Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
MORGAN
Tonight has been the girls night that I truly needed to get out of the vicious cycle of thinking about Danny/Aidan and the reality that he’s in my life for the foreseeable future.
I’m just finishing up my dinner, laughing at the way Jules just says whatever the hell she wants and how it almost always horrifies Audrey, when my phone buzzes on the table.
I flip it over to see a text from my mom.
Mom
Hey, Max and I will be in Boston in a couple weeks. He’ll be busy at a conference most of the time. Would love to grab dinner or something if you’re around!
I set my phone face down again, wishing that my dinner didn’t suddenly feel like it was turning sour in my stomach.
As far as I know, Mom hasn’t been back to Boston since my high school graduation—which means I haven’t had to see her on my turf since I became an adult.
There’s something comforting in knowing she hasn’t been around to ruin any of my favorite Boston places for me, unlike the way she ruined my favorite restaurant in New York City, the best coffee shop in Park City, and the view of Los Angeles from the Griffith Observatory.
So many bad memories are tied to her that I wonder why I even agree to see her anymore.
But, she keeps making the effort—she calls or texts often enough that I know she hasn’t forgotten me, but not often enough to consider it a meaningful relationship.
And here she is, wanting to see me again because she’ll be in town with Max.
She’s trying, even if her efforts all feel half-assed. Maybe that’s all she’s capable of?
“You okay?” Lauren asks, nudging me with her elbow from the seat next to me.
“Yeah,” I say, realizing I’d been staring at my glass sitting on the table in front of me with such intensity that she probably thinks I was trying to make it levitate. “Just got distracted by a text.”
“Your mom?” Clearly she saw my screen.
“Yeah, unfortunately.”
Lauren’s arm sweeps around my shoulder as she pulls me into a side hug.
While technically they’re my cousins, she and Paige are more like the sisters I never had.
I used to spend a month every summer up in Maine with them, and my dad and I have spent every Christmas with them since my mom left.
So I developed a very close bond with the two of them even though we lived over three hours away growing up.
It’s nice that we all live in the same city now, even if Paige is almost always traveling for work.
“You good?” Eva asks, brows scrunching as she assesses me from across the table.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Just embarrassed that I’ve made a bit of a scene when I’m supposed to be having fun with my girlfriends. “I just got distracted by my mom texting me.”
Audrey leans back as the waiter clears her empty plate. “Did you ever ask her about your stepbrother’s last name?”
Jules’s eyebrows lift in anticipation of my response.
“No. I’m putting the past in the past, where it belongs,” I say, wishing that this was true in my mind as well.
Now that I know who “Danny” is, and that we work together and my dad is his agent, I need to stay far away from him.
Despite being a great father to me, my dad is a great agent because he has no issue being a cutthroat asshole. Sleeping with his daughter is not something Aidan can risk in a contract year. It’s not an understatement to say that his entire future rests in my dad’s hands.
Unfortunately, it seems that the more I’ve tried to avoid Aidan this week, the more he’s been on my mind.
And flashbacks from Bermuda—the easy flirting the first night in the bar, how protective he was at dinner and on the boat, the way our bodies came together even when we knew they shouldn’t—hit me at the most unexpected times.
I can’t stop thinking about our time together and wishing we could turn back time, even just for a night.
“Oh, come on, Morgan,” Audrey says with a groan, as she rests her elbow on the table and cradles her chin in her palm. “You said it was the best sex of your life, remember?”
Her voice is quite a bit louder than I’d like in the glass-encased rooftop restaurant, so I lift my gaze to see if anyone else heard her. And of course—of fucking course—who is standing right behind her, but half of the Boston Rebels.
Drew smooths his hand over the top of his fiancée’s dark hair with a shake of his head, like he’s realizing she’s had too much to drink. But Drew is not who catches my eye.
No, it’s Aidan Renaud, standing slightly behind him, a goddamn smirk plastered across his perfect face and eyes dancing with amusement as he stares at me like he just knows I was talking about him.
How do these moments, where I just want the earth to open up and swallow me whole, always happen to me?
Dad used to laugh and say, “Stupid shit really does always happen to you.” Things like starting my period at the tennis club while wearing a white skirt, or tripping right before I got to the sand pit at the long jump the one year I did track in high school, and instead landing face-first in the sand.
My cheeks are on fire, so rather than respond to Audrey and potentially make the situation worse, I tilt my champagne glass up and take a sip.
But of course, the French 75 only reminds me of being at the club with Aidan in Bermuda before he fucked me up against the wall outside, and now I can feel the flush creeping down my neck and chest.
Luckily Eva’s phone rings then, so loud that all our heads are turning toward her. Eva snatches it up and mutes it saying, “Sorry, it’s the nanny.”
Luke is already at her side, and they step over to a quiet corner of the restaurant to take the call.
This is the first night they’ve both been out at the same time; they wanted to do a trial run with the nanny to see how Gigi does with neither of them home.
Eva’s still got another few weeks before she can lace up her figure skates and start training for the Olympics again, but it coincides with the start of Luke’s season, so they’ll both go back to work at the same time.
The guys start pulling up chairs from empty tables, and I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate that they would show up here.
It’s happened before, more than once. But somehow, I hadn’t really considered that the next time it happened, Aidan might be with them.
Running into him is going to be part of the new normal.
Even if I could somehow back out of working with the Rebels, which is not something I’d do, he’d still be around because his teammates are my friends.
“Best sex of your life, huh?” he says, leaning toward me from where he’s planted a chair at the end of the table next to me, his voice low enough that I’m sure I’m the only one who can hear him.
“I was talking about someone else.”
I glance away and don’t miss Lauren’s gaze focused on me. There isn’t much she doesn’t notice, and I don’t want her to start putting any puzzle pieces together, especially since she works with us.
His low rumble of laughter is a caress running along my skin, and I shiver in response. It’s like he knows that what we had together in Bermuda was the most amazing sex. I might have even said that to him at one point, and maybe he said it too?
Above us, the string lights that run from one side of the rooftop restaurant to the other sparkle against the glass walls and ceiling, creating a glowing ambiance.
All around us, lush plants provide enough greenery that you feel like you’re eating outside.
The whole space has an ethereal glow, and it’s giving me flashbacks of the grove of trees and bushes we retreated into as we left the club our last night in Bermuda.
I don’t want this beautiful space to remind me of that night with him.
I don’t want my body to crave my stepbrother’s the minute I see him.
I don’t want to know that under this broody exterior lies a guy who brought me coffee because he knew I wasn’t a morning person, who drove a boat slowly and near the shore so I wouldn’t be afraid, who refused to let me celebrate my birthday alone in my hotel room.
“Sure you were,” he says, his voice low and soft as he reaches under the table.
My entire core clenches when his callused hand lands on my bare knee, and another shiver wracks my body when he slides his hand halfway up my thigh.
“That’s why you looked like you wanted to disappear as soon as you saw me standing there. ”
He’s teasing me, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I’m a conflicted jumble of emotions and have been since finding out who he is earlier this week.
My body wants to lean into him, give in to the attraction.
But my head tells me I need some distance so I can figure out how I feel about all of this.
“Maybe you could teach me how,” I say. Then I raise my voice quite a bit louder when I add, “I hear disappearing is your specialty.”
From the other side of Jules, Colt’s laugh rings out. “Way to put him in his place, Morgan.”
Our group starts talking animatedly about Renaud’s absence last season, and how much better the team will be now that he’s back.
But I’m barely listening because I’m so distracted by his hand, now resting on his own thigh beside me, and the way he keeps flexing his fingers, splaying them wide before relaxing.
I remember him doing something similar under the table at dinner after the wedding, the last time we sat side-by-side like this.
I wonder if it’s a coping mechanism? And if so, what exactly is he dealing with right now?