Chapter 14
Alex
I was tellingKat the truth. I had no idea where my worthless brother was, because I’d never looked for him. Damon was most likely in prison, and he could rot there for all I cared. He sure has hell had never contacted me, either.
From the beginning, Damon and I had always been at odds. He was older than me, bigger, meaner, and a lot of girls thought he was better-looking. He had the bad boy thing down pat from an early age. I was smaller and younger, but I was faster and a quick learner. I stayed scrawny into my teens, when I finally filled out.
I wasn’t a threat to Damon, and yet something about me had always gotten under his skin. He’d hated to see me win at anything, and he’d felt the need to be the dominant one instead of treating me like a brother. I had no idea why. Our childhood was a bad one—our father hit us and our mother made excuses—and God knew I could have used a brother in the darkest times. I thought maybe Damon could have, too. But if he wanted a brother, he sure as hell never wanted me.
So we fought. Damon won, until I got big enough, and the fights were a little more even. I never knew why he hated me so much, but I decided early on that if my brother wanted a fight, I would give him one. Just like I’d give a fight to anyone else who asked for it, including our father.
I always thought Damon’s bullshit didn’t bother me. Until he decided to fight me for Kat.
I watched the landscape fly by for one hour, then another. Kat was quiet in her seat next to me. She hadn’t said anything else about my apology—hadn’t said whether it was accepted or if it was years too late. I thought maybe she wasn’t speaking to me because she was angry, and then I glanced at her to see she’d fallen asleep.
Good. She needed rest. The bruise on her cheekbone was going a rainbow of colors, and the cut on her ear looked red and sore. I’d seen the bruises on her bare arm earlier, and she held the hand with its two splinted fingers gingerly in her lap. Yet again, I was reminded that Kat was a fighter. Was it only yesterday that that worthless asshole had tried to kidnap her? It already felt like a year ago. I already felt like a different man than the one who had boarded a plane to Nashville instead of Hawaii.
Watching the road, I thought about what she’d told me about her family. About Tyler, scaring her so bad she locked herself in a bathroom and called the police. About her parents playing the denial game about the whole thing so she wasn’t safe at home anymore.
I knew how it felt, not to be safe at home. You can’t turn that feeling around, no matter how much you might want to. The only option to keep yourself together is to get out. It was what I’d done, and eventually it was what Kat had done, too.
She’d gone through a lot in a short amount of time. First, losing me—which was both of our faults—and then leaving her family. Forged in fire, indeed. I understood better now why she’d spent the years after that moving from city to city, taking bartending jobs, why she had never considered taking any of her family’s money. If they had even offered it to her, which was unlikely, there was no way Kat would have accepted it. Even though she was born wealthy, from the moment she left home, she was on her own.
And me? I’d been on my own, too. My parents were dead now and Damon was lost to me. The difference was that I had Aidan, Dane, and Noah. And I had money. Lots of it. It wasn’t happiness, but it was something.
And what was happiness, anyway? It wasn’t a concept I thought much about. I’d spent my childhood surviving day to day, and I’d spent my adulthood doing nothing but making money. There wasn’t much philosophizing about the meaning of happiness in my thirty-five years. The only time I’d come close to that mythical feeling was the time I was with Kat, and then it was gone. It had hurt so much I hadn’t wanted to think about happiness after that.
Kat stirred in her seat, then scrubbed a hand over her face. “How far are we?” she asked sleepily.
“You were out for a few hours,” I replied. “We’ll be in Dallas this evening.”
“I need some water,” she said. “And some Advil. And some food. And a bathroom break. And a coffee.”
“Anything else?” I asked. “A pony? A magic carpet ride?”
“Very funny.” She sat up straighter. “Jesus, I was really out. You didn’t draw a mustache on me, did you?” She pulled down the visor and looked in the little mirror, as if checking.
“You think I’m that petty?”
“Hmm.” She flipped the visor back up. “I seem to remember you telling the divorce lawyer that I snored.”
“You do snore.”
“It was once. Once, and you know it. On a night I’d had too much wine.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “You told him that I drink water too loudly, and that my feet were always cold. So who was petty?”
Kat shuddered, but I could see a smile at the corner of her mouth. “Jesus, Alex, your feet were blocks of ice. I still have nightmares about it.”
“Our apartment didn’t have much heat. In Chicago. In winter. My feet were cold because of science.”
“You could have invested in slippers.”
“Slippers?” I said, incredulous. “Twenty-two-year-old men don’t wear slippers. We brave it out and suffer, and we’re manly about it. I live in Texas now. There’s no need for slippers.”
Kat bit her lip, smiling, and looked out the window. Were we actually joking about this? That horrible day at the courthouse, when we’d fucked in the bathroom, then torn each other to pieces?
Was it possible we’d gotten to the point where it could be funny? Because we were joking about it now, and I didn’t feel any pain. It didn’t seem like she did, either.
I’d lived so many years with the divorce as the worst thing in my life, the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me, that I had a moment of complete unreality. This wasn’t my life, the one I was familiar with. If I didn’t hate Kat, if I wasn’t burning with anger over what had happened, then who was I?
I had no fucking idea. I didn’t even know where to start. But maybe it was time to start thinking about who I could be if I didn’t hate Kat anymore. It was long past time to find out.