The Co-op

Chapter Twenty-Six

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

DEACON

A noise hums out of LaRynn from somewhere high in the back of her throat. Her scent in my nose, her full upper lip between mine. And my body reacts on instinct, relief, confusion, and desperation mixing a cocktail in my bloodstream. I taste the air between us and her tongue slips into my mouth, her head tipping back for more access. Her teeth sink into my lip and I groan, change the angle to taste her again. Her cool palms glide under my shirt and she scratches my skin with her nails. I press our hips together and she whimpers, the sound like a pull cord to every nerve ending in my body. One hand slaps into the wall beside her head, the other skates up her ribs, calluses scraping against her smooth, warm skin.

The hand on the wall finds the strands of her ponytail and I lightly tug, expose her neck for me to lick and nip and kiss.

Something thumps on my mind’s door, some warning knock I go on ignoring.

More of that cotton candy smell. I’m floating on a cloud of that scent, sugar and salt, and my eyes roll back behind my lids when she tangles her fingers in my hair, an unconscious groan rolling out of me.

A distant alarm rings in my brain, something that calls up the memory of the last night we kissed like this all those years ago, as a tsunami warning rang through the trees. We can’t, we can’t do this. This is going to end up worse for us both if we don’t fix things first.

But then she glides the heel of a palm up the swelling part of my jeans and I groan before I push myself away, our lips peeling apart with the lightest smack. She frowns at me, swollen lips and mussed hair and Jesus no one should be this painfully beautiful. It’s like taking in a lightning strike as it cracks across the sky—that little shocked, awed pause before thunder rumbles through you. Something equal parts scary and mesmerizing.

“Go,” shreds through my chest. “I think we need to go to bed. This—this shouldn’t happen like this.” I’m a husk, barely another touch and I’ll get swept away. And I may not know much, may feel shaken and rattled, but I know this can’t be about sex this time. We can’t let sex get in the way, can’t use it as a Band-Aid for the past, either, and it’s clear neither of us can handle it on its own with any emotional intelligence.

I watch the expressions roll across her features: confusion, disbelief, frustration, before landing on pure, unadulterated, seething rage. She snorts and shoulders past me, clipping my still-hard cock with her hip and pulling a grunt out of me.

“Wait—” I barely choke out.

“No,” she bites back.

There’s no door to slam, but the jerk she gives on the curtains has the sharpness of a knife slicing across me.

I rub my palm up and down my face, adjust my pants as I make my way to my room. Why didn’t I think ? Why couldn’t I just speak? Just say Wait, we need to slow down, we need to have a conversation.

Because I’m scared that conversation might only make things worse. Make it harder to work with one another. We still have this fucking house to fix. Because as little as she trusts me, I think I panicked about trusting her, too.

I toss the night away, eventually calming down enough to know that we have to have some semblance of a conversation. I try to play it out in my mind, try to memorize what I want to say. I barely shut my eyes before the dawn cracks them open again.

When I shuffle out to the kitchen in the morning, LaRynn is frying something on the stove, a pot of coffee dripping and gurgling in the background. She’s already dressed for the day in the tiniest gym shorts she has—the kind with the seam up the middle of her ass, emphasizing every curve. Some tank top with a flannel half hanging off one smooth shoulder. Her hair in two long braids down her back. Fuck, I love her hair in braids. She knows I do.

“Good morning,” she says without turning to me. Overly sunny, at least for her.

“M-morning,” I say groggily. “LaRynn, I—”

“Beignet?” she asks cheerfully, turning to show me the contents of a plate. Something dusted in powdered sugar.

“What?”

“Would you like a beignet? Essentially a donut. The only breakfast pastry I know how to make.” She lifts her brows in offering.

“You made me breakfast?” I ask, unable to mask the wariness in my tone. Something’s not right.

I swear I see one of her eyes twitch, but she simply replies, “I made enough for the both of us, yeah.” She starts plating a few. “And I wanted to thank you for last night. Clearly, we need to figure out some sort of healthy tension relief apart from each other. I think we probably need to give in and go get laid, don’t you? This whole thing has our heads all muddled up and it was easy to get carried away.”

“Wait. What? ” Not this again.

She gives me an innocent look. “Listen, I’m not mad at all. I’m just saying it’s clear that our signals are getting crossed. What with your eavesdropping on my private time and constant leering—”

“Hold on a damn minute—”

“—mauling me the instant my lips came near yours.”

I narrow my eyes at her. “You damn well know you kissed me. ”

“I was merely thanking you for the driving lesson. You’re the one who started practically humping me up a wall.”

“And I suppose it was my own hand grabbing at my cock then, too?”

“Must’ve been.”

“You don’t get to do this.” I shake my head in disbelief. “Look, I’m sorry if I made you feel— rejected last night.”

“Nothing to reject but bad judgment. Truly, thank you, Deacon.”

“Stop it.”

“No, really. You told me in the beginning that I was free to see other people and yeesh, clearly I should, right? We both should. You even more so. A man like you must be very”—she eyes me up and down and scrunches her nose—“ needy. ”

She starts tearing apart her beignet and popping pieces of it into her mouth. The circles under her eyes tell me she didn’t rest well, either.

“I never said that, LaRynn.”

She drops the beignet carelessly onto her plate. “Are you saying I’m not, then? Free to see other people? I thought you said you’d respect this conversation if we needed to have it?”

“Fine,” I say, before shoving an entire pastry into my mouth. I’m not playing into this with her, though. When I eventually swallow it, I add, “You want to hurt me back? That make you feel better?” I watch her nostrils flare as she tears into a bite of her own. “You’re acting like a child.”

Shit. It was the wrong thing to say. She pauses in her chewing, her eyes lifting back to me in slow, deadly motion. It’s like watching someone crank back on a catapult. She swallows and licks away some powdered sugar from the corner of her mouth, and I hate that I imagine I can taste it, too. “Is this not what you wanted? You wanted to stop. You said this shouldn’t happen. I’m merely making it easier on us.”

“Because it shouldn’t happen until we talk about some shit, LaRynn.” I toss down the beignet. “And you and easy don’t belong in the same fucking sentence.”

She bares her teeth at me in a phony grin. “Truly, I can’t begin to express my gratitude. Would’ve been such a colossal mistake. It was a moment of weakness.”

My gut rolls with shame and hurt, the feeling like an echo from the past as she sits there and rips into another beignet without a care. I catch the clock on the wall behind her and stifle a curse. We have to get over to Santa Sea. Is this how real couples have to function? Continue on with their obligations while they fester? “I guess you’re right, if that’s how you really feel,” I say.

“It is.” She doesn’t finish her second beignet.

“Whatever you say.”

I clean up the kitchen after we eat, earning myself a bitter-sounding “thank you” before we meet at the landing to head out.

She turns up the volume on the music the moment we get in the car, and it’s probably for the best, because I’m still fuming and anything I want to say will inevitably come out wrong. It always comes out wrong, anyway. I flick my eyes her way to find her leaning against the window, her hand balled in a fist.

It’s the sight of that fist, knuckles nearly white, that makes the anger evaporate into something… worse. Something like hopelessness.

We can’t ever seem to get on the same page, the right foot, or build a good foundation no matter how hard we try. And we can’t seem to escape each other, either. Not really.

She straightens in her seat when I make the sharp turn into the campground.

“It looks different , ” she says. I simply nod, but I don’t think she catches it. “When did they add those?” She points to the pairs of Airstreams that don either side of the little camp store. They have decks and plants, and per Mrs. Gold’s incessant badgering, poles set with string lights.

“I finished restoring those and building the decks about four years ago now,” I say.

“You did?”

I sneer at her on instinct, the words “colossal mistake” replaying in my mind. “Yes, me, no matter how unbelievable you find it. Ramsey helped with some of it.” Ramsey’s more of a silent partner, but he also owns a third. I don’t know why I feel like I need to give him credit, but I do.

“Ramsey? As in your brother?”

“That’d be the one.”

She shifts in her seat. “I saw that he made it to pro ball a few years back. He still playing in Georgia?”

“Ah, yes. If only you’d met the perfect prodigal son, instead of me.”

Her head rears back. “Now who’s acting like a child?”

I grip the wheel tighter and don’t reply. I shouldn’t talk about Ramsey when I’m already feeling this way. My brother escaped the hardest period in our home since he was away at school—off succeeding, off doing big and great things. Unlike me. We talk and do just fine during the holidays, but… we’re just not close, and I don’t know if we ever will be. Even when Dad was dying and Ramsey was miles away, they spoke more. And I’m glad he used his third of the life insurance money to buy this place with Mom and me, but even being in business together hasn’t done much to bridge the gap.

I pull into my parking spot and see Jensen already here, rakes and garbage bags in hand. A few of the campers signed up to join in, too.

I get out and wait for the group to gather before I brief everyone on tool usage and our plan. Refreshing gravel and bark, pulling any weeds, replacing campsite numbers, etcetera, before we set up for the party. I pair off with Jensen, and LaRynn separates with some of the other volunteers.

So much for a team-building day. I’d planned to work with her at my side more. Maybe show her around the place and show off some of the improvements we’ve made? I don’t know what I was thinking.

Jensen’s been pushing me for constant updates since this whole thing began and is rapidly turning into a monster. I feel like a middle school girl with the repetitive and then I said, and then she said s I’ve recounted over the last month.

“She said that?!” he says now, wincing at me when I update him on the pipeline from kiss to LaRynn saying we should go out and get laid .

“Yes. Why do you look like that makes you nervous?”

“Because it does . It makes me very nervous.”

“I’ll be fine, Jay. I know better than to get this thing mixed up with her.” I know better than to actually believe she wants me to go and do that, too.

“It’s not that. Though, believe me, I think you two parading other people around each other has the potential to be a truly categorical disaster. But…” He takes a pull off his water bottle. “It’s just—wouldn’t you risk your community property in cases of infidelity?”

“It’s not infidelity if we’ve had this discussion? Which we did. And it’s not like I have actual plans to.” My rake rips through the ground aggressively. “ And the property is in a trust.”

“You guys getting hitched made that community property—I think? Doesn’t it? Despite the fact that it was already shared. She could technically win it over if it all blew up, couldn’t she? I just wonder if maybe she’s trying to bait you into something.”

“Jesus Christ, Jensen, you think I know?! You’re telling me this now?! After you’re the one who told me to bring up this conversation to begin with?!”

“I think I saw it going differently in my mind.”

“No shit.” I dig into the ground again moodily. “You think she’s trying to set me up?”

He slaps his forehead with a groan and drags the hand down his face. “Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

“Yes, let’s not. Especially when a very simple Google search would clear all of this up for you,” comes LaRynn’s voice from behind us.

I close my eyes and exhale through my nose before I turn to face her. She’s breathing heavily, her flannel gone, only in her tank top now, red-cheeked… and fucking pissed.

“LaRynn—”

“Really, Jensen?” she says. “I’d expect that from him, but not you, too.” She tosses down the wheelbarrow and pulls her phone out of her back pocket. She looks like she’s holding back tears.

“Here. Multiple articles on how in California, since infidelity is not actually illegal, it would not affect property division in divorce proceedings. Here’s another result saved on how we are both additionally protected since this was left to us in both of our names.”

“Rynn—”

She cuts me off with a cruel laugh. “You really didn’t think to research that beforehand? Glad one measly little kiss has you falling over yourself so much that you think I’m really trying to lay out some nefarious plan to trap you. Maybe I called it Operation Blue Balls. Maybe I planned to call Anya and have her seduce you for a cut. Is that it? That’s really what you think?” She turns her glare on Jensen and he slinks away.

I toss the rake aside. “I can’t think half the time I’m around you because I’m too busy trying to figure you out.”

“Well, fucking stop , then! I’m not some project, Deacon. I’m not some car, or some trailer, or some house you can take apart and figure out before you restore it into something shiny and new, alright?!”

And then she’s off, trying to run away again. Like hell am I letting it go this time.