by Sienna Blake
Sagging against his gravestone, I shook my head, because the image was ridiculous. But it wouldn’t leave my thoughts. I kept trying to return to my grief, my pain, my sorrow, but the memory of Jaime—light-hearted and carefree and funny as hell Jaime—wouldn’t let me. Finally, I wiped at my eyes, shifting over so my back was against the frigid stone, and sniffled. “You’re a real ass, you know that, don’t you, Jaime?”
Jaime would have smirked and tilted his head. “You always were an ass man, brother.”
I choked on something halfway between a laugh and a sob filled with more pain than I could bear.
“Her name is Kayleigh,” I said, starting over as I imagined Jaime’s shoulder brushing against mine as he slid down next to me. “And her freckles look like a dusting of cinnamon…”
Kayleigh
It was Christmas Eve and there was no peace on earth.
With everyone piled inside the snug and cosy O’Sullivan house, it would seem easy enough to avoid one-on-one contact with Darren, but at every turn I quite literally ran into him.
With a cup of hot chocolate and a cinnamon roll from the kitchen, I went to hide in Eoin’s room during breakfast only to collide with Darren leaving his to sneak back food of his own; I didn’t risk going back downstairs for another mug. Instead I sat on the edge of Eoin’s bed and stared grumpily at my marshmallow-stained sweater in the hamper.
Later I slipped inside the empty study, thinking it would be safe, only to have the door slam against my ass two seconds later when Darren opened the door with a book under his arm.
We bumped into each other in the hall, in the kitchen, on the porch, and in the living room so we each had bruises on our skin to match the ones on our hearts.
The only place I didn’t run into Darren was getting out of the shower earlier that morning, and maybe that was because we’d already been there, done that. Or maybe it was because I got up at 5 a.m. to make sure it didn’t happen.
After all, Darren and I hadn’t seen each other since fighting in his garage after the family visited Jaime’s grave earlier that morning. To say that things were tense would be an understatement. And nothing made things more tense than trying not to be tense. It was the equivalent of someone telling you to “relax” when you were stressed: all that accomplished was the further grinding of teeth and clenching of fists.
I was alone in the kitchen when I ducked down to pull out a sheet of sugar cookies from the oven. I stood and collided with Darren. He yelped, grabbing at his arm as metal clattered to the floor and hot cookies scattered on the kitchen floor.
“Watch it!” we each hissed at the same time before banging our heads together as we bent over at the same time to pick up the mess.
I knelt across from Darren as we each rubbed our heads and sent angry glares across the confectionary calamity.
“You burnt me,” Darren hissed, flinging cookies over my head into the garbage bin behind me.
“You ruined my cookies,” I said back irritably.
“You should have been more careful.” Darren’s stormy grey-blue eyes glared at me.
I leaned forward and jabbed a finger at his chest. “You’re the one making a mess of things,” I whispered.
Our breaths were hot against one another’s as our eyes locked with anger and something more that I dared not dwell on.
“Is everyone alright in here?”
As if shot out from a cannon, Darren and I both popped up immediately from behind the island with wide smiles, wide, fake smiles for Darren’s ma.
“Everything is great,” I said, voice dripping with cheerfulness. “Just fantastic.”
“Merry Christmas Eve, Ma,” Darren said next to me.
Ma’s eyes narrowed slightly as she eyed a cookie that had rolled all the way to the fridge. “I thought I heard something crash in here,” she said suspiciously.
“Oh, that was all my fault,” Darren jumped in before I could. “I accidentally knocked Kayleigh here as she was taking a pan of cookies out of the oven.”
“No, no,” I insisted, laying an arm on Darren’s before realising my mistake and yanking it back like it was the edge of the cookie sheet and not just flannel. “I should have seen you coming and—”
“Don’t be silly,” Darren interrupted, not so gently pushing me away. “It’s all on me.”
“No,” I said through gritted teeth as I turned to face Darren, frustration threatening to boil over. “I insist, it was my mis—”
“What’s going on?”
Noah, followed by Aubrey in matching black and red plaid pyjamas, entered the kitchen and stood next to Ma. He frowned as he spotted the disaster of cookies on the floor. “What happened here?”
“It seems,” Ma started before Darren or I could manage to open our mouths, “that either Darren ran into Kayleigh or Kayleigh ran into Darren. Either way there has clearly been quite the collision.”
“A collision?” Michael wandered into the kitchen next, his face buried in his work phone. “What colli—ugh!”
I winced as a cookie crushed under Michael’s leather loafers.
“Why are there cookies on the floor?” he asked, balancing to flick crumbs off of the sole of his shoe.
I felt my cheeks redden as Ma’s sharp blue eyes looked between the Darren and me. Noah and Aubrey each lifted an eyebrow. I was stammering, unsure what to say, when someone stampeded down the stairs. It could only be Eoin.
“Are the cookies ready yet, Kayleigh Bear?” Eoin asked, his voice booming with childlike excitement before noticing Michael. “Mikey, why’d you step on the cookies?”
“They were on the floor,” Michael grumbled. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“It was their fault,” Noah pointed to Darren and me.
Barely unable to stand it any longer, I forced a smile and a laugh and said, “I’m going to go get a broom to sweep all of this mess up so we are done with it.”
I sensed Darren tense next to me as Ma told me that I could find a broom in the garage. I didn’t even bother grabbing a coat before slipping out the back door, and I thanked the blast of icy air in the grey morning for helping to clear my mind. As I was rounding the corner of the small house, someone caught my wrist and whipped me around. I came face-to-face with a storm infinitely darker than the clouds above us.
“We can’t keep on going like this,” Darren said, placing a hand on either side of my head against the brick façade and looming over me. His long dark eyelashes were too close, his full, sensual lips were too close, his throat, the same one I traced with my lips, was far, far too close.
Ducking my eyes, I easily slipped out from under the snare of his arms, stepped away from him, and crossed my arms. “I agree,” I said, daring a glance at him, which I immediately knew was a mistake.
Darren was looking at me with an intensity I’d yet to see in him. He wasn’t looking at me like he wanted me, longed for me, yearned for me. He was looking at me like I was his, his and his alone. He was looking at me like Eoin didn’t exist, like his family didn’t exist, like nothing existed but him and me.
Swallowing heavily, I started to whisper, “We need to stop whatever this is between us and—”
“No.”
That one single word from his lips somehow managed to terrify me, thrill me, anger me; I was turned on as hell.
“No?” I repeated, lifting an eyebrow as I took a step toward him.
“No,” Darren said, his eyes focused intently on mine. “What we need to do, Kayleigh Scott, is to stop pretending like there isn’t something between us.”
“There isn’t,” I said out of instinct, out of protection, out of fear.
“Bullshite.”
“There isn’t,” I insisted, my chest now just inches from Darren’s, whose heaved just as heavily as mine.
“There is,” he said, leaning down to hiss against my lips. “There is something intoxicating and magnetic and unstoppable.”
My heart pulsed to the rhythm of his every word, but neve
rtheless I shook my head stubbornly.
“There can’t be something between us,” I whispered, glancing over my shoulder to make sure that we were alone, “all we do is fight. That’s not lo—that’s not what you do with someone you have feelings for. Eoin and I never fight.”
“You have feelings for Eoin?”
I paused too long. Darren’s question caught me off guard.
I cursed at the dark flint in his eyes when he knew the answer as clearly as if I had shouted it into his face: no, I don’t. But him reading me so easily filled me with bristling frustration.
“Yes,” I lied. “Yes, I do.”
“No, you don’t,” Darren said, searching my eyes.
My chest pressed against Darren’s as I jutted my chin defiantly up at him. “I’m done fighting with you,” I hissed.
A devilish grin tugged up at both the corner of his mouth and the strings of my heart. “I’m not done fighting with you,” he said, lowering his lips so they were as close as possible without touching.
I spit out a laugh. “You want to fight with me?”
“Yes,” Darren said immediately. “It’s all I want to do.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why?” I asked, genuine confusion momentarily taking the place of my anger at him.
His blue-grey eyes trapped mine just like his arms had done with his hands on either side of my face, but this time I couldn’t escape so easily.
Darren whispered, “Because it means there’s something here worth fighting for.”
My heart pounded against his as our icy breaths twisted together in the cold. Finally, I stepped back and cleared my throat. “I have to get back inside,” I said, slipping past him toward the garage to retrieve the broom. “Eoin will be wondering where I am.”
Darren was wrong.
It was a good sign that Eoin and I never fought. That’s what a healthy relationship was like. That’s what love was supposed to look like: harmony, peace, quiet.
Darren was wrong.
Darren was wrong.
Darren was wrong…
Darren
Was it childish?
Probably.
Was it misdirected?
I suppose so.
Was there any way in hell I wasn’t going to goad Eoin into a fight?
Nope.
The honest truth was that I was mad and I was frustrated and I needed to punch someone but didn’t have the nerve to give myself an upper cut so swift that I tasted the tang of copper between my teeth. Kayleigh left me outside alone in that cruel wind, and I’d been nearing my boiling point ever since. It was near fecking inevitable that I was going to lose it; it was just a matter of time.
“What the fuck, Daz!”
Eoin threw his hands up into the air when I flopped down on the couch with a book and switched off the television right in the middle of a try during the rugby match he’d had on. I craned my neck over my shoulder to look back at him, ignoring Kayleigh perched awkwardly on his lap.
“Oh, were you watching that?” I asked, feigning innocence. I felt her darkening eyes on me as I shrugged. “Sorry about that, man,” I said, clicking the television back on.
“Fecking hell, Darren!” Eoin called after me as I moved to the study. “I can’t go back in time, you asshole.”
Well, I couldn’t go back in time either. I couldn’t go back to find Kayleigh before Eoin did, and unfortunately Eoin had to pay for that.
I already told you it was childish. I already told you I didn’t care.
“Hey, Darren, hand me that oven mitt,” Eoin asked later, bent over the oven and struggling with a massive steaming casserole.
I ignored him.
Kayleigh hurried over to help him after shooting me a glare of daggers. I ignored her, too.
“Ow! Fuck, Darren!”
I accidentally wedged Eoin’s fingers against his chair when I scooted mine in for dinner, and the red in his cheeks was a good sign that I was getting close. Eoin was renowned for being hot tempered on the rugby pitch, and I knew exactly which buttons to push. Head ducked over my plate, I heard Kayleigh whispering sweetly on the other side of Eoin, “Here, here let me see”, as she cupped his fingers in hers; this only made me madder.
I managed to bite my lip when Eoin’s fingers intertwined with Kayleigh’s on the table while Ma said grace before all of us began our Christmas Eve dinner. My own fingers pinched the sensitive skin of my wrist as I clenched my eyes shut.
“Hey, Daz, pass the spuds, will ye?” Eoin asked, nudging me in the ribs.
I scooted my chair away from him without a word and instead reached for my whiskey glass. Brimming over like a whistling teapot, Eoin grabbed his chair by the seat and hopped it over toward mine.
He pressed his mouth to my ear and shouted, “Hey, Darren, pass the spuds, will ye?”
My hands clenched into fists beneath the table. I resisted the urge to shove Eoin back; he needed to take the first shot. Next to me, Noah winced at Eoin’s shouting and grabbed the potatoes.
“Here, just take these, alright, Daz?”
Noah held the white casserole dish of scalloped potatoes and waited for me to take it from him to pass to Eoin.
“Eoin can reach it,” I mumbled, stabbing a slice of turkey so aggressively that I feared I might have cracked the porcelain plate underneath.
Noah rolled his eyes and held it out closer to Eoin. “Here you go.”
Eoin sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. “No. I asked Darren to pass me the spuds, not you. So Darren’s going to pass the spuds.”
I kept my eyes fixed on my plate, silent.
“My arms are getting tired here, fellas,” Noah said.
There was the sudden screech of a chair and then Kayleigh was moving behind me, grabbing the potatoes, and setting them squarely in front of Eoin.
“There,” she said with a curt nod of her chin. “No need to fight.”
Oh, how wrong she was…
I was plotting more ways to irritate Eoin when he proceeded to push the casserole dish back across the table, knocking over the butter tray and spilling Aubrey’s wine glass.
“Hey!”
As half the table scurried to soak up the red wine before it soaked through the napkin on her hunter-green dress, the other half shouted at Eoin to stop. But Eoin was just getting started.
Perfect.
“Hey, brother,” he glared at me, chest rising and falling angrily (all he was missing was the steam unfurling from his ears), “pass the potatoes, will ye?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Kayleigh’s hand on my brother’s arm as she started to say, “Eoin, it isn’t worth…”
Her voice trailed off when I picked up the potatoes. Aubrey stopped patting frantically at her lap, Ma paused halfway up to get a towel, Michael looked up from checking to make sure the spilled wine hadn’t fried the work phone he’d sneaked onto the dinner table.
This was the point where I should have seen the impact my actions were having on my family. This was the moment where I should have realised that these relationships were more important than a relationship with a girl I hadn’t even been on a proper date with yet. This was the moment where I should have said enough.
Instead, I said, Fuck it.
With Eoin boiling next to me and the rest of the family watching my every move, I lifted the dish above my plate and slowly scooped out a spoonful of potatoes onto my own plate before returning the dish to right where it had been beside Noah.
“Oh, fuck,” Noah whispered, hiding his face in his hands a half second before Eoin’s massive palms slammed into my chest, sending my chair crashing back to the floor.
“Eoin!” Ma shouted.
I scurried to my feet, my vision red and pulsing, and buried my shoulders into Eoin’s stomach.
“Darren!”
I heard Ma’s voice. But I also heard my inner voice of anger and frustration and lust and hurt and they were all louder. Much, much louder.
&
nbsp; Eoin stumbled back a few steps before I drove him into straight into the cabinets, sending stacks of plates and rows of glasses rattling. I was barely aware of chairs screeching on the tiled floor as Eoin’s tree trunk arms slammed down on my back. I fell to the floor. Down but not out. I yanked Eoin’s feet from underneath him and scrambled on top of him.
I was lifting a fist to swing down when Noah caught my wrist—this stopped me from hitting Eoin, but it did not stop Eoin from hitting me. His knuckles, hardened by cold nights and rough turf, connected with my eye socket. Then Eoin was on top of me and the back of my head was smacking against the hard tile before I could even register the radiating pain. I thrashed beneath him even as Michael and Noah tried to yank him off of me.
Things should have been over when they finally succeeded, panting and grunting as Eoin kept swinging at the air. I should have laid on the ground, patted my fingers gingerly over my swollen eye, and wobbled to my feet toward the pack of frozen peas in the fridge. I should have come to my senses and stopped.
Fuck that.
With a growl of rage I barely recognised as coming out of my own throat, I lunged at Eoin, tackling him out of Michael and Noah’s arms and back to the ground. His fist caught my ribs. Mine caught his jaw and his head whipped back. My knees pinned his arms at his sides and I lifted my arm again to strike his face when I caught sight of Ma standing with the broken shards of a glass from the cabinet in her hands.
Her eyes were on mine. They struck me with more pain than the full weight of Eoin’s fist. In her eyes I saw the thing I never wanted to see in them: worry, hurt, fear.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, glancing down at Eoin.
But I meant it for her.
My fist fell limply to my side. Eoin pushed me roughly off of him. He scrambled to his feet, ready for more, before Michael jumped between us.
“Woah, woah, it’s over,” Michael said, hands out to separate us. He glanced over his shoulder at me. “It is over, right?”
I nodded as I pushed myself wearily to my feet.
“What the fuck was that, Darren?” Eoin asked, rubbing at his jaw where a black and blue bruise was already forming.
