Walk on the Wilder Side by Serena Bell

23

Brody

It takes a while for me to get Justin settled in the portacrib, but once he’s down, I text Rachel. Come over? I give her the address.

While I’m waiting for her, I tie flies, sitting on the couch in front of my coffee table. Beads, cord, feathers, yarn, hooks, spread out in front of me, my mind blissfully empty, as it often is when I tie.

This is my meditation, right here. One beaded nymph after another, while the sedges and midges I’ve already finished form small, neat, satisfying piles.

Tying flies also brings my father back to me, because fly fishing was something I usually did alone with him. Gabe never loved fishing the way I did. He liked hunting better. So when my dad and I went together, there was no Gabe to upstage or one-up me. There was just the river, the line, the fly, the fish—and me and my dad.

Wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap.

Rap, rap, rap.

When I open the door, she’s standing there, absolutely beautiful with her hair down and her I’m here if it’s no trouble smile. I want to pull her into my arms and make love to her all night. Fuck telling her this story. Fuck everything except the way she makes me feel. Instead, I hold the door open, and she steps inside.

She looks around my apartment, and smiles. “This is very you.”

My eyes follow hers, trying to see what she sees. I keep it simple: a comfortable couch, an equally comfortable recliner, a flat screen TV, a coffee table.

She steps to the wall, looking at the framed posters hanging there. One for A River Runs Through It, the 1992 movie that my dad made me watch as a kid for the fly fishing. If she’s ever seen it, it’s probably because someone told her Brad Pitt was hot in it.

She stops in front of my three national parks posters, side by side—Yellowstone, Zion, and Olympic National Park. “These are beautiful. My parents aren’t much for the outdoors, so I haven’t been to many parks.”

“We’ll have to fix that,” I say, before I can think better of it. Because who knows if Rachel and I will ever hang out together again once her visit home is over.

One of my hands closes into a fist.

“I’d like that,” she says, shyly, and I can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.

Just more confusing, maybe.

She runs her hands across the spines of the few books on my small shelf. Mostly mysteries and thrillers. “Loved this one,” she says, pointing to Tana French’s In the Woods.

“Me too.”

“I didn’t know you liked to read.”

“I’m slow,” I admit. “But I don’t mind when it’s not for school. When no one’s riding my ass about it.” I shrug. “Fly fishing’s slow, too. I like slow.”

She smiles in a way that makes me picture kissing her, leisurely and languid, while I move in her. Maybe she’s picturing it, too, because her cheeks pink up.

But before I can take a step towards her, she says, “Justin’s so cute.”

Right. We have things to talk about.

I offer her a seat on my couch and a cold beer. She settles on the couch but says she just wants water—“I drank way too much beer already today.”

We sit for a moment in awkward silence. And there’s no good segue, so I just jam the throttle: “Rachel. He’s not mine.”

Her mouth falls open.

“That’s why I said not to believe everything you hear.”

“But—you were—going to marry his mother?”

“I thought he was mine. I had no clue he wasn’t. God. I don’t know where to start.”

“Start at the beginning.”

That makes me laugh. She makes it sound so goddamn easy, but what is the beginning?

The night I hooked up with Zoë for the first time? The night the condom—from her stash—broke before I’d filled it? The day she told me she was pregnant and it was mine? Or the day Connor told me he’d seen her with someone else?

None of those, actually. The beginning of the end was the day I looked down into my son’s eyes and saw the truth.

“When Zoë told me she was pregnant, I was totally freaked out. But once I got used to the idea, I didn’t hate it. And I started manning up. I registered for a program to get my GED. I buckled down and started turning things around, doing more around the office, taking the business more seriously. I vowed not to fuck up with Gabe anymore. So I could be a good dad and a good husband. And then…”

I stop. My stomach flips, just like it did that day.

“I was in the middle of the fucking GED course. We were doing the genetics unit. The part where they use eye color to explain how genes are recessive or dominant, you know?

“I went home and I picked him up. He dangled there, kicking his little feet and grinning at me. And his eyes were brown.

“I mean, they’d been basically brown since he was born. Kind of a muddy color. Everyone kept saying they’d get lighter, but they didn’t. They were getting browner.”

She stares at me.

“Zoë has green eyes. I have green eyes.” I cross my arms. “And there it was, right in front of me. Justin’s eyes should be either green or blue.”

“Brody, I—”

“I asked Zoë about it. She probably could have bullshitted me. I think I wanted to be bullshitted. But I think she needed it off her chest. I think the lie was killing her. And she just kind of folded. Confessed everything. Two-timing both me and Len, getting pregnant, figuring out it had to be him. He’s married—to someone else—so the path of least resistance for her was to keep the whole thing with Len a secret, let me believe I was Justin’s dad, and put my name on his birth certificate.”

“Oh, Brody.” Her eyes are so tender. “I can’t even…”

I wish she’d stop looking at me like that, because it’s making me feel all the things I haven’t let myself feel, except in the smallest fits and starts.

“I got a DNA test, and, yeah, he’s not mine. So I left. Moved out. Quit the GED course. Starting missing work again, calling in sick, bailing out on charters, like nothing had changed. Like Justin had never been—”

I cut myself off before my voice can break.

“Brody.”

I wave her off. “It’s okay, Rachel.”

She shakes her head. “It’s not okay.”

“But what am I supposed to do about it?” I ask, with a bitter laugh. “I have to let it go.”

“It’s so unfair.” Outrage tightens her voice. “You were trying so hard to be a better person, and you got punished for it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.”

She looks away, staring at the River Runs Through It poster blankly. Then turns back.

“Connor knows?”

I nod. “He’s the only one who knows the whole story. Connor’s always had faith in me, even when pretty much no one else did. From the minute I dropped out he tried to convince me to get my GED. He was convinced if I did, I could join him at college. He tried so hard to talk me into it. I kept telling him I didn’t have what it took, and he kept telling me I was full of it.”

“And with your dad gone and your mom so sick when you were in high school, it probably felt like no one at home cared.”

“Gabe was taking care of my mom and trying to save the business. And I was the fuckup who made it harder on both of them. I can’t tell you how many times one of them had to bail me out of my own shit.”

Her face darkens. “You were a hurting fourteen-year-old boy. What teenager who’d just lost his dad wouldn’t be a mess?”

She says it so vehemently, I almost believe it. But then I remember my dad asking Gabe to run the business and take care of the family. Gabe asking Clark to run the business if he had to move to Boston.

Zoë saying she and Justin would be better off with Len after he left his wife because he was a hardworking guy with a real job.

“I get it,” Rachel says quietly. “Why you value your friendship with Connor so much. If he’s the one guy who’s ever seen you for the man you really are.”

It feels like she’s smacked me in the middle of the chest. In a good way, but also—it hurts.

“And I understand if you don’t feel like you can, um, do this,” she says. She makes a gesture that loops in both of us. “I haven’t been fair, asking you to go behind Connor’s back and risk that friendship.”

I watch her quietly. The way her eyes take me in. Seeing me.

The man you really are.

I have to close my eyes for a second. When I open them again, she’s still looking at me. And I make a decision.

I cross my arms. “Being with you does put my friendship with Connor at risk.”

Her shoulders slump. She straightens right away, but I see it. And that gives me even more courage. She wants this, too.

“But to loosely quote an amazing woman I know—” I reach behind her and gently tug the elastic out of her hair so I can thread my fingers through it— “I don’t fucking care.”

I lean in and kiss her.