Chapter 32
PACE – LATE OCTOBER
Sibling Instinct
There’s a tightness in my chest that I can’t shift. Staring at the ceiling and listening to Annie shuffling in her room, wondering all night why she didn’t want me to sleep in her bed, made it worse.
I know she has reservations about us. She’s right to. I have a million solid reasons why we shouldn’t be hooking up. Not that we’re hooking up; she made perfectly clear that last night was not going to be repeated.
I naively, indulgently, thought that she wanted something between us more than an orgasm.
So I’m sitting here at the breakfast table in the hotel, alone, on my third coffee already, wondering what her main worry is.
It could, understandably, be her thinking that a guy who came in his pants last night wouldn’t be worth a risk.
But I know Annie. She’s so far from superficial.
Her reservations must be bigger than that.
For the first time in thirty-four years, I’m on the receiving end of the one-night stand brush off and it’s fucking eating me. Because last night, not sleeping a wink, I kept coming back to one thought – Annie is so much more to me than a cheap orgasm in a hotel room.
But I’m not that to her. I am to Annie what every woman has seen me as since college. What I’ve intended to be to them. Sex. The guy they screw before they start their real lives. No commitment. No heartbreak.
It’s always suited me. I’ve seen the fallout of relationships enough times through my mom. I know what rejection feels like from my own father.
But this morning, it feels like I’m dangerously close to getting hurt. Is that it? Has Annie been hurt so badly that she’s shutting herself down, too? Or is there more to it? Auston.
I’ve chosen a breakfast table tucked away from the sight of most people in the restaurant, and I’m wearing a black cap pulled low over my eyes. There’s a newspaper next to me that I requested but that I’ve been too distracted to even open.
“Someone woke up hungry,” Sas says, eyes screwed tightly behind her specs, the way they do when she’s hanging.
As if right on cue, a waiter tops off my coffee and takes away my empty plate because she’s right, I woke up ravenous after what limited sleep I managed and since we slept with the adjoining door open, I didn’t want to disturb Annie.
“Would you like coffee?” the waiter asks her.
“Massive, yes,” she murmurs, adding “please” as an afterthought.
“I see you’re firing on all cylinders this morning, firecracker,” I say, just as grumpily, despite the fact I didn’t touch a drop of alcohol last night.
Except the tequila I tasted on—
“Are you reading?” Darcy slips onto the bench seat next to me, looking brighter than Sas but undoubtedly like she had margaritas last night, too.
I’m pleased Annie switched to club soda long before the end of the night, otherwise what happened last night never would have.
That might have been for the best.
“I didn’t even know you could read,” my sister jibes, stealing my mug of coffee and gulping it down, then realizing it was boiling hot.
“I’m a man of many hidden talents. How’s the head?”
“Did I fall off my horse yesterday and forget?” she asks.
“Carbs and caffeine, little sis. And no, you didn’t fall off your horse, you fucking nailed both your events.” She rocks into my shoulder.
“Where’s Annie?” Colton asks, next to sit and simultaneously beckoning over a member of staff.
“Sleeping. I left a note on her pillow to tell her I’d take her some breakfast back up if she wants to lie in. She could do with it.”
“There’s no way she’ll skip breakfast with Darcy here,” Sas says, chuckling.
“Can we circle back for a second?” my sister asks. “You left a note on her pillow?”
My attention shoots to Quinn across the table.
“Not like that.” Even though, yes, I went down on his sister last night and it blew my fucking mind.
“Our rooms are adjoining and we—” I’m not sure making it sound like Annie and I were pillow talking for hours is going to sound much better than having oral sex with her, so I decide to quit talking, much to the amusement of the women at the table.
I’m not amused. I’m guilty as hell. In my mind, I drew an arbitrary line last night that I wouldn’t have sex with Annie but today, sitting with my buddy and teammate, I feel dishonest and disloyal. Everything I’m not and don’t want to be. “Thanks for that, Darce.”
She snorts. “Any time.”
But I still check back to Quinn, who shrugs. He knows I wouldn’t go there. Or thinks I wouldn’t. Except I sort of have.
“Seriously, though, I see the way you look at Annie,” my sister goes on, as if she can’t read the fucking room. “When you think no one is looking your eyes are all—” I jab my leg against hers – the fuck?
“She’s a friend, Darce. Moreover, she’s Quinn’s sister.”
As if destiny is trying to torment the shit out of me, I look up from my plate to see Annie. Her long hair is plaited down her back and she’s wearing one of her patterned dresses that sits off her shoulders and swishes when she walks in those cowboy boots she loves.
She doesn’t look hungover at all. In fact, she looks reenergized.
Like a woman who really needed the one-night break she got.
I knew last night she wasn’t drunk – I wouldn’t have let anything happen between us if she had been – but seeing how fresh she looks is confirmation that she was sober enough when she wanted me.
Sober when she sent me back to my own bed right after.
That twist in my gut that’s starting to play on my mind, screw with my head, and absolutely terrify me, returns.
She spots us and beams to the others as she waves, then her eyes briefly meet mine and I don’t like what I see.
“Morning, y’all,” she says, looking back to the others as I stare at her, feeling as burnt as I did last night. As if the only person who fell for us last night was me.
“I already ordered you horchata,” I tell her. Talk to me, Annie. “I was going to bring it to your room. Want me to get it now?”
Finally, she meets my eyes and we’re locked in an unspoken conversation for long seconds – if only I knew what she was saying. Then she smiles and my heart starts racing. “I got your note. Thanks for letting me sleep. It was bliss. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t wake up before the birds.”
I nod, still mentally all over the place. Hating how this is confusing as hell but knowing that I feel something for the woman locked in my gaze that I haven’t felt before. A pull from somewhere deep inside me.
I sense Darcy staring at me, searing me with that sibling instinct that I know is bang on. I’m falling for Annie and Darcy knows it.
“Oh my God!” Sas says, like she’s finally coming to life, and cutting through my emotional spiral. “Have you seen the link that Sienna just dropped into the group?” Sas is fixed on Colton, though she has the attention of everyone at the table.
Colton takes her phone from her and presumably hits the link. “The fuck? That’s not real.”
“What is it?” Annie asks.
The way Colton and Sas look at each other across the table makes me lean over my buddy’s shoulder to see the social media post displayed on the phone screen.
What the…?
“Sienna sent us a link to a post about Auston,” Sas says.
“Sienna? As in your brother’s PR, who’s looking out for me?” Annie asks.
I get to the end of the social media post. “That’s not real,” I say, even as my stomach flips at the thought of what I’ve read.
“What’s not real?” Annie asks. “And why in hell do you guys have a group message chat about me without me in it?”
More guilty looks are exchanged between Colton and Sas.
It is bullshit that they’ve left Annie out of a group making decisions about her life.
It pisses me off, frankly. But this morning, after what went down last night between Annie and me, I’m already on red alert for saying something I ought not to at this table and raining down a whole heap of shit on Annie and me.
“Pass me the phone,” Annie demands, holding her hand out to her brother, face stern, brows knitted. “What the hell is this?” Her words are almost a whisper as she catches on. “Auston is being traded to the Bears?”
“Annie, don’t believe the shit that ends up on social media,” I say. “It’s some sensationalist crap, designed as clickbait after the game at the weekend.”
Colton gets back to eating his breakfast and speaks through a mouth full of bacon. “Auston doesn’t want to come to the Bears. We all think he’s a dick.”
“Why would you guys make a mid-season trade, anyway? You’re winning every game,” Darcy asks, now slurping her own hot coffee.
“We’re winning but not thanks to our quarterback,” I explain, though it’s off point in the circumstances.
Colton forks more bacon. “Lamar’s trying his best but losing Tommy has been a massive blow for us and it’s only a matter of time until we come unstuck.”
“Unless Coach Roy suddenly decides to reconfigure the entire team around a gunslinger instead of a pocket passer, Lamar needed more bench time. The Bears team is the strongest it’s been in years but it’s set-up for Tommy’s game.
” Sas leans back in her chair, explaining to my sister.
“I mean, if it wasn’t for all the personal shit, Auston would be a good trade for the Bears, depending on what they had to give up to get a player of his caliber.
Plus the fact he’s not performing for the Archers and the fans are all offside means it’s not completely out of the realm of imagination for him to want to make a move either. ”
She’s doing that thing Sas sometimes does – speaking before engaging her brain – as the rest of us around the table all glare at her, bearing witness to the moment she realizes what she just said.
She winces. “That wasn’t the most appropriate thing to say right now, was it?”
Annie’s been quiet this whole time, but she’s still holding Sas’s phone and now I notice how her rosy cheeks have lost color.