Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
J ulianna was still in the bedroom when I left for work the next morning.
The door was fully shut. It was the first time that had happened in days, and my heart sank when I noticed it.
The invitation was most definitely closed for me.
I left her a note on the kitchen table telling her she should use the Jeep to go anywhere she wanted.
I thought she might text me during the day.
She didn’t.
When she’d retreated to her room with her laptop last night, I’d stayed outside alone on the porch most of the late afternoon and evening with Lakey.
I’d casually drank beer on an empty stomach until I was pretty drunk, which left me disgruntled at work with a pounding headache.
I kept playing through my mind the past, my failures, and how much I wished more than anything we had spent our wedding night together.
And not as friends. I was so tired of being merely her friend.
I caught Melanie in the parking lot after work and asked her to go out for dinner in downtown Roanoke. Her brow furrowed, then she turned away, dismissing me with her hand and her long ponytail swinging in my face.
“No way! Take your wife out, not me,” she replied, checking something on her phone.
I looked down at my feet and took a deep breath. “We…we fought yesterday, and…we aren’t speaking.”
Melanie turned around. Her blue eyes were wide when I looked her in the face. “Are you kidding? You’ve barely been married twenty-four hours!”
I shrugged. Her hand went to her hips.
“What did you do, you idiot?”
I frowned. “Hey, I’m still your boss.”
“Not outside those doors.” She pointed toward the forest ranger office building. “Out here, you’re an idiot. That girl has always meant so much to you. Why did you fight with her?”
“I love how you assume I’m the idiot,” I grumbled.
“Are you?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Probably.”
She rolled her eyes and paused. She seemed to be debating something internal. She let out a large sigh.
“Fine. We’ll go eat and talk about it.”
We met up at The Red Plate Diner. If there were two things Melanie and I had in common, it was the love of the outdoors and breakfast food for supper.
“Lordy. These eggs are perfect,” she praised before taking a huge bite. She was the tiniest woman I knew, and she always ate like a burly man. “Okay. Let’s talk about it.”
I knew she was asking about Julianna, and I huffed.
“Nothing to talk about. ”
“I swear, if you make me roll my eyes again, I will pluck off your fingernails.” She leaned over the table. “What happened?”
I took a deep breath. “The day was going great. I took her for a walk in the hollow. But then we started discussing the past, and things went wrong. I need to tell Whit something Julianna doesn’t want him to know.”
“Something recent?”
I shook my head.
Melanie’s brow furrowed. “Does it involve you?”
“Heavily,” I replied, taking another bite of my remaining food. “I don’t want to talk specifics. It doesn’t affect anything right now, but it was something Whit should have known a long time ago.”
“Did you sleep with her in high school?” Mel was on a fact-finding mission, but I wasn’t ready.
“No, I haven’t slept with her,” I replied. “Anyway, we disagreed, we argued, and then she just sort of went…silent.”
“Oh,” Melanie said, sitting back in her seat again. “Oh, that’s bad.”
“Yeah.” I couldn’t have agreed more. “She went to the bedroom last night, and I heard her come downstairs once, but I didn’t see her. We haven’t talked since.”
“Do you think she was waiting for you to come to her?”
It was a fair question and one I’d asked myself all day. “I don’t know,” I answered. “I don’t know if she wanted to talk or not. I should have done it, but I didn’t know how. I did something in the past that I regret toward her, and I don’t want to hurt her again.”
“I’m gonna need more context.”
“Not right now. Listen, I know I’ll have to approach her and make this okay again, and I need to know how to do it. How can I tell her I’m sorry without showing my full hand? I keep trying to create distance between what’s happening and what I want. ”
“Do you really want to know what I think? Good, because I’m going to tell you,” she said without pause. “This whole thing is ridiculous. You should just fuck each other already and?—”
“Don’t you dare say another word.” I closed my eyes briefly.
Her lips pursed. “Fine. I think you guys should get together and quit denying what’s happening.
You need to realize she wouldn’t be at your house if she didn’t want to be.
She has a perfectly awesome house to stay in while she’s here.
I’m assuming she has some sort of support system wherever she lived before.
She doesn’t need you. She wants you. Can you not see that? ”
I blew out a breath. “It makes sense, in theory, but she also wants to use my insurance.”
“Considering she came to your house before your insurance was even a question, I’m confident that’s not playing into her decision-making right now.
” My sister scooped up the last of her eggs and let the fork fall with a clatter on the ceramic plate.
“The history between you all is thick, but perhaps it’s time to make some new memories. You should go for it.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s complicated.”
“You think you’re not good enough.”
Her quick words were like an ice pick to my brain. But then again, she had our father in her, which meant she was cunning and perceptive. I should have known she’d read me.
“I know I’m not good enough for her,” I replied.
“You’re exasperating, you know that? You’re handsome, well-off, smart, capable, and selfless. How could you possibly believe Julianna doesn’t want that?”
I shrugged. “I’m not terrible. But Julianna is different. All these years, I thought of her, and I told myself I was idolizing her. But this last week, I’ve seen her flaws, and they pale in comparison to her beauty, warmth, and talent.”
“Talent?”
I took a drink of my sweet tea. “Yeah, she’s a writer.
She carries her laptop all around the house.
She’s not let me read anything yet, but I remember she was so good at it when we were in school.
She was great at her social media marketing job, too, and that company let her go, the idiots.
” Melanie smiled, and I kept going. “She gets nervous around crowds, but she’s so friendly, always smiling at everyone.
It takes a level of comfort to bring it out, but she’s witty and interesting.
And best of all, she and Lakey have bonded from the second they met, and I trust my dog. ”
“Over any person, of course.” Melanie laughed. “She sounds amazing. You should bone her.”
“I swear to God, Mel?—”
“At least tell her how you feel. Make it clear you care for her and that you’ll always be there for her, even if she doesn’t want you the same way. And that you want to bone her.”
My sister was killing me.
But maybe…just maybe…she was right.
“I should never have agreed to this,” she continued. “I should have insisted you go home and climb into bed with your wife.” Her smile was wide and bright.
“Nobody is climbing into anything with anyone,” I muttered, leaning back as the waitress delivered our pumpkin pies, along with the piece I’d ordered to take back to Julianna.
It would be part of my peace offering. “Whit is going to be so mad about the marriage. He hasn’t responded to our calls and texts yet.
I don’t know if they have him on lockdown or what, but he called last week and warned me off her. ”
She scoffed, waving a hand in dismissal. “Whit is all hot air and fancy pants. He has no control over his sister or you. ”
I knocked my fork casually against the table. “Yeah. Well. You don’t know him.”
“Yeah, well,” she mocked, “I have a feeling he’s just a man and that means he’s not very smart and shouldn’t be trusted.” She took a bite of pie and then moaned much too loudly.
“Jesus, that was disgusting,” I grumbled. She pointed her fork at me.
“It’s too good not to make noises,” she replied, swallowing, then going in for bite two.
But she stopped midway and pointed her fork at me again.
“Listen, we don’t have to talk about it.
And I can’t make you do what I want. But be happy, Bram.
You might have grown up rich, but you were dealt a shitty hand in the ways that mattered. You deserve to have happiness now.”
My throat was too tight with emotion, and I loathed the feelings. I shook my head. “I’ve done many things you don’t know about, Mel.”
She smiled. “We all have. Quit thinking you’re special because you’ve been through some stuff.”
She was goading me a little, but shame crept in.
Mel had been through more in her life than I could fathom.
While I was growing up in the most prominent house in the county, she was living on a backwoods compound with her abusive cousin and religious nutjob of an aunt.
She was scarred emotionally and physically.
I couldn’t see them, but she’d told me about them the same night I’d first told her about Julianna, the night at the winery.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have insinuated you haven’t felt pain.”
She waved her hand. “Come off it. You’re changing the subject. Whit’s problems are his problems. He’ll come around, or he won’t.”
“He’s like a brother to me. The things he says about me, to me, they matter. ”
She snorted. “Yeah, if you were like a brother to him, he’d be thinking about you a little more and about himself a lot less.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that.
“Just don’t push away the opportunity that’s right in front of your face,” she begged. “It might never come back around. She might not come back around. Be open. That’s all I ask.”
She eyed the Styrofoam container on the tabletop and giggled. “That’s for her, right?”
“Quit it,” I said, and threw a ball of straw paper at her.