As I carefully sand a panel of the kayak I’m building, I hear Brody’s voice behind me.
“Thought I might find you here.”
I’m in the big storage shed behind Wilder Headquarters, half of which has been semi-permanently granted to me for boat work.
“Texted you a bunch of times and didn’t get an answer,” Brody says. He’s keeping it casual. “You didn’t show up for guys’ night out.”
“Wasn’t in the mood,” I say.
“Hanna didn’t show up either.” His voice is careful.
“She doesn’t always.”
“True,” Brody says. “But you do.”
I don’t look at him.
“E,” he says. “You know we’re all talking about you, right? And the longer you hide from us, the more people are speculating and making shit up. We’re Wilders. If you hide out here for too long, we’re going to write you a whole Titanic-level drama. Everyone wants to know what the fuck’s going on with you and Hanna.”
“Nothing’s going on.”
“Right,” Brody says, with a short, harsh laugh. “That’s why neither of you denied that Buck has supernatural powers after he barfed on Easton’s feet.”
I close my eyes. I haven’t seen Hanna for more than a week. Or to be more exact, we haven’t spoken. I’ve seen her all right—leaving headquarters shortly after I arrive, spending time with her girlfriends instead of the guys, eating her lunch alone to avoid me. And still, my strongest impulse is to tease her—
What, you avoiding me? Afraid you’ll be so overwhelmed by my hotness you won’t be able to resist?
But of course, I don’t. We’ve finally done the thing she was afraid of: We’ve finally broken the friendship. There’s no going back, apparently.
“Nothing is going on? Or nothing was going on?”
I should have known that Brody, of all my brothers, would see clear to the bottom of my bullshit. “Nothing is.” I sigh.
“You want to tell me about it?” he asks.
“Not really.”
“Let me rephrase,” he says. “Do you want to tell me about it here, while you keep working on the boat? Or do you want to come to Oscar’s with me and do a few shots and then tell me about it?”
“Why don’t you ever let a man sulk in peace?” I demand.
“Because I’m your brother,” Brody says. “That’s what having four brothers is all about. You can’t spend the time you want on the toilet, you can’t have secrets, and you can’t sulk by yourself.”
Against my will, I smile. “I’m afraid if I start drinking, I won’t stop.”
“Fair enough,” he says. He tips over an oversized bucket that at one point held varnish but is now bone dry, and sits on it, planting his hands on his thighs.
“Start talking.”
It takes longer than I expect to bring him up to date… probably because when I open my mouth to tell the short story, a novel comes pouring out. I tell him about how Hanna went on her date with Bear. How the world thought they were the cutest couple ever. How Hanna said the kiss with Bear was fine.
And I tell him what happened next. The PG version.
But the X-rated version is very much alive in my mind.
Just remembering it makes my chest hot and my throat tight with recalled desire and current misery.
Brody listens quietly and watches my face like it’s playoff football. Of course it has to be Brody who’s in charge of giving me the third degree—the one brother I can’t bullshit.
I tell him how one thing led to another, a tumble of desire and getting-to-know-you that, to me, felt more and more right and inevitable.
He nods. Like he knows. Like he’s been there. I know he has because I know the story of how he and Rachel met. Two opposites who weren’t supposed to be together, unable to resist the pull of circumstance and chemistry. Sex toys on a boat and grappling in Brody’s truck, and lots and lots of feelings.
I lead him right up through the gathering when Buck did his messy magic trick.
“She went home with me that night,” I say.
He shrugs. “Yeah, so I heard. Left her truck at Gabe’s. No one was surprised by then.”
Even though I don’t want to, I can see her, the vivid pinks and reds of her face, her eyes closing in pleasure.
“It was—” I shake my head. Laugh, without much humor.
Brody laughs, too. “Been there, buddy. It’s a whole different ball game when you care, right?”
“Scary different,” I admit.
He nods in quiet solidarity.
“Except… The next morning… I thought we were on the same page. I didn’t think we had to put words to it. I thought we understood each other.”
“There’s your first mistake,” Brody says. Not mean. Just matter of fact. “You can’t know what’s in someone’s head unless you ask.”
“Well. I thought I knew.”
I open my mouth to talk about what happened next, and I realize: It won’t make sense unless I tell him everything.
He’s waiting. Patient.
The truth’s going to come out at some point. Might as well get a preview of how my family’s going to react when they find out I’ve been flirting with a competitor.
“Bear offered me a job in Colorado,” I say. It’s skipping over a lot of backstory, but I think it gets across most of what he needs to know.
“Whaaaaa—?” It’s more a noisy huff of disbelief than a word. His eyes search my face, and he sees the truth there. “And you’re seriously thinking about taking it.”
“I was. And then I wasn’t. And now I am.”
“And Hanna got pissed? That you were leaving?”
“I wish.” My chest hurts. “No. She told me to take it.”
“Did you tell her you didn’t want it? Did you tell her you wanted her?”
I sigh. “Yeah. I told her I wanted it all. Future, marriage, babies. And she said…” I feel slightly unhinged, but I crush it down, ruthlessly. “She said ‘Don’t.’ Like, stop talking like that, Easton. Like, I don’t want to hear it.”
Brody winces.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Do you think maybe she—?”
I’m already shaking my head as he finishes, “—misunderstood? Didn’t know how you felt?”
“No. I was pretty dang clear.”
“Are you sure—?”
“Hey,” I say, as gently as I can, when I hurt all over like I’ve been bruised in a fight. “Yeah. I’m sure.”
Brody dips his head. “I’m sorry, E.”
“Not half as sorry as I am.”
We’re both quiet for a minute, while I try not to think about how much I already miss her—being together, touching, laughing. How if I could, I’d go back to how it was before, just to know we could still joke around. Just to know that if she needed me, I could still find her and tuck a stone into the palm of her hand and stand by, quietly.
Brody’s voice cuts through my thoughts. “So—tell me about the job.”
I do, starting with the day Bear came to town and I asked him if the job was available, ending with the offer in the parking lot.
When I’m done, he says, “Does Gabe know?”
I shake my head.
“You gonna tell him?”
“Yes, of course. I’m not just going to leave town and let him figure it out.”
“Any chance you’d let him make a counteroffer?”
I burst out laughing. “A what?”
But Brody’s apparently not joking. “A counteroffer. You tell him what Bear’s giving you, and he matches it.”
“No way he could match this kind of money.”
“And that’s what it’s about? The money?”
“No.”
“Then…?”
I don’t answer right away, and Brody watches me quietly. “Can I tell you something?” he says, finally, when I still haven’t spoken.
“Shoot.”
“It took me a long time to tell Gabe what I needed from him. Because I didn’t think I deserved it.”
“It’s not that,” I say. “If that was how I felt, I wouldn’t have asked Bear for a job, right? I know what I’m worth.”
“I’m just saying, there are two kinds of Wilder brothers.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Those that have ‘married’ sex, and me?”
Brody snorts. “Well, that too. But that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say, there are the ones who’ve known exactly what they’re meant to be doing from the moment they were born, and the rest of us.”
I think about my brothers, and it’s obvious what he means. Gabe and Clark were made to be outdoorsmen, from minute one. But the rest of us—I know it’s been more complicated for us. Brody was a rebel in high school and for years afterwards, a regular tear-it-up bad boy who hated rules and bucked Gabe’s authority at every turn. Kane never quite seemed quite at ease with outdoor adventuring—and these days, he’s doing a lot more photography and running photography trips.
And then there’s me.
“Takes some of us a little longer to figure ourselves out,” he says.
I bristle—it’s not that I haven’t figured myself out…
But then I think, have I?
I hadn’t known how I felt about Hanna. I hadn’t known how empty my flavor-of-the-week ice cream sex had gotten. And I hadn’t known how much I wanted to be taken seriously until an outside opportunity came along and I jumped on it like a drowning man on a flimsy bit of a life raft.
Maybe that’s a bad analogy.
But the point stands.
“So, what do I do?” I ask.
Brody smiles. “Fuck if I know,” he says. “But the general shape is, figure out what you want, ask for it, and then hold on and don’t let it go.”