Renna Rose Lancaster never searched for love.
She stumbled into it long before she was old enough to know what to call it.
It lived inside flower crowns that barely survived a minute on his head. Pebbles he slipped into her pockets because every tre...
"Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost."
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The chaotic frenzy of the theme park had finally simmered down to a soft exhale, leaving a buzzing sort of quiet in its wake. It was that specific flavor of evening where the neon lights started bleeding into the twilight, warping the entire place into something hazy and slightly dreamlike.
My body felt like like it had been put through a meat grinder, mostly because Cameron and Aadam had made it their life's mission to drag me onto every single contraption engineered to induce whiplash.
The bumper cars had witnessed an absolute demolition derby, and I was the prime suspect. I drove like a total psychopath, locking eyes with my targets and ramming into them with zero mercy. Over the barrier, my friends were relentlessly rinsing me, roaring that the moment the DVLA approved my license would mark the downfall of Scottish civilization.
Then came my near-death experience at the mirror maze. If Aadam hadn't kept a metaphorical chokehold on my safety, my face would have been shattered into a million pieces. Every time I was about to confidently sprint into a pane of glass, his hand would hook under the waistband of my skirt, yanking me backward in the nick of time.
The funhouse ended up being a complete fever dream of rotating floors and random air blasts shooting from the most unhinged angles, wiping out half the squad and sending them sliding on their arses. But it was the dark house that sent me to an early grave.
The boys decided the budget animatronic monsters weren't giving what they were supposed to give, so they pooled their collective brain cells to terrorize me instead. They kept vanishing into the shadows, pulling off coordinated jump scares until my heart rate hit the triple digits and panicked tears started leaking out.
Before I could dissolve into a full sobbing mess, Aadam shut the whole operation down. He flattened his boys with a single, lethal glare, pulling me flush against his side and shielding my face from the dark until we finally burst through the exit.
Yet, even with the tears, I hadn't felt that alive in years. I'd never had guy friends before. My interactions with the opposite sex had been strictly limited to my cousins, uncles, or the vetted options daddy wanted me to entertain. I was completely out of my depth here. But these boys had folded me into their circle with such effortless warmth.
By the time we hit the arcade stalls, they shifted into full-blown protective mode, treating me like some coddled, precious little sister. Which, of course, meant Aadam spent the entire time lurking in the corner, nostrils flaring. He hated that I was thriving on the attention, looking like a territorial beast while the boys bounced around me like eager puppies.
Then, I spent the rest of the evening turning the trip into my personal photoshoot, holding a gun to his head to make him pose for a thousand different shots.
