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Adam. The name of the man who’d turned my life upside down for the worse.
“It’s fine,” I said. I started walking once more, taking her hand from my shoulder. “If anything, it was my fault for letting things go on for that long. Seriously, I can’t believe that I almost married a guy who’d been having multiple affairs on the side. Mostly, I can’t believe that I was naïve enough not to realize it was happening.”
“You weren’t naïve, Dream,” Clarissa said as she formed up at my side. “You saw the good in him. You’ve always been like that, and it’s one of you best traits.”
“It’s the trait that ended up biting me in the ass.”
“You can’t think that way. I mean, you know what they say about hindsight.”
“This goes beyond hindsight. The stuff I let him get away with…like how he always gave me crap whenever I talked to you. Seeing a text on my phone from you was enough to get him pissed off.”
“God, what a creep.”
“Seriously – he was convinced that you were a bad influence. He thought that because you like to date but not get into anything serious meant that it’d rub off on me.”
“Especially since he was the one cheating on you! Total bullshit!”
“And you know the worst part? When I finally got the nerve to confront him about all the behind my back stuff he’d been up to, he just shrugged and was like, ‘Hey babe, sometimes a guy needs a change of pace, you know?’ Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever heard? I had his phone in my hand, a picture of some nineteen-year-old in nothing but a thong that I’d found in his messages. I showed him and he didn’t even care!”
I raised my finger again, leaning into the full-on vent I was about to launch into.
“And it’s not like I was snooping through his texts to find this stuff. The jackass hadn’t even bothered to turn off the photo previews on his lock screen. All I had to do was press the text and it came up. He didn’t have enough respect for me to hide it.”
We continued along the dock, passing by the tourists taking pictures with the ocean behind them or coming in and out of the souvenir shops. The scent of fried seafood was in the air, my stomach rumbling in anticipation of all the delicious food of my hometown that I was suddenly craving.
“Even worse than that,” I said, really getting into it. “The most hypocritical bullshit of it all, was how he was totally, one hundred percent opposed to not just texts from you, but texts from…well, you know who.”
Clarissa’s eyes flashed, a wry, knowing smile forming across her face.
“You mean those sexy brothers you’ve been crushing on since the day you and I were old enough to have crushes?”
“Clarissa!” I hissed, my face going a deep red. “That’s not what I was going to say!”
She shrugged, the smile still on her face as we hurried up the wooden steps that led to the parking lot.
“Just because you weren’t going to say it doesn’t mean it’s not true. And you know that I’m right.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to ignore how fast my heart was beating at the mere mention of the Wolf brothers.
“I don’t know that you’re right,” I said, coming to my own defense. “I mean, seriously, they’re like brothers to me Hell, they were almost my brothers.”
She let out a loud, totally amused laugh at my words. “It’s funny how you say they’re almost like your brothers like you all came out of the same mom or something. Dream, they were your stepbrothers, by law, for such a short period of time, I don’t even think that counts. You guys never lived together like siblings or anything, it totally doesn’t count – And you’re not blood related, in case you need a reminder. And I didn’t want to bring it up, but that’s not even the case anymore now that your mom and their dad are done-zo. Their marriage was so short lived, I almost want to believe your mom is part Kardashian.”
I sighed, but I also couldn’t help but laugh. It was drama on top of drama with my mother and the Wolf brother’s dad, not that I was terribly surprised. A couple years back, while I was in Chicago and the brothers were busy with their military careers, our parents decided to get married. I had grown up alongside Duncan, Evan and Jay, we’d been close friends for as long as I could remember, so it made things immensely weird when my mom called me and told me she was marrying their dad, rich and handsome Bradley Wolf. The fact that I’d gone from secretly mooning over the Wolf brothers to being related to them through marriage had been more than weird. Thankfully, as Clarissa had said, the marriage had been short-lived, not even making it to the one-year mark, so we never had to spend any family holidays pretending to be, well, family.
Now the Wolf brothers were back to being just some guys in town, and I was still in the process of wrapping my head around it all.
“It’s the last thing I want to think about right now,” I said. It was a lie, and I knew it the second the words came out of my mouth. After all, fantasies about the Wolf brothers had been a common theme when I’d have some fun with myself under the covers with my vibrator of choice.
“OK, OK,” she said. “I know this is all weird for you – I won’t make it more so. But the fact of the matter is that they’re all back from the Army and are here in town.”
I shook my head, quickly correcting her. “Only Duncan was in the Army – Green Berets, to be specific. Jay and Evan were both Navy SEALS.”
Clarissa laughed. “Wow, you writing their Wikipedia entries or something?” She grinned and gave me a playful shove. I smiled too but was a little embarrassed to have been so on-the-spot with the right info. It didn’t exactly make the case that I hadn’t spent more than a little time thinking about them over the years.
“Well, they’re all back now. I’ve seen them around town and…” She closed her eyes and made the face someone might make after taking a bite of the best steak they’d ever had. “Mmm-mmm! They’re looking good as ever.”
I just shook my head and chuckled. She nodded toward her car, an off-white Volkswagen Beetle, the back covered in bumper stickers for local bands and various progressive political causes.
