6. Reid #2
I remember making myself busy after that.
Refilling drinks. Checking the grill. Avoiding him without making it obvious.
Because suddenly, he wasn’t just the kid I used to hoist onto my shoulders.
The kid who used to doodle on napkins at family dinners and drag me into his bedroom to show me his latest sketch.
He was Ari . Confident, expressive, impossible not to notice.
He teased Cael, talked with his hands, and threw me these sideways glances like he knew exactly what he was doing.
Or maybe he didn’t. But when our eyes met—his bright, daring—I looked away first. Told myself it was nothing.
That he was just being Ari. But something in me had already shifted, and I knew it wasn’t going to unshift anytime soon.
Didn’t matter that I stayed out of sight every time he came home from school after that summer. I still caught myself asking Sage about him, careful to keep it casual. Always listening for the scraps of updates like they mattered too much.
And now here he was. Grown. Back. Looking at me like maybe he wanted something too.
Sage’s voice cut gently across the spiral of it. “I’m not asking you to be anything you don’t want to be. I’m just saying—you’ve always been solid, always saw his worth. Ari needs you, Reid, even if he acts like he doesn’t.”
Yeah. Solid. I wanted to be that. Wanted to be the one Ari leaned on. The one who caught him when he stumbled.
But it was worse than that.
I wanted to be the one he reached for in the dark. The one who got those smiles— all heat and trouble —directed nowhere but at me.
And God help me, I didn’t know if I could want him like that and still be the man Sage thought I was.
“Thanks,” I muttered. It was the only thing I could say without losing whatever thin grip I had on myself. “For trusting me.”
“I always have,” Sage said, calm. “That hasn’t changed.”
He meant it like reassurance, but it didn’t land that way. Not when trust and guilt were rubbing each other raw beneath my ribs.
I drained the last of my coffee, letting the bitter liquid sit thick in the back of my throat. Better that than the taste of every other thing I couldn’t say yet.
Sage stood, rolling his shoulders, the scrape of the chair legs loud in the quiet. “I’m heading out. Text me when you get the time. I got some parts for the car.”
I nodded. “Will do.”
He nodded once, clapped me on the shoulder—a familiar weight that felt more like family than friendship—before heading for the door, and walked out into the night.
As soon as the door clicked behind him, I sagged forward, elbows braced on the scarred surface of the table, palms over my face.
It wasn’t the weight of the wildfire that had worn me down tonight.
It was this.
It was him .
Ari.
It was wondering how the hell you protected someone from yourself.
By the time I decided to head home, the coffee was long forgotten, the weight of Sage’s visit sitting heavy behind my ribs.
Didn’t take long to get there. Nothing in Briar Creek ever did. My place sat out past the old baseball field, down a road where the blacktop gave up halfway through and gravel finished the job.
The house wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t falling apart either.
One of those sturdy ranch-style places from the seventies, with wide windows and an old oak out front that used to have a tire swing when I was a kid.
My parents had bought it before I was born, their version of settling down late in life.
If they were still around, they’d be in their eighties.
Dad didn’t make it that far—massive heart attack before I even graduated. Mom hung on longer, but diabetes took her slow and mean, like it wanted to make sure she felt every bit of it. By the time I was twenty, it was just me rattling around this place, pretending the silence didn’t get to me.
I guess that’s part of why it felt natural, back then, to fall into step with the Jackson family.
They were breaking apart around the same time I was holding the pieces of my own family together.
Ari had been six. Sage, barely an adult himself, was busy working double shifts and trying to keep his little brother’s world from going sideways. And I guess I’d just... fit.
Didn’t feel noble then. Doesn’t feel noble now. Just survival, for all of us in different ways.
I parked out front, gravel crunching under the tires. Let the engine idle too long before finally shutting it off.
Porch light still burned—a soft yellow halo spilling across the concrete steps. Not cracked, not broken. Just worn in that way old places got when they’d been taken care of by someone who knew how.
It wasn’t new. But it was mine .
And most days, that was enough.
Tonight, it felt like too much space with no one to fill it.
Inside, the house smelled like clean laundry and lemon polish—the kind of clean that came from habit, not from trying to impress anyone.
The living room was small but comfortable, floors clean, a dark blue couch tucked against one wall, worn soft at the corners.
The throw pillows didn’t sag—they were plain, solid colors, no patterns or embroidered quotes, just something to lean against at the end of a shift.
No TV on. Just the quiet hum of the fridge from the kitchen and the faint click of the old pipes settling for the night.
Tessa used to hate that sound. Said it reminded her of something crawling in the walls.
She’d left most of the decorations behind when we split. Said I needed something to fill the space. I’d packed most of them into boxes in the hall closet after she moved out. Didn’t feel right pretending like the framed quotes and fake succulents were mine.
We’d done it the way people hoped they could.
Quiet. Clean. Signed the papers, hugged at the courthouse, promised to be kind when we ran into each other at the grocery store.
And we were. Hell, she even sent a Christmas card last year from wherever she moved to up north. New husband, a dog in the picture.
No drama. No hard feelings.
But that didn’t mean I liked coming home to silence.
I stood in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, thumb tracing the Formica edge, thinking about Sage’s face when he left.
Ari needs you, Reid.
Ari wasn’t just a good time. He wasn’t some fling I could burn out of my system. He was more than that. Always had been.
Ari wasn’t the first boy I ever wanted, but he was the first one I never let myself have.
And now here he was, grown, smiling at me like the years in between didn’t mean a damn thing. Like he didn’t know what it would cost for me to want him back.
I pushed off the counter, heading to the bedroom.
Everything neat, squared away—bed made, boots lined up by the closet, dresser top holding the usual: a folded pocket knife, a small tray for loose change and keys, and an old photo of Mom and Dad, edges curled from years of dusting.
Simple. Clean. Like everything else in my life—kept in order, even when my head wasn’t.
It looked like a room someone lived in out of habit, not love.
I sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, staring at the floorboards, wondering what the hell I thought I was doing.
Wanting something didn’t make it right.
But that didn’t make it stop, either.