AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Oh, come on—” But Alec’s automatically defensive protest subsided as he accepted the truth of that. Despite being fully aware that Lilly objected to relationships and anything beyond this short interlude in Santa Barbara, he’d thrown out his, I think you should let me be something to you. I want you to be something to me—and expected her to fall right in with his amended plan.
“We can keep it simple, stupid, and bring up the obvious,” Jojo continued. “Maybe you, Alec Thomas Thatcher, as unbelievably hot and eminently eligible as most women no doubt find you to be, do not actually do it for Lilly.”
He stared at his sister.
“Float her boat,” she added helpfully. “Flutter her gills, make her octopus arms dance.”
“You are seriously freaking me the fuck out.”
“I’m finding the ocean inspiring today,” she said with a guileless grin.
“Not about your ridiculous analogies. But because you think I wouldn’t know when a woman is genuinely into me. Into us.” Despite whatever words she said.
“There was that little inappropriate crush you had on the piano teacher,” Jojo said in a sing-song voice, her gaze sliding skyward.
“I was eight years old!”
“She did enjoy that Valentine’s card you made her that vowed endless love, spelled l-o-v-v-e.”
“Damn it, family lore needs an edit function, like Wikipedia. Nobody should remember that.”
“Forgetting is not an option,” Jojo said, serious now. “It’s what we have left, it’s what’s holding us back, it’s what’s keeping us together.”
He thought of his brother, he thought of last night’s movie, he thought of the last five years. “I hate it when you’re smart.”
“I’ll go back to being a smart-ass then.”
“No, Jojo. I need your thoughts, I do.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lilly had a rough childhood. I don’t want to tell things that are not mine to share, but it’s left her…cautious. No, beyond cautious, it’s made her certain she can’t have a man, children, a family life like…”
“Like we had. A marriage like Mom and Dad. I could tell from talking to her she admires it.”
“That marriage wasn’t perfect. Isn’t perfect.”
“No, but from the beginning they shared the same vision. That’s the foundation.”
He read between the lines. “You and Timothée?”
“Timothée was a rock-hard realist and I was wandering around in the clouds. We didn’t share the same plane of existence, let alone a vision.”
“I’m sorry, Jo.” Timothée had rubbed Alec wrong from the start and he should have been more mindful of his sister and the choices she was making. “I should have talked to you and—”
“We were all reeling, Alec,” she said. “Everybody coped in their own way.” A beat of silence passed. “Now…what are you going to do about Lilly?”
He pinched the bridge of his nose again. “I’m sure given time I can convince her to see me in LA, just getting together once a week or so to start. But at the moment she’s in full retreat, and I need a chance to change that momentum.”
His head dropped back and he closed his eyes. “But fuck, I don’t think she’ll even talk to me now.”
Drawing in a breath, he straightened up and looked over at his sister. “Maybe I should leave it alone. Leave her alone. For God’s sake, when I checked into the resort I was no more interested in coupling up than she was.”
“Okay.”
“I could go back home and go back to the very comfortable status quo.”
“Okay. But do you really want that?”
He hesitated.
Jojo skewered him with a narrow-eyed look. “Do you really want that because you have a true aversion to marriage and would be content that your future connections to others would solely exist of your online fantasy football leagues and those people you come across during your early morning runs at the zoo whom you know merely by sight but never by name?”
He grimaced. “What do you think I really want, Dr. Freud?”
