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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ares
Red and I fell asleep in the tub.
I fell asleep.
This shouldn’t awe me as much as it did. I’d fallen asleep before with her hugged up against me. Sleep wasn’t comfortable by any means in the tub, but I’d managed despite not being able to find comfort anywhere on any mattress. Over the past few months, I’d grown used to that shit, I guess, but I found sleep with Red. She smelled like flowers and heaven.
And she was gone when I woke up.
I hadn’t gone looking for her. What happened between us shouldn’t have happened, and I had no intention of getting into a friends-with-benefits situation with my ex-fake girlfriend.
More like enemies with benefits.
Red wasn’t my enemy, but I was hers. I’d put her through hell, and I wasn’t going to fuck with her heart that way.
Even if she didn’t love me.
Regardless, I couldn’t handle the back and forth. That was selfish of me to consider my own feelings. They were low on the reasons a FWB situation wouldn’t work for us, but the added stress wasn’t good for me. I wasn’t supposed to be in fucking stressful situations.
Eventually, I unfolded myself out of the tub. I couldn’t tell when, but it was late. I avoided people for my own sanity, but by the time I did run into folks the next morning at breakfast, I found out very quickly no one had heard Red and me. The pair of us were passing ships in the kitchen, and no one stared at us.
That fact hadn’t stopped me from staring at her, though, but she gathered her grub quickly before exiting the room. The parents’ private chef usually kept food around, stacks of pancakes and waffles while holiday music played for whoever passed through. Red had made her circulation through the kitchen swiftly, and I honestly think she didn’t see me before cutting out of the room. Between the Legacy kids and our parents, there were over a dozen people moving around through mealtimes.
No matter. I had every intention of finding her and talking to her later. I wanted to make it clear what had happened yesterday was a mistake. It was a mistake I wasn’t comfortable with, but I found the discussion had to wait when my dad said he and the other fathers needed me that morning. My punishment was still in full swing, and this morning, I got to play workhorse.
The dads piled into cars that morning, the trip to the hardware store a quick one. They needed bricks to build a burn pit behind the Reeds’ house, and I got the job of loading the bricks.
Lucky me.
The job went to Bru and me, as he tagged along too. My buddies had been invited to help, but they’d all opted out, and I would have too had I not been forced.
But I had been. I passed Bru on our ins and outs of the store with bricks. The dads had told us what they needed, then proceeded to let Bru and me do the work. I had no idea why the kid had volunteered, but it was something he’d do. When it came to brown-nosing, he won the award.
I was obviously grumpy this morning. My back still ached due to the tub, and I wasn’t used to all this manual labor shit. I didn’t lift in the gym anymore, just doing cardio these days.
I grunted after dropping the last brick, and it took me a second to angle up and get my back right. Bru set his stack with ease beside me, the guy looking like he was feasting on ’roids with the way his muscles bulged in his T-shirt. I may be a little paranoid, but it felt like he’d been eyeing me since breakfast.
He was eyeing me now, as I stretched out. “You good?”
Nah, but he wasn’t going to know that. I told him I was cool, then got away before he could ask me about anything else. I ended up running into Dad, who asked me the same question. He caught me mid-stretch inside the store. I waved him off. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Okay.” His hand clasped my shoulder. He and Dorian’s dad, Royal, had been chatting about something with Wells’s pop, Jax. I didn’t know where everyone else was, but I assumed somewhere in the store.
The small conversation continued after my dad excused us. He asked if I’d come with him to go look at art supplies at the craft store next door, and I did.
Even if my stomach was in a clench.
My dad and I shared our love for art, my father prolific. One could find his work all over the globe. His use of steel and metalwork was legendary, but he ended up going more toward the business side of the art world. He owned many art galleries, but that didn’t stop him from being a complete badass at what he did.
The craft store was limited in materials, but Dad found some stuff he could use to sketch. He asked me if I needed anything, and I grabbed some charcoal so he wouldn’t look at me funny. I hadn’t sketched in weeks, months.
“So you’ll forgive me for tricking you and getting you away, but I wanted to ask you about something,” Dad said, the pair of us in line at the checkout. He pivoted in my direction. “You changed your major.”
This wasn’t a question, and my stomach had locked when he said he had something to talk to me about. This direction wasn’t so bad, though, and I shrugged. “Yeah.”
I didn’t know how he’d found out, but I wasn’t surprised he had. My mother used to teach at my university. She still had colleagues there who were friends, and my dad was a part of that circle. Even without that link, he was my father and everyone at Pembroke University knew him. He donated money since it was his alma mater, and since he was prolific, he was like a god to the art department there.
