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“I guess you’re right. You’ve probably been talking, so you know he’s not here.” My back is still to him, my legs hanging over the dock, bare feet in the water.
“Yeah, well, he didn’t walk away from a lifetime of friendship ten years ago without letting me get a word in edgewise, without letting me explain or apologize. If I’m talking to him instead of you, that’s your fault.”
My whole body goes tense, my muscles nearly spasming.
I shove to my feet, turn to face him, but nothing comes out at first. All my words are too damn jumbled up with the fact that I’m seeing Dusty James for the first time in ten years. His hair is a little longer, just a couple inches, and curly. He’s wearing old, threadbare jeans, a button-up shirt with paint stains that says Dusty’s Collision Repair, and work boots. He has sun freckles on his golden skin and his forehead is wrinkled in anger. He’s still about two inches taller, which is a dumb thing to think since obviously he hasn’t still been growing that direction since I last saw him at twenty-five.
He’s got thick-ish scruff along his jaw, body still broader than mine. Dusty hit a growth spurt when we were teenagers and wasn’t the gangly, scrawny kid anymore. But his blue eyes are still filled with fire…and like he’s always been, he’s fucking beautiful. That truth rubs me wrong.
“What are you doing here, Dust?”
He throws up his arms in frustration. “Hell if I know. Clearly, you’re not going to give me the benefit of the doubt. I guess I just thought that after all these years, we could have a normal conversation like a couple of adults. I see that your hate for Rhett is bigger than anything else. Goddamned Swift brothers. You’re all the same.”
He turns, stalking away, footsteps heavy.
Something scratches at my chest, words fighting to climb up my throat. Not knowing what they’ll be, I still open my mouth and let them out. “You don’t wear your glasses anymore.” Why the fuck that’s what comes out, I don’t have a clue, but I can’t do much about it now.
Dusty stops, and this time he’s the one with his back to me, shoulders stiff.
I can tell he sighs, before he turns around…hands deep in the pockets of his low-slung jeans. “I got the surgery a few years back. Makes it easier at work.”
He shrugs, then starts walking back toward me.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. All I know is I’m fucking tired. It’s going to kill me to be back here, and I don’t know how to handle that without my best friend.
“I fucked up, Morgan. I don’t know why I kissed Rhett that night, but we weren’t…we’re not—”
“No.” I hold up my hand to stop him, my insides feeling like someone poured acid on them. “I don’t know what I can handle as far as you and me, but I sure as shit can’t hear you talk about that night with Rhett or any other nights you might have had with him. Whatever happens, you can’t talk about that.”
I don’t know why it fucks me up so much, the thought of Dusty with him, of Rhett touching him and kissing him… I squeeze my eyes shut, pushing out the mental images. I can’t forgive Rhett for trying to take Dusty from me, for trying to steal the only person who has ever understood me.
“Okay, but I need you to know it’s never happened since then, and also that he is my friend now. I’m not gonna cut him off the way you did me.”
His words are the sharpest of blades right to my gut. My fingers twitch to grab myself there, but I don’t allow myself to do it. Rhett is his friend, and he’s letting me know that it won’t change because I’m back. That shouldn’t bother me, shouldn’t hurt, but it does.
“You were always mine, Dust,” I manage to say, hating the vulnerability in my words. He’d been the place where I didn’t have all those expectations on me that came with being a Swift. My best friend. The one who held all my secrets, whom I went to when everything else was shit.
“Yeah, I was.” He tugs his hands from his pockets and looks out in the distance, sun glinting off his hair. “But you threw me away.”
“You were fucking my brother!” jumps from my mouth in a loud bellow, but he doesn’t even flinch.
“I wasn’t fucking him. I’ve never fucked him. It was one dumb kiss, a mistake. But why would you care so much if I did? We were friends, not lovers.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about this.” I turn and start heading toward the end of the dock, Dusty hot on my heels.
“But you brought it up. Why does it matter if we hooked up?”
“Because you were mine,” stumbles from my mouth again. “My best friend. My…person. And you knew how I felt about him. How he felt about me.” My heart runs a marathon in my chest. “He wanted to hurt me, and he used you to do it. I don’t… I can’t…” The words are trapped inside me, all of them thrown together and shaken up so I can’t make sense of them.
“Jesus, this family. None of you talk to each other. You’re all so fucked up, blaming yourselves and blaming each other. Do you know how hard it is for me to see your dad and not tell him what I think of him? I fucking hate that man for the things he’s let happen to you.”
And this right here, this is what Dusty has always been to me. What I lost. What we lost. Because before that night, he always had my back, and I always had his. I never would have thought it possible for him to hurt me, and I would have cut out my own heart before hurting him.
But he’d gone to Rhett instead of me. Whatever was going on that night, he chose my brother, and I don’t know how to make peace with that.
Dusty keeps coming closer, doesn’t stop until he’s right in front of me. He smells a little like paint, but also like sugar maples, a mixture of sweet cherries and spice.
“You were leaving,” he says, the words bouncing off my heavy breaths.
