Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Kit
When I leave for my jog in the morning, a Do Not Disturb sign swings from the brass knob on Tess’s door. It’s still there come lunchtime, long after I’ve showered and placed an overdue call to Zoey, who both accuses me of being a lovesick idiot and tells me how proud she is in the same long-winded speech. I’m not surprised that Tess is still in bed; the sound of her door closing at two in the morning woke me from a dead sleep. I don’t know how I knew, but instinct led me to the balcony, and there she was. Palm pressed against the dark pool deck and shoulders hunched. I watched long enough for a man I recognized from around the resort to arrive, and then returned to my bed to give them privacy.
Sleep wouldn’t take me back, though. Not until her footsteps thudded down the hall and the telltale squeak of her doorknob turning informed me she’d returned safely to her room.
By the time I spot her at a stool by the outdoor bar in the late afternoon, chatting with the resort owner in hushed tones, I’m feeling off-kilter. My days so quickly adjusted to revolving around her. I don’t know what to do with myself without Tess. Any other woman and I’d consider that a problem. But the syrupy-sweet relief that floods my veins upon seeing her takes up too much space in my head, leaving no room to overanalyze why everything’s different when it comes to her.
I step fully onto the patio, letting the glass door to the restaurant fall shut behind me. She hones in on me instantly. She mutters something to the owner, and his gaze tracks to me. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that’s pity on his face. And I’ve never been accused of knowing better.
Tess braces her ring-laden fingers on the countertop as she slips from her seat. She’s wearing flowy, white linen pants that shift and stir around her long legs as she crosses the bar to meet me where I’m standing. Waiting. Because I know an, I-need-to-talk-to-you face when I see one.
“Look at you, finally up and at ’em,” I say when she’s a few feet away. My joke lands like a cracked egg on pavement. She doesn’t offer so much as a courtesy laugh as she closes the rest of the distance, stopping only when there’s a respectable foot or two of awkward silence hanging between us. I cock my head, studying the tight set of her mouth and her wringing hands. “Is everything all right, Tess?”
She rocks onto her toes and glances sheepishly down at her brown woven leather sandals. Even if her absence today hadn’t been a dead giveaway that something has shifted, her complete lack of sarcastic commentary—or any commentary, really—would do me in.
So this is the part where she pulls away. I knew things were going too well, that I’d won her over too easily. Or if not won her over, at least convinced her that spending time with me wasn’t the end of the world. Now it seems even that fragile belief has been damaged.
The most masochistic part of me doesn’t want to accept it. I blame him for asking, “Do you want to talk about it over dinner? There’s a place close to the aquarium that’s got great reviews?—”
At the mention of the aquarium, her gaze flashes to mine. Her eyes are glossy with tears. The sheen dulls the Sprite-bottle green of her irises, giving them the appearance of tempered sea glass.
Her lips part, then close. Part again. This time, with a breathy voice, she says, “I’ve been thinking…”
I wait a few seconds, but nothing follows those words. So I try for humor. “Well that’s never good.”
Her gaze hardens, nose wrinkling, and for a second anxiety loosens its grip on my throat. If I can get that kind of response out of her, then the Tess I know is still in there. She’s just reverting to old habits, if her self-diagnosis of being a chronic restless soul is to be believed. We aren’t doomed. Can’t be.
Her posture stiffens and she lifts her chin. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let things get away from me at the aquarium. Or the past couple days. It’s given you the wrong impression, and that’s my fault.”
I scoff. “It’s very much not.”
“You’re right. It’s your fault,” she deadpans. “Can you just let me talk?”
I mime zipping my lips and tucking the key into my pocket. She sighs so heavily the man she’d been talking to raises an eyebrow in our direction, but when he notices me noticing him, he returns to the glass he’s been polishing for the last five minutes, this time with more vigor.
Tess follows my line of sight, and when her gaze returns to mine, some of the tension has left her expression. “This trip means a lot to me, Kit. Probably more than it ever has, now. And when it’s over, I’ve got to figure out some things. A lot of things. There’s no space in my life for a fling, and respectfully, a fling is exactly what you said you prefer.”
“I never said that’s what I wanted with you.”
“Oh yeah?” She crosses her arms and settles her weight on her left leg. “So what do you want with me, Kit?”
I don’t know seems like an even worse answer than what she’s assumed. Her gaze settles on my pursed lips, and she nods like I’ve confirmed her suspicions.
“We can be friends. That’s all I can offer you. Take it or leave it.”
A distinctive type of nausea swirls in my gut at the thought of never tasting Tess’s smile again. Never feeling her warm skin beneath my fingertips or hearing the little gasping sound she makes when I roll my hips against her core. I physically ache with the withdrawal of it. But more than that, the idea that I might lose her entirely? When I’ve just gotten her back? Impossible.
“Okay, Tess.” I hold out my hand, pinky erect. “I accept your terms. Promise I won’t kiss you again until you ask for it.”
She balks, pretty pink lips popping open audibly. “I’m not going to ask you to kiss me.”
Her cheeks burn bright in response to my shrug. The truth is, I’m scared as shit to lose her. Scared as shit to have her and not know what to do with her. But I believe my instincts when they say this isn’t it for us. All I have to do is convince her to believe it too.
So I match her stance, arms folded over my chest, and try not to revel in the fact that her eyes immediately dart to my biceps. I smile tartly. “Beg, then. Or politely demand. Whatever you want to call it. Until then, friends.”
“Has anyone told you that you’re the worst?”
My whistle scares a seagull off the patio railing. “It’s come up a few hundred times.”
“Not shocking.”
Nerves coat my throat, but I chuckle through them. My commanding officer once told me during a particularly rough deployment that no one was truly that brave, they were all just faking it to trick their nervous systems into believing it was true. I might’ve taken it to heart, and then promptly applied it to every aspect of my life. But it’s paid off more than it hasn’t. If I have to fake it till I make it where Tess is concerned, then so be it.
“So…dinner then?”
She chews at her bottom lip. I want so badly to thumb the damage. The temptation is so intense that I have to shove my hands into my pockets to be sure I won’t succumb. Just then, my phone starts ringing.
Her slightly sunburnt forehead wrinkles as she lifts both brows. We can blame that on a particularly long beach session yesterday, which I spent the entirety of trying not to ogle her in that tiny blue bikini.
“Who still keeps the volume up on their ringer these days?”
“Me, and, like, so many other people.” I remove my phone from my pocket and grimace at the familiar area code. “One sec.”
I plug one ear to block out the ambient noise of the other patrons chatting around the patio, and hold my phone to the other once I accept the call.
“This is a collect call from Inmate Gage Llewellyn at Jackson County Jail. To accept the charges, press one, or say, ‘I accept.’”
Shit. My spine goes rigid. Tess raises her eyebrows, and I quickly scramble to regain the easy posture I’d had only moments ago. Before my brother fucked up yet again. I cover the speaker with my hand and gaze at Tess as casually as I can. “Sorry, gotta take this. Catch up with you in a bit?”
She stiffly waves me off, an unspoken question in her gaze. Probably the same that’s hidden in mine. Something like, What the fuck is going on?
I take the long, L-shaped hall back to my room with clipped strides as my brother is connected through the line. When his familiar voice drifts through the phone, tired but otherwise unaffected, a bit of the stress I’d been carrying in my chest shakes loose.
“Hey, Kit. How’s it going?”
The keypad on my door blinks green, and I turn the knob to enter my room. “Oh, you know, just shooting the shit. What’s up with you, bro? I imagine you’re having an amazing day, considering you’re calling from the county jail.”
He mutters a curse, and I shove a clammy palm to my forehead. He doesn’t need me to get snarky with him, but my God is it hard not to when we keep finding ourselves in these positions. I want to reach through the phone and shake some sense into him, but I’ve lost all hope that it would help.
“What happened, Gage?”
“Man, I swear it wasn’t my fault. Zack and Easton were fucking around with some speed, and I was just in the room. But we all got arrested.”
I sink onto my mattress just as my stomach plummets to the floor. “Meth? You have got to be fucking kidding me. What were you thinking?”
Before he even speaks, I already know the answer. He wasn’t. He never is. Since the first time he got busted with drugs in the eighth grade, he’s continued on this endless cycle of acting without considering the consequences. So much so that my junior year of college, when he was still in high school, I got the call that he’d overdosed on some pills he’d gotten from a friend that were unknowingly laced with something much more potent. He got his stomach pumped, then our terrified parents dumped their life’s savings into a rehab facility that they really thought would work. Took out a loan when he had to go a second time while I was away on a deployment.
By the third go-‘round, he called me first because he was terrified of their reaction. I’m not sure mine was much better. But I made him swear right then and there that he’d never bother our parents again. It was killing them to watch him struggle, and it was killing me to watch them give up everything for a kid who couldn’t see how his addiction issues were hurting everyone around him. Or if he could see it, he simply didn’t care.
Every time, it’s the same excuse. His friends. Some stranger at a party. Not him. Never him. He was just a victim of the circumstances, and could I please bail him out yet again?
“It’s the last time. I swear, Kit. I’m not gonna talk to those guys no more. I’ll get a job. Get clean. Just please don’t let me rot here.” His voice is as frayed as my nerves. And despite the rage boiling in my veins, it cuts me to the quick. At the end of the day, he’s my little brother. When he calls, no matter how much trouble he’s gotten himself into, I can still hear Mama the day they brought him home from the hospital and placed him in the pillow nest on my lap.
“He’s your responsibility now, Christopher. You’re his big brother. You gotta show him the ropes. Make sure you look out for him. Always. You promise?”
I’ve been keeping that promise all twenty-six years of his life. At this point, I can’t even tell if it’s helping or hurting him that I’m always there to catch him when he falls. Only that it’s killing me.
I scrape a hand through my hair, focusing on the flickering red glow of the clock on the bedside table. It’s late in the afternoon, and a weekend no less. I can get a bondsman, but it’d be no use. The earliest Judge Carson will set bail is Monday. Ask me how I know. “What are your charges?”
“Possession.”
I grind my molars to the precipice of breaking. “How much?”
The line goes dead for so long I pull the phone back to be sure I haven’t dropped the call. The seconds are still ticking past on my phone screen, so I return it to my ear. “Gage, how much were you caught with?”
“Hardly any, man, but they’re also accusing me of intent to sell.” His voice is smaller than it’s ever been.
I’m off the couch and pacing, the only thing that helps temper my racing heart. “That’s a felony. Do you realize that? How could you be so stupid?”
“It wasn’t mine!” he whines. “You have to believe me.”
“I wish I could.” Except experience is a hell of a teacher, and everything we’ve been through to this point tells me he would, in fact, do this. Working in law enforcement, especially in a town as sleepy as Loveless, where drugs are the entertainment of choice among the less savory crowd, I can see it all play out. The dollar signs rack up behind my eyes, like the world’s worst lottery. This is bad. The worst it’s ever been.
And it’s never going to get better. Not for so long as I keep saving him when he’s headed up shit creek at breakneck speed without so much as a plastic spoon for a paddle.
“I’m not paying it. Not this time.” I pause at the glass door to my balcony, gazing out over the swaying palm trees around the pool to try and steady my swimming head. “If you keep going in this direction, you’ll be dead by the time you’re thirty. I’m doing you no favors by saving you from the consequences of your actions, and quite frankly, there’s not much I can do to save you from these. You’ll go to jail, Gage. Might as well aim for time served.”
“Fuck you,” he seethes. The wounded-puppy act drops instantly, and I’m reminded of the time he blackened my eye when I caught him stealing pills from our parent’s medicine cabinet after Dad’s back surgery. The day I truly realized this was not just a young kid messing around, but a man with a serious problem. “If you don’t post bail, I’m calling Dad. He’ll come get me. He’s not a self-righteous asshole like you.”
I hook a hand on the back of my neck, suddenly feeling half my age. I want to volley this problem to our parents. Let them fix it for once, when I’m so weary from doing it for years. But then I think of our mother crying softly while we sat in court for his first misdemeanor, and I blow out a resigned breath.
My baby brother. My responsibility.
“The earliest we can do anything is Monday. You know that.”
Just like that, we’re friends again. In his mind, at least. “So you’ll get me out first thing?”
“It doesn’t work like that. You’ll have to see the judge for your bail hearing. Only then can I get you out.” My gaze drifts to the rooftop bar on the opposite end of the building, where I can just make out the faraway shimmer of Tess’s blonde hair. “Do you have a place to go after? That isn’t with those guys?”
He hesitates, and my heart sinks.
“You can’t go to Mom and Dad’s. That’s an absolute hell no, do you understand?”
“It’s not like you’ll be able to stop me, Kit,” he says pointedly. “They’re my parents, too.”
I bite back a growl. My brain is working overtime, cycling through options. But there’s really only one. I study Tess as best I can from here, as though committing her to memory. How will I explain that I’m leaving? Will she even care at this point? “I’ll be with them. And I will not hesitate to kick your ass if you show up. You may be my brother, but I will not let you bring that shit into their house. Not again.”
His rage seeps through the phone. Silent but so sharp I can feel it lancing my already frayed nerves.
“Whatever, man. You act like you’re so much better than me, but you’re just a prick who couldn’t keep his own wife satisfied at the end of the day. Mom and Dad ain’t much more proud of you than they are of me, huh?”
I close my eyes, shuttering off the world and the emotions his words invite all at once. “I’ll see you on Monday. Okay?”
His response is a guttural curse punctuated by the sound of the phone being slammed into the receiver. I’ve seen inmates do it a thousand times. Imagining my brother in their place has my skin crawling.
My phone lands on the covers with a muted thud. I follow suit, flopping face down into the white comforter. It does nothing to dull the ache now pressing at the backs of my eyes. I feel sick. Terrified. Guilty, for whatever fucking reason. But mostly I feel anxious. Because there’s no going back now. I have to face my parents, like it or not.