Page 7 of Until Tomorrow (Love Doesn’t Cure All: The Ashwood Duet #1)

Logan

“Did you know shark kink is a thing?”

Well, that question pulled me from my thoughts of Eva.

What the ever-loving fuck was he talking about?

I stared at my best friend like he’d grown a second head.

Some days, I wondered about him. His hazel eyes crinkled at the corners as he grinned like an idiot—a smile that tipped up higher on the left than the right and brought out his dimples.

Dark brown hair was a tousled mess, only adding to his boyish appearance as he laughed at me.

“Got your attention, didn’t I?” Elliot asked.

“What the hell are you reading?” I demanded with a frown.

Elliot enjoyed this thing called BookTok.

Not that I understood half of it. I just knew my best friend, the gay firefighter, posted a lot of pictures and reels shirtless as he reviewed pornographic books.

I didn’t call them pornographic to his face.

Anymore. I’d done that just once and learned way too much about pepper scales, smut versus spice, and other things I didn’t want to know.

He had a huge following, which didn’t surprise me.

He took excellent care of his body between eating right and working out, leaving him with miles of muscles that I was all too painfully aware of.

“I don’t even know,” he said with a shrug. “It’s supposed to be good, according to the book ladies. It has a shark scene. ”

“Now, when you say shark scene… is this like one of your alien tentacle novels?” I was about to regret asking for clarification. I just knew it. The fact that I knew about tentacle books was too much. “Is she fucking a shark?”

“Maybe?” He made a face as he shrugged. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’m just buying time until M. Trivett drops his next book. His queer romances are far superior to mediocre shark shifters.”

“Gives Daddy Shark a whole new meaning,” I muttered under my breath, making him burst out laughing. The moment was almost enough to distract me from wondering if the delivery boy had made it to Eva with her lavender chai latte. Or from the broken look on her face. That would haunt me all day.

“Earth to Logan.” Elliot snapped his fingers in front of my face, making me blink. “What’s going on with you? You’ve barely talked to me in the past two weeks, you ran after Eva, she didn’t come in, and now you’re acting weird. What’s wrong with you?”

“I asked Eva for a divorce,” I told him quietly. And Elliot laughed . I stared at the moron as I waited for it to hit him that I wasn’t joking. His laughter faded, and his expression fell.

“ Oh, shit . You’re serious, aren’t you?” he asked, and I nodded. “What happened? There was no lead-up to this. Or was there? I didn’t even know you two were having issues. Were you having issues?”

I took a moment, purposefully drinking my coffee at a snail’s pace while I figured out the best way to lie my way through the situation.

I had no intention of telling Elliot that, because of his drunken attempt to kiss me, I was questioning my entire sexuality.

Not only did he not remember that night, but I didn’t want him blaming himself for the end of my marriage.

I envied Elliot more than ever as I dealt with this.

He’s gone through his figure-it-out stage before we ever hit college.

Even then, it wasn’t so much that he didn’t know but that he felt like he owed it to himself to be sure.

He tried sleeping with Abigail Hunt once, couldn’t get it up, and bought her an apology necklace with the money he made at the local grocery store.

He never looked back, never hid his sexuality, and brazenly beat the crap out of the few guys who tried to make fun of him for it. Elliot was a golden retriever, but he had one hell of a bite when he wanted.

I couldn’t be that way. I didn’t know how. And I certainly didn’t feel comfortable advertising my confusion to the world, even if Elliot would’ve taken my secret to the grave .

“It just wasn’t working out,” I said. His eyes narrowed, and I stared right back uncomfortably. I could go toe-to-toe with the worst of my profession and never bat an eye, but every time Elliot looked at me like that, I turned into a kid caught in a lie. “Eli.”

“Logan, you’re a shit liar, you know that, right?”

“I’m a great fucking liar. I just suck at lying to you. ” And Eva.

“What happened?”

“It just wasn’t working.”

“Come on, don’t give me some bullshit,” Elliot scoffed. Yes, lying to him was hard. This was what I got for having the same best friend since I was born. “We’ve known each other since the week you were born. We used to take baths together.”

And some part of me wanted to pick up that childhood tradition all over again. I shook that thought free. No lusting after my best friend. That was a line.

“Why do you feel the need to remind me of that?” I demanded.

“Because you need some humbling from time to time.” He grinned. “And it’s fun to make you squirm while I do it.”

“God, you’re a dick.”

“But you love me,” he teased. “Now, what happened? I’m not going away until you tell me.”

“You haven’t gone away since the week I was born,” I reminded him with a laugh. I couldn’t get rid of Elliot if I tried. He was a boomerang and just kept coming back. I sighed and ran my hands over my face. “Look… I don’t… know, okay? There’s just some shit I’m trying to work through right now.”

“You want to tell me what kind of shit?” he asked, not that I was surprised. He would keep pushing the matter, but that was Elliot. He wasn’t the guy to give up on shit—not when he cared. Which meant he’d be a pain in my ass until he found out why. He was going to test my resolve on the matter.

“No.” I shook my head. “No, I don’t. But I promise when I’m ready to tell you, I will.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t care.”

“I’m going to irritate the hell out of you until you tell me, you know that, right?” Elliot took a sip of his coffee before giving me that stupid grin of his. It did things to my stomach that I wasn’t willing to admit out loud .

“I’m fully aware,” I murmured.

“Do you know how she’s doing?” There it was.

The dreaded question I didn’t want to talk about.

It’d always been Elliot and me until the day the Smiths took in Eva as a foster child.

I was fascinated with her from the moment I met her, even after she punched me in the face twice.

Once I won her over, she followed us everywhere.

Elliot was as much her best friend as he was mine, which would make this whole thing a sticky mess. Or rather, a fucking disaster.

“Angry. Today’s the first time I’ve seen her in fourteen days, and she barely looked at me,” I said softly. Fourteen obscenely long days. “She’s shutting down.”

That worried me more than anything else.

I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but it worried me.

Eva didn’t deal with things. She just put them away in boxes, as she said.

It was easier to pack it away and pretend the feelings weren’t there than to deal with them.

She’d done it with her mother’s death, her father’s death, and a lot of the shit she’d gone through in foster care.

But no matter how hard she tried to shove things in boxes, they always crept up on her, and I’d been there for all of the fallouts in the past. I was trying hard not to obsess over how she’d handle this. It wouldn’t be pretty when it finally hit her.

“Don’t worry,” Elliot replied. Like that would happen. “I’ve got her.”