Bliss Brothers (Complete Series), page 55
“You want to leave Bliss?”
I look him in the eye. “Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.”
Beau considers this. “I’ve thought about it. But I thought more about the fact that I was pretending to be someone I’m not. For years. Just to keep up appearances.”
A snort drags itself from the back of my throat. “That was keeping up appearances?”
“I didn’t say it made sense.”
“Well, none of this makes sense.” A hole widens in the center of my chest—a ragged, gaping wound. It’s invisible, and it’s still fucking disgusting.
“You don’t have to stay,” Beau says simply. “If it’s about appearances for you.”
“I don’t care about staying or going,” I tell him, because it’s the truth. “I only cared about her.”
“She’ll come around. You want to go get a drink?”
“No. I’ve got to finish up.” I wave vaguely behind me.
“Find me at the bar if you change your mind.”
*****
I didn’t change my mind.
The boathouse has been dark for two hours, and I’m in here like a serial killer, sitting on the counter, staring out the window. I still can’t wrap my mind around her ridiculous decision to go to Seattle. Out of nowhere.
Seattle. What the fuck is the point of Seattle? She doesn’t have to go to Seattle.
And I don’t have to stay here.
In fact, now I’m not sure that I can stay here. How’s that for irony? I thought that if I fell for her, I’d somehow jeopardize my future at Bliss, which I’m not even sure that I want. I am a fucking idiot.
I fell for her anyway, and now everything is in ruins.
“Ruins,” I whisper, like I’m a creepy voiceover artist.
Then I hop down from the counter. There’s nothing left to do. There’s no more paperwork, nothing I can clean or straighten. The season is winding down, and there’s no denying it anymore. It’s time to move on.
Plus, every time I look at that dock I want to throw myself into the water and float out to the ocean. That’s impossible, by the way. Ruby Bay doesn’t flow into the ocean. I mean, on some level it does—there’s always a way to the ocean in the water, or whatever it is they say—but whatever.
Fuck all of it.
I take one last slow turn around the boathouse. It’s dramatic, and I know it. I’ll be back tomorrow. But this is the last time I’m going to think of it this way. This is the last time I’m going to wallow in sadness. I will forever forget the way I fucked Katie Lennon on the sofa right there and ruined our friendship forever.
Balls.
I stride through the office, go down the narrow hallway—where we kissed, but I’m not going to think about that anymore, either, and fling open the door.
I can’t stop the scream. It rises from back in my throat even as the goose bumps rocket up my arms and wrap around the back of my neck. Run, my mind whispers, but my body is frozen, glued to the spot. The scream echoes back at me from the water.
There’s a ringing silence.
And then—
Laughter.
Katie falls to her knees outside the door, laughing like she’s never heard anything funnier. Indignation burns its way up my spine, battling against the chill of the goose bumps.
“Oh, my god, Huck—Huck, you—you sounded like that guy in all the movies, the Wilhelm scream…what are you doing here in the dark?” She tips her head back and wails the last part.
“I was thinking,” I say icily. “What are you doing stalking me? Are you here to murder me or something?”
“You are so obsessed with murder,” she laughs, each word punctuated by a breath. “I’ve never wanted to kill you. I love you, Huck. That’s what I wanted to say. I fucking love you. I’ve been a little bit in love with you since middle school, and I thought—I thought that we could have a couple weeks here together and I thought I could keep our friendship in a bottle, just like in college. But it’s not college anymore. And I don’t want to be friends with you anymore. I want to love you. And that scream.” Tears stream down her face, and a blazing heat rushes over every inch of my skin. My knees are shot through with water, every tendon loose, and my lips are numb.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I love you. Please don’t be my friend anymore,” Katie chokes out the words. “I love you.”
I pull her up into my arms then, her body loose. The scream probably scared her as much as she scared me with her pale silhouette in the doorway. “I love you,” I say into her hair. “It was never really about the sex, though the sex was really good.”
“It was great,” she insists. “It was so fucking great.”
“It could still be great. But Katie—I don’t know if I want to go Seattle. I also don’t know if I want to stay here. I’m a wreck. I am Huck Bliss, professional train wreck. Kayak wreck. Whatever.”
Katie presses her lips to mine, and there it is—the solution.
Nothing else matters, as long as she’s here. Nothing.
“I love you,” I whisper against her lips.
“Let’s go have sex,” she whispers back.
“Deal.” She starts to push me backward, into the boathouse. “Not in there. It’s got to be haunted now by the scream that we’ll never speak of again.”
We have to wait for her to stop laughing before we can leave.
20
Katie
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Huck faces me across the table at the library, a package of Twizzlers between us. I love Twizzlers so much.
I love him even more.
You know, as a sixteen-year-old, I figured that the warm, fuzzy feeling I got whenever I looked at Huck was a side effect of a close friendship. Like an idiot, I thought I could go out into the world and find another Huck, and then another. Maybe date one of them. Maybe make one of them my college boyfriend and bring him home to meet my mom and plan a wedding—all in the right order. My parents met in college. I thought that was the one true path.
I was so wrong.
I pluck the bag of Twizzlers from the table, rip it open, and take one out. The first bite is pure comfort. After the second bite, I finally hand him one. Huck accepts with a gleam in his eyes that says I’m hungry, and you’re kind of holding out.
“Let’s negotiate.”
“No employee bungalow,” he says. “If I’m going to live here, I don’t want to rent. Renting is stupid.”
“Your rent is free,” I counter, “so it’s not actually that stupid. You’d rather have a mortgage?”
“Uh, yeah. Equity.” He gives me a look. “You know that. Plus, if we’re also renting in Seattle, we need some kind of financial cushion.”
“And you want that in the form of a house?”
“Yes. On the Club side, like my brothers.” I’m not totally opposed to the idea of owning one of the cottages on the Club side of the Bliss property, it’s just that I never thought of myself as one of those people. A person with the connections and means to essentially join a country club. Who’d have thought?
I smile at him, and he smiles back, the Twizzler held between his teeth, goofy as fuck. “It’ll make it easier to visit my mom if we have a home base.”
“Your mom has a house in Ruby Bay.” He takes another Twizzler. “Is that really a consideration for you?”
“I’m not sure if she’ll sell or not. She’s…she’s different now.” I flash back to that moment at the dinner table, when I noticed the years-long bags under her eyes had lifted. I could still see it—the sadness, the loss of my dad—but it was like a book on the back of a shelf. Not quite on her sleeve.
Huck raises his eyebrows. “I’m glad you noticed.”
“Oh, please. You only noticed because we didn’t talk for a long time.”
He raises both hands in the air. “No need to rehash that sad time in our lives. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Timing,” he says briskly. “April through September at Bliss. October through March in Seattle. Telecommuting for one of us for each half of the year.”
I look at the love of my life across the library table where we spent so many afternoons. He is…kind of an idiot. “How are you going to telecommute working at the boathouse?”
Really, it’s more of a miracle that the firm in Seattle offered me a hybrid telecommuting job. It turns out that if you call your hiring manager with enough swagger in your voice, you can talk them into what is possibly the best job arrangement in the world. Thank god for technology, right?
“I’m…not, obviously. I’ll find something more to do. I’ll have to, since the boathouse isn’t open in the winters anyway. And it’s not really, you know, on my level to spend all my time doing boat rentals.” Huck twines his fingers together behind his head and tips back in the chair.
“Thank you,” I say, slapping my palms down on the surface of the table. “Huck, seriously, why were you even working that job in the first place? And don’t tip back like that. You’ll fall.”
“Because I didn’t want to get entrenched. Aren’t you thrilled about that? Now that I’m not entrenched, like Roman and all my brothers, I can come with you to Seattle. And I’m not going to fall. I’m a grown man.”
“For half the year. And you could fall. Embrace the possibility.” I slip my foot under the table and rock his chair back another inch.
Huck lets the chair fall forward, the legs smacking down hard on the floor. “For half the year,” he agrees. “It’s the best of both worlds. And you are kind of the antagonist in this situation.”
“For now,” I hedge.
“For now you’re the antagonist? Honestly, after the other night, I’m going to make you wear a bell around your neck.”
“Don’t—don’t.” I take a deep breath and let it out as slowly as possible. The way he screamed the night I went to see him at the boathouse keeps me up at night. If I so much as think of it—for one fleeting instant—my body convulses with laughter and it wakes me up. From a dead sleep. “Hoooooooo,” I say. “For now, splitting our time between Ruby Bay and Seattle seems ideal.”
Huck twists the Twizzler into a knot on his tongue and shows me. It’s so gross, but also, he’s very sexy, so I let it slide with only the slightest look of disapproval. Then my words sink in. “What do you mean, for now?”
“I mean, when we have kids, how are we supposed to spend half the year in two different places?”
Huck leans back in his chair, hand over his chest like I’ve shot him with an arrow. “Did you just say kids?”
“Yes.” I sit up straight. “Small humans, made from our DNA. Hopefully smarter than we are on the second gen.”
“Katie.”
“Yes?”
“You can’t do that to me. It’s worse than the staring. I am not ready to be a father.”
“I didn’t say tomorrow. I said eventually.”
“Not so much. You said when we have kids. That’s definitive.”
“You’re definitive.”
He shrugs, a big movement that seems more for his benefit than for mine. “I guess that’s the beauty of having a future. We can just…roll with it. See how it turns out. Not make any crazy decisions while we’re sitting at the library.” He leans forward again. “Are we done negotiating now?”
“I think so. Why?”
“Because.” Huck pushes his chair back and stands up, then looks around and leaps over the table, his feet landing once, softly on the surface. He hops down next to me, puts two fingers under my chin, and raises my face to his for a kiss. “I’ve been wanting to do this. We don’t have to negotiate on that, do we?”
“This wasn’t really negotiating, anyway. We were listing what we wanted,” I whisper into his mouth. “Just kiss me.”
He does, long and slow and deep. When he pulls away, I can see it in his eyes—everything. Past. Present. Future. My entire life, wrapped up in one person. It takes my breath away.
“You’re the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen,” he says, and I feel the shock of pleasure down to my core. This is never going to get old. Never, never, never.
Huck hesitates. “But…”
“But what?”
“But I’m starving, and I can’t eat beauty. I’m sorry, toots. It doesn’t work that way.”
“Toots?” A burst of laughter way too loud for the library slips out from between my lips. “Take me out for pizza, you weirdo.”
“I’ll take you out for the rest of my life.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
“Oh, and afterward? We’re going to…” He leans in close, and my body gets ready to hear something completely filthy. “…go to a meeting at Bliss.” His voice picks up the pace, excitement ringing through. “I think Charlie has news about Asher. Or Roman figured something out. I don’t know. What’s important is that you can wait for me in the hot tub.” He pauses, lifting his eyebrows in a way that should be ridiculous but ends up being sexy nonetheless. “Naked.”
“Gross.”
“Gorgeous.”
“The hot tub, not my body.
Huck offers me his hand, and I take it and stand up from my seat. When I was younger, I always thought that settling down with someone would feel like a thousand other doors closing. Now—here in the library especially—it feels like the only door that matters is swinging open wide. And there’s a butler on the other side, in a nice suit, beckoning me through. Drinks and appetizers.
Fine. I’m hungry, too.
“Did I tell you I met Wilder Felix? That day we had the fight. He and his wife came to rent a boat.”
Huck lets out an exasperated sigh. “And you didn’t call after me? Every single time that guy stays at the resort, I miss it.” He narrows his eyes. “Wait. Are you telling me you’re in love with Wilder Felix?”
“No. Just one-upping you, as usual.”
He winds his fingers through mine and leads me through the stacks. I’m looking forward to the meeting. No—I’m looking forward to the naked part, afterward.
My stomach rumbles, audible in the library hush. “Pizza?”
“Now and forever, baby. Now and forever.”
Epilogue
Asher
It’s been a long time since I was back at Bliss.
It’s been even longer since my father slipped me a slim file of papers, his eyes urgent. It wasn’t long before he died. A week, maybe two weeks. “I just couldn’t tell her about it.” Those same blue eyes—exactly like mine, like all of my brothers’ except Huck’s—begged forgiveness.
“Dad, what?” I didn’t open the folder. “Were you in the mob? Did you have someone killed?”
He barked a laugh. “God, no. If I was in the mob, we wouldn’t still live in New York. We’d live on a private island somewhere.”
I’d shaken my head, hard. “You love it here.”
“Yes, son, I do love it here. Ruby Bay has been our home for many years. But I love tropical weather more. Who wouldn’t?”
“So you’re handing me this big secret,” I’d prompted. “And I’m supposed to do what with it, exactly?”
“What you’ve been doing all these years,” he said. “You go, you make sure everything’s all right, you come back. You’re the man behind the curtain, Asher. Surprise.”
It was a surprise, because the man behind the curtain—the heir apparent, the king in waiting—that was always Roman. Roman wanted to be in charge of Bliss. Roman wanted to take over Dad’s big office someday. Roman wanted all of it, and me?
I wanted something else.
It clicked into place, then. All the trips across the country, and around the world. Those things had less to do with Bliss than I thought, but they were all connected. They all lead back to the resort my father took over and made his own. I find myself here over and over, always coming home, always going.
This time is different.
I don’t know when I’ll leave again, because I don’t have any more directives from Dad. That was the last one.
“Are you sure you’re not going to back out?”
Oh, yes. I’m not making the return trip alone, either. Her big brown eyes lock in on mine, and not for the first time I feel that strange flicker of emotion. There should be nothing there—this is supposed to be a business deal, a way out of a loophole—but I still can’t make up my mind about how I want it to play out.
I still can’t stop myself from thinking—
No. I don’t have time for those thoughts. Not now. We’re almost at the back entrance, about to go through the lobby.
“I’m not sure,” I tell her, because at least I can be honest about that.
Nobody looks at us in the hall, or through the lobby. Nobody notices when we turn down the next hall and go through to the offices. It’s spruced up in here. Roman’s done a nice job. I stop at the receptionist’s desk, and when she sees me, her mouth forms a perfectly round O.
“Asher.” She shakes her head, blinking hard. “Your brothers have been waiting for you.”
“I know. Are they in the office?”
“Roman’s called a meeting.” Sara’s eyes dart from me to the lady next to me, but I don’t offer her anything. I can’t. Not yet. They’re back there.
I lead her through the bullpen, my pulse so loud in my ears that I can’t hear the whispers. I’m assuming there are whispers, anyway. I can’t imagine the staff here has no idea about everything that’s been going on.
Ten feet from the door, I hear him—Charlie.
“I’ve tried everything. And if we can’t find him, we’re going to have to go another route. That’s the bottom line. We can’t have a mysterious expense line. It puts our entire livelihood in jeopardy.”
Beau pipes up. “Alex, what is calm down because this isn’t going to get solved tonight?”
A stifled laugh—must be Beau.
“Can somebody tell me when we’re going to quit discussing this? I’m planning a trip.” Driver.
“I’m planning to trip balls,” adds Huck. “Just kidding. God, you’re a tough crowd.”
“Guys, I’m telling you, we just need to give it a few more days.” Roman’s voice is calming, but Charlie’s had enough.
