Walk on the Wilder Side by Serena Bell

33

Brody

“Connor.”

He ignores me.

“Connor!”

He breaks into a run.

I chase him all the way to the parking lot and manage to grab his arm right before he reaches his truck. “Connor. It’s not what you think.”

“What do I think?” he demands. “You tell me what I think. You fucking explain to me what I think.”

I take a step back, let his arm drop. “She and I—we—”

He raises both eyebrows. “Oh, Jesus, Brody, what kind of fucking mess have you made?”

It’s a blade between the ribs.

We’re both out of breath from the run, and he’s glaring at me so fiercely that it hurts. In all the years I’ve known Connor, he’s never gotten mad at me like this.

He really, really fucking doesn’t want me with his sister.

I need to not think about that too hard.

“This isn’t just me getting my rocks off, Con. I care about her. A lot.”

“Jesus, Brody.” Connor’s head is down, but when it comes up, I see something in his eyes that shakes me to the core. Pity. “Dude. This is what I was fucking afraid of. This is why I told you to leave her alone. I knew one of you was going to wreck the other one and I’d have to pick up the pieces.”

“What are you talking about?” I demand.

“I’m talking about the fact that you are obviously in so deep here, and she’s just—”

He winces.

“What?”

“I heard her say something to her friend. On the phone. I didn’t put it together, because I didn’t know then that you were—” He hesitates again. “—with my sister. But now I know she was talking about you. And it was a while back, so maybe it doesn’t mean anything. But I just thought you should know. Maybe it’ll make it easier to walk away.”

I’m staring at him with a sensation in my gut like wet concrete. “She said it was her”—his hands come up in air quotes—“walk on the Wilder side.”

Walk on the Wilder side.

“She didn’t mean it that way,” I say.

“Maybe not,” Connor says. But he doesn’t sound convinced.

“When was that?”

“It was a while ago,” he admits. “Couple of weeks at least.”

“Things were different then.”

“Different how?” he asks.

“We hadn’t—we weren’t—”

But when I think about it, when I go to explain to him what’s happened, it melts away like sugar in water, insubstantial. We have spent lots of time together, but never, in all that time, did she suggest that she might want to drop the plan. She never said I was more to her than a good time or that she was weighing the possibility of putting Boston on hold.

So maybe it’s not so different now.

“I’m going to talk to her,” I say, trying to hold onto the confidence that I felt earlier today, when we put Justin in the carrier on her chest. Or the confidence I felt yesterday when I made her come with my mouth. “I’m going to ask her to stay.”

“Brody, no,” Connor says, sounding so alarmed that my heart grinds to a stop. He’s shaking his head. “Please don’t.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this serious about anything. Not even the time he begged me not to ask Julia Shree to the senior prom because he was—he claimed at the time—in love with her.

I didn’t.

He wasn’t.

But the point is, Connor is pleading with me.

“Please don’t, Brody. She’s been through way more than enough. I’m asking you not to make this complicated for her. Just, put a nice neat ending on it. Closure. Tell her you had a really good time but you know she’s got a life in Boston. You’ve known Rachel her whole life, Brody. She wants it all. The white wedding dress and the suburban house and the Ivy League husband. She needs things nice and organized and steady. Predictable. She needs to keep things neat. Let her go back there and live in her sublet with her friend Louisa and take her librarian job. Let her meet a guy who’ll take good care of her and make it easy for her.”

A guy who’ll take good care of her and make it easy for her.

I can almost see it. The kind of guy Connor means. They meet at a party with some friends. Or maybe an event connected to the library. A library fundraiser. He’s there in dress pants and a button-down shirt, and he chats with her about books they’ve both read. He asks her out to a nice restaurant and drives her around in his Prius, and he lets dates three, four, and five pass without putting the moves on her because he wants to make sure they’re really comfortable with each other first.

“And you’re—” Connor rakes a hand through his hair. “You’re not—”

He stops.

“I’m not that guy,” I say, so he doesn’t have to.

He scowls. “Jesus, Brody, I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

This is Connor. My best friend. The guy who has been with me through thick and thin. The guy who knows—who should know—that I would never do anything to hurt his sister. Who should see that I am fiercely loyal and totally faithful and trying so fucking hard to turn this ship around and make myself into the kind of man who deserves a woman like Rachel.

And if he can’t see it?

Maybe it’s not there.

Maybe all the people who didn’t think I had it in me to take care of the people they loved—my dad, Gabe, Zoë…

Maybe they were onto something.