Stuffed: A Thanksgiving Romance Read online

  My stomach twisted because while I didn't want to, the only way to keep them from worrying was to lie.

  "Work is great," I said, false smile in place as I shoved some stuffing in my mouth, hoping they took that as a sign to move on.

  "Really?" Amy asked and I felt the food already in my stomach turn sour. I knew what was coming. And, like a train that pulled the brake too late, there was nothing to do but sit back and watch it fly off the track. "I heard that the merger made the investors worry and the stocks plummet."

  She said it casually, like we were talking about the stocks for Starbucks, not the company that held my livelihood in their hands. That was Amy though. She had so much practice making peoples' lives miserable that she perfected the art of blameless backstabbing. But I knew her well enough to see through the careful tone she used. Besides, Amy wasn't in the same kind of business I was. And she damn sure wasn't someone who watched the stock market. So her knowing, it was on purpose. She had looked into me.

  And the effect, yeah, it was exactly what she wanted.

  My mother's hand froze with her wine halfway to her lips, her whole body getting tense. She, being in business herself, knew how bad that meant things were. When I chanced a look at my father, he looked worried. He never looked worried.

  "That's why you finally got to come home," my mother guessed correctly. "They're cutting hours. Have they started doing layoffs yet?"

  "Two days ago," I said, deciding honesty was the best route.

  "Is your resume up to date? You won't get anything out of them if they just go belly-up. And unemployment will only be eighty-percent of..."

  "Mom," I cut her off, having caught the look of both interest and concern on Adam's face and not wanting this conversation to continue, "let's not do this now, okay? That's my after-the-holiday problem. Let's not ruin this vacation with work talk."

  Cory, ever my champion when he wasn't my big brother tormentor, jumped to my aid. "Yeah, let's move on to politics for a lighter subject," he joked, knowing full-well that our parents had a strict 'no religion, no politics' rule for the dining table.

  But from there on, the conversation went to lighter things, allowing my stomach to unclench itself so I could eat again. We sat afterward and everyone else had coffee as my mother only served desserts on weekends or holidays, something I both admired and loathed in that moment. I could have used some chocolate.

  Because if I wasn't completely mistaken, Amy just kept trying to dig at me.

  Why? I had no idea.

  Habit, maybe.

  Or just her personality.

  A bully was always a bully.

  And she never could get along with other women, not even the ones in her friend group. There was always some drama or another going on. It was a little sad to be honest.

  Men though, that was where she excelled.

  Being naturally beautiful and having learned how to dress and do her hair and makeup to further accentuate that fact mixed with her ability to make any man feel like he was the only man in the room, even if she had done the same thing to every other man in the room, made her really good at the flirting thing.

  And she used all of our coffee clutch to do so with Adam.

  By the time my dad dismissed himself to his books, allowing me to excuse myself as well, I was in a mood. I paced my room for a long time. Finding myself too antsy to sit and read like I wanted, I threw on a couple more bulky layers, grabbed my quilt, a book, and a bag of chips and went down the back staircase and into the backyard.

  I climbed up into my old tree house, feeling better at just being outside the walls as both Amy and Adam, curled up, ate most of a bag of chips, and read a hundred pages.

  I felt infinitely better.

  On that note, my tired eyes telling me it was past my bedtime, I climbed back down from the tree then up the back stairs into the loft.

  "Pip, where the hell have you been?" Adam's voice asked, a little sleep-rough, making me start and stifle back a scream.

  I turned from my focus on my bedroom door to see him in the living space.

  Shirtless.

  He was shirtless.

  And the reason he was shirtless?

  Yeah, the pull-out couch was pulled out.

  And he had been sleeping on it.

  He was sleeping ten feet away from where I would, most definitely now that I knew he was there, not be sleeping.

  "Callie?" he prompted.

  FOUR

  Adam

  If there was ever a woman who truly looked like a deer in the headlights, it was Callie right then. Her eyes, already doeishly wide, were even bigger. Her lips parted. Her entire body froze.

  No one was surprised when she disappeared after dinner.

  It was no secret that Callie and Amy never got along.

  It was also a fact of Callie's life that she was completely incapable of facing confrontation. Which was exactly what she would find from her mother if she showed her face again that night.

  Sometime around five years old, Pip mastered the art of hiding away. It was her father's doing. Her mother always faced up issues, dealt with them head-on. Her father, however, was much more comfortable letting the chips fall where they may while he went into his library and escaped into other worlds. It was a habit Callie had picked up and amplified as she grew older and learned to read. I'm not sure in the twenty some-odd years that I knew her that I had ever seen her without a book in her hand. Or purse. Or backpack. Or, on the occasion that she wore a sweatshirt, in the hand pocket in the front. It was a truly consistent character trait of hers. She found comfort in written words. When she was nervous and it was inappropriate to actually pick up the book to read it, she could be seen running her fingers over the spines or tracing the designs on the covers.

  She carried pens and wrote her favorite quotes on the inside covers.

  She collected every possible retelling of her favorites.

  She had at least four copies of Far From The Madding Crowd. At least. And that was only the intel from the last time she had been home for Thanksgiving to discuss such things with her father.

  Six years was a long time.

  I think maybe a part of me was worried that the world would wrestle those traits away from her.

  Seeing her walk into the kitchen with those leaf leggings and huge, oversized sweater, with her hair in a messy bun and those giant glasses on her face with a messenger bag cross-body that I knew had a load of books in it, yeah, somehow that was almost a relief to me.

  Why?

  That had a very simple answer that I was trying to ignore.

  "What are you doing here?" she blurted out, shaking her head.

  I pushed up in the bed, reaching to my side to flick on the light. Her eyes dipped, following my bare chest and stomach to where the sheet bunched around my hips. Her cheeks blushed and her gaze flew back up, not quite making eye-contact again.

  See, Pip, while good at hiding her true feelings from bullies like her cousin and people who would make her discuss them like her mother, was always painfully transparent to me. So it was abundantly clear that from about twelve or thirteen on, she developed a crush on me. No one else, not even Cory, seemed to pick up on it but me. Or, at least, no one had ever mentioned it to me. And, to her credit, she really did hide it well. But I knew. I always saw right through her.

  Six years was a long time and I knew that her childhood crush was buried under other crushes and loves and relationships, a fact that settled a bit like lead in my stomach.

  But it was nice to know that there was still a part of her that was attracted to me.

  "I'm sleeping here," I said, giving her a lazy smile as she still stood there frozen in the same spot she had been when I first called out to her.

  "But... why? You live around here, don't you?"

  I did. And it would have been more comfortable to go back to my own house and my own bed where I didn't have a fold-up mattress bar jabbing into my back. But I didn't want to go home.


  "Yeah, but you know your mom. She likes having everyone under one roof so she can just call up the stairs when breakfast is done or wake everyone up for midnight hot chocolate." There was enough truth in that for her to believe it, even though I knew it wasn't the only reason.

  "But why are you here?" she asked, brows drawing together in confusion.

  "I'm a little old to bunk with Cory these days."

  "Right, but the spare..."

  "Amy," I supplied, feeling my lips twitch as I realized why she was pushing the issue so much. She was uncomfortable with me being so close.

  "I don't understand, though. Mom never let any guys up..."

  "That was when you were just a girl," I said with a shrug. Her mother's rules were very, very clear about no boys, not even her own brother, being allowed up in her room. "You're all grown up now, Pip."

  And she was.

  Last I had seen her, she was just shy of eighteen and still a bit waifish, borderline boyish. Or, perhaps it just appeared that way because she was generally in layers or baggy, flowy clothes, forever hiding away. It was something I, fresh from college where girls were often in as little clothes as possible to not offend decency laws, found refreshing.

  But when I walked in earlier to her in just a tank top and leggings, yeah, it was clear that the years had been kind to her. Where I remembered her straight up and down, she had rounded out in hip, chest, and ass.

  Yeah, she definitely, definitely was all grown up.

  And I was finding that that was becoming an issue for me.

  "Oh, um," she fumbled, chewing her bottom lip for a second, then shrugging. "Alright. Well, I will, ah, try to keep it down."

  To that, my smile broke free.

  Aside from a pretty constant issue with remembering how her feet worked and therefore falling on her ass a lot, Callie was one of the quietest people I had ever met.

  "You're going to reschedule the wild orgy for another time then?" I asked, chuckling when her cheeks went bright red. When she couldn't seem to come up with anything to say to that, I decided to give her an out. She was tired. It was a long day. And she had an interrogation about her future plans from her mother to look forward to and, if I knew Amy, more not-too-subtle jabs at her confidence. "Go on. Get some sleep, Pip. We have to do the orchard thing in the morning. And your mom likes to get moving early."

  She nodded at that, letting out a breath she had been holding since I said the orgy comment. "Right. Goodnight, Adam," she said, turning away and rushing toward her door, closing herself behind it.

  "Goodnight, Callie," I called, knowing she was listening.

  It was going to be an interesting holiday.

  FIVE

  Callie

  I was a grown freaking woman.

  A grown woman who had slept with a man before, who had felt hands on her skin, who had fallen asleep half-smothered by another body.

  And yet I found myself awake almost the whole night on my childhood bed, unable to sleep because there was a half-naked man in a bed ten feet and one closed door away from me.

  So, alright, it was Adam's half-naked body. That had to be taken into consideration. He wasn't my most recent ex with the pasty-white skin and the charmingly soft belly and spaghetti arms. This was Adam. This was the same Adam I had seen shirtless countless times in my life. But the years brought with them the kind of muscles only men could have- etched, deep, the kind of cuts you could sink fingers into. They weren't massive, he was always more of a thin type of strong. But the muscles were even more impressive than I remembered and he had dark chest hair, a trait I was always fond of. Men were supposed to have chest hair. And, well, there was also a small trail of dark hair that disappeared beneath the sheet that took my attention for an embarrassingly long moment.

  Then there was that orgy comment, so like him, but still unexpected, and my already activated libido went through the roof. Which left me awake in my childhood bed, trying to suppress images of walking into the other room and climbing into bed with him.

  I failed that task until four in the morning came on strong, making my sandpaper eyes insist on sleep. Which I did.

  I was startled awake all of two and a half hours later to someone slamming on my door. So accustomed to living alone in an apartment building where I never even bothered to meet my neighbors, yeah, I shot up in bed on a shriek. I was still pushing my hair that had escaped its elastic band out of my face when the door opened and Adam's big form took up my whole doorway.

  "Hey Pip," he said, shocking me by moving inside. My eyes dropped and I saw steaming cups in his hands. I was shaking my head before he even said anything. I wasn't a coffee fan. It was something my family both didn't understand and often forgot. "It's tea," he surprised me by saying, moving next to my bed in his perfectly fit jeans and an oatmeal-colored thermal, looking every bit ready for autumnal activities, and putting the steaming cup down on my nightstand.

  Then he did the damndest thing.

  He sat down next to my hip, looking me over, smiling a bit at my bed messy hair. If I wasn't mistaken, his eyes darkened a little as they dipped lower. My own gaze followed and I realized I had slept in the clothes I wore the night before, sans the sweater and, well, my bra. So I was just in the tank and it was morning-chilly and, as my old college roommate would say, "It was a tit nipply in here for the breast of us". My nipples were sticking out of the material slightly. And Adam was looking.

  I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

  I mean, on a physical level, I knew how I felt about that. I felt a lot like I wanted to grab his hand, put it over one of said breasts, and see where things went from there.

  But it wasn't that simple.

  There was history.

  There was my brother's friendship to think of.

  As well as the relationship between Adam and the rest of my family.

  And, not to mention, my poor, battered little unrequited-filled heart to think about.

  "You know how many times I have told my mother I hate coffee and she keeps pouring it for me?" I asked, reaching across my body to grab the mug, blocking my breasts from view and his eyes rose accordingly.

  "Green tea. Agave, not sugar," he said with a shrug. "Same as it's always been."

  Augh.

  Of course he remembered that.

  Of course he paid attention.

  He was one of those guys.

  The good ones.

  The ones every girl dreams of.

  Including me.

  I took a sip, letting the too-hot water burn my tongue, trying to snap myself out of it. I was just overtired and disoriented. "Is everyone up and dressed already?" I asked as I watched him raise his coffee cup up, black, like always, and took a sip.

  "I don't think your mother sleeps," he said, shaking his head, smiling fondly. "She's already elbows deep in egg white omelets."

  "Let me guess. Veggies, but no cheese."

  He nodded. "With a side of steel cut oatmeal with fresh berries."

  I shook my head, pulling my legs up toward my chest. "Well, on the plus side, I will probably drop a few pounds over this holiday instead of packing them on like most people."

  His head tilted, brows drawing together slightly. "You don't need to lose weight."

  Okay.

  I needed to get the hell away from him.

  He was every bit as amazing as I remembered and it was problematic.

  "Alright," I said, turning and moving toward the end of the bed, which made my legs brush his in the process. "I better go get ready then before I get blamed for holding everyone up. Is it cold out?"

  "Sixty," he said, standing and moving away, giving me the space I desperately needed. "See you downstairs."

  With that, he left, leaving the door open because he knew I had to head downstairs to shower. I dug around in my bag and grabbed my small toiletries bag, then took off down the stairs, daringly doing so while drinking tea. Which, for once, did not end up with me burned with it.

/>   I skidded to a halt outside the bathroom as Amy came out, the room a bit steamy behind her. She looked too perfect for such an early hour, her long legs in deep green skinny jeans with brown three-inch booties. She had on a tight brown, green, and white striped fall sweater, her long hair braided down one shoulder. It was an effortless look I knew she put a lot of effort into.

  Her eyes dropped to inspect me, landing on my chest, and when she looked at me, she sneered. "A robe might be a good idea when you have men in the house."

  Before I could even try to think of something to say to that, she moved past me, brushing into my arm in the process.

  I threw myself into the bathroom, taking deep breaths, and curling up my nose to breathe in her perfume. I jacked open the window, much rather being cold than having to smell like her, and stripped for a shower. I got out, brushed my hair, and left it to air dry then reached for my clothes. I realized I had grabbed one of the new bra and pantie sets- white with black lace, and shook my head at myself. Why had I bought fancy underthings again? Some buried hope that maybe Adam would get a chance to see it, perhaps?

  Pathetic.

  I sighed, getting into the set then dragging on a pair of jeans, a green flowy tank, and an oversized and left-open white cardigan. I slipped into the same knock-around boots as the day before, put on a bit of mascara, and called it a day.

  Amy looked over my outfit from her position shoulder-to-shoulder with Adam with a sneer. My mother seemed to give it her approval. My father didn't even notice it.

  "Is that an ex-boyfriend's sweater?" Cory asked, reaching for the orange juice. "It's three sizes too big for you."

  "Yes, I frequently date men who wear womens cardigans, Cor," I said, shaking my head at him.

  I didn't look at Adam.

  Not once.

  First, because I was pretty sure he could see the suppressed desire there. Second, because I didn't want Amy to notice and use that against me somehow. And third, well, my libido had enough to deal with.

  "So... apples!" my mother declared as soon as the dishes were in the dishwasher and cleaning.