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6
Nathan
I turnedto find my stepbrother Nathan. Three years older than me, he was pretty much a real, live, hunk. In the flesh. I had to admit he’d taken my breath away when I was fifteen, and still did, all these years later.
Damn him.
A good foot taller than me, I couldn’t begin to guess how much he weighed. But he was all muscle when we were kids, and clearly hadn’t lost any of it. With his dark hair, glittering brown eyes, and devilish grin, he’d always been a ladies’ man. He never flew solo on Friday or Saturday nights in high school unless he chose to, and after he went to college, I had no doubt it was more of the same.
For some reason though, he never kept any one girlfriend for long. He’d date someone for a month, maybe two, then move on. Somehow, he never had a bad breakup. If anything, all his ex-girlfriends would say he was a great guy afterward. I never could figure it out.
But he was still devastatingly handsome. The years had been kind to him, giving his rock-hard jaw a light dusting of scruff that replaced his boyishness with a new maturity.
“Hey, Nate,” I said, relieved to see a friendly face in spite of my efforts to avoid socializing. “How long has it been?”
After a kiss on the cheek, he grabbed a seat on the park bench next to me. “I think at least a year. Maybe a couple?”
He hadn’t always been so nice to me. Back in the day, he’d been an overly-confident alpha teenage-asshole who’d teased me at home and pretended I wasn’t alive when we were in public. I couldn’t blame him. As the awkward dork that I was, I had nothing to offer him. I only took away from his mojo. And popular high schoolers couldn’t have that.
He turned to face me. He’d always been good about eye contact, at least when he wasn’t ignoring me. “How’ve you been, Gigi? I saw you over here, and wanted to visit.”
It was nice the way he was opening the door to talk about my divorce, but not bringing it up directly in case I didn’t want to.
There was no doubt he knew about it. My mother had a mouth like the town crier.
“Thanks, Nate, but I’m not exactly good company right now,” I said, turning my gaze to the rippling water in the lake.
I could only look at his perfect specimen of male beauty for so long without losing my power of speech.
He took a swig of his beverage, some kind of fancy hard lemonade only Mom would have at a picnic. “Yeah. Okay. Mom… filled me in.”
That was another big difference between Nathan and me. When our parents married, he had no issue calling my mother ‘Mom.’ But I was never able to bring myself to call his father ‘Dad.’ I always felt a little badly about that. But I just couldn’t.
“So you know everything then, thanks to Mom,” I said. “Yeah, shit has not been going well. I’m feeling a little loser-y these days.”
“Oh, Gigi,” he said. “Look, I… wait a sec. I’d… like to talk to you about what you’re going through.”
“Why?” I asked.
So he could tell me what a fuckup I was?
“Look. This is something we need more privacy for. Here’s my idea. See down there, the rowboats?”
Of course I did. About fifty yards away, a pair of them were lined up for anyone at the reunion to use. I suspected they were rented by Mom to give the kids a chance to do something fun, forgetting that most parents wouldn’t want their kids running off with a rowboat on a lake unsupervised. Especially since there didn’t seem to be any life jackets around.
Mom was not a detail person. Probably how she poisoned people with her potato salad.
Potato salad needs refrigeration? Knew I forgot something! Children in rowboats need life jackets? Oops!
“Yeah, what about them?”
He was probably going to challenge me to a race or some other stupid thing we would have done as kids.
Not interested.
I went back to watching at the water, where a couple dragonflies were doing some sort of high-speed dating dance.
He nudged me. “C’mon, miss grump. You weren’t like this when we were kids.”
