Neanderthal by Avery Flynn
Chapter Ten
Griff
Kinsey was here at Dixon’s house, talking to everyone and having a grand old time, while all Griff could do was stand on the edge of the living room and scowl while scrolling through the work email on his phone.
Of course, he still clocked the way she laughed at all the right spots when Dixon told her about being chased by Grandma Betty’s attack goose at Gable House. While he shot off a quick emailed response to a question about the latest test results for a new line of hydrating lipstick, he couldn’t help but notice how she heaped praise on Morgan for helping her pick out the perfect bottle of wine to bring to dinner and confessed that she came from more of a moonshine and sweet tea family. Then, when she and Dixon’s fiancée, Fiona, bonded over the importance of STEM education for elementary students, he ignored the incoming text from his dad and shut out everything else but Kinsey.
Normally, this would be where all the pieces clicked together, quick and easy to create a solution. This time? Yeah, he had a better chance of getting Nash to stop talking for twenty-four hours than to make sense of the situation with Kinsey and how he’d been so fucking wrong about love.
He’d done his research. Lust was simply a chemical reaction, a twin hit of dopamine and norepinephrine, followed by a wave of serotonin and then the release of oxytocin and vasopressin to seal the deal. That’s what people were talking about when they said they were in love. They were only putting a life-complicating societal construct on top of what was simply biology. At least, that’s what he’d thought until Kinsey Dalton walked into his gym and he knew the second he’d heard her go general on three grown men that she was the one for him—the woman he hadn’t even realized he’d been waiting for.
Caught completely unprepared, he had no plan, no ideas, and no fucking clue. What was he supposed to do when he’d finally met “the one” and not only was she engaged already, but he couldn’t talk to her even if she were single and flirting her perfect ass off with him? He was an idiot.
A second text notification from his dad flashed across his screen.
Right on time to remind me what an idiot I am, Pops?His dad had won a Nobel Prize in chemistry at the age of forty-two, and to say he was self-important would be an understatement. He loved nothing better than to point out how Griff was wasting what little intelligence he’d inherited from his father on barbecue sauce and Lego sets. It was everything in Griff not to remind his father that he also managed all of R&D for the most innovative cosmetics company in the world.
Knowing he’d regret it, but that it was better than floundering for solutions to a problem that didn’t have any, he tapped the notification.
DAD: The state of affairs Morgan has created for herself is vexatious.
Jesus. And to think half his DNA was from this pompous asshole. Griff looked up from the screen, his gaze catching Kinsey’s. That same shock of awareness that had thrown him at the gym when he’d heard her the first time hit him again, making his jaw ache all over, as if Mac had just landed that bone breaker of a punch a second time.
She smiled at him, and everything went fucking haywire. It was like his brain sent the signal to his mouth to turn up at the corners, but instead his body said fuck that noise and he jerked his head down so fast, his chin almost hit his chest.
DAD: Hello? Are you there? Is your silence because of a question about the definition of the words I used or do you disagree?
The message had Griff grinding his teeth. Just because he chose not to use it didn’t mean he didn’t have a fucking world-class vocabulary. It was so typical of his dad when he was drinking. The insults that sliced right through any of Griff’s defenses. The declarations about the stupidity of everyone who wasn’t Holden Beckett. The inserting himself into everyone else’s business with the intent to force people into living the way he wanted. Still, Griff and Morgan were all the bitter old man had left, so Griff pulverized his molars and maintained limited contact, mostly via text.
Shoving aside the urge to ignore what was no doubt a rye-fueled stewing session, Griff started to type out a response in hopes that all the old man needed was to vent, and then he wouldn’t sling his poison at Morgan.
GRIFF: What situation and why are you concerned?
DAD: This new roommate of hers. It’s highly unusual that someone your sister just met is invited to live with her. Is this a flimflam? Have you conducted a thorough background check?
It was as if their dad had never met his daughter. Morgan was impulsive and headstrong in all caps with a soft heart for everyone and everything. She was exactly the kind of person who would share an apartment with a stranger. Kinsey, however, was no stranger.
GRIFF: She’s known Kinsey for years.
DAD: Online. That’s not real.
GRIFF: Bullshit.
The throb started behind his right eye, the one that always seemed to make an appearance whenever he talked to his dad.
DAD: Cursing is the last resort of the intellectually lacking.
He forced out a long breath as he counted to ten and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the phone before letting himself answer.
GRIFF:Is there a point to this conversation?
DAD: You should be watching over your sister.
He let out a pained groan as his temples got in on the throbbing in his eye. He should have known better. No good ever came from responding to his dad’s texts. The only thing worse would be to visit the family home upstate in person so that he could see his dad drunk enough that he stood at such a tilt that he nearly tipped over. The man was brilliant, a stone-cold genius—even now, when his brain was pickled, he was the smartest person Griff had ever met.
He was also an asshole who wanted to control Griff and Morgan as if they were still children.
GRIFF: Kinsey’s a grown woman.
DAD:Exactly.
He didn’t even know how to process that level of misogyny. That was four-hundred-course level of patronizing patriarchy even for their dad, who excelled at it so much that Griff didn’t even have to put any effort into hearing his dad voice a million unwelcome thoughts in that vein.
There was the time he got off an airplane because, when the pilot came over the intercom to welcome everyone aboard the flight, it was a woman’s voice. Then there was the time he told Grandma Betty, his mother-in-law, that it was unseemly for his son to work in the family business because cosmetics were for women and beneath a real scientist’s intellect.
Of course, all those digs and barbs lost some of their sting whenever Griff remembered that Dad had agreed to become a Beckett at the wedding and let his children carry the Beckett last name instead of his own last name because no Beckett last name meant no access to the Beckett family funds. The man was a complete prick, but he was also a greedy prick, and he wanted money to pay for his research without being beholden to a university or corporation.
Not that it mattered now. The only research Dad had conducted since their mom had died a decade ago was into the numbing effects of rye whiskey on bitter regret.
GRIFF: Bye, Dad.
He pocketed his phone. It vibrated, but he wasn’t going to look at it again. The old man could go fuck himself right about now. Pulse pounding through his head as irritation scraped him raw, he rubbed the back of his neck, needing to feel the sharp sting of it to yank him back from the edge.
For as long as he could remember, interactions with his dad always ended with Griff needing to run off the anger or pound away on a hanging bag to get all the frustration out of his system. Some people said divorce was bad for the children. Those people hadn’t grown up with Holden Beckett as a father.
Demanding.
Never satisfied.
Intense to the nth degree.
Nothing and no one was ever good enough for Dad. Divorce would have been a fucking blessing. Instead, their mom had stuck it out, thinking she was protecting them. Then there’d been the accident that hadn’t been an accident, and he and Morgan had been left alone with an angry drunk who loved to carve out little pieces of them bit by bit.
Clenching his jaw to stop himself from screaming into the void, he looked over and caught Kinsey watching him. She didn’t blush at being caught staring; she didn’t even look away. Instead, she lifted an eyebrow in question as if to ask if he was all right, and just like that, the tension in his shoulders eased and the last echoes of his father’s voice in his head faded away.
It didn’t make sense, but that didn’t make it any less true.
He was halfway across the room, heading straight for Kinsey before he realized it. A hand on his arm stopped him.
Nash stared at him as if Nash had been five minutes into one of his monologues and Griff hadn’t grunted at the appropriate intervals. “Earth to Griff.”
“What?” he asked, unable to keep the annoyance at being stopped out of his voice.
“The Bramble bio,” Nash said, oblivious to or not intimidated by Griff’s perma-snarl. “Have you posted it yet?”
Figuring it was the easiest way to get out of this conversation and over to Kinsey, Griff took out his phone, ignored the fifteen new texts from his dad, opened the dating site’s app, and posted the bio. “Yes.”
Nash grinned. “And so it begins.”
His cousin could enjoy the moment all he wanted. It didn’t matter, because the woman Griff wanted was unavailable and out of the question. He was so fucked, and the bet with his cousins was the least of it.
