other is hating each other.

Tom pulls me behind him, snatching me from BJ, which only makes BJ buck harder as the boys drag him backwards and away from me.

The faces of the boys and Tom, all of them, each somewhere between a quiet shock and muted horror, watching on as we pull at the seams of ourselves.

“What the fuck do you want from me, Parks? Do you even know?” BJ yells at me again.

I shake my head; I can’t see properly. “I don’t want anything to do with you,” I call to him. It’s a lie.

“Back at you,” he slurs.

“Perfect.” A lie.

He points a finger at me, and his eyes look squinty and wet. “I’m fucking over your shit.” A lie. His, this time.

My eyebrows shoot up as I nod. “Then why can’t you just leave me the fuck alone?” That’s not what I want. Another lie. All these lies we can’t stop exorcist-spraying all over each other.

His eyebrows shoot up. “You want that?”

“Yes,” I yell and it feels like a thunder-clap. Echoes through the ancient mountains around us and the Greek philosophers who waxed lyrical about true love and soulmates roll in their graves as I try for the billionth time to sever myself from mine.

Tom places himself very firmly between BJ and I, shielding me completely.

No one’s ever shielded me from BJ before. I suppose no one’s ever had to.

Tom looks sad, actually. Not at me, for me. For BJ.

He shakes his head. “Bro, can you just fuck off?”