AllFreeNovel
Share Us
His mouth quivers, like he’s trying not to laugh. “Fair,” he concedes. “But I also didn’t kill you when you pretended to have the hots for Sonya to get me to finally make a move on her.”
“Sounds like you owe me a favor,” I say, crossing my arms and glaring at my brother.
But trying to win a glaring contest with Quinn Hott is definitely a lost cause. He just glares right back, and his glare is way scarier than mine.
And for some reason known only to the god of brotherly love, I cave.
“Okay. Yeah. Something happened. A lot happened.”
“You fucked her.”
“I didn’t fuck—” But I stop, cutting myself off at the gotcha expression on his face. “You asshole. Yeah. We—” I throw up my hands. “It was good between us, okay? Best sex of my life. And not just sex. But you knew that, didn’t you?”
“I figured,” he says, shrugging.
Brothers, man. They suck. And also, they’re the best. All my defenses are worn down, and this bad beer tastes really good, and his expression isn’t so much pitying as it is sympathetic. And so I tell him the truth.
“She fell in love with me. She told me after Weggers said he backed Tobuary’s wedding. And I—” I shake my head. “I can’t.”
“You…can’t.”
“I don’t. Fall in love. I’ve tried, Quinn. More times than I really want to think about, and one time that—really fucking sucked.”
His gaze skates into a corner before coming back to rest on my face. “Amen. It sucks when two people don’t want the same thing.”
“And Ivy and I don’t. She wants good friends and a small town. Her house and garden and her theater. I want—” I close my eyes, open them again to find Quinn staring at me. “I want her to have that. I want her to have what she deserves. She deserves to be loved. She’s beautiful and talented and smart and giving. Fun and funny. Amazingly sexy. I want her to have everything she wants, even if I can’t be the guy who gives it to her?—”
“Shane,” Quinn says. “Has it occurred to you yet that you can’t fall in love with her because you’re already in love with her? Because what you said sounds an awful lot like love to me.” He frowns. “Except the part where you want someone else to have her. That’s just being a stubborn, self-flagellating dumbass.”
I’ve never actually been clubbed across the sternum by a two-by-four, but I imagine it feels a little bit like this.
I stare at him.
He stares back.
“But,” I say, “I’m a professional actor. I’m about to start filming the project of my dreams. She lives in Rush Creek, and she’s tied there because she runs this amazing little nonprofit where she helps kids and she can’t just walk away from that. I live in LA, and a lot of the time, my time’s not my own. I don’t control how much I’m in the public eye, and she left life in public behind because she fucking hated it. The last guy she was with treated her like shit and disappointed her?—”
“And you’re afraid you’re going to do the same,” Quinn says.
“No—”
I picture Ivy in the parking lot, telling me she loves me, and in that moment I wanted so badly to reach for her, to reach for the gift she was giving me with her big, generous, willing to try again even if it hurt heart.
I squeeze my eyes shut tight. “Yeah,” I say, before opening them to find Quinn watching me quietly.
He pushes my beer closer to me. “I can’t tell you not to be afraid, man. I was fucking terrified. I can just tell you what I figured out, and maybe it won’t make sense to you yet, but—” He shrugs. “Don’t hate me for saying this, but therapy definitely helps.”
“So I’ve been told,” I say with a dark laugh.
“Nothing that happened in our childhood gave us a reason to feel secure. Nothing gave us a reason to think you could hold on to any happiness that came your way. Kids internalize that shit. You internalized that shit. It’s hard to undo it.” He throws up his hands. “That’s it. That’s what I’ve got.”
I’m having a lot of trouble breathing right. Because…
What if…
What if I…
What if Ivy and I…
