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I felt vulnerable admitting that but saw no point in hiding from her or judgment. Again, I’d probably only be here a little while.
I got her attention with that, her lips parting. “Why?”
“Dad’s always between jobs.” I picked at the plastic on my sandwich. I shrugged. “Has a hard time keeping work, I guess. Mental health stuff.”
I felt really, really vulnerable saying that, and I did gaze away this time at Fawn’s snow. I found her name interesting, Fawn, and the snow seemed fitting. A fawn in the snow.
“Well, maybe it won’t be that way this time.”
I glanced at her, instantly discovering something curious.
A smile. Fawn smiled at me, and though it was faint, she did.
I think right away she saw that I saw because she pushed back her hair, fidgeting. “I mean, it sounds like that sucks, so yeah. Maybe it won’t be that way this time.”
“Maybe.” I sat back. “You, um, think I can sit here longer if it isn’t? If I’m not here just two seconds, I mean.”
I’d like to sit with her, I think. I would.
Fawn did that mouth-parting thing again, and instead of responding, she nodded. It was quick and almost shy and made her face red. It’d been red when I came over, but I think just out of agitation that I’d joined her.
That didn’t seem to be the case now, and I smiled at my food. Maybe I would be here longer than two seconds.
Maybe this time it would be different.
CHAPTER ONE
Bru – the present
“How the fuck do you two even know each other?”
My brother’s words had bite to them.
His gaze matched.
Ares Mallick came at Fawn and me hot when we’d come in, but he wasn’t the only one who was pissed the fuck off.
Which was why I was cutting him off from Fawn again.
I cut off his view, cut off any and all contact he could possibly make with her. He didn’t have any right to it according to what she’d told me at the airport.
“I’m going to need you to clarify something for me first, bro,” I said, slipping my hands in my pockets. My brother was taller than me, but I noticed he’d gotten leaner since I’d last seen him. I assumed that was because he wasn’t playing football this year. He actually went by Wolf on the football field, and people called him that. He was clearly still a gym rat, though. His angular jaw was chiseled and defined, and because Wolf was my adoptive brother, we looked nothing alike. He had a tan to his skin that I didn’t have, his parents a mixture of races. His hair was darker than mine too, and more often than not, he kept it back and out of the way. It was long and curly, so I got that. He did that today, and I think I only picked up on his leaner build because I myself had been packing on the pounds in the gym. It’d been something to do between classes.
Yeah, something to do.
Wolf’s reasons for not playing football recently weren’t unknown to me and was almost the reason I didn’t go away to school this past semester. My brother had been going through it, and I wanted to be there for him. What I hadn’t expected when I came back from a semester overseas was all this, though. What Fawn had told me was insane.
Fawn Greenfield…
Behind me, she was looking at everything but Wolf, and it’d been so long since I’d seen her. Been around her…
Gazing away, I faced my brother. “I want you to explain to me what happened last semester. What happened between you and Fawn.”
My brother blinked then and with good reason. I was still having a hard time digesting what she’d told me, and even seeing Fawn at all had been crazy. I’d actually been trying to figure out what I was going to say to my family about my last semester when I saw her.
And then, well, I saw her.
She’d been there right in the middle of Maywood Heights International Airport. She had her phone in hand, and I thought I dreamed her up at first. It’d been a really long time, and I greeted her, of course. We were catching up when she said she missed her flight home and the alternative was her going back to her school, Pembroke University. I was familiar with it since my brother and sister went there, and she was talking like she was going to spend the holidays on campus.
