Candy Hearts, Vol. 2

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

FINN HEART

“ You didn’t tell him ?” Beau whisper-shouts from next to me as we stand on our older brother’s doorstep.

“No,” I answer simply and go back to pushing the doorbell incessantly.

I don’t have to justify shit to Beau. He’s been in a funk, and I’m doing what’s best for him by getting him out of Crushville and giving him a break from all the shit that went down just a couple of days ago.

I feel for him, I swear I do, and because I do, I’m doing everything I possibly can to help him out. That’s not only normal in our family—we Hearts stick together through it all—but it’s especially true for Beau and me. Being identical twins, I don’t exactly feel everything he feels, but I understand him better than anyone else, even better than his best friend. Well, ex-best friend now, I suppose.

And okay, maybe I should’ve called Charlie, but I panicked.

Beau was talking about quitting his job—the one he loves. He was spewing shit I never in my wildest nightmares thought he’d say, like, “I’ll quit and I’ll move away. I bet they need firemen in California. That way I never have to see Lu or Tanner ever again. I’ll never have to come back to Crushville or to Chicago.”

What the hell else was I supposed to do but call Beau’s boss, beg him to approve off days for Beau until Monday and get him on a plane to Vegas?

I didn’t think to call Charlie because I know damn well he has a home game today and on Sunday. So we’re here, we’re gonna have a brothers weekend, and we’re gonna have a fucking good time until Beau forgets about his awful ex-girlfriend and his surprisingly traitorous best friend.

I never expected Tanner to betray Beau the way he did, and that’s going to take me some time to recover from too since I considered him part of our family just like Beau did. But I have to get over it because getting Beau out of this shit show and back to his old self is the only thing that matters right now.

“Come on, fucker,” I mutter at nothing as I keep my finger pressed down on the doorbell button. “Open up.”

“What if he’s not here?” Beau asks, super helpfully.

“Then we’ll go to the hotel and call him.”

“Why didn’t we go straight to the hotel?”

Good question, I think to myself. Why didn’t I tell the cab driver to just take us to the Winner resort directly? Because Beau keeps getting more and more depressed the more space he has from what happened, not less. If anyone can cheer him up it’s Charlie.

The door opens suddenly and I see Charlie pulling on a shirt, and some pillow creases in his cheek. I guess he was taking his mid-morning nap after he probably?—

“What the hell?” I mutter when Nikolay Brotnik, a.k.a. Santa and the bane of Charlie’s existence, appears behind him. Shirtless and with a murderous glare.

“What are you guys doing here?” Charlie asks.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Beau explodes, and points over Charlie’s shoulder at Santa.

“It’s a long story,” Charlie says with a sigh and opens the door wider to let us in. “Come in, but seriously what’s going on?” He directs the question at me. I grab our duffels and carry them in only to dump them in the living room.

I recognize the look of genuine fear and worry in Charlie’s eyes, so I pat his shoulder and try to be reassuring.

“Nothing like what you’re thinking.”

“Then what the fuck? You show up here out of the blue, without any warning?”

He turns to look at Beau, who’s already getting a Coke out of the fridge, and before I can come up with an answer that might explain “the shit show” in the fewest words possible, Beau finds the perfect words without any problems at all.

“And on Valentine’s day—” Charlie exclaims but Beau cuts him off after taking a sip.

“And I had great plans for today, but they were shot to shit when I found Lu and Tanner naked.”

“Motherfucker,” Charlie mutters. I see the protective-older-brother gleam come into his eyes so I try to stave off any murderous impulses he might have.

“Two days ago, yeah,” I try to say brightly. “So now we’re here until Monday, to spend Valentine’s Day in the City of Sin. Any chance you can get us tickets for tonight’s game? And you up for going out tonight?” Charlie stares at me, open-mouthed, so I just keep rolling. “I thought we could hit a casino, maybe a show, and then watch you kick Atlanta’s ass for the first time in your career on Sunday, then we’re heading back home with our souls healed and ready to face our lives with a brighter outlook.”

I give them a winning smile, the one I use when I have to tell a new client how much money they’re gonna have to pay in taxes.

“This one stupid?” Nikolay asks after a long beat of silence. He points at me, and I know what Charlie’s about to do. Sadly I don’t have the body weight to hold him back from beating his teammate to a pulp, so I look up at Beau. He sighs when he sees the clear panic in my eyes and walks over to stand next to Charlie.

Beau is a firefighter, probably one of the strongest men in the Heart family—and there are a lot of those—but he’s only slightly stronger than Charlie, and Nikolay...

Well at six-five and with wider shoulders than I think I’ve ever seen on a person, I don’t know if my brothers could take Nikolay. It’s his job after all, to be big. As a defenseman for the Las Vegas Pirates, same as Charlie, he’s supposed to look big and intimidating.

The three of us might only be six foot three, but when you add skates, Charlie has always been a formidable player all on his own.

This situation though, and where I think it’s going, is probably going to get real messy if Beau doesn’t?—

“Oh fuck,” I whisper when it’s Beau who steps up to Nikolay instead of having to hold Charlie back.

He jams a finger right in the middle of the Russian’s chest and practically growls.

“You better watch your mouth or I’m going to show you how real men fight on solid ground, Santa .” He says his nickname with derision.

“What—”

“Just shut up. And never call my brother a name again, okay?” Charlie interrupts his teammate, then he simply spins around and looks at me like I’m... well, yeah, stupid.

“Fi,” he starts with his older brother, superior patience. “I love that you thought to bring Beau here, and we can most definitely make all of your plans happen. What Beau just went through is fucked up, but you won’t be going back home a better man, and you’re most definitely not gonna heal a damn thing here. But we are going to get Beau drunk, and hopefully he can realize that although everything sucks...” He turns to Beau then. “You still have us. Always. And you know what Grandpa Yoyo has always said... ‘Home is where a Heart is . ’ So welcome home, let’s get you settled.”

“Love the sentiment,” Beau says with a roll of his eyes. Yeah, he’s not gonna fall for Charlie’s heartfelt words today. This is why I brought him here—I don’t know how to make it better for him. “But Finn got us rooms at the Winner so we’re not even sleeping here. And I don’t want to go out to a club or get drunk. You know I get awful hangovers.”

“Maybe the pain of a hangover will help with forgetting the heartbreak and betrayal,” Nikolay says in a thick Russian accent.

“Not helpful,” Charlie mutters, but apparently Beau disagrees.

“More helpful than all your lovey-dovey bullshit. Now just give us passes for tonight will you?” he demands—very ungratefully, I might add, which isn’t like Beau at all.

“No. I don’t have any more tickets for tonight’s game. I can get you some for Sunday, but if you want to go today, then I’m going to have to call in a favor to get you into Gab’s suite.” Hearing the name of Charlie’s team’s owner brightens my mood a bit. I loved the woman the second I met her back in October.

“That is better.” Nikolay nods solemnly. “Gab will fix them both.”

“Excuse me?” I demand. Why do I need fixing?

“Oh, please,” Beau says. “You need professional help to fix that crippling eternal optimism.”

“It’s not something I want fixed,” I tell him and then just for funsies stick my tongue out at him. He mimics me and Charlie steps into our line of sight before we can completely revert back to our childish ways.

“Okay, okay, I’ll drive you to your hotel, then make sure you have a ride to the arena tonight, okay?”

“Thank you, Charlie,” I sing-song like I used to do when we were way younger. Maybe there’s still a way to salvage this trip.

“You didn’t have to pay,” I mumble at Charlie when I come back from the bathroom in the hotel lobby. He slaps the keys to the unnecessary car he rented for us in my hand and I hold them up to his face. “For this or for the room. You know I had a reservation and they make you give a credit card for that, and I make a very good living,” I try to reprimand him. His hero complex isn’t as out of control these days as it was when he first got into the NHL fifteen years ago, but it’s still alive and kicking.

The seven years separating us means that he’s always had a bigger role than simply being an older brother when it comes to Beau and me, and sadly it also means that he’s not really a son to Mom, more like a... helpful and very loved nanny.

At least that’s how it was after Dad died when Charlie was only fourteen.

“Shut up, I have millions.”

“I know,” I deadpan and roll my eyes at him. “I’m your accountant, remember?” I’m well aware of how nice his one-year contract with the Pirates is, though I still don’t understand why he accepted it when he’d already announced—to the family and to the world—that he was retiring.

“How could I ever forget?” he asks in a tone that tells me I’ve been successful in my nagging.

“Why the hell did you rent a G-Wagon?” I demand as we walk over to the couch in the lobby where Beau is drinking a virgin margarita. Jesus, he looks pitiful

“It was already here and you’re gonna enjoy it, okay?” Charlie says, clearly done with my shit. “You two go to your room now,” he says and looks down at the little envelope the nice lady at the counter gave him. “It’s room twelve twenty-one. Be at the arena at five, Gab set everything up for you guys. I’ll send you the location of the entrance you’re gonna use and we’ll have dinner and figure out what to do after, okay?” He looks at me and nods down at Beau. “Keep him out of trouble.”

“Yeah, I’ll try,” I tell him with a nod, then force myself to smile brightly at my twin when Charlie walks away. “Let’s go up.”

I do manage to keep Beau out of trouble all day and dare I say he even enjoys himself at the game. He and Gab spend most of the game talking about Beau’s unfortunate situation, and then she encourages him to go eat his feelings.

Charlie walks over to us after his win, with Nikolay in tow, and tells us he’s coming out with us. “Don’t ask,” he warns Beau, when he opens his mouth with what I’m sure is a protest ready to go.

“We are going out,” Santa—as he commanded us to call him—calls out from the back seat once we’re in the ridiculously awesome G-Wagon. “Benny has a boyfriend who owns a club in Winner Resort. We go there after dinner and Beau can drown his sorrows.”

I don’t know about that, but I keep my mouth shut.

We do manage to have a relatively drama-free dinner, mostly catching Charlie up on everything going on in Crushville. He and Santa seem to be getting along a lot better than they did the last time I saw them, but they’re... weird. They don’t really talk to each other much, but they seem to be joined at the hip, even going to the bathroom together, which I thought was only a women’s ritual.

We do end up going to Lure, a gay club where Santa declares Beau will get a lot of attention but not be tempted to get over Lu by getting under someone else. I’m surprised by the insightfulness of the Russian until two giant bottles of top-shelf Vodka arrive at our table and he starts drinking and... doesn’t stop.

His accent disappears more and more with every drink, and he gets even funnier. I’m shit-faced at two in the morning when Beau declares he’s going to sleep and I see no problem with hanging out with Charlie and Santa a while longer.

I am at a gay club after all, and the view is spectacular.

Charlie won’t let me go out to dance at around three-thirty in the morning, when he sees my intentions. Instead, he drags us all out of the club, and pushes me out of the elevator on the twelfth floor with a stern look on his face.

“Take care of Beau.”

I grumble all the way to the bedroom door, and when I see the expected one-two-one-two, I realize I never grabbed the second key from the stupid envelope. And so, with a lot of regret and knowing I’m going to earn the slap over the head that’s waiting for me, I start knocking on the door.

Jesus, Beau’s gonna kill me.