The Best Kind of Forever (Riverside Reapers Book 1)

AERIS

I’ve officially hit rock bottom.

This is the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to me. Hayes should’ve left me at the bar to die.

I’m hunched over the bushes in the middle of the sidewalk, emptying the contents of my stomach from the last twenty-four hours. Hayes rubs soothing circles on my back, even holding my hair out of my face. Oncoming torrents of sweat drench my skin, and rivulets of half-digested food expel from me, splattering the patchy grass.

It takes me forever to finish retching, but when I do, I can barely even look at Hayes. His white shirt is a motley shade of brown, and it’s already starting to smell.

Worry teeters on the precipice of my hyperactive mind. “I’m so sorry. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just did that,” I cry, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’ll buy you a new shirt, I promise—”

Concern rings in his voice. “Aeris, it’s okay. Now, I’m going to repeat what I asked you, okay?”

Once the nausea starts to subside and the dizziness becomes manageable, I nod obediently.

“Are you feeling fine, or do you need me to carry you the rest of the way?”

“I can walk.”

“Okay,” Hayes says, his fingers still placating me with their gentle eddying on my back.

Once we make it to my doorstep, Hayes idles behind me, like he’s a vampire that needs to be invited inside.

With the door still open, I gesture for him to come inside.

He doesn’t move.

“You can come in,” I tell him in case he needs some kind of verbal confirmation.

“You don’t know me. I’m not going to come inside your house.”

I place two hands on my hips. “Are you a serial killer?”

“No, but…”

“Then you have my permission to come inside.”

He opens his mouth to argue, but I cut him off before he can get trapped in that pretty head of his.

“I’m not sending you all the way home like that. At least clean up, okay? Then you can be on your merry way.”

I have a feeling that Hayes is a naturally stubborn person, but lucky for me, he stops resisting. I throw his dirty shirt in the laundry, quickly brush my teeth, then I open my shower up to him.

I forfeit a sigh, flopping onto my back on my bed.

This was not how I pictured the night ending. I wouldn’t have been against a little light groping and a sloppy makeout sesh. I also wouldn’t have resisted a terrible one-night stand that I’d inevitably have to buy Plan B for in the morning. But this…this is scraping the bottom of the barrel. This is something my dignity will never recover from. Would it be rude of me to sneak out of my own house? I need to get a passport, change my name, dye my hair, and relocate to Mexico as soon as humanly possible.

And to make matters worse, I can’t seem to get out of my form-fitting clothes. Why are trivial tasks so much harder when you’re drunk? I hate it.

I shimmy my hips without fully sitting up, trying to do some kind of hop-jump combination to get my jeans to release my legs from their denim prisons. My pants are clinging to me like Saran wrap, and the more I struggle, the more my frustration ratchets. Amidst the battle, I’ve lost a heel, and the other one is moments from rocketing off to the other side of my room.

I feel something fuzzy slither around my leg, and I look down through graying vision to pinpoint my tuxedo cat, Crunchwrap, nuzzling against me. And yes, she’s named after the Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell.

I abandon my mission of freeing my lady bits, picking Crunch up and holding her Lion King-style over top of me.

“I messed up tonight, girl. Big time.” Heat prickles the back of my neck, hot tears loom in my eyes, and regret begins to snowball through me.

“If Roden saw me now, he’d be so disappointed.” I blink away the moisture on my lower lash line that’s threatening to leave streaky evidence through my foundation.

Crunch stares at me with her demonic, yellow eyes, blinking slowly like she can secretly understand every word I’m saying. I’m holding her under her armpits so the top half of her looks a little smushed, and she usually hates being held this way—with her arms sticking straight out—but she isn’t hissing or batting at me. Cats are attuned to their owner’s emotions, right? God, this must be her way of pitying me.

“This guy I met, Hayes, he seems like a great guy. But I can’t let him in—not that I think I stand a chance with him after tonight,” I explain, a single tear slipping from the threshold of my weary eyes. My heart aches like it’s been wrung out to dry, and there’s this unsettled flicker in my belly that I know isn’t from the alcohol.

Crunch meows at me, turning her head to lick at the scruff of her neck.

“He’s beautiful. He really is. Oh, God. And I think I made a comment about his penis,” I mumble. “Like, yeah, I joked that it was small, but it looks a lot bigger than average.”

“You think I’m beautiful?” I hear Hayes say from the bathroom doorway, and I shriek, flinging my cat to the floor.

I’m not sure why I was expecting him to magically come out clothed, but the only thing he’s wearing is a towel slung low on his hips.

Hayes is a statue carved from the finest of marble. His lack of pants makes for a very clear show of the hard V-line he has, no doubt leading to a mouthwatering sight at the apex of his bulging thighs.

The taut ripples of his abs glisten from leftover water, and I can’t tear my eyes away from the corded ropes of muscle that band themselves around his arms. His bicep looks to be the equivalent size of my head. My head. I don’t think his hand would strain to wrap fully around my neck.

He’s barrel-chested, and there’s tiny, illegible scripture scrawled above his left pectoral. I don’t see any other tattoos marring his skin—until he gives me a brief flash of his back. And wow, what a back it is. All winding ridges and dips, accompanied by a thinly drawn tree that scales the length of his spine.

It must have hurt like hell to get a tattoo straight on the bone. If Hayes deals with pain so well, I wonder where he exceeds in other departments. And don’t get me started on his ass. All I can make out are two soft dimples resting right above the juiciest globes I’ve ever seen.

His hair is unkempt and waterlogged, and I get this urge to drag my nails along his scalp. There’s a teasing crinkle below his aquamarine eyes as he waits for me to herd all my runaway thoughts and form a coherent sentence.

A hot, white flash of embarrassment careens through me. “How much of that did you hear?” I hyperventilate.

Laughter thunders in his chest. “Just the part about my apparently bigger-than-average dick.”

Heat crawls into my cheeks and turns the tips of my ears red. “Please ignore me. I’m heavily intoxicated right now. I don’t mean a word I’m saying,” I say, albeit the conviction sounds weak.

His eyebrows jump to his hairline. “So you don’t think I have a bigger-than-average dick?”

The gears in my mind turn, my brain finally able to function at least enough to hold my tongue.

“I…didn’t not say that.”

His stare is stormy and intense, and his tongue peeks through his lips to periodically hydrate them. I wouldn’t mind denting the lower one with my teeth. Jesus, I need to be spayed.

“You’re adorable when you blush, you know that?” A flirtatious lilt skirts along his tone.

Of course his comment makes me blush even harder.

I’ve never been good with accepting compliments, so I decide to change the subject as discreetly as possible. “Your, uh, clothes have about two hours before they’ll be done,” I inform him.

“Thank you again for letting me borrow your washer and dryer.” There’s a genuineness that hangs off every word he says—something that’s been foreign to me in all my twenty-three years of existing on this godforsaken planet.

I don’t have the best track record with guys. My last ex, Wilder Mason, was a manipulator, but I was so blindly in love with him that I tricked myself into making up excuses for the way he treated me. I thought it was normal for him to always ask me where I’d be and who I’d been with. I thought it was normal for him to regulate how much I ate and what I wore. I hate my body because of the way he treated me. When I wasn’t in the mood to be intimate with him, he’d guilt-trip me, tell me I was being selfish by not tending to his needs, and convince me that no guy would ever want a girl who wasn’t sex-crazy.

I became Wilder’s puppet, his prisoner. He isolated me from all my friends, even my family. He yearned for control, and my eagerness to please him made me the perfect target for his manipulation. After a while, I wanted out, but I was too afraid to leave. I was afraid of what he would’ve done. I was afraid that he was going to hit me.

When my brother died, Wilder was the only one I could turn to. My relationship with my parents was too strained at the time. But after hearing about Roden’s suicide, he packed up all his things and left. A selfish part of me was relieved to be free of him, but the neglected part of me suffered without a support system. Wilder promised me he’d always be there for me, no matter what happened. That he’d always love me.

I’ve been chasing after love my entire life, wanting that gratification of meaning something to another person. But life doesn’t work that way. People don’t work that way.

Wilder destroyed the hopeless romantic in me. He destroyed my hope for love. And now I stay far away from any of those feelings, because I already know how the story ends. I already know that heartache is waiting for me at the finish line.

As much as I want to let Hayes in, I can’t. I don’t think I’d survive another person abandoning me. First my brother, and then Wilder. The two people I loved most at one point in my life. I hate love. I didn’t used to, but I do.

You either love too little and watch everything you’ve built slip through your fingers like sand in an hourglass, or you love too much, and that heap of sand weighs your chest down until you can’t breathe. Love isn’t black and white. It’s a murky gray, a bleak landscape devoid of effervescent life. And it’s my crucible.

“It’s the least I can do since I ruined them,” I remind him, my hand badgering at the roots of my ratty hair. I feel greasy and disgusting. I haven’t taken a shower in two days, my deodorant has definitely worn off by now, and I’m almost positive I’m rocking a whole raccoon eye look.

Hayes sits down next to me, the mattress giving way to his weight. “You need to stop being so hard on yourself,” he chastises, startling me when he reaches out to hold my hand. The raised scars on his palm send a lance of electricity through my arm, but I don’t pull away.

This is the closest I’ve been to him, so I take advantage of the proximity. Through a sleepy gaze, I memorize every part of him—his ambrosial cologne, his well-defined dimples, the forefront curl in his blond hair, the way his upper canines hang a bit lower than the rest of his teeth, the cerulean ring around his pupils.

“Why are you being so nice to me?” I blurt out, and the minute those words windmill out of me, I want to slap a return to sender sticker on them.

Great. Good going, Aeris.

His seafoam irises turn a deeper shade as he ponders me, spotlighting the veins of gold branching out from his pupils. “Why wouldn’t I be nice to you?” he inquires.

I slam my lips together, withdrawing my arm from his grasp. “Because you don’t know me.”

“What’s your last name?” he asks, his voice sporting a warmth that’s enough to rid the goose bumps on my arms.

“Relera. Why?”

“I’m getting to know you, Aeris. Plus, I need to know the name of the beautiful girl who let me escort her home.”

That line shouldn’t have worked on me…but it did. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

“What do you do for work?” he continues.

“I’m a content writer for a social media company called Your Ass Is Grass, which specializes in promoting unique vegan recipes,” I say, picking at my wrist—a nervous habit I’ve entertained various times before.

He cocks an eyebrow. “No way. Seriously? That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever heard,” he remarks, and I can tell he means every word of it.

“It’s not too bad.”

“‘Not too bad’? Aeris, that’s awesome.”

I manage to untangle the words caught on my tongue. “What do you do for work?”

His teeth lock in place, and he rubs the length of his neck. “I’m, uh…I’m a personal trainer.”

That explains the muscles.

“Look, Hayes, you don’t have to do this. I’m not asking you to talk with me. I can be…a lot…sometimes.”

Ah, and the waterworks are right on time. Despondency wades through my bloodstream, subsequently siphoning all the air out of my lungs. My chest feels tight, my breath is bated, and tears swipe at the backs of my eyes.

“I know. I want to,” Hayes counters. “And I don’t scare easily.”

You should, I say to myself.

But instead, all I offer him is a watery smile. I begin to fumble with the zipper on the back of my corset, but my poor coordination hinders me from making any progress. My arms oscillate around, and I twist aimlessly from side to side, probably looking like a fish out of water.

With a groan, I turn my back to Hayes.

“Can you, uh…can you help me?” I ask timidly, gesturing to the death trap currently cutting off all my circulation. It’s pulled so tight that my boobs are barely contained, swelling over the tops of the sewn-in bra cups.

He gulps thickly, and I catch him blushing out of the corner of my eye. His long fingers make quick work of the zipper. My top is off within the second, and I cross my arms over my exposed chest just as Hayes disappears into the bathroom.

Once I’m in a T-shirt and some sweatpants, I call out to Hayes that the coast is clear. I hear a clanking noise come from the other side of the door, and when he emerges, he’s double-fisting a bottle of Tylenol and a glass of water.

“I, uh, found a glass in your medicine cabinet.” He hands the drink to me, along with a few pills.

“Thanks,” I say, swallowing them back and hoping that they work faster than advertised. The more conscious I become, the more the queasiness flowers.

“Do you have any crackers? Maybe they’ll help with the nausea.”

The acid in my gut sloshes around, and I place a hand on my stomach, as if I’m making some kind of unspoken truce with it. “Crackers probably aren’t the best idea.”

Hayes nods, leaning his shoulder against the wall.

The silence in the room is entirely too loud, but I’m too nervous to say much of anything. I’m afraid I’ll word-vomit on him. Or, you know, actually vomit on him…again.

Finally, after what seems like a millennium, my voice cracks when it tastes the air. “You should probably get going after your clothes dry. I wouldn’t want to keep you.”

Disappointment flashes across his features like a broken roll of film. “Right,” he agrees, though his mouth falls into a hard line.

“Right.”

The truth is, I don’t want Hayes to leave. I don’t want to be alone. Hayes is the first person since my brother’s death who’s made life feel a little less hopeless. But as much as I wouldn’t mind falling asleep in his arms, listening to the soft patter of his heart, I’m never going to allow myself to feel that vulnerable ever again.