One
Hallie
The Rutherford backyard waslittered with the remnants of yet another successful Fourth of July pool party.
I sat on my parents’ deck wrapped in a towel, holding a red paper cup close to my lips. The scent of the citrusy concoction my brother made almost replaced the smell of chlorine from the pool and sulfur from spent fireworks. On the food tray at the center of the patio table, only a few sad grapes and bruised strawberries remained. My sister, Anna, had hijacked the Bluetooth speaker and was now subjecting us all to her feral party playlist–explicit enough that we were all silently thankful our mom couldn’t actually understand the words.
The deck rail was lined with empty cups and beer bottles, and the pool was finally quiet and still, unless you counted the lonely flamingo floatie drifting around in slow circles. The party had dwindled down, and now there were just a few of us left to roast each other and shoot the shit with Mom like we were teenagers on summer vacation.
But we weren’t.
We were all adults now, or something like it. I mean, fuck–Brooke had a mortgage, a husband, and a kid already, like she’d spent the last four years of her life checking items off a list. My oldest sister was easily the “adultiest” adult out of all of us.
Beside me, Adrian sat with a towel slung low around his hips, nursing his drink and taking everyone’s teasing comments about wasting his business degree in stride.
“Hey, the tips I get from middle-aged women having a ladies’ night out are keeping my lights on,” he said. “So you can all say whatever you want.”
My brother was a bartender at Applebee’s, and he had zero shame.
I swallowed and kept my teasing comments at a minimum, knowing I was in no position to joke about someone else’s career choice. I glanced down at the melting ice in my cup, glad that the attention was on his career instead of mine.
Because the more they asked questions about my nonexistent remote job, the more I’d risk stumbling over the flimsy lie I’d told everyone when I moved back home. I’d successfully evaded talking about myself all night, and I intended to keep it that way.
“We’re all very grateful for how generously you’ve been pouring tonight, friend." Directly across the table from me, Knox Ballard lifted his cup in a casual toast, smoothing things ever effortlessly.
Just like he always did.
My brother’s best friend had been a fixture at our Fourth of July pool parties for as long as I could remember. Then again, he was practically an honorary Rutherford at this point, having been around since he and Adrian met in the sixth grade.
He evenlookedlike one of us, with his dark hair and towering height. When he’d come to the movies with us when we were younger, people actually thought he was my mom’s fifth child. And Knox wentalong with it, too, saying things like,“Can I get Red Vines, Mommy?”until Adrian punched him in the stomach.
But he was no longer that scrawny teen who showed up just to eat all the Cheez-Its and pester me while I did my homework. The person sitting across from me now was a fully grownman, all broad-shouldered and muscular with a real job, a tattooed chest, and a quieter sense of confidence. Knox’s once-floppy hair was shorter now, but still long enough to fall over his forehead, forcing him to toss it back every so often in a way that had been distracting me all night.
And the beard?
Who gave him permission?
This man, whom I’d once witnessed burp the entire alphabet, had no business looking so fucking sexy.
I bit my lip when Knox’s dark eyes briefly caught mine from across the table, and my cheeks burned as I turned my attention to my mother, who yawned as she pushed back her patio chair. “Okay, who’s going to help me clean all of this up?”
“Not it,” Adrian blurted.
“I have to get Cayden home to bed.” Brooke gestured toward the padded bench on the other side of the deck, where my nephew had been napping on my brother-in-law’s chest since the fireworks ended. “Sorry.”
She wasn’t sorry.
Anna made an excuse about needing to get upstairs to call her long-distance girlfriend before it was too late in her time zone, and I accepted my fate with a sigh. What excuse did I have?
“Let’s get it in the morning, Mom,” I suggested. “I’ll come down and take care of it.”
For the past month, I’d been living in the little apartment above my parents’ garage. Needing to move back home for a while was becominga Rutherford rite of passage. Brooke did it. Adrian had done it twice. Even Knox had found himself in that position once, accepting my parents’ generosity during a brief rough patch.
Now it was my turn to take up residence in that musty garage apartment, and with the way things were going in my life, I might as well start unpacking the boxes in the corner of my living room I’d been pretending were just temporary.
After hearing me offer to clean up for my mom, Adrian shook his head, staring me down with a shameful look. “Imagine that, the golden child’s tryin’ to get brownie points.”
“First of all, everyone here knows Brooke is the golden child,” I retorted, trying not to laugh. Nobody disagreed. And even without glancing in Brooke’s direction, I could see her nonchalant shrug in my peripheral vision.
