Chapter 31 Brie
brIE
I pace in front of the windows while Sawyer’s in the shower. How do I know he’s in the shower? Did he tell me he was going to take a shower? No. Did he look at me before he walked into the bathroom? No.
Did he walk into the bathroom without even a glance, shut the door, then audibly locked it? Yes. Yes, he did.
What am I even doing here? I’m not that same teenage girl. I don’t have to take his shit. When I ran and hid (yes, I’m big enough to admit it: I hid) in the bathroom earlier? That’s the last time I act like that little girl.
I look out the back windows, past the covered porch. It can’t be more than six miles to Gia’s house. It’s barely snowing anymore. Surely businesses have salted the sidewalks by now. Maybe the streets in town are even cleared.
In a split second, I make the decision. I hurry to where I deposited Sawyer’s jacket by the door, and pull it on.
I take his gloves for good measure, and his stupid hat we used as a blindfold for that stupid game.
Then I shove my feet into my shoes and walk out the door into the cloudy haze of the late-afternoon.
In my seething ire, the door shuts behind me with a bang.
I storm off with enraged confidence, not bothering to look back or give myself time to second-guess. This is the right decision—I can sleep in my bed at Gia’s tonight and never see Sawyer’s stupid face again.
I’m not even halfway down his salted walkway when the door behind me opens and slams shut again.
“Brie!”
No. Refusing to let my guard down, I keep my gaze ahead and storm off harder. I will not be deterred. I will not be persuaded. I will not be coerced.
I hear the quick slapping of sandals, and in no time he’s in front of me.
Naked.
Well, not totally. A towel is slung low on his hips, and he wears those slides I wore for the tour of his house.
But his hair is dripping and his incredible torso glistens.
His defined pecs and abs tense and goosebumps erupt as flurries melt on his skin.
His large shoulders lean toward me just a fraction as he runs those long fingers through his damp hair.
“Where’re you going?” he asks.
“Thought I’d try living with the forest animals, what do you think? I’m going back to my sister’s.”
His eyes narrow. “Gia’s?”
I jut out my chin. “Exactly.”
His expression turns hard. “You want to walk almost seven miles to Gia’s house.” He moves closer to block my path and looks down at me head-on, face twisting in outrage. “What’re you trying to prove? That you’re insane? No.”
The fucking audacity. I stare up at him, heart pounding. “No? You don’t get to tell me no. You have no bearing on what I do.”
He huffs out a breath. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you back there, but I won’t let you walk in the snow and ice, down the mountain and through town for almost seven miles dressed like that. Your feet would freeze before you make it a half-mile.”
The fact he isn’t wrong sends another bolt of irritation through me.
And there it is again, louder this time: that nagging sense I’m missing something.
Nothing about this situation makes sense.
Why is Sawyer making me come one minute, rejecting me the next, and worried for my safety now?
Hot, cold, hot, cold. Why has this been his game for years?
And why are we stuck up here in the first place? I can’t think clearly when his throat pulses like that, his eyes boring into me as snow kisses his naked torso. But Sawyer living in a half-built cabin on this mountain feels like an elaborate ruse to trick me. It doesn’t fit the Sawyer I know.
“Why’re you even here anyway?” I snap. “Why don’t you live where you belong?”
If he lived in Belmont like he should, I never would’ve been stuck with him in the first place.
“And where’s that?”
“Town! The north side of town! Northwest, if you want me to be specific. That’s where your kingdom is.”
He practically sneers, “Town isn’t for me.”
That doesn’t make any sense. It is exactly for Sawyer. The Strongs, collectively, are a paragon of Belmont. The most affluent neighborhood in town.
Unable to swallow the question down, I ask, “But, why?”
His eyes darken, and I can see him weighing his answers in his head. The muscles in his torso are strung tight, but he gives me an airy shrug. “It’s where all the hoity-toity folks live.”
“But you’re the hoitiest of the toities,” I insist, as if it isn’t the most ridiculous sentence to come out of my mouth.
He gives me a flat look, like there’s something I’m so obviously missing here. And clearly, I am. Clearly, I just don’t get it. Yet he’s done nothing to help me get there, given me no hints or clues to any of the questions slithering in the back of my mind.
If he doesn’t want to talk about town, that’s fine, I have plenty of other things to ask instead.
I roll my shoulders, readying myself for the next stage of our verbal battle. “What happened to your old truck?” It sounds like a challenge. I dare him to tell me.
Both hands tighten into fists. “Got rid of it before leaving for the Navy.”
“Why didn’t you get something better when you came back?”
Now he’s grinding his teeth. Now he’s aggravated. It’s in every flex of his muscle, every protruding vein in his neck.
“Define better.” He starts back toward the house.
Is he walking away from me? Shutting down on me? Again?
I am so tired of dancing around the meaning of things. He’s being intentionally evasive. He is impossible to talk to. But I’m not letting him off this time. He has nowhere to go and, apparently, neither do I.
Stomping up the steps behind him, I say, “Why did you decide to become a principal? How come you’re not outsourcing all this hard manual labor?” I gesture to his house as we enter it.
He grinds his molars as he takes a pair of boxer briefs from a dresser and pulls them up underneath his towel. My eyes involuntarily follow his every movement. He dries his hair with it before tossing it over a chair.
My brain glitches as I take him in, clad only in his black underwear before he throws on a pair of jeans that sit low on his hips. The horny part of my brain protests when he puts on a Navy t-shirt, and it’s all I can do to internally tell the slut to shut up.
“Why’d you go into the army?” I ask, intentionally trying to get a rise out of him.
He points to his chest. “Navy.”
“Are you going to answer any of my questions or just stand there? I’ll even give you some easy ones. How do you know I don’t like peppers? How’d you—”
“I paid attention,” he interrupts.
Paid attention. He’s talking about before, when we were younger.
I let out a humorless laugh. “That much is obvious. You knew just how to push my buttons.” I shove my fingers into the air at imaginary buttons. “Just which ones to push for maximum humiliation.”
His eyes harden on me. “And you think I don’t regret that? You think it didn’t keep me up at night, even then? That it didn’t keep me up at night for years?”
For a moment, I stand still, shocked, but I recover just as quickly. “What, I’m supposed to feel sorry for you? Poor Sawyer! He felt bad for intentionally humiliating me for years! Oh! And laughing about it with his friends!”
All the pain of those moments hits me like a tsunami, except I’m not sad about it anymore.
I’m furious. Sawyer robbed me of a happy school life.
The one place I should have been able to forget about my problems at home, about my dad, the bills, the rundown house I was behind on maintaining, and Sawyer made it a different kind of hell without a second’s thought.
Between clenched teeth, he says, “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. There’s no excuse for what I did. None.”
He averts his gaze, watching the floor. His body is strung tight, jaw clenched.
I snort. “Is that seriously all you have to say to me? Is that your version of an apology?”
His eyes cut to me. “There is no apology big enough to encompass everything I did. Any words would be meaningless.”
Like a bull, my breath blows out through my nose, my head dips as I glare at him through slitted eyelids. I’m practically pawing at the ground, ready to charge at him.
“Try,” I snarl. “Or, better yet, tell me why. Why did you do it? Day in, day out, for years. Did you just hate me that much?”
His laugh is hollow, and his voice rises a little. “I didn’t hate you. That was the problem!”
I’m so close to actually strangling him. “I’m sick of your riddles, Sawyer. Just say what you mean!”
Tugging on his hair, he lets out a loud huff and turns away from me. After a few steps, he circles back around, huffing again. I recognize his expression. It’s the same one I just wore. He’s about to explode.
He stops a few feet away, hands in his hair. “You really want to know?”
I shout, “Yes, I want to know!”
Turning, he paces away and back again. “Fine!”
“Just tell me!”
“I was obsessed with you, Brie! Ever since we were little kids, I was fucking obsessed.”
My mouth drops and I swear my heart literally stops in my chest. Surely he can’t mean what it sounds like.
“You were shy, but sure of yourself,” he says.
“You barely ever spoke, but when you did it was honest, none of the usual bullshit that comes out of people’s mouths.
You were clumsy, but determined. Even when you were down, even when something awful happened, you’d brush yourself off and just keep going. ”
Anger replaces my shock as I take in his words. “What was I supposed to do?” I spit out. “Curl up in the fetal position and cry? Beg you to stop? Fight you?”
“No! Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Sawyer, you only made fun of me. You made my life a living hell. Constantly.”
He blinks rapidly. “I know.” He shuts his eyes and presses his lips tight, shaking his head. “I know.”
“So you see why I can’t believe you,” I say more quietly. “I can’t believe you were ‘obsessed’ with me and still treated me like shit.”
When he opens his eyes, they’re red. It barely makes a dent in my fury.