Chapter 20 #2
We don’t stay much longer because Eva and Luke come back to the table to tell us Gigi woke up and they’re headed home, and it’s obvious the staff is getting ready to close for the night.
So we all pile down the stairs of the restaurant and everyone sets out in their own directions after we say our goodbyes.
I turn to walk home because we’re only a few blocks from where I live, and suddenly Aidan’s walking beside me.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
“Walking you home.”
“I’m perfectly capable of walking myself home. I do it all the time.” If he’s concerned for my safety, he needn’t be. It’s a busy Saturday night, and the two streets I need to walk down to get to my place are well lit and will be packed full of people.
“As a friend, I feel responsible for making sure you get home safely.” His teasing floods me with memories of just how friendly we’ve been in the past. “If you prefer, I can walk behind you and pretend like I don’t know you.”
“How do you even know you’re headed the same way?”
“Besides the fact that we’re walking in the same direction, you mean?” His tone has a bit of a bite to it, like it always does when he’s uncomfortable. I don’t know why I know this about him, but apparently I do. Now I’m wondering why he’s uncomfortable.
“How do I know you’re not following me?” I tease, just to lighten the mood.
“Relax,” he says, and runs a hand up my back. I glance sideways and note the way his eyes are dark orbs as they study me, his olive skin bathed in the light of the street lamps. “I live over on Marlborough Street. You?”
“Newbury,” I tell him, wondering why he has to live three blocks from me, on one of the nicest streets in all of Boston, when he could live anywhere in the whole damn city?
“I met with your dad earlier today,” he says, and my gaze snaps up to his face. “Just a standard check-in before the season starts. But obviously he knows that we work together.”
“Yeah, I told him about the media piece I was writing about you.”
“Does he know . . . anything else?” Aidan asks.
“How the hell would I have broached that topic with my father?” I ask, glancing over at him. “I can’t even mention that I met you in Bermuda, or that you’re my stepbrother, since we don’t talk about my mom.”
“Ever?”
I nod. “He’s always been supportive of me having a relationship with her. But for obvious reasons, he doesn’t want to know about her life after she walked out on him.”
His hand curls around my hip as he moves me in front of him to avoid a big group of drunken guys heading toward us, two of whom are walking backward and yelling to the others. Once we pass them, he doesn’t let go, even as he steps up beside me.
“It seems like she walked out on both of you, no? Why do you still want to have a relationship with her?” He asks the question with obvious curiosity instead of the judgment I would have expected.
My lips turn down at the corners as I swallow the lump in my throat. “It’s complicated.”
I think about the text from earlier tonight and how, after her last wedding, it was nearly two years before I saw her in person again. This time, I’ll be seeing her twice within a month, and that feels like maybe it’s progress?
I glance up at Aidan as we walk, but apparently he’s decided to hold on to his thoughts. Finally, as we turn the corner onto Newbury Street, he says, “You seem like you have a good relationship with your dad?”
“Yeah. I know his reputation as an agent, but he’s a great father.”
Most of what I know about Dad’s professional reputation is from Lauren’s husband, Jameson, who was my dad’s client when he played for the Rebels.
When he retired early to raise his little sisters, Audrey and Jules, after their mother died and their father left, Dad gave him his first job as an agent.
Dad’s basically the reason Jameson and Lauren missed their chance together and didn’t reconnect until five years later.
Jameson has told me a few horror stories about how Dad has screwed over his clients if he thought they weren’t being loyal to him.
“He’s been a great agent for me. He took me on in college and convinced me to enter the draft while I was still in school. I got to play two more years of D1 hockey knowing that I had a spot lined up already. It’s funny that he never mentioned having a daughter.”
I scoff out a laugh. “Why would he mention his teenage daughter to his client?”
I barely hear Aidan’s low chuckle over the sound of a driver laying on the horn at a guy who’s double-parked. “Fair point. Were you always such a daddy’s girl?”
“Yeah. I don’t know if it’s because he traveled so much for work when I was younger, or because my mom was never particularly warm and fuzzy, but when Dad was home, I always gravitated toward him.
After my mom left, we became more like partners, figuring out how to exist without the person who’d made us a family in the first place.
Since then, Dad’s always treated me more like an equal than his child. ”
Aidan’s hand squeezes my hip, and it feels like he’s giving me a supportive hug—a shared recognition of what we’ve both been through with our parents.
“Was it like that with your mom after your dad passed?”
“No, because Max was always around for us. He was basically a surrogate dad to me, even before he and my mom started dating. He took me to hockey practice, he took us out to dinner . . . that type of thing. I think he was just checking in on us as much as he could, because he knew it’s what my dad would have wanted. ”
I chew my lip, wanting to ask him so many more questions, but not wanting to pry. “Max seems like a really good guy.”
“He’s the best.” There’s no hesitation when Aidan says this, and it makes me realize how hard it must be for him, watching Max marry a new woman every few years.
It’s hard for me with my mom, but she was never the kind of parent to me that Max has been for Aidan.
The irony—that they’re not even biologically related—isn’t lost on me.
I slow and turn onto the brick walkway that leads to the steep stone steps of my brownstone.
This walk back from the restaurant is so reminiscent of the times we walked back to our hotel rooms in Bermuda, but it feels platonic enough that it makes me wonder if we can fall into a friendship after all the lines we’ve crossed together.
This would be so much easier if I could just think of him as one of the guys on the team, if we could hang out without it being awkward or without bringing up memories from Bermuda.
“Thanks for making sure I got home safe,” I say as I start to turn away.
“That’s the least I could do for a friend.” His emphasis on the word has me wondering whether he’s really able to think of me as a friend.
The way his eyes flick down to my cleavage, visible in the V-neck of my sweater, makes me think not. But I don’t ask. Like me, he’s probably trying to figure out how to do this whole friendship thing with someone he’s already slept with.
“All right, well, thanks, friend.”
Turning away from him, I take the stairs up to my front door two at a time.
After I slip inside, I turn to shut the door behind me and through the large glass pane, I catch sight of Aidan standing on the walkway.
My stomach swoops low in my belly as our gazes lock, and the smirk on his face as he shakes his head slightly tells me he thinks I just ran away like a scared little kid.
And maybe I did. Because what I said to AJ back in her office before I went to Bermuda—that if there’s one thing I excel at, it’s attracting assholes—is still true.
Whether Aidan Renaud is actually an asshole, or he’s just really good at pretending he is, remains to be seen. But the fact that I’m wondering what it would take to unravel that mystery is, in itself, the problem.