Almost Just Friends (Wildstone #4)(21)

Six months. He’d been out of rehab for six months, and after being secretly hooked on pills for three years, he’d told himself he was doing great. But it turned out great was relative. Yes, compared to the Category 5 hurricane he’d turned his life into last year, he was great. But compared to where he wanted to be—a whole person, which he had no idea how to make happen—he suspected he had a long way to go to get to great.

For shits and giggles, and to torture himself, he went through the cabinets. The place was a disorganized mess as always. Piper could find anything she wanted in here, but he had absolutely no idea how. She was a great sister, but a complete slob.

He looked around, shook his head, and began to clean up. He couldn’t help himself. He apparently had been the only Manning born with the neat gene. Above the toaster that wasn’t working, the one he’d promised to fix but hadn’t, nestled between the sugar and the flour, sat aspirin, Tums, and . . . bingo, an old prescription of OxyContin from when Piper had sprained her ankle on the job a few years back. Because his sister was anal and a control freak, it appeared not a single pill had been taken.

He ran a finger over the bottle with a shocking, bone-deep yearning. It’d be so easy. So damn easy. For a painfully long moment, he stood there, during which time he’d have paid any amount of money to have his mom or dad appear to tell him that he had this. To tell him they believed in him. To hug him, just one more time.

But because wishes, like lightsabers, butter beer, and Prince Charming, weren’t real, he remained alone. Swallowing hard, he shut the cabinet. But he was shaking when he took out his phone and sent a text to his sponsor.

He got an immediate response: You need me?

Did he? All he wanted was to be of value, but everything he touched turned to shit. And God, he hated a self-pity party. So he forced in a deep breath and shook his head. He was stronger than this. He was. So he texted back: No, I’m okay now, thanks.

He received another text that read: Anytime, you know that . . .

And he did. He was shoving his phone into a pocket when he heard something, a crinkling sound, like maybe there was a rodent riffling around in the pantry. After that last storm, he wouldn’t be surprised if an entire colony had moved in. Moving silently to the pantry door, he accessed the flashlight on his phone and . . . yanked it open.

Not a rodent.

Piper. She was sitting on a five-gallon container of cat food, inhaling a family-sized bag of cheese puffs and—shock—writing in her journal. Not as jumpy as Winnie, not even close, his badass sister merely lifted her gaze, casual as you please, and her brows went up.

“My alone time is for your safety,” she said around a mouthful of cheese puffs.

How well he knew. Growing up, she’d hidden in this very closet whenever she’d needed a moment from him and Winnie, which with hindsight he totally understood. They’d been a couple of wild, feral kids, and she’d been saddled with them. As they’d all gotten older, she’d continued to hide whenever she’d had a problem, especially if she’d gotten broken up with, something that tended to happen once a guy got to know her.

“You get dumped?” he asked.

In a move that proved she wasn’t that different from Winnie at all, she flipped him off and went back to munching and writing.

“So that’s a yes.” He leaned against the doorway.

“I don’t know if you know this,” she said in a frosty tone that he knew meant imminent death—his, “but alone time is when you’re, you know, alone.”

“I thought maybe it was more of a I-don’t-want-to-talk thing,” he said.

“That too. Definitely that.”

He nodded, but didn’t go away. “So who was it? You had some major sparks bouncing between you and what’s-his-name.”

“What’s-his-name who?”

“Rowan’s brother.”

She gave herself away by jerking her gaze back up to his.

“You with him or something?” he asked.

“Of course not. No. Nope. I just met him.”

“That’s a lot of denial. And you know what they say about double negatives, they cancel each other out.”

Piper pinched the bridge of her nose. Shorthand for Gavin was driving her nuts again. It was a short drive, and there’d been a time in their lives when he’d taken great pride in sending her on the trip. But he was too miserable at the moment to even be proud of himself. “Sometimes the amount of time you’ve known him doesn’t matter. Shit happens.”

“It matters to me.” Piper drew in a deep breath. “I don’t have time for a relationship.”

“Who’s talking about a relationship?”

She snorted. “One-night stands are more your thing.”

Touché. “Were my thing.” He tried to take a few cheese puffs, but Piper hugged the bag to her chest the way his grandma used to clutch her pearls. He considered wrestling them from her, but she could probably take him.

“Last time we had any sort of real conversation, you were seeing like five different guys,” Piper said.

“Like I said, things change. And don’t turn this on me. If you didn’t get dumped, what are you doing hiding in the closet, stuffing your face and writing”—he looked at her journal—“a list of why emotions suck.” She’d written three items so far: