Haley jolts backward, and Hector laughs. “Hey, Adrienne,” he says through a smile.
“Hey.” I wave.
“We were just grabbing some things for the brewery,” Haley says, looking like a deer in headlights.
“You don’t have to explain anything to me. I’m cool with it.”
She heaves a sigh of relief and brings her hand to her chest.
“Does Blaze know?” I ask.
Haley looks from me to Hector then back to me. “We haven’t told anybody yet because we thought it might be weird.”
“You’re grown and single. He’s grown and single. What’s weird about that?”
She shrugs. This is new. I’ve never seen Haley embarrassed. Ever. It humanizes her a little.
“But you should probably hurry up and finish. Hector sounds hungry.” I laugh and wink, then go find my hot chocolate.
I’m curled up under my blanket, halfway through one of my favorite episodes of The Golden Girls. It’s the one where Blanche finally meets a guy she actually has feelings for only to find out later that he’s married. I feel you, Blanche. I feel you. Except my guy isn’t married. He’s just emotionally unavailable.
My phone pings.
Blaze: Hector and Haley, huh?
Apparently, the cat is out of the bag.
Me: Yeah. Who knew?
Blaze: Does Liam know he’s a matchmaker?
Me: Pretty sure this isn’t the kind of fire he intended to spark. *wink emoji* *fire emoji*
God, am I seriously sending emojis in a text? What the hell has happened to me?
Blaze: I can think of a million ways I’d rather have met you, but I’ll take the lick fate gave me.
Blaze: Speaking of licks, I want to take you out on my boat tomorrow.
Blaze: If you don’t have plans.
Blaze: *three water droplet emojis*
Oh my God, this man.
Me: I was going to watch a Backstreet Boys documentary and dunk Funyuns in cheese dip, but I can reschedule.
Blaze: Fuck the Backstreet Boys.
Blaze: Delete that message. You’re not fucking anyone but me.
Blaze: I’m picking you up tomorrow at 7.
That attitude. The way he barks out orders like the world belongs to him and him alone. On anyone else it would seem arrogant and rude, but I know Blaze. I know his heart. There’s not an arrogant bone in his body. Still, when he talks like that all I want to do is answer back: Yes, please, and thank you… sir.
Lake Norman is beautiful. The water is this amazing blend of blue and green, smooth like glass except for the occasional wave when another boat passes. Along the shore, there are multi-million-dollar mansions with docks that lead out into the water. All the homes are separated by thick groves of trees with full green branches. It’s breathtaking.
We’re floating with the motor off somewhere in the middle of the lake. He’s in his swim trunks and I’m in my bikini. Lying on a benchseat underneath the hardtop, I’m between his legs with my back to his chest, and he’s reading The Scarlet Letter and feeding me strawberries. One of his hands holds the book while the other drapes lazily over my shoulder and traces circles around my nipple through my bikini top. Eventually, he slips the fabric off my boob entirely, leaving me exposed. Sometimes he takes a break long enough to reach for a strawberry. He’ll take one bite, rub the fruit across my hard peak then feed me the rest of it. Life really doesn’t get any better than this.
“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”
His chest heaves against my back, and I feel the sharp intake of breath when he reads that passage. I turn on my side so I can look at him.
“What do you think he means?” Blaze asks when his eyes meet mine.
I trail a fingertip across his chest. “I think it means there’s an inner strength in all of us, something that protects our minds from the pain of our reality. We have a built-in numbness.”
“But it always catches up with us, the pain.”
He’s talking about Micah. He still blames himself.
“True. It does. But that pain, the second wave of it, is something we bring upon ourselves. We can control it.” I close my eyes briefly, deciding whether or not to open up another part of myself to this man. When I open them again, he’s looking straight at me, straight into me.
“When I was thirteen, someone broke into our house. I was in the shower when I heard glass shatter. I turned the water off, wrapped myself in a towel, and hid in the closet. I should’ve panicked, but I didn’t. I didn’t even scream. I don’t know what they were looking for or if they took anything at all. I just know I waited there, cold, naked, in the dark closet until my mom got home. It was like I was watching it happen to someone else. My mind never caught up to the reality that I was a thirteen-year-old girl naked in a closet while God-knows-who roamed around our house. I think even now a part of me still feels the effects of that day because every time I hear a noise while I’m in the shower, it shakes me a little. Yet I wake up every morning, and I shower. That fear doesn’t control me.”
My finger moves over his chest and to his arm, tracing every outline of the tattoos on his shoulder then down his bicep. He watches me and smiles when I get to the eyes of a wolf.
“Micah loved to draw. We’d do homework together, and he would draw the whole time. This…” He points to the wolf face. “Was the last drawing he ever gave me.”
“Wow. He was good.” I think about the tattoos all over Micah’s body and wonder if he drew them himself. “And this?” I trace a tattoo of a checkered flag with a tribal outline. “Is this for Levi?”
His jaw tenses. “No. That’s to remind me to keep going no matter what. To not stop until I finish.”
There’s a set of numbers between the flag and the wolf. 2.21.16. I run my fingers across them, and he winces.
“Somewhere around three years ago, his girlfriend died in a car accident.”
I pull my hand away. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me what that one means. I don’t need to know.”
I have a feeling I already do.
He reaches for my hand again then brings it to his chest. “I want to.”
Waves of anxiety roll around in my gut. It’s the same feeling I used to get when I would hear Sugar fumbling for her keys outside the front door after I’d waited up for her all night. It’s knowing this won’t be pleasant but not knowing why.
“Okay.”
His heart is hammering beneath our hands. His chocolate-caramel eyes are tainted with sorrow. It’s happening. We’re falling, crashing. All I can do is brace myself for the impact. “Three years ago, I caught my girlfriend fucking my brother.”
Oh.
He blows out a steady, controlled breath. It’s warm against my skin. “She walked into my life when I was ten years old and became my everything. She knew Micah too. She was the only thing that got me through the grief when they took him. We laughed together. We cried together. We remembered together. We grew up together in every sense of the word. The only time we were apart was in college, and even then she was only a few hours away. As soon as we graduated, we both moved to Charlotte. I came home one night, excited about opening the brewery, and there they were, on the couch, naked as the day they were born. I wanted to beat his face in right then and there, but she stopped me. So, I packed my shit and left. I went to Hector’s. The next day, Levi called me and told me he’d race me for her. Like she was some kind of piece of fucking property. That’s what she meant to him. Fucking nothing. She was my everything, and she was his nothing.” He blows out another steady breath as if he’s trying to hold it together.
I breathe with him because we’re still falling. We haven’t hit the ground yet. I know that the moment we do, I won’t be able to breathe at all.
“He said if I won, he would never talk to
her again. He was just starting in NASCAR then, and I have never been one to turn down a challenge, much less the chance to make my brother look like a pussy, so I said okay. I’d invested eleven years of my life into this woman. I was willing to do anything.” His voice cracks. “I don’t know who told her what we were doing or where we were doing it, but somehow she showed up just as we took off. She jumped in her car and followed us, thinking she could stop us or some shit. I don’t fucking know.” He rakes a hand through his hair and sighs. He’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me like the whole scene is playing out before his eyes somewhere across the lake. “Levi and I had been racing each other since before either one of us was legal to drive. She knew that, but it didn’t stop her. Maybe she thought it was her fault. Maybe she didn’t realize that we were just brothers being brothers. She was mine. Whether I won the race or not. Rebecca was mine. She always had been.” His voice is completely pain-ridden, and I see it when I look at him. It’s still there, the unconditional love he has for her, for a ghost, a ghost who cheated on him with his own brother. My anger about that—the cheating, not the grief—is overshadowed by my need to console him.
How could anyone ever think this man wasn’t enough for them?
He swallows and clears his throat. “Anyway, we took a turn. She didn’t. Her car skidded off the road and down the side of a hill. I don’t know how many times she flipped, but…” His voice trails off at the end.
I squeeze his hand. “You don’t have to finish.”
“The autopsy showed she was pregnant. It might have been mine. It could have been Levi’s. I won’t ever know. Don’t want to. In my mind and in my heart, I lost two of the greatest things to ever happen to me that day.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry,” I whisper, my voice weak as tears fall down my face—tears for him, for Rebecca, for their unborn child, for a future I now know I’ll never have.
He wipes them away with the pad of his thumb. “I don’t need you to be sorry. I just need you to understand.”
Understand. Understand that this is why he’ll never love me. We are Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale. We’re Gatsby and Daisy, Anna Karenina and Vronsky. We’re the romance that was never meant to be.
I muster the strength to smile up at him. “I get it. I understand.”
Blaze never misled me. He didn’t spoon-feed me a bunch of lies. He never promised me anything more than this, the physical. He told me exactly what this is before I ever agreed, and I promised him I was strong enough to handle it.
That was before I knew him.
He looks at me, and his eyes aren’t distant anymore. They are no longer focused on the past. They’re focused on me, on every part of me. Is it even possible to feel both elated and heartbroken at the same time?
His hands inch down my body, then grab my ass and pull me against him. “Good. Now I need you to make me forget.”
He slips his hand inside my bikini bottoms, and I let him. I let him because even though every single part of me is telling me that Blaze is a hurricane and I am a tree, he needs me. He needs me to stop the hurting.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was right.
Right now, the pain is irrelevant, but when this ends, it’s going to rip me apart.
Adrienne ran her fingertips over my past. Literally. She traced the outlines of the pain etched into my skin. I opened up old wounds and shared them with her, and she stopped the bleeding. She didn’t offer me a light. She walked up and sat beside me in the dark—Indian-style, with that goddamn sexy ass smile and that way she has of making you forget everything but her name.
It’s been almost a week since I took her out on the lake, and I can still taste her skin on my lips. She shared parts of her past with me. I showed her my demons, and she didn’t run from them. That was one of the best days of my life—tasting her, touching her, fucking her while we were out there on the water.
Love isn’t a choice. You don’t decide you want to fall in love one day then walk up to a vending machine and make your selection. I’ll take brunette with a firm ass, great sense of humor, and a divine pussy, please.
Love isn’t calculated.
It’s unexpected.
It’s a chance meeting and an instant connection.
It’s that moment when you look into their eyes or memorize the curve of their smile and think, This is it. I’m fucked.
Adrienne makes me feel things. She makes me feel all the fucking things, out loud and in vibrant color. I don’t know if it’s love—I’m not sure I’m capable of that anymore—but I do know it’s pretty damn close.
I didn’t need her to tell me she’s sorry. I’m so fucking tired of people telling me they’re sorry. I needed her to see past the hurt, past the pain, and understand that this is me, scars and all. I needed her to understand that she’s only getting half a man and be okay with that.
I also need her to understand why I don’t want her anywhere near Levi.
Which is why when Hector told me—Haley told him—that Adrienne was taking the boys to Charlotte Motor Speedway today to watch my brother race, I flipped my shit.
Now, here I am eating popcorn and drinking shit beer while overlooking turn three and waiting for a chance to politely remind my brother to stay away from what’s mine. By politely I mean threatening bodily harm—but doing it with a smile. I have a feeling if Adrienne knew I was here, she’d be politely reminding me she can handle shit herself. I probably should have told her. Then again, she didn’t tell me she’d be here today, so there’s that.
A guy in a blue Number 48 T-shirt scoots past me as we all look to a huge American flag waving in the distance and sing the national anthem. The announcer starts talking about the weather then introduces the drivers. The rumble of the cars grows louder as they make the first turn. People begin to put on earphones, the bulky over your head kind, and hold their cell phones up to record the cars when they make the first fly by.
It’s been years since I’ve been to a racetrack. The mere thought of racing makes my stomach turn. The fact that I’m even here right now tells me I’m more pussy-whipped than I thought.
As soon as the race is over, I go find Levi. He’s wrapping up a post-race interview on victory lane.
I walk up with a slow clap and a shit-eating grin. “Congratulations, Big Bro.”
“Blaze.” He scrubs a hand over his face. “I thought… The other night when you saw me… It just seemed like—”
“Like I wanted nothing to do with you?”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“Good. Because I don’t. I’m here to tell you to stay the fuck away from Adrienne. I don’t know what angle you’re playing with this sponsor bullshit, but I mean it.” I step into his space, close enough to snatch him by the throat and steal the breath from his lungs if I wanted to. “Stay. The fuck. Away.”
“There’s no angle. Everyone in the racing circuit knows about Corporate Cares. Lots of us want to be a part of it.”
Liar.
“That’s great. Very noble. You know how you do that? You write a fucking check.”
A camera crew passes by, setting up a few feet from where we stand. A crowd is starting to gather, so I need to make this quick. The last thing I want is to be on the five o’clock news hashing out family drama with the guy who just won the All-Star Race.
“Look, Blaze, I know you hate me.”
There is no love lost between my brother and me. Ever since I stopped shitting my pants, we’ve been competitive. He was jealous of me for being Dad’s favorite, and I resented him for being the first to find a life outside of Chase-Abbott Banking.
“I sure as fuck don’t like you.”
“So, you hate me?”
At the end of the day, he’s still my brother. Even if he is a world-class bag of dicks.
“No, Levi. I don’t hate you. But I can’t forgive you.”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. She loved you. What we had was a mistake. The whole thing. It was nothing
compared to what you had.”
We’re not doing this. I didn’t come here to talk about Rebecca. I’m here to tell him to stay away from Adrienne. All the voices in the background swirl around me, buzzing loud like a swarm of bees. My heart is beating too fast. My breath is coming too hard. I’m going to hurt him. If he doesn’t shut the hell up right fucking now, I’m going to hurt him.
I clench my fists at my sides then turn my back to him. We’re done here.
“I was going to throw the race. I was going to let you win,” he calls after me. His words slice me to the soul.
Okay, we’re doing this.
I spin around. “So, Rebecca died—my unborn child died—trying to stop a race that never should have happened to begin with? A race you didn’t even bother to take seriously? Un-fucking-believable.” I need to calm the fuck down. I’m on the verge of shouting, and we have an audience. “I’m not going to stand here and listen to this. But I mean it. If you’re sorry… If you give two shits about being my brother again, you’ll stay away from Adrienne.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. When he opens them again, he’s breathing so hard he’s shaking. “I can’t do that.”
I narrow my eyes. Silent. Waiting. Giving him one last chance to say the right thing, to do the right thing.
He doesn’t.
“Then I guess there’s nothing left to say.” Then I turn around and walk away.
Three years ago, Rebecca died, and part of me died with her. The brewery has kept me going. It’s given me something to distract myself from the truth. It gives me something to do other than sit on the couch night after night and realize that I am alone. Then by some twisted act of fate or divine intervention or karma—whatever you want to call it—that distraction was taken away from me. I had nothing left to do but lie in bed at night and drown in the memories. Until Adrienne held out her hand and saved me. She’s the only thing keeping my head above water. She showed me that you don’t overcome heartache by being busy. You overcome it by being happy.
Blaze: A Driven World Novel (The Driven World) Page 14
