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Charlie’s scowl deepens. It’s unsettling to see my always-happy friend looking so bleak. “You looks like a million bucks,” she says, meeting my eyes. “And I’m happy for you.”
“So you’re frowning, why?” Gigi asks.
Charlie steps back and folds her arms across her chest again. “She’s about to go dancing with the devil. That, I don’t have to be happy about one bit.”
I’m nervous as I let myself in to Ren and Frankie’s house the next morning. I’m overdue for this conversation with my brother, and that’s because I’ve been avoiding it. Because the brother I’ve trusted with some of my hardest truths is the one I’m about to come pretty close to lying to.
I’m going to try my best to be as honest as possible.
Frankie must still be sleeping, because I see only the top of Ren’s head through the sliding glass doors leading out to their deck. After doctoring up a cup of milky coffee, I step out onto the patio and find my brother sitting in a deck chair, feet on the railing as he stares out at the ocean and Pazza, who streaks by on the sand, chasing after her ball. He glances over his shoulder and smiles, then stands to give me a hug. “Hey, Zigs.”
“Hey, Ren.” After our hug hello, I ease into a chair beside him and sit, legs crisscrossed.
Pazza bounds up the steps to me, wet with salt water as she drops the ball at my feet and pants happily. I give her a good rub behind her ears, then, after she snatches it up again, take the ball from her mouth and lob it back out onto the sand. “So.”
He glances my way and smiles. “So.”
“I, uh…may have poached your friend.”
Ren’s eyes crinkle as his smile deepens. “I’ve heard.”
Thank God I have my coffee mug in front of my mouth, because there’s no other way I’d manage to hide my shocked, dropped-jaw expression. Burying my face in my mug, I finally take a gulp of coffee. By the time I’ve swallowed and glanced up, I’ve made sure my face is relaxed.
Sebastian talked to him about us? “What did he say?”
Ren sips his coffee, glancing back out at the ocean, tracking Pazza as she chases her tail, then flops onto the sand and rolls around in it. “Oh, not a lot. Just that you two hit it off at the wedding—as friends. That he knew how much you mean to me and he wanted me to know that you’re safe with him.”
My jaw clenches. Safe. Like I’m some fragile thing to handle with care.
“Safe, huh?” I mutter into my coffee, before gulping down some more.
Ren’s brow furrows. He angles himself toward me, head tipped. “Are you upset about that?”
Exhaling slowly, I set my mug on the arm of my deck chair. “I’m a little tired of being talked about in such…protective, bubble-wrap terms. I’m not an innocent little girl anymore, not a struggling teenager, either. I’m strong and capable, and I can handle being friends with Sebastian Gauthier without you two needing to have some patriarchal chat about my ‘safety.’”
Ren blinks at me, brow furrowing deeper. “I…take your point. I hadn’t considered it in that way. I saw it as Seb owning that he’s frankly pretty careless with most things in his life, and wanting me to know, as someone who loves you, that you weren’t going to be one of them. The content of what he said was reassuring, yes, but much more so, it was the fact that he made a point of saying it at all.”
I tip my head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I know Seb well enough to have been a little anxious when the conversation began and your name was in the mix, because I’ve seen the kind of trouble and hurt that he gets tangled up in. While I would never expect him to intentionally tangle you up in that, too, the truth is his past dictates that you could have been inadvertently hurt along the way. So I appreciated him telling me he’s being intentional about keeping you safe from that.
“Even then, my biggest relief was that he came to me and spoke so openly about becoming friends with you. Talking like that is hard for Seb, and yet he made a concerted effort to do it anyway. That means a lot.”
I sip from my cup, mulling this over, warmth spreading through me that has nothing to do with the fresh, hot coffee I just swallowed. Framed that way, I think maybe what Sebastian did means a lot to me, too.
Cradling my hands around my cup, I tell my brother, “Thanks for explaining it. That…helps.”
Ren stares at me, searching my face. “I’m sorry if I’ve ever made you feel overprotected, Ziggy. I just want to be there for you.”
“I know, Ren. I’m beyond grateful for all the ways you’ve been there for me when I needed it. I just…want you to be there for the me who’s here now, not who was. Make sense?”
He nods slowly. “Yeah, it does.”
I stare out at the ocean, a smile tipping my mouth as Pazza barks emphatically, scaring off a seagull. After she bounds my way with her ball again and I throw it out toward the surf, Ren and I sit side by side in companionable quiet, drinking our coffee. While I turn over this little insight into Sebastian.
I’m trying hard not to let fuzzy warmth wrap itself around my heart like a fire-warmed blanket, but it’s hard. It’s hard not to feel good, knowing even while we’re just pretending to be friends, that Sebastian cared enough to talk to Ren openly, healthily, that he made a promise to his best friend that he and I won’t get mixed up in things that could hurt either of us. He wouldn’t lie to Ren—he loves him too much, that’s obvious, even if he tries to hide it—which means Sebastian Gauthier, for all his huffing and puffing about not actually reforming himself, just might be reforming a little after all.
Pazza’s bark startles me and pulls me from my thoughts. I catch Ren watching me curiously, a small smile on his face, before he whistles softly and calls Pazza back when she starts to go too far down the sand.
