Beyond Eighteen(7)

“Hey Wil, we’d better get downstairs. Nick…” I heard Joanie say from behind me as I felt her hand clutch my arm.

Nick smiled at me before acknowledging Joanie.

“Here, let me at least take your bag downstairs for you,” Nick said to me as his hand slid over mine. I pulled away and he snatched my suitcase.

I heard Max’s voice fill the hall with, “I got that.” He was marching from Cindy’s room, his face wrought with determination and a touch of disgust.

I felt every inch of my skin tingle as my heart fell into the pit of my stomach. God, please don’t let them get into a fight here. I just wanna go.

Max reached out and claimed the suitcase from Nick. They both stood across from each other, filled with testosterone. A silent moment of tension built between them, their arms stiff and widened from their sides. Both inflated their chests to make the point they were not going to be the one to yield. I couldn’t stop the trepidation from pummeling me. Guilt rippled throughout my entire body, settling right where my shoulders meet my neck. Max’s jaw tensed and his breathing sped up as they stared each other down.

“Wilson, I’ll meet you and Joanie at the car,” Max snarled. He didn’t take his eyes off Nick. It wasn’t until I didn’t move quickly enough that he turned toward me. Resentment blanketed his face and it paralyzed me. Joanie pulled on my arm, dragging me down the stairs and out the front door.

The chilling Aspen air ripped and snapped across my face, pulling me out of the trauma of watching Max and Nick exchange those death-filled stares. I was sure they were eventually going to escalate into fisticuffs.

“Wilson, the last thing we need is to be there if they explode into a fight,” Joanie lectured me. I wanted to answer her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t figure out what was stopping me from running back into the cabin and throwing myself between them. I could visualize the whole dramatic moment in my head: Max swinging at Nick, then Nick blocking his punch and grappling him to the floor. Tumbling back and forth, struggling to make fist-to-face contact, both fighting for me. Pride or fear? It would be hard to tell.

Anxiously, I licked my lips before catching them between my teeth. The freezing moisture clung to the corners of my mouth. I wished I had some Chap Stick to relieve the sting of mistakenly wetting my lips in the Aspen chill. I wished I hadn’t drunk those gallons of Bacardi before I kissed Nick. Hell, I wish I never kissed him. But like my grandpa used to say, “If wishes were fishes, we’d all have a fish fry.” Don’t ask me what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is it always seems to flash in my mind when I regret making stupid choices. God, I miss my grandpa. He always seemed to have ways of making me feel better, even when what he said didn’t make sense.

“Great, how in the hell are we all going to fit into that car?” Joanie pondered as she broke through my reverie of all the sequestered memories of my grandpa. She was swaying back and forth, trying to keep herself moving so she wouldn’t freeze over. My eyes dropped to Max’s two-seater BMW Z4.

“I don’t know,” I mumbled as I paced back and forth next to the car. I knew how uncomfortable it was trying to make out in that car, so I had no idea how the three of us were going to fit. But to be truthful, I didn’t care. Max was still upstairs with Nick and I wasn’t the least bit okay with the idea that they could, at that very moment, be trying to kill each other.

I walked around to the driver’s side of the car; my breath clouded my vision, and every part of my body that protruded past my torso was hammered with below-zero temperatures. I should have known when I pulled on the door handle it was going to be locked. Great…just my luck. Max is upstairs with Nick, doing God knows what to hurt him, and I can’t keep the thought of going back in there from swirling in my head.





Chapter Four


~ Max ~





At what point am I going to either kick Nick’s ass or walk away? I had every reason to beat the shit out of him. I could feel the rage vibrating in my chest. I’d reached a point of saturation with everything that had occurred in the last couple of days. I needed him to fucking bleed, pay for taking advantage of my girlfriend in a moment of weakness. The muscles in my arms started to restrict, my hands began to twitch, and every message they received from my brain was pure anger. Right as I felt my body lean off kilter and I was going to either walk away or punch him, Nick took a step back away from me.

His movement was enough to break the rage that entranced me. But I still wanted to rip his face off and ask questions later.

“I’m standing here asking myself why I haven’t kicked your ass yet,” I said in a seething growl.