cheeks just barely visible now that her tan from the day was setting in. She held my gaze for a long while before tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear and picking up her cards for the next hand.
I kicked back in my chair, checking out my own cards as the day floated through my mind. I couldn’t believe Betty knew my father, and the way she’d talked about him made my chest tighten. She was right — he was a good man. He was the best man, and it was a knife to my gut every time I realized that he wasn’t here anymore, that he didn’t get to see us boys grow into men, that he wouldn’t be there to stand next to Mikey when Bailey walked down the aisle to him.
Or next to me, if I ever found a woman who would do the same.
The next dozen rounds of poker flew by, and after Ruby Grace knocked all the guys out once again in a bigger hand, Mikey groaned, tossing his cards in and standing. “I need a root beer float. Anyone else?”
Logan scoffed. “Uh, no thanks, Mikey. We’re all old enough to drink actual beer. But thank you.”
“She’s not,” he pointed out, gesturing to Ruby Grace.
That fact soured my gut a little.
“And besides, you’re telling me that just because you’re old enough to drink beer, you don’t want a delicious root beer topped off with creamy vanilla ice cream right now?”
Logan’s mouth pulled to the side, his eyes glancing around the table, to his cards from the last game, and back up again.
“Alright, I give. That does sound fucking delicious.”
Mikey smirked triumphantly. “That’s what I thought. One round of root beer floats coming up.”
“You better not spill it down the sides,” Logan called after him. “I swear, if my glass is sticky, I’ll thwomp you!”
“Extra sticky glass, you got it, big bro!”
Logan humphed, pushing back in his chair before trotting after Mikey into the kitchen.
“I better help,” Jordan said, standing. “If Logan goes into an OCD attack, no one is safe.”
Ruby Grace chuckled lightly as Jordan tipped his imaginary hat at us, leaving us alone at the table. She leaned back in her chair, then, gathering her hair in one fist before letting it fall behind her. It exposed the delicate lines of her collar bone, the lean muscles of her neck, and I hated that I wanted to taste her so bad I had to physically hold onto the edge of the table to keep me from getting up and doing just that.
Seeing her with Betty and the rest of the residents at the nursing home today hit me in a way I didn’t expect. She wasn’t anything like the girl in church. No, at the nursing home, she was boisterous, playful, entertaining. She was everyone’s highlight of the day, and she shone as bright as the sun did at that pool.
They loved her, it was easy to see.
And it was also easy to see why.
When she came back to my place for dinner and to play cards, I’d sat on the opposite side of the table from her. I needed to put space between us — especially after being skin to skin in the pool, her toned stomach pressed against mine, her surprisingly ample breasts exposed in her little bikini top.
But getting away from her didn’t prove to be helpful.
If anything, it only gave me a better view of her hazel eyes, the freckles dotting her cheeks, her smooth, plump lips. I was thankful I couldn’t see her legs under the table, because I already knew what those did to me.
And watching her with my brothers, handing out shit just as well as she was taking it from them, it made me feel something I never had before. I couldn’t even put my finger on it, what that warmth in my chest was, that sinking in my gut.
As her phone lit up yet again with her fiancé’s name on my folding table, I realized it was a longing, a sense of loss.
Because no matter how I tried to deny it, I wanted her to be mine.
It was silly to even think it when we hadn’t so much as held hands, but I felt it — some sort of deep possessiveness over a girl I’d never have. She was going to marry another man, entertain his brothers, or family or friends. She would cook for him, hold him when shit got rough, be