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  Without further adieu, here's this week's chapter.

  Kyle

  Overton Preparatory Academy was an aggressively bougie pce on every level. Situated in the north end of Boston, their campus stretched the better part of a city block and consisted of over half a dozen buildings. Their athletic facilities were probably the best indication of their everything: they had their own ice rink, for God’s sake! And while they didn’t have a full-on ballpark for their baseball and softball teams… Goddammit, they came very close.

  I sat in the dugout- an actual freaking dugout, with a wooden bench and roof- alongside my nine best boys and my five best benchwarmers. We were all cd in our white and red uniforms, custom ones paid for by a generous alumni, while we looked across the diamond at our rivals from Saint Sebastian’s Prep in their green and bck ones. A full crowd filled the stands behind us and ahead of us, while various booths and hawkers from school clubs offered up things like periodicals and hand-sewn clothes and snacks like hot dogs and samosas. Yes, really. Homemade samosas at a high school baseball game. And the worst part? They were fucking delicious.

  I sat there, shoveling a samosa into my mouth before standing up and facing my team. I was the varsity coach, so the majority of my pyers were in their final two years of high school. And they all had death in their eyes as they gred at their rivals, just as I’d taught them. I was so proud. “Alright, men,” I said, “We’ve a real big game today, so I hope you’re ready to give it your all, to take no prisoners, to make every single st one of your opponents cry like ugly, drunk babies-”

  “But why would a baby be drunk?” asked Jett Collins, my shortstop, a long, limber twelfth grader with shaggy bck hair and a borderline-disfiguring case of acne running across his pale white face.

  “I have no idea, Jett, it was a hypothetical-”

  “But it was your premise, so why-”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions, Jett,” said Jett’s younger brother, Jeff. The only freshman on the varsity team and my prodigy of a third baseman, Jeff shared many features with his brother, except he was somehow taller, skinnier, and had worse skin. Poor boy.

  “Look, the point is, you guys are going to kick all kinds of butt today,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the little shits. It was amazing how teenage boys could go from endearingly dumb one moment to annoyingly dumb within a split-second.

  “You’re allowed to say ‘ass’ around us, coach,” said Tyrone Warwick, a short but broad and bulky young bck man in eleventh grade with a shaved head and braces that would probably never come off. And also, yes, horrible acne. “We won’t tell.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Carson Watanabe, another junior, this one with a bck buzzcut and the worst ears I’d ever seen in my entire life. No acne though, so at least he had that going for him. “I absolutely will.”

  “Enough!” I barked. God, I was not in the mood for this today. I wanted to go on vacation. I wanted to fuck my new girlfriend’s brains out every hour for two straight weeks. I wanted to watch hockey pyoffs and old kung fu movies and whatever musicals Rose felt like showing me. I wanted to go out drinking and dancing all night and not have to worry about the consequences for a change. But first, I had to get through this one game, to get the team through to the pyoffs and hopefully onwards to our first championship since I’d been promoted to varsity coach two years prior.

  If these little neanderthals would cooperate with me, of course.

  I continued, “We are going to go out there today and py the best game of baseball of our lives up until this point. We are going to make our opponents rue the day they set foot on our diamond! We are going to make them-”

  “Uh, coach?” Jeff said.

  “We are going to make them-”

  “Coach!”

  “What?!”

  “Who’s that gorgeous babe sauntering over towards us?” Jeff said, pointing over my shoulder.

  For a moment, I got my hopes up. I thought Rose had arrived earlier than expected to wish me luck. As, I turned around and my hopes were dashed. Crushed. Obliterated. Vaporized. Eradicated. My ex girlfriend, Sarah, had entered the proverbial chat.

  Son of a fucking fuckity fuck! I screamed internally, a growl of anger and anxiety rumbling the space where my throat met my chest.

  Sarah looked exactly the same as when I’d st seen her: tall, toned, lightly tanned, immacutely dressed in a grey pantsuit that hugged every inch of her athletic body, with deep brown eyes and golden blonde hair sparked with gray worn in a short, stylish pixie cut that showed off her sharp cheekbones. She strutted over to us in high heels, hips moving back and forth in a mesmerizing sway. Perhaps, at 40, she’d been a little old for me, but damn if there wasn’t something about her made me want to fuck all day and night.

  It helped that sex had constituted most of our retionship. We’d rarely gone out. The way she told it, she wanted to take full advantage of my roommate never being around. I’d thought nothing of it, mostly because the sex had been amazing… At least at first. After a certain point, though, it started to dawn on me how Sarah seemed to actively avoid being seen with me in public. Maybe that was why I’d popped the question- I was desperate to validate our retionship, and it seemed like a good way to do it. Plus, I wanted a family, and with her already being in her fourth decade, we were running out of years in which she could safely get pregnant.

  In retrospect, mistakes, as they say, were very much made. I wouldn’t make them again. I wasn’t going to rush things with Rose. We were on the same page, we wanted the same things, and she wasn’t ashamed of me, and I sure as hell wasn’t ashamed of her. I’d do anything for her. Unlike this woman coming up to me amidst a chorus of hoops and hollers and awoogas from my team, which she and I silenced with twin death-gres.

  “Sarah,” I said, my back to the team.

  “Mr. Duggan,” Sarah said.

  I sighed. Every freaking time. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to warn you about something,” Sarah said.

  “Oh? What’s that?” I said, eyes narrow. Was she threatening me?

  “Your roommate is unstable,” Sarah said. “Delusional, possibly violent.”

  Oh, you could not be fucking serious. “And you know this, how, exactly? You never met my roommate.”

  “We encountered one another at the hairdresser’s earlier today,” Sarah said primly, eyes narrow, bitch-face resting. “Over the course of a brief conversation, I ascertained his identity and retionship to you. He seems to be under the impression that he’s a woman.”

  “She is a woman,” I said bndly, bunching and un-bunching my hands into fists repeatedly, breathing in and out my nose.

  “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Mr. Duggan, but-”

  “Rose is a woman,” I cut her off. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “... I see,” she said, her gre intensifying as it ser-focused on me.

  “We can agree to disagree, sociopolitically, Sarah,” I said, my fists remaining firmly bunched now. “And frankly, I don’t see how it’s any of your business-”

  “I seek only to protect you, Mr. Duggan,” Sarah said, condescension dripping off her every sylble. “You have an earnest heart and an innocent disposition-”

  “Those are not words anyone else would use to describe me,” I drawled.

  “Well then perhaps I know you better than most.”

  “I wouldn’t use them to describe me either,” I said.

  “My point still stands,” she said ftly.

  I breathed in slowly, held it in my chest, and exhaled just as slowly. “Yeah. So, I have work to do.”

  “It looks more like a childish game to me,” Sarah said.

  “That’s nice,” I replied. “Could you please make yourself scarce? The game is starting soon, and frankly, you’re distracting my pyers.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “I simply thought it wise to warn you that you have a faggot living in your midst.”

  My eyes tore open wide, and I clenched my fists so hard my knuckles all cracked at once. Which was unfortunate, given that Carson had misophonia, but oh well. I took a few steps forward, looming over her and casting a shadow that consumed her entirety. She was tall, especially in heels, but as was often the case in my life, I was bigger. I said in a harsh, raspy whisper, “You will not talk about Rose like that. Not in front of me. Not ever.”

  She didn’t even flinch. “Why are you protecting that little pervert?”

  For a moment, I considered pying it cool. But then I remembered something my dad taught me: when you love a woman, you aren’t ashamed to show it. “Because she’s my girlfriend,” I said in a low, even tone.

  For a moment, Sarah’s steely expression fractured, shock and disbelief and utter disgust cracking across her visage. As soon as I saw the cracks, though, she smoothed them over, repcing them with the well-practiced stoicism I’d come to expect from her. “You tell yourself that, Mr. Duggan,” she whispered into my ear, then turned on her heel and sauntered away into the crowd.

  I gred at her until she vanished into the stands, a pyre of anger and fear burning in my chest as I realized she pnned on staying for the game. Fucking asshole.

  I turned around, and was immediately greeted by the sight of my entire team grinning at me like a bunch of stoned idiots. “What?” I asked.

  “Was that stone cold milf your woman, coach?” Jett asked.

  “Is that tall drink of water your main squeeze?” Carson asked.

  “Are you tapping that?” Tyrone asked.

  “You guys asking me that is deeply inappropriate, and I have half a mind to bench you for the entire game,” I said. I wasn’t going to, because then we would lose the game, but they didn’t need to know that.

  “Is she?” Jeff asked.

  “No, she’s my ex,” I exhaled.

  At which point the boys erupted into a chorus of cheers, words mixing together into something along the lines of ‘coach has got GAME!’

  I sighed. This was going to be a long afternoon.

  Pinching the bridge of my nose and cringing, I said, “Okay, so if we could please focus up now, we really do need to start talking strategy for our game. So-”

  I was interrupted, yet again, by a series of exaggerated hoots and hollers from my pack of horndog teenage charges. They pointed at something behind me, and I groaned and thought ‘what now.’

  However, once I turned around and saw what they were losing their minds over, my fury froze over and was repced by a gentle bliss. Rose sashayed over to me in her white and blue dress and sensible shoes, makeup freshly done, hair trimmed and styled to frame her delicate face in the most beautiful way possible. Her legs, toned and smooth, were revealed by the fpping of her skirt in the wind, her hips swaying back and forth, her cleavage peeking out modestly through the lowish neckline of her dress. The sunlight shined off of her blue eyes so that this time, they really, truly were sparkling. God, if she wasn’t the most beautiful woman on God’s green earth, I’d eat my own shoes. If it wouldn’t make me look like a complete hypocrite, I’d be cheering louder than all my boys combined.

  She came up to me with those cerulean eyes shining for me and only me, looking up at me with complete and utter adoration and devotion. It was enough to banish all other thoughts from my mind. Where I was, what I’d been doing, who I’d just been talking to and about what; none of that mattered if I had her.

  I looked down at her, my eyes flickering between her face and her boobs as I tried not to let the thought of what my cock would feel like pressed into her cleavage overtake me. I was at a school, for God’s sake.

  “Hey,” Rose said, her breathy, sultry voice enough to stop armies.

  “Hey,” I said. Okay, Duggan, think: she’s just gotten her hair done. Remember your training- you know what to do. “Your hair looks beautiful.”

  She blushed. Hell yeah! Mission accomplished! “Thank you. You look, uh, sporting in that uniform, by the way.”

  “Heh. Thanks,” I grinned, while also praying to God that I didn’t get a boner.

  “You okay?” she asked, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow. “You look nervous.”

  God, she could read me like a rge-print book. “Just… Ran into someone a few minutes ago. Someone I wasn’t very happy to see.”

  “Huh. Lotta that going around today, I guess.”

  “You too?”

  “Yeah,” she grimaced. “My oldest sister- she’s the same as ever.”

  “Meaning?”

  “A total bitch,” Rose said.

  “Ah,” I replied. “Are you okay?”

  “A little frazzled,” she admitted. “I’ll get through it, though.”

  I cupped her cheeks between my hands, looked deep into her eyes, and said, “We’ll get through it. Together. No matter what.”

  Her smile could have unched a thousand ships. “Okay.”

  “You still gonna stay for the game?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” she said. “I do so love watching my man work.”

  “Heh. Thanks,” I said, then gave her a kiss.

  “Heehee,” she giggled. “Good luck out there.”

  “Much appreciated. All I have at my disposal is a small army of idiots, so I’ll need all the luck I can get,” I said.

  She poked my nose. “I’ll go find somewhere to sit.”

  “Oh, one thing you should know,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “My ex showed up a few minutes ago,” I said. “Don’t know what brought it on, but she wasn’t in a good mood. If she’s still here-”

  “I’ll be on the lookout,” Rose nodded, hand resting on my chest. “Thanks for the heads up. Now go kick some butt.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I grinned.

  She kissed me one more time, then turned and walked away. And yes, I did stare at her ass on the way out. It had gotten nice and tight and gorgeous in the past few months, and damn but it was mesmerizing to look at.

  Evidently, my team agreed with me, given that another chorus of hoops and hollers and cheers erupted from the dugout behind me as she traipsed off into the stands.

  “Coach has got game!” Jett cheered.

  “That one was your girlfriend, right, coach?” Victor Crenshaw, a pasty twelfth grader with big bug eyes and a squashed nose asked.

  “It had to be,” Larry Constantin, a comically oversized man with bushy hair his baseball cap struggled to contain, said. “Just look at the two of them! That’s mad chemistry, yo!”

  “You tell me,” I said with a wry grin as my eyes followed Rose into the stands. She took a seat in the front row, near the far left end.

  My eyes flickered to the other end just long enough for me to notice Sarah was still there, in the back row of the far right corner, gring daggers at my girlfriend.

  Oh God, this was gonna be a complete disaster.

  To my eversting relief, the game finally started. The visiting team was up first, and I was able to lose myself a bit in the pageantry of it all. My pitcher managed two strikeouts in a row right off the bat, causing the crowd to lose their minds. Basking in the glory of it all, my eyes drifted to Rose… At which point I noticed she and Sarah had locked eyes from across the stands. And that Sarah was getting up and moving towards Rose.

  I gave a hand-signal for our pitcher, Malcolm Gdwell, to try to get the batter to hit a foul. Gdwell nodded, and then released a change-up that curved at the st second and went careening into the section of bleachers where Rose and Sarah were. It went right down the middle, and the crowd practically fell over itself stampeding to retrieve the ball. In the confusion, Rose jumped off the side of the bleachers, doing a front-flip through the air (my woman was nothing if not dramatic) and then darting behind and around.

  With a strike on the board, I signalled for Gdwell to pour on another of the same, with the exact same result. Sarah was swept up in the pulsing crowd, while Rose made her way through the vendors and hawkers. She made a few stops along the way. Good:I knew her well enough to know what she was going for. She picked up the school newspaper, a letterman jacket, a pair of snow pants and snowshoes, and a custom foam finger that was bigger than her head. Weapons in hand, she maneuvered her way to the middle section of bleachers and climbed up.

  I signalled for Gdwell to go for a regur fastball, and he struck out the batter immediately. Three up, three down, top of the first over. Damn. We did good work.

  The bottom of the first inning came and went with minimal fanfare. Two of my boys got on base but we didn’t manage to get any points on the board. Rose was safely squared away in the exact center of her row of bleachers, and positioned the school newspaper in front of her while peaking over it to cheer for my team.

  The second inning inflicted another no-hitter on the visiting team, to my delight and that of my boys. Sarah spent the majority of it combing through her section of bleachers furiously, upsetting a lot of people in the process before finally giving up after nearly getting hit by another foul ball. It was during the bottom half that she noticed a certain auburn-haired gremlin in another row of stands, peering over a newspaper.

  Come the top of the third, she was climbing up the bleachers, making her way to a stationary Rose at the center. I gulped, losing focus on the game as she tore the newspaper away from Rose…

  Only to reveal a letterman jacket, snow pants, snowshoes, and a foam finger behind the newspaper, propped up and stuffed with another newspaper.

  Sarah shrieked, at which point she and I both noticed Rose at the top of the bleachers, giving my ex-girlfriend the middle finger before backflipping over the top and nding on her feet below. She scampered off, at which point one of my benchwarmers, Luke Mason, an extremely rge eleventh grader who looked like he’d been held back five or six times, said, “Dang, coach. Your girl is crazy.”

  “Damn straight, she is,” I said with a lustful sigh.

  The game of cat and mouse between my current girlfriend and my psychotic ex continued throughout the fourth inning, until the midway section led to a break in the action. At which point my boys started hollering in lust and confusion again as Ruth began to approach our dugout, with all three of her kids in tow.

  “Okay, now I’m lost,” Jett said. “Is she coach’s woman?”

  “Are those your kids, coach?” Jeff said.

  “They look nothing like him,” Tyrone said.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of adoption, you peons!” Malcolm said.

  “He’s a family man!” Larry said. “Respect!”

  “And polyamorous by the look of it,” Carson said. “Coach, are you dating a pair of twin sisters?”

  This is a nightmare, I thought. An unmitigated, uncomfortably personal nightmare.

  “Kyle!” Ruth said.

  “Uncle Kyle!” her twin daughters said in tandem.

  “Hi, Ruth,” I sighed. I was gonna have an aneurysm before the day was over, I was sure of it. “What’s going on?”

  “I came to warn you,” Ruth said.

  “Oh shit, is coach about to go through a dramatic divorce arc!?” Jett excimed.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jeff said, “Obviously this is the part where he finally commits to one woman instead of stringing along three of them.”

  “Don’t be so polyphobic, Jeff,” Carson said. “True love is between a man and two or more women who also love each other. Haven’t you ever read Wheel of Time?”

  “... Yes,” Jeff said, blushing furiously.

  “What did you come to warn me about, Ruth?” I asked, pinching the bridge of my nose. “And why did you bring your kids?”

  “Uncle Kyle, are you and Auntie Rose gonna get married?” one of Ruth’s daughters asked.

  “Eventually, yeah,” I shrugged.

  “Oooohhhhhh!” my boys all cheered.

  “I had to pick them up while my husband was at work,” Ruth said. “But that’s beside the point. Sarah found out about Rose!”

  I blinked. “Which Sarah?”

  “What do you mean-”

  “Because my ex-girlfriend Sarah was just here, telling me she knew about Rose being Rose and trying to neg me out of dating her,” I said, the gears in my mind turning slowly but surely. “She’s in the stands right now.”

  “I meant my sister, Sarah, who was at the salon and saw Rose there,” Ruth said.

  “Auntie Sarah is mean,” one of Ruth’s daughters said.

  “Don’t say that,” the other daughter said. “She’ll hear you. Look!”

  The little girl pointed across the diamond, to the right-hand section of bleachers, finger following the trail of my ex-girlfriend.

  The music sounded to signal the start of the second half of the game, but I could feel the ground vanishing underneath my feet as realization struck me in the stomach and sent me tumbling down through oblivion. Sarah my ex and Sarah who was Rose’s terrible sister… Were in fact the same Sarah.

  Sarah had told me her st name was Kelly. She told me that she worked in the corporate sector, that she was divorced, no family, no siblings. She never wanted to go out, just stay in and make copious use of my body. She viewed me less as a boyfriend and more as an easy booty-call. Which all made perfect sense, now that I knew. She hadn’t wanted anyone to find out. She didn’t even tell her sister that she was sleeping with her roommate.

  Holy shit. I’d known, on some level, that she’d been using me, but this… This… This- “That fucking bitch,” I muttered.

  “Language, coach!” Larry said.

  “Oh, shut it,” I said.

  “I’m gonna find somewhere to sit, try to wrap my head around this,” Ruth said.

  “No, just go,” I said. “Let me handle this.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I gred at Sarah as she continued her search for my new girlfriend, for my lover, for her sister whom she wanted to destroy. “Never been more sure of anything,” I growled.

  Ruth nodded, and took her children in hand to lead them to safety.

  We managed a home run via a stealing home in the bottom of the fourth, causing the crowd to erupt in enough cheers that Rose was able to slip away again. She quite literally managed to crowd-surf her way across the bleachers before rounding the diamond and heading towards me. “Kyle,” she said, climbing into the dugout and ignoring the distressing leers my boys were giving her. “My sister is-”

  “My ex,” I said.

  She blinked. “What?!”

  “I just found out,” I said. “Ruth was here- she and the kids filled me in.”

  “Your ex is my sister,” Rose said, eyes wide, voice crackling with fmes of ire.

  I held my hands out in front me, palms ft. “I wanna emphasize: I had no idea. She gave me a fake name, only came over when you were out of town, didn’t let me take pictures of her.”

  “She- she… Oh my God, she was cheating on her husband with you!” Rose excimed.

  “Holy shit, this is fucking juicy,” Malcolm said.

  “Yeah,” I growled, the sheer magnitude of what Sarah had done smming into me like a locomotive. “I’m furious right now- I feel like a piece of meat, like an object she threw away-”

  “When you asked her to marry you?” Rose said with a raised eyebrow.

  “It… Look, we both agree I wasn’t thinking clearly when I did that, okay? And it’s obvious now that was never actually going to happen,” I said, the weight of my shame downcasting my eyes.

  “Right,” Rose said, carving a line in the dirt with her shoes.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  “Not any more so than you are right now,” Rose said with a bitter ugh as she put her hand on mine, running her fingers over the topside in a gentle, reassuring series of strokes. Even now, as she grappled with a revetion that would make anyone question every aspect of their life, she was trying to make sure I was okay. “Look, you’re at work right now, we can talk about this once you’re done. I’ll head back to the stands.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, meeting her gaze once more. “Sarah’s on the hunt.”

  “I need to show her I’m not scared of her,” Rose said, and the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice… God, she was so fucking strong. Tough as steel, my woman was. Goddamn unbreakable. “And I need to show that phindering sack of shit what standing by your man looks like!” God, if that wasn’t the hottest thing she could’ve possibly said…

  She fisted my shirt and gave me a big, wet kiss with plenty of tongue, then looked at me with fire and thunder in her eyes. “Now win this fucking game, Duggan!” She turned to my pyers and said, “That goes for you little chucklefucks too!”

  And once more, my boys erupted into cheers and appuse, even the ones on the field. But like… In a ‘respecting women’ sort of way this time. You love to see it.

  Everyone else in the crowd just looked confused, but hey, it was that kind of day.

  Rose dashed back into the center stands as the bottom of the fifth inning began. She made it to the central bleachers again, positioning herself in the far-right end.

  Sarah was giving chase, making a beeline straight for her.

  I pulled Tyrone aside as he made his way to at-bat.

  “Coach?” Tyrone said.

  “I want you to hit that ball as hard and as high as you fucking can. Understand?” I said.

  “Coach,” Tyrone nodded with a devilish grin. ‘

  He went to home pte, struck the base three times with the tip of his bat and waited for the wind up. It came in the form of a curveball, resulting in a wild strike.

  Sarah made it into the bleachers, stalking across the left side and parsing through the crowd to get to Rose. Rose, for her part, was already standing up, looking ready to do some more acrobatics.

  Another pitch, this time a change-up that Tyrone missed by a quarter inch. Goddammit.

  Rose was backed against the railing of the stands, looking ready to jump and run. Sarah had death in her eyes.

  Tyrone was arguably my best pyer- if he couldn’t manage this, then-

  Another pitch. This one… Was a screwball. Heh. How appropriate.

  Fortunately, Tyrone chose then to live up to his own hype. The bat connected with a thunderous crack that send ripples of concussive sound all throughout the diamond, throughout the campus, throughout the city, throughout the county, throughout the whole fucking commonwealth. All attendants froze, all eyes locked on the baseball as it soared through the air and trailed towards the center bleachers.

  The fans all cmored and climbed atop each other, a dder of human spectators all scrambling vertically to catch the incoming home run. Sarah smmed into a wall of spectators hoping to intercept Rose, and Rose…

  Rose jumped over the crowd, twirling through the air and opening up her purse to swipe the ball out of the air before she fell into the arms of the crowd below, everyone just cheering for her.

  Everyone except Sarah, of course, who turned around and ran after her at the same time that Tyrone cleared second base. Rose simply did a back-flip off the left hand side of the railing and ran towards home in tandem with Tyrone, ducking behind the bleachers and the dugouts until, just as Tyrone smmed into home pte, she dove into my arms with the ball still nestled in her bag.

  “Hi,” she said, her forehead pressed against mine, the tips of our noses brushing against each other.

  “Hi,” I said, holding her like she was the most precious anything in all creation.

  She took her seat in the dugout, my boys clearing a bit of space for her, clearly too awestruck and probably turned on to object to the sudden intrusion.

  She stayed there for the rest of the game, with Sarah standing a hundred yards away. She was just… Lurking. Gring. God, I can’t believe I asked that psycho to marry me. What the hell was I thinking? That I’m lonely, desperate, hungry for love, grasping at straws, my brain answered for me. Stupid brain. Being right about shit. Dammit!

  Finally, the game came to a close, and we won 2-0. With that, we maintained our record going into the pyoffs, and as the boys shook hands with the visiting team they’d utterly humiliated, Sarah began to approach us.

  I pulled Rose close to me, arm around her, fingers running through her hair, pressing her warm, delicate body against my wall of muscle. She fit into the grooves of me perfectly, my every angle and inch. Like she was made to be wrapped around me, like I was made to fit into her specifically.

  Fuck, I really did have it bad, didn’t I?

  Sarah stood in front of the dugout, in front of Rose and I, in front of me and the woman I loved, as everyone else cleared out.

  “Hey, sis,” Rose finally said, shattering the silence like one of those ‘in case of emergency, break gss’ things on a fire arm.

  “Brian,” Sarah said ftly.

  “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Real mature, Mr. Duggan,” Sarah said.

  “Would you just call me by my first name for once in your damn life?” I snapped. “God, you even did this when we were b-”

  Rose held up a hand, and I shut my mouth. She spoke then: “I don’t care if you don’t accept me.”

  “That’s good, because I don’t,” Sarah said.

  “But you will leave the man I love out of this, or I swear on our father’s grave, I will burn you to the fucking ground,” Rose said, eyes wide, voice high and cheerful but tone utterly wroth.

  Sarah scoffed, and started, “Oh, please-”

  “You’re an adulterer,” Rose said. “You stepped out on your husband and strung another man along in the process. I have an eyewitness between my proverbial fucking thighs. I can destroy your life, your marriage, your reputation, your career, with a phone call if I want to. And if I ever, EVER see you again, I will.”

  Sarah… Blinked. Something I don’t think I’d ever seen her do before. It was honestly a little creepy. She glued her composure back together and choked out, “You’re bluffing-”

  “No,” Rose said, “I’m not. I’ve been hesitating, compromising, lying to myself and everyone around me, for nearly thirty-one years. No more. I am done being afraid.”

  “You say that now, but we both know what disgusting, perverted little boy you really are underneath all that makeup and padding-”

  “Get out of my fucking sight,” Rose said in a firm whisper. “Leave and never come back. And if you tell anyone, especially Mom, you’re done. Your life as a respectable businesswoman and family woman is over. Just as over as you and Kyle are.”

  “Oh, is that what you think?” Sarah ughed. “You think he and I are over?”

  “Pretty sure we are,” I monotoned.

  She kept on ughing, and God, I’ve never wanted to punch a woman more. “Mr. Duggan. The fact that you’re sleeping with my brother, a piss-poor facsimile of me, is proof that we’re not over. That once you got a taste for the O’Neil women, you couldn’t settle for anything less. Even if that means settling for a fake girl like Brian here.”

  “Oh go directly to Hell,” I said, bunching my fingers into a fist.

  “You first,” Sarah grinned. “Come on, Kyle, be honest here: you were madly in love with me, and now you’ve transferred that love onto the only O’Neil willing to take an overgrown little boy like you, even if the O’Neil in question is a malnourished little boy himself! It’s pitiful. And tragic- I know how much you wanted a family, Kyle! You’re aware your little boyfriend here can’t give you a child, right? Or are you genuinely stupid enough to think this freak could carry your baby-”

  She stopped when something collided with her face: Rose spat at her, and it nded directly in her eye.

  “Shut. Up,” Rose growled.

  “God, you are both so utterly pathetic,” Sarah said, that smug fucking look on her face making me want to grab a pair of pliers and-

  “Auntie Sarah, why are you being such a cunt?” Ruth’s daughters asked in tandem. We all tilted our heads to the diamond, and found the little girls standing there, and their mom running up behind them with her baby still in her arms.

  “Girls, hey now, I told you that’s not a word we use outside of the house, and even then, it’s only for when we’re watching women’s wrestling!” Ruth said, panting as she slowed down and pulled the twins into her arms.

  “Sorry, Mommy,” one of the girls said.

  “But she’s being mean to Auntie Rose and Uncle Kyle,” the other said.

  “Ruth,” Sarah said primly. “I’ll ignore this little dispy of terrible parenting just now if you promise to keep your brats on a tighter leash and make a choice. A very important choice, about where your loyalty lies.”

  Ruth drew in a deep breath, then pulled all her kids in Rose’s and I’s direction and stood beside us. “I don’t think it’s much of a choice at all. And you have no right to judge my parenting, Sarah. Given you basically raised Rose and I, it’s a miracle neither of us turned out worse.”

  Rose just beamed at Ruth, pride and adoration exploding out of her like a fireworks dispy. And honestly, I was right there with her.

  Sarah, however, was downright apoplectic. “This isn’t over,” she said, jabbing a finger in our group’s general direction.

  “I’m sure,” I growled.

  And with that, she stalked away.

  Once she was out of eyeshot, Ruth turned to us and said, “Are you okay?”

  “Been better, been worse,” I admitted. “Feel kinda vioted, to be frank.”

  “Understandable,” Ruth nodded. “What about you, Rose?”

  Rose closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath through her nose. She held it, then slowly released it from her mouth. “I’m angry. But honestly, given that I expected to be scared or sad… This isn’t a bad change of pace.”

  I smiled at her, parting a lock of her hair and kissing her temple. “You got real fire in you, babe. I’m proud of you.”

  Her gentle smile said it all. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “Auntie Rose!” one of the girls said.

  “Yes, sweetie,” Rose grinned.

  “Uncle Kyle said you two are gonna get married! Is that true?”

  My eyes widened and my cheeks heated and my spine stiffened. Rose turned around, and her face had gone into full gremlin mode. “I dunno, is it true?”

  “I mean… Uh… Maybe? Eventually? We’re just starting out though, and-”

  “We’ll get there,” the gremlin, my gremlin, my woman, said. “Don’t worry. I believe in us.”

  “But I wanna be a flower girl!” her niece said. The other niece stomped her foot in agreement.

  Rose just smiled and patted both their little heads, while Ruth looked down at her girls, at all three of her girls, with a look of maternal affection. Rose said, “Like I said, eventually. But first, Uncle Kyle and I need to go on a little vacation. Spend some one-on-one time, maybe get out of town for a while.” She turned and looked at me, then continued, “And maybe then we can talk about the future. If that’s okay?”

  The future I’d envisioned echoed inside my mind. Of her. Of us. Of what we’d build together. And I wanted it, all of it. “That’s more than okay. That’s… That’s just perfect, Briar Rose. Absolutely perfect.”

  “Just like us,” she smiled.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just like us.”

  It wouldn’t be easy. As cathartic as seeing Rose tell off her sister, tell off my terrible ex who’d used me like a glorified vibrator for six months and then tossed me away when I got inconvenient, it would probably lead to more battles to fight in the coming days. And that was without getting into whatever fallout would happen when her mom inevitably found out. But right now… Right now, we were okay.

  Right now, we were perfect.

  I scooped her up in my arms, and she didn’t object beyond a small yelp of surprise. She was my princess, and I carried off to my car as we bid her sister and nieces and nephew good-bye. We had a date to make, and a vacation to enjoy. Me and my Briar Rose.