Chapter 11 #2
It’s painful, but probably not in the way he thinks.
My brother and I were close as kids. Even with our four-year age gap, from the time he was old enough to move, he was following me around and I loved it.
He wanted to follow me and I wanted to lead him.
We’d wear matching PJs and play with all the same toys.
Well, we’d fight over all the same toys.
We’d tear up every playground we visited, not playing with any of the other kids, just each other.
Even when I got to high school, I never felt like I was too cool to hang out with my brother.
He’s always made me laugh and was a hell of a lot smarter than me, so he’d help me in school and I’d teach him everything I knew about hockey.
He played for a while because I played it, but he wasn’t very good and swore up and down that he preferred to watch the game than play it.
I won the sibling lottery with Gray.
And every day I feel like shit for going off to college while he dealt with the fallout of our dad’s affair.
He sighs again, and I imagine him running his fingers through his short walnut-brown hair.
Gray takes after our mom, with lighter hair and green eyes, and unfortunately, I take after our dad.
Sometimes, if my hair is styled in a certain way, I look in the mirror and see him.
Needless to say, I don’t style my hair like that.
“I really thought this was it,” Gray says, disappointment lacing his words. It hits me square in the chest. “I don’t know if I have it in me to keep pitching to people. To keep getting rejected.”
“You’re right, it sucks.”
“Says the guy who had multiple NHL teams knocking on his door before he graduated.”
“It was two, and look how that ended up.”
Silence. Gray brought up a sensitive topic and he knows it, but he’s hurting, so I won’t hold it against him.
“What do you need, Gray?” I ask. “Do you need more money?”
“Probably.”
“How much?”
Another sigh. “I don’t know. I have to…I have to go back to the drawing board, figure out how to make it better, more appealing to investors. I probably need more beta testing and—”
His voice cracks. He sounds so tired.
“You need a vacation, kid,” I say.
He scoffs. “Yeah, with what—”
“Come to Mexico. I’ll fly you down; you can stay with me for a week. I’m here for another month at least.”
“Miles, I can’t pay for—”
“I’m well aware of what you can and can’t pay for, and that’s why I’m paying.”
“Seriously, Miles—”
“Shut up, Gray. Just book the flights and tell me when you’re coming. You deserve the time off. You’ve been working your ass off and I can hear it in your voice. You need a break. Come to Mexico, get inspired again or drink until you reset your brain, whatever, I don’t care.”
“Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll book flights.”
“Good.”
“You okay, man?” Gray asks.
“Yeah, why?”
“Because you’re being bossy.”
“I’m always bossy—it’s what I do. Big brother shit.”
“Mmm, if you say so.”
“Just book your flights and tell me when you’ll be here.”
He agrees, promising to text me dates, and I let him go with the promise that if he doesn’t book flights, I’ll fly up and carry him on to a flight to Mexico. He knows I’m serious.
His words clang around in my head for a bit. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, though, because I am always bossy with him. Always have been. Maybe I’m more irritable than normal, given that I’m increasingly desperate to have a conversation with Abby.
I scan the beach as I continue my jog, checking the people as I pass by the row of purple cloth beach chairs positioned under umbrellas. There are no empty chairs, and it’s hard to tell one person from the next, but I have no doubt I’ll be able to recognize Abby if she’s here.
I’m just looking for a pair of legs that—
I nearly trip over my own feet when I find them.
She’s in the same bikini she wore on her first day here, a bright red thing with a thick band that covers her ribs and chunky straps that tie behind her neck. Her hair is up in a wild bun, her legs propped up on the beach chair, holding a notebook of some kind that she’s—is she drawing?
I beeline to her as casually as possible, taking out my earbuds as I approach her chair. Beside her on a small table is an empty drink cup and an almost empty bottle of water. She picks her head up as I approach, and I don’t miss the way her lips tug into a smile.
“What is the statistical probability of running into you by chance as many times as I have?” Abby asks, squinting, then lifting her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.
“What if I told you that this time I was looking for you?”
Her lips twitch as she tries not to smile any wider. “I’d say you’re messing with the math.”
“Well, it was never my strong suit.”
“Mine either,” she says and gestures to her notebook, which I can see now is a sketchbook, a black pencil in her hand.
“That looks familiar,” I say, nodding to the sketchbook.
“Oh, this…well, it might be the one I had in college. I only really ever bought one brand, and I did have to unearth this from the back of my closet.”
She starts flipping through the pages, and one must catch her eye, because she presses her lips together, even as they twitch to keep from smiling more. Her cheeks pink and she closes the pages, keeping her eyes averted.
“What? What did you find?” I ask. I sit on the edge of her beach chair and try to get a look at her sketchbook.
“It’s—oh my god, it’s so embarrassing.” She covers her face with the hand holding the pencil, or tries to cover her face, but the way her fingers lie across the drawing utensil leaves plenty of her face still visible.
“Please, Abby. Let me see,” I beg.
She groans, flipping open the notebook to the page she was on, and holds it up for me to see.
It’s obvious immediately what I’m looking at.
It’s me. It’s my profile, crooked nose and all.
I broke it my freshman year of college during a game and it never really looked the same since.
She also got the scar on my chin just right from where I took a stick to the face when my dad and I were trying to teach Gray to play hockey as kids.
I didn’t have stubble in college—I was clean-shaven then—but my hair was longer, messier, and she got all that too. Even if I wasn’t biased to believe that anything Abby created was beautiful, I would still find this impressive.
“It’s so shoddy, I really—I mean, technically just not great. Even if you can’t tell, it’s still embarrassing.” She turns the notebook around again and cradles it to her chest. “Plus, it’s…well…”
She gestures toward me.
“Yeah, so embarrassing—you had a crush on me, didn’t you?”
She playfully swats my arm and pinches her lips together in fake annoyance. “Oh my god, shut up,” she says.
“Is that what you were drawing today? My face? From memory?”
She rolls her eyes at me, but there’s jest in it. She silently flips to another page in her sketchbook and angles it toward me.
This time, it’s a perfect depiction of the beach, specifically the view from her chair.
There’s a large palm tree planted between her and the ocean, and she must have been working on shading the bark of it when I approached because it’s only half-done.
She somehow manages to capture the movement of the water, and I imagine that if I stared for long enough, I’d hear the back-and-forth swoosh of the waves.
It’s obvious that her technique has improved over time, even though I don’t know shit about art. But I can recognize the growth of a skill. As an athlete, I know what it looks like to improve over time.
“This is stunning, Abby. Do you draw a lot?”
She shakes her head, stretching her legs out long behind me on the shared beach chair. “I haven’t found the time for it. The spoons for it. Even when I was with Todd, it felt silly to use my free time to draw when I could have just been hanging out with him.”
“Did he make you feel like that?”
She shrugs, avoiding eye contact.
I grind my teeth in an effort to not make a dig at this man. Maybe I wasn’t a great boyfriend, but this loser was out here keeping her from the things she loved the most.
“And since I’ve been single,” she continues, “I’ve just been surviving. I’m too tired for hobbies.”
Before I can think too hard about it, I rest my hand on her leg, just above her knee, as a gesture of comfort.
She gives me a tight-lipped smile and a half-shrug. “Please don’t look at me like I’m pathetic,” she says.
“I’m not, I swear.”
I’m trying not to wear every single emotion on my face, trying to hide that the only thing I can think about is how I’d make damn sure she always had time for her hobbies if she were with me.
Maybe it’s better that she read pity rather than outright desire.
Speaking of which…
“Hey, so…I was hoping we could talk about last night.”
“Yes, definitely,” she says, adjusting in the chair to sit up more and draw her legs toward her in a criss-cross position.
I place my hand at the edge of the chair so I have something to grip. My stomach can’t decide if her reaction is bad or good and flips end over end, making me feel a little nauseated.
“It was hot,” I say. Venturing a glance at her.
She’s twisting her lips to the side, again fighting a smile. “It was, but we can’t do that again.”
Shit.
This is what I was afraid of. We did too much too fast and now I’ve scared her off. I disagree with her about whether we should indulge in those activities again, but I’m not going to push or argue with her. Because my priority isn’t having physical access to Abby; it’s having access at all.
The last thing I want is for her to close the door and tell me that she wants me to spend the next five days avoiding her. If she never speaks to me again after she leaves the resort, and I fully expect that she won’t, I want these last few days. And I am not above begging.
“Do you…not want to see me at all?” I ask.
“No, I didn’t say that. We can see each other. We’re seeing each other right now.”
She’s smiling. She seems relaxed, and that relaxes me.
She’s not closing the door on me, and while I’d like to know why she doesn’t think we can repeat last night, I’m not going to push her now.
And given how she’s scanned my body a few times since I approached, I’m not convinced avoiding me is what she actually wants.
“Oh, she’s got jokes.”
“I’ve always been the funny one in this dynamic,” she says, trying to play it serious, but a ghost of a smile betrays her.
“Have dinner with me,” I say. And if she’s surprised at my request, she doesn’t show it. In fact, she seems pleased.
“Okay,” she says, letting herself smile this time, and it takes all my self-control not to lean in and kiss her. “I still haven’t had Mexican food because you ran me off from the restaurant the other night.”
“Please. You ran of your own free will.”
“Well, don’t scare me away tonight.”
I’d rather stab a fork into my hand than scare her off again. “I’ll do my best, but so far this week, my track record isn’t so good.”
“We won’t count the first day. I felt like I’d seen a ghost when I saw you,” she says.
“Same, but like a really hot ghost.”
“Oh, you think I’m hot?” She shimmies her shoulders a little at me, an exaggerated tease.
“I already used that line, but nice try, jester.”
She blows a raspberry at me, and I stand, not wanting to overstay my welcome, more at ease now that I know I’ll get to see her for dinner tonight.
“Five o’clock for dinner?” I ask, and she nods. “Wear something pretty for me?”
“Only if you do,” she says.
I may not have something pretty to wear, but I certainly plan to give her something to look at.