Exposed by Kristen Callihan
Chapter Twelve
Rye
I am changed.I feel it in my bones, in the way the world around me suddenly looks different. Edges are sharper, colors are deeper, smells are stronger. I am aware of the way my body moves through the air, of every ache and twinge gained from losing myself in her. Everything is different.
In the words of “Amazing Grace”: “I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.”
Yes, I’ve taken to quoting hymns in my head. That’s what Brenna has done to me. It’s terrifying. But I’m strangely happy about being terrified.
In short, I’m one messed-up dude.
Laughing, I head for Madison Square Park, where I’m meeting Scottie and Jax at Shake Shack. If they notice my mood, they don’t say a word while we wait in line. True, Scottie keeps giving me disapproving looks, but Scottie’s go-to expression is disapproving, so I don’t think twice about it.
I’m setting my strawberry shake down on the table just at the edge of the park area when Scottie launches his attack.
“You’ve gone and slept with Brenna, haven’t you?”
Pink shake flies over my arm and shirt as my hand reflexively squeezes tight and destroys the cup. “Shit!”
Blandly, Scottie hands me a pack of wet wipes he keeps in his briefcase.
I grab them and mop up the mess before tossing my empty shake cup into the trash. “You did that on purpose.”
One, imperious brow lifts. “Made you mess yourself? If only I had such power.”
Grunting, I sit on an empty chair. “I’m not ruling it out. And quit talking shit. Someone might hear and think you’re serious.” Thankfully, the park is fairly empty today. Even so, I have to shut this line of conversation down. Fast.
Unfortunately, Scottie just stares with that gimlet eye he’s perfected over the years. “You’re evading. It won’t work. Did you have to screw Brenna?”
Anger swarms in my gut and tightens my muscles. He makes what Brenna and I did last night sound cheap, sordid. As it is, I’m having a tough time ignoring how we parted. She’d clearly wanted me out before the sweat we’d worked up had even dried. It hurt, but I didn’t say a word to make her even more uncomfortable. There was no point. Either she wanted me there, or she didn’t. It was her choice. Not mine.
I can only hope that she’ll eventually want me for more. Scottie’s reproachful expression drives home that everyone appears to be hoping for the opposite.
“Enough.” I glance at the line where I know Jax is waiting for his shake. I don’t see him, which means he could be lurking anywhere. “Do not say another word.”
“I’m not going to tell Jax.”
“Tell me what?” Jax asks, popping out of nowhere like Houdini and making me jump. “That Rye and Brenna are bumping uglies?”
I glare at Scottie. “Seriously?”
The man nearly rolls his eyes. “Don’t look at me. I didn’t tell him. I prefer to keep all your secrets to myself. Much easier to manipulate you sods that way.”
Jax frowns. “That’s creepy, Scottie.” He turns to me as he takes a seat. “He didn’t tell. Give me a little credit. I can read you guys like a headline. It was obvious you two are doing the bump and grind. The Humpty Dance. Netflix and chillin’. Etcetera, etcetera.”
“You sound like an Urban Dictionary page,” I mutter.
“Fine. You are fucking. Is that better?” He grins wide.
“No. And we’re not having this conversation.”
“Yes, we are,” Scottie interjects. “Because it’s galactically stupid what you’re doing.”
“Oh, well if it’s galactically…” I roll my eyes and steal Jax’s shake. Chocolate. Good but no strawberry, damn it. “Listen, you two are imagining things. Brenna and I are not bumping uglies.”
“Yes, you are.” Jax takes his shake back. “It’s completely obvious. Every time she blushes and ignores you, every time you grind your jaw and ignore her, you just make it more so.”
“We always ignore each other.”
“Not like this. You two fairly hum with sexual tension.”
“God help me,” I plead to the sky. “Seriously, if you get me out of this nightmare, I’ll be a good boy from now on.”
Jax snorts. “No god would accept that bargain, Ryland. Best you ask the guy downstairs.”
I flip him the finger. Even though he’s probably right.
“Jax’s poetic phrasing aside,” Scottie says. “It’s clear something is going on between you two.”
“Plus,” Jax says. “And this is just a suggestion. If you don’t want anyone to know, you probably shouldn’t suck face in the kitchen during family dinner night.”
Blood drains from my head and rushes to my toes. “Shit. You saw that?”
“That horror is burned on my brain now, thank you very much. Hell, I should get an Oscar for backing out and pretending I saw nothing.”
I scrub my hands over my face, the urge to jump up and run riding high. But they’d only hunt me down later. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” I lower my hands and glare around the table. “She will kill me if she knows we’ve even talked about this. Do you get that?”
Scottie makes a sound of affirmation. Jax, however, squirms like he’s just realized this. Dumbass.
“More to the point,” I go on. “She’ll be horrified and humiliated.” The truth chafes. But I don’t blame her. This conversation is horrifying me too much as it is.
Then something else occurs to me, and I go ice-cold. “Shit, does anyone else know?” Whip knows, of course. But he’s nice enough not to say the words out loud, which kind of makes it still a secret. The others, though… “Does Killian know?”
No, he couldn’t. If Killian knew, he’d be here, punching me in the face.
“Calm down.” Jax leans back to slurp his shake. “No one else knows.”
I pin him with a stare. “Not even Stella?”
He waves his shake with an idle hand. “She doesn’t count. We’re a relationship unit.”
“God.” I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose where a headache is forming. “Which means Sophie knows too.”
Scottie’s smile is brief but fond. “No. I love my wife, but that doesn’t mean I’m unaware that she has the biggest mouth in all creation.”
“You keep things from her?” Jax is aghast.
“Not important things that affect us or our family. But Rye is right to look terrified…”
“I don’t think I looked terrified…”
“The whole group knowing Brenna is consorting with him would devastate her.”
“Thanks,” I grumble. “Glad to know consorting with me is so awful.”
Jax chuckles and slaps my shoulder with good humor. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“You’re about to wear that shake home, Johnny Boy.”
He takes an extra-long suck of it. Asshole.
Sighing, I reach over and steal Scottie’s shake, taking a drink before he can stop me. The man is a low-level germaphobe, so I know he won’t want it back. Scottie gives me a repressive glare.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t fuck with him in this way, but he’s pissed me off. And I’m thirsty. So, I drink some more of his salted caramel shake before I speak. “You’re both wrong, by the way. This thing with Brenna and I just started. And it’s complicated.”
“Of course, it’s complicated,” he snaps. “Which is why it’s stupid.”
“Galactically,” I deadpan, slurping on his shake. Figures he’d get something salty.
His glare is glacial. “Quite.”
When I say nothing—because he’s not entirely wrong—Scottie sighs. “Even you should be able to understand how complicated it will be when this thing goes south, and we’re all left dealing with the fallout.”
When. Not if. As though the very idea of Brenna sticking with me isn’t even worth contemplating.
My teeth grind. “Even me?”
“You’re not the brightest penny when it comes to this stuff,” Jax says.
I’ve played the role of the band’s unofficial clown. Mainly because I don’t like sweating the small stuff, and someone has to lighten the mood. But, until now, I hadn’t thought my guys actually believed I was an idiot.
“I have near-perfect recall and an IQ of one-fifty. Try again, asshole.”
Jax shakes his head. “I was referring to romantic shit. You want to tell me you know what you’re doing there?”
I deflate with a sigh. “Fine. I’m romantically challenged.” I point my stolen shake at them. “And we’re not talking about this.”
“We are,” Scottie states emphatically. “Damn it, Rye. You know it’s a bad idea to get involved with someone in the group.”
They are absolutely killing my post-Brenna-sex high. “You all have women who are part of ‘the group’ as you call it.”
“They weren’t part of the group when we started. And they weren’t working with the band—”
“Sophie was.”
Scottie raises his eyes to the heavens and mutters under his breath before trying again. “She wasn’t attached to us at that point. Not in the way you and Brenna are attached.”
“We’ve been a family for over a decade, Rye.” Jax’s expression is earnest now. “You two get together and then break up and it’s like a divorce. We’ll all feel it, and it will hurt. A lot.”
A small, hard lump of disappointment and resentment sits in my chest. I can’t help who I want. I’ve tried to ignore it, and it never went away. But I’ll be damned if I say as much to them.
“Look, I don’t want to fight with Bren anymore, all right? But we’ve been stuck in this…thing. It’s like we can’t help it. Whenever we’re around each other, we react like…”
“Angry alley cats?”
“Vinegar and bicarbonate?”
Jax grins. “Way to science it up, Scottie.”
I glare at both of them.
“What I want to know,” Jax says, “is why Brenna hates you so much. I know you asked me not to bring it up again, but considering you two are now getting into it, maybe it’s no longer an issue.”
Slumping in my seat, I eye my two friends. Despite their meddling, I know they care. They wouldn’t be here bugging the ever-loving hell out of me if they didn’t.
“I don’t know how it got so bad. I mean, I know it started when you all insisted on that stupid interview…”
“Not our best hour,” Scottie murmurs dourly.
Back when we were about to go on our first world tour, Brenna made a bid to become our official PR manager. She’d been doing PR for us since the beginning, but given that she was eighteen, we had some reservations. Sure, we were only twenty, not much older than her, but she was Killian’s little cousin; we wanted her safe and at home. But Brenna wanted her shot, and who were we to stop her? So we decided to go over a few ground rules. All understandable, until the meeting somehow turned into making sure Brenna could contain her obvious crush on me.
What a bunch of asshats we’d been. But I’d been the worst. Embarrassed and more than a little tempted by Brenna, I’d gone into total shithead mode. I wince at the memory, the exchange clear as a bell even now.
“I know you’ve had a little crush on me, Berry.” God, the ego on me.
A lovely shade of raspberry had washed up all the way to the dark red roots of Brenna’s hair. “Of all the…I do not have a crush on you!”
I could have stopped there, but no, I had to make certain she hated me, thinking back then that it was better that way. Safer. “You really shouldn’t. I’m a terrible bet. Total player. No offense, Bren, I like you but you’re not my type. At all.”
“Likewise,” she’d gritted out.
Again, I could have stopped. But the guys had been watching. Killian had laughed, a relieved sound like he knew all along Brenna couldn’t have been so foolish. It dug at a sore spot I never knew I had. And I lashed out. Like a jerk.
“I mean the very idea is laughable.”
“Laughable?” She’d drawn herself up then, lifting her chin, fire flashing in her amber eyes. It was at that moment I truly saw the Brenna I know today. Cool, confident, and oh so disdainful of me. “Listen here, buttercup, I could twist you around my finger if I so choose. But you’re not worth the effort.”
She’d been magnificent in her rage. And I’d eaten it up, getting off on it in a way I couldn’t explain. We’d gone another few rounds before the guys shut us both up.
I wince at the memory and rub the back of my stiff neck. “It should never have happened that way. She didn’t deserve it.”
“Hey,” Jax protests. “We were just trying to keep her safe.”
I sit up a little straighter. “No, man. We should have given her the same space to make mistakes. We all were players, young and stupid. We shouldn’t have put her on the spot like that. We didn’t have to make it about her and me. Aside from Killian, she could have ended up hooking up with any one of you…” I don’t want to think about that. I’ll get too pissed and have to hit something.
“Ah, hello?” Jax starts with a laugh. “The only one she had a massive crush on was you.”
Hearing him say it aloud has my heart thudding with a weird mix of pleasure and regret. For a brief moment in time, I’d had Brenna’s regard. And then I lost it.
“Yeah, well, I killed that crush forever.”
“Like I said,” Jax mutters. “Not the brightest penny.”
“I had to do it. She kept looking at me that way…” Tempting the hell out of me. “Even if I’d wanted…Shit. No. You both know Killian had laid down the law and told us in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away from his cousin.”
“He shouldn’t have done that,” Scottie says. “It wasn’t his decision to make.”
“No, it wasn’t.” I pick at the edge of the table where the black enamel is peeling off. “But hooking up with her would have led to hurt feelings and messed with the band.”
“You’re right about that.” Scottie looks at me with something close to hesitation before his expression smooths out. “Brenna and I kissed once.”
“What?” Jax and I shout together. Although Jax sounds scandalized while I’m just pissed.
Scottie shrugs. “It was still in the early days when we’d started working closely together. We got drunk and decided to try it.” He smiles fondly. The fucker. “A colossal failure. It was like kissing my sister, honestly.”
I should feel relief, but my petty side is sticking to the point that Scottie got to sample Brenna’s lips before I did.
He catches me scowling and lifts a beleaguered brow. “And we both realized how stupid it was because we both had to continue to work together.”
“It’s only stupid,” Jax says thoughtfully, “if Rye’s sleeping with Brenna to scratch an itch. Somehow I don’t think that’s why.”
They both turn their eyes on me. Dissected and left open in front of them, I fight the urge to cross my arms over my chest. When the silence grows, and I can’t stand it any longer, I let out a breath. “She’s the one that got away.”
I clear my throat and give them a belligerent look. “I know we bicker and snipe at each other. Honestly, it’s some messed up form of self-defense for me at this point. But you think I don’t know the risks in trying to change things? That I haven’t tried my hardest to stay the hell away from her all these years, when she’s the…Fuck it. She’s the only woman I’ve ever wanted to be around for more than a few hours, even when she’s hating me.
“So, yeah, I know. I know the risks better than you chuckleheads. But she’s finally let me in. And I’m going to take the chance, for however brief it might be. Even if I crash and burn and don’t survive the wreck. Because I can’t do anything less and still comfortably breathe.”
Birds chirp and cabs blare. And Scottie and Jax sit there with their mouths agape. Then Jax closes his. “Shit. It’s like that, huh?”
Understatement of the year.
“Yeah. It’s like that.”