Magnolia Parks (The Magnolia Parks Universe Book 1)

She’s sitting there, perched up on one of the walls, her legs tucked under her. Wearing some red checked skirt and top set thing, I don’t know—she looks like my dream girl, whatever it is. Everything she wears I want to take off her body. Sounds like a sex thing, maybe it is a bit but also, I just want to see all of her. I don’t want anything, not even clothes, between us. And fuck—we have so much between us these days.

I go and sit next to her wordlessly. Funny because I honestly didn’t come here to meet her. Maybe I was hoping I’d bump into her? I don’t know—it’s not just her spot, it’s mine too. It’s where we’d go when we were teenagers if we needed to think.

St Dunstan in the East.

I can’t go there without thinking of her, but I suppose what else would I be thinking about anyway?

She looks over at me, waiting. My move, I guess.

It’s always my move. I shake my head.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in love with someone and have to watch everyone else be in love with them too?”

She gives me a long look with dark edges. “I have an idea.”

I sigh. “Then why the fuck aren’t we together, Parks?”

She doesn’t say anything, she just stares straight ahead as she shifts her legs, kicking them out in front of her, dangling them down. It’s not fair. I love her legs. I wonder if she does it on purpose, to distract me. I wouldn’t put it past her these days.

If you told me she was a master manipulator or, I don’t know—a witch?—I’d probably nearly be relieved. Relieved to have a reason to be stuck on her how I am more than just because I love her in a way I can’t undo.

The way we’re sitting—shoulder to shoulder—one of my arms sitting on the concrete behind her, her leaning back into me without even knowing she’s doing it.

This is what we’re like.

This is what we’re always like.

I look over at her, breathe her in. Same smell as always. If she ever leaves me for good I’ll take baths in Gypsy Water to get to sleep at night.

“Christian said he was going to come and talk to you—” She nods. “He did?” I look at her, waiting for more, but she doesn’t say anything. “What’d he say?” I ask. She shrugs. I frown at her. “What do you mean—” I imitate her shrug.

She shrugs again. “I don’t want to say.”

“You don’t want to say?” I blink a few times, and then it flares up in me like a hot flush. “What the fuck, Magnolia—what’d he say?”

And then she gets a look in her eye. I recognise it. It’s the same look she’d get in her eyes whenever Mars would give her shit for bringing me home, because no one can give me shit but her.

Those were always my favourite nights because she’d grab my hand, pull me to her room, slam the door and throw me against it, pretending we were hooking up just to get a rise out of Mars, but it always meant she’d touch my body all over, more than she needed to, and she’d let me hold her against me under the guise of a ruse, but the ruse was the guise.

Whenever Mars gave her shit, the look in her eye was always a massive “fuck you and watch me come out swinging,” and she’s got that look now here, swinging those legs, kicking down my inhibitions more and more by the second.

She sizes me up.

“I’ll tell you what he said if you tell me why you did it—”

Fuck me.

I sigh.

“I told you why I did it.”

“And I told you, I don’t believe you,” she shoots back, quick as light. “I don’t believe you.”

I shrug, trying to look indifferent, because I can’t deal with this right now. “That’s not my fault.”

She shakes her head, shaking off the hurt my indifference there caused her—I can see it swim across her face, pool in those lake eyes that I’d swim in forever if she’d let me, and I don’t know why the fuck she won’t let me?

“Fine,” she says defiantly. “Then tell me who.”

I shake my head. “I’m not telling you that—”

“Why?”

I give her a look, wide-eyed and begging. “Because it’ll make it worse.”

She shakes her head like she knows. “It couldn’t be worse than not knowing.”

“Yes, it could,” I say. “It’s the specificity of a face. It’s nearly fucking impossible to see past—I see you and Tom in my mind all the time. I used to think of you and me to fall asleep, and now I just see you with him.” I shake my head, trying to clear the image from my brain. Her face falters at the way I sound. Her heart’s knees buckling at the sight of me. It’s quick—like a flash—the sympathy for me before it’s back to stubborn and digging in.

“I didn’t cheat on you.”

Which is technically true—technically—but too fucking on the nose to bring it up today.

“Are you shitting me, Parks?” I look at her with wild eyes. “Why the fuck are we talking about this? Again. We’re not talking about how I fucked up, we’re talking about your colossal fuck up. With my best friend. Who’s in love with you now.”

She frowns. I don’t know at what.

How angry I am? Being put in her place? That he loves her?

“You had to know—” I look over at her, cautious. Search her face, make it feel impossible to bullshit me on this because I need to know. “Did you know?”

She stares at me for a couple of seconds and then her eyes go extra heavy. She nods. She looks guilty. “What the fuck, Parks.” I push up off the wall, start pacing.

She jumps up after me. Because if I move, she moves.

“I mean, I had a feeling—” She sounds a bit panicked. “I didn’t ask—”

I give her a look. “Yeah, you didn’t need to.”

She reaches for me. “He’s just my friend.”

And maybe for the first time in the history of time, I pull away from her and give her a ragged look. “Yeah, but you’re not just his friend, are you?”

“Beej—that’s not my fault! I didn’t feed into it.” I give her a look. “I didn’t!” She shakes her head wildly.

“When you can’t get on to me and you’re in trouble—who do you call?”

“Tom,” she says quickly.

“No.” I shake my head. “Before Tom. The last two years. Who do you call?”

Magnolia’s eyes drop from mine and she looks away.

I point at her. “Henry’s been your best friend since you were four—it’s fucked up, Parks”—I shake my head—“that you’d call Christian before him.” I’m vindicated.

Shake my head more. “You don’t treat him the same as Henry and Jo—” Magnolia replies, “Because he’s not the same as them. We have a history.”

“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?” I spit.

She looks at me, eyes so wide that when she blinks the lids barely touch. “Yours!”

“Mine?” I repeat. Loud enough that people are looking—maybe a phone or two flashes—I don’t know. “I made you fuck my best friend?”

Now she’s yelling. Proper yelling. “We never slept together.”

“Never?” I repeat back louder.

“Never,” she repeats.

I glare over at her. “What’s all that shit about orgasms then, hm?”

She gives me a look—baffled.

“Beej—you are substantially more sexually active than I am—I feel like you should know the answer.”

I shovel my hands through my hair, try my best not to laugh at what she said because I don’t want her to get the upper ground. I get to stand up here so infrequently, I’m not getting down just yet.

“And how was it my fault?”

She gives me a look, head tilted, jaw tight, eyes dark.

“Are you shitting me?” I yell. “I made you do it? Because you broke up with me—”

“You had sex with someone else!”

“One time. One time, Parks! And I came to you and I told you straight away. It was a mistake, I fucked up. But it was just one time.”

“And how many times now?”

I groan and glare over at her. We’re stuck on a loop.

“I mean it,” she asks, nose in the air. “How many times now?”

I shake my head. “Don’t.”

“Tell me.” She grabs my arm to wrangle herself into my view.

I jerk out of her hold. “No, Parks—”

And I’m fucking over it. I can’t keep having this talk. I can’t keep telling her the reason I did it is because I wanted to. It’s fucking me up and it’s fucking her up, and she wants answers from me that I will never, ever give her.

I take a step away from her. “You know at some point in all this, you’re going to have to look your own shit in the eye, Parks. Yeah, I was the first one who fucked up first, but you’ve fucked up constantly ever since.”

She pulls her head back, like I’ve hit her.

“You dated my best friend—you went home with Julian Haites, apparently,” I say. She rolls her eyes. “You got scared because your nanny told you some bullshit about me that you know is bullshit, but then you started dating these fucking random dudes to make yourself feel better and me feel like shit, but all that was you, not me.” I shake my head at her. “I didn’t make you do shit. You were the one who started dating Tom—”

“You were getting a fucking lap dance from a stranger in the middle of Raffles!” I’m trying to read her face, trying to figure out how far away she is from crying. “Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

I nod, conceding.

“Yeah, I’m a fuck up, Parks. I know I am—I can stand here and tell you all the ways that I’ve put us in the ground, but it wasn’t all me.” I give her a look. “I didn’t make you run to Christian. I didn’t make you run to Tom. I didn’t make you run to any of your fucking playthings that you dangle in front of me to make me jealous—”

“Yes you did, of course you did—you with your shag count of girls so high you’d put Mick Jagger to shame—”

“Yeah, Parks—okay. I get it. I fuck around a lot. It’s because I’m in love with an idiot who doesn’t want to be with me—”

She looks angry, shakes her head. “That’s not true, you know that’s not true—”

“Okay, fine.” I nod, jaw tight, eyes glassy. “Maybe she thinks she wants to be with me, fuck it—maybe she even actually does, but she cannot, for the fucking life of her, reconcile that I did a bad thing once, and I hurt her, and I can’t change it—”

She’s blinking a lot. Trying her best not to cry.

“More than once,” she says, voice quiet.

“Yeah, well.” I shrug. “She’s hurt me more than once too.” Our eyes lock, she’s glaring up at me, I’m staring down the barrel of a rifle that’s about to snipe us out of love. “And until you can admit that we’re fucked up because of you too, we’re never going to work.”

Her face goes a bit blank and I wonder if she’s hearing me—like, actually hearing me.

Then her eyes go dark.

“Then we’re never going to work.”