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When their lips parted, he touched his cheek to hers and said, “I’ll help you carry your baggage if you help me carry mine.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I want that with you.”
He drew in a deep breath and blew it out slowly as they drew apart. “Ready to hear my deep, dark secret?”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Oh, yes I do. Trust me. I’m not a perfect guy.” He swallowed hard, and when he spoke, his tone was serious. “The reason I rehab my kitchen so often is because when we were growing up my parents’ kitchen was cramped and Lorelei used to say that when she grew up she’d build a new kitchen every few years. Even at her young age, she knew that what she would want would change over time.” He shrugged. “I keep trying to get it right. You want to talk about fucked up? That’s fucked up. Like I said, we all have our shit and we deal with it differently. It doesn’t mean Ican’tstop refinishing my kitchen. Ichoosenot to. Iliketo try to get it right because it keeps my sister’s memory alive. My brothers think it’s bat-shit crazy, but it’s not. It’s just how I deal with her being gone.”
“It’s not crazy to want to keep those memories alive. Do you keep pictures of the renovations every time you change your kitchen so you can remember them?”
He shook his head. “No. Maybe I should.” He paused, turning a serious gaze on her. “Do you know why I express my feelings so readily?”
She shook her head. Her heart was filling up to near bursting. Dylan hadn’t just suffered a tragic loss; he’d dealt with it. That was something Tiffany had never had the guts to do. She buried it, built walls around it, then parked a Mack truck on top of it.
“Because before she died I was a carefree motherfucker. I was the guy who made everyone laugh. Everything rolled off my back. And after we lost her, I got so angry I couldn’t stand to be around myself. And a few weeks later, rather than be angry all the time, I shut myself off. I didn’t let anyone get close to me for a long time. My parents weren’t speaking to each other, and then they went from silence to fighting all the time. Hiding was easier than dealing with anything. But in the middle of the night, I’d wake up hearing Lorelei whispering in my ear, like she refused to let me fall into oblivion. I would get up and walk around the kitchen, glad she wasn’t there to hear our parents fighting.”
He pushed to his feet and paced. “How fucked up is that? Being glad that my dead sister wasn’t around. The fighting was so bad my brothers and I used to leave the house.”
“It’s not fucked up. You were thinking about protecting her.”
He scoffed. “No one could protect anyone from the nightmare that had become our lives. We couldn’t even talk about Lorelei. If we tried, my father blew up. He couldn’t take it. A part of him—a part of all of us—died along with her. To this day my father’s a miserable bastard. But Lorelei has always been there in the silence. While my father was storming around the house, fighting with my mother about everything and nothing, Lorelei was in the glances that passed between me and my brothers; she was the haunted look in my parents’ eyes. She was in the very air we breathed. Shebecamethe silence because we weren’t able to talk about her. It was awful to keep all those feelings bottled up.”
“I can’t imagine.” Only she could, because hadn’t she been doing the same thing with her mother? She never talked about her, and when her brothers brought her up, she left the room.
“One night I went down to the kitchen. It was pitch-dark, and I was pacing, trying to remember stories Lorelei and I used to laugh at, and happier times, you know? Her face had begun fading from my memory, and that scared the shit out of me. The kitchen is where I felt closest to her. I’m surprised I didn’t wear a path in the floor. Anyway, I didn’t know my mother was sitting at the kitchen table. She must have watched me for half an hour or more before she finally said something. I nearly jumped out of my skin when she said, ‘Dilly, you have to keep living. Your sister adored you. Don’t honor her memory by losing the best parts of yourself.’”
He looked up at the night sky, his hands fisting at his sides. “I can’t believe I’m breaking down like a fucking pussy in front of you. I’m not usually this way.”
Her heart ached for him. She thought it was hard to open up, but now she realized that for a man it must be ten times as difficult to show that beyond the strength, beyond the ability totakeandplunder, he was only human, too.
“I think it makes you even stronger, and your mother was right, Dylan.”
“I know she was,” he said through gritted teeth. He drew in a deep breath, his clenched fists unfurling. “My mother and I talked for the longest time. After that, she joined me in the kitchen during my midnight visits, and we talked about Lorelei. To this day, when we’re together as a family,no onetalks about her. It’s too painful. It’s like we all know that the minute we bring her up, we’ll fall apart. But back then, when we were right in the thick of our loss, and everyone else was asleep, my mother and I talked about everything. Life and death, my sister, my father, who had become so angry and so mean that one stormy night Mick confronted him. And somehow, at sixteen, Mick got him the hell out of the house for good. Talk about brave? Man. My brother has balls of steel. But I think my father was so broken by then, he couldn’t stand to be around himself, either. He really is a brilliant man. Despite his grief and anger, he knew he was tearing our family apart, and I’m sure that was hard for him, too. I think he needed Mick to push him out, so in his mind, he felt like it was okay toreallyleave us. Because you see, summer girl, my father had already left us emotionally, just not physically. It was too hard for him to see the reminders of Lorelei through us, and in the house.”
Her heart broke for Dylan and his family. She knew his shrewd older brother well enough to imagine him standing up to their father, in the same way she could see Dylan doing everything within his power to hold on to Lorelei and to respect his family’s need not to speak of her, when it was the one thing he needed.
“Dylan, do you have any relationship with your father now?”
“Not in any real sense. We see each other every now and again. But he’s cold and he’s so different from what he was like before Lorelei died. I think the man I knew as a kid is long gone. At some point you have to save yourself, like you did after your mother left. Eventually, I found my way back to being me, only different. Brett calls me a ‘touchy-feely chick.’ And yeah, I am very in touch with my emotions. But I’m not carefree anymore. I know I seem it, but I’m not blind to how I handle losing her. I know I take on the worries of sick kids and try to make them feel better as a way of making up for not being able to help Lorelei. But hey, that’s better than drinking, acting like a bastard, or locking my emotions away. Seeing those kids smile, knowing I bring even a few minutes of joy to their lives, that’s a win-win, right?”
Win-win. She found herself thinking that’s what it was like being close to Dylan, too. She’d never met anyone who was so in touch with, and honest about, who they were. Most people, like her, hid behind their weaknesses. Dylan exposed them and used them to help others. And he made her want to do the same.
“Absolutely.”
“My greatest fault,” he said, “is that you’ll get too much of me.”
“I want too much of you, Dylan.”
As their lips touched, all her fears scrambled away like rats seeking water, leaving only Dylan.Sweet, honest, breaking-through-my-barriers, Dylan.
Chapter Seventeen
“NOW DO YOU want to start that list?” Tiffany lifted their joined hands and smiled at Dylan. It was almost eleven o’clock Saturday morning and they were in the elevator on their way up to the third floor of one of Phoebe’s buildings to check out office space. She’d just told Dylan about her office criteria, which he had to admit, was quite specific.
“Because you prefer a certain side and floor of a building?” He drew her closer. “Yes. I’m starting a list of quirks I like about you, and I’m calling it The Many Faces ofMySummer Girl.” He went for her lips, and at the last second brought his mouth to her neck, which he knew drove her wild.
She fisted her hand in his shirt as she had last night. They’d lain beneath the stars for hours, talking and kissing, groping, and trying to keep to their no-sex rule. It had been sheer hell. She had left her phone off the entire time they were on the roof, and when he’d called her this morning at eight to see if she wanted to have breakfast together, she’d already been working for an hour. She’d been too tied up with last-minute contract revisions to meet then, but they’d met for an early brunch, and having to wait had made it that much sweeter.
