“Though,” she said. “I think you actually did me a favor. Made me grow up. Helped me learn when to suck it up and cut my losses.” She pushed off the wall. “Everyone has a first heartbreak, the one that teaches you how things can go bad. I think I was lucky that I had you doing the breaking. Someone else, and I might have ended up doing something really stupid.” Her fingers found his forearm and squeezed. “Thanks for looking out for me.”
And then she was gone, the spots she’d touched burning, but the hole in his heart an absolute crater.
By the time he made it back inside, Tanner was a little more centered. Kelsey was, too. Or at the very least, she was beautiful and laughing and putting on a great show for all parties involved.
“Then,” she said, the story not breaking its pace as he took his seat, “Bas came out of the bathroom, teeny tiny washcloth over his manly bits, the only white part left on his body.”
Rachel and her posse cackled.
“And he was all green?” the pretty brunette he thought was named Abby asked.
“Yes!” Kels laughed. “Devon and I replaced his body wash and shampoo with animal-safe dye. He looked like a stalk of broccoli, skinny but with his mop of hair flopping all over the place.”
Bas grinned good-naturedly. “I don’t know what I was thinking, bleaching my hair that summer.”
“Me neither.” Kels smiled back at her brother. “But those blond locks really made the green dye pop.”
“Brat.” But he tossed his arm over her shoulders and reached up a fist to noogie her hair. “Only took me about thirty showers to get it so I could leave the house and not look like an alien.”
Kels squirmed away. “Green is not your color.”
Bas shook his head. “You and Devon put me through the wringer, you know that, right?”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “No playing the martyr, love. I seem to remember a certain brother who took all of his sister’s stuffed animals and held them for ransom. Not to mention replacing the tip of your lovely sister’s eyeliner with that of a permanent marker.”
“That was in response to the broccoli incident!”
Tanner snorted.
First, because he’d bleached his hair that summer, too, and second, because he’d seen the outcome of both pranks.
The Scotts were vicious.
Case in point, when Bas pointed across the table and declared, “And Tanner, I thought he was my friend, but it turned out he was in on all of them.”
“What?” Kelsey’s eyes flicked to his.
“He gave Devon the dye and he thought of the eyeliner prank.”
Ice from her end of the table. “And what about Mr. Snuggles? He never recovered from his incarceration.”
Meaning, he and Bas had accidentally shoved Mr. Snuggles in an access panel for some plumbing, not realizing that the pipes got really hot and that the synthetic fur of Kelsey’s favorite unicorn toy would melt.
She’d cried when they’d returned the misshapen toy, and he’d never felt more like an ass.
Except perhaps when he’d broken things off with her.
“I was in on that, too.”
Definite frost, but she continued putting on her show, and so her lips curved. “You monster.”
“No brothers and sisters to torment meant I had to find my own way.”
Some of that ice melted, her knowing what it had been like growing up in his house. Not an uncommon story, his upbringing. Parents who worked too much, who spent all their time either uninvolved in his life, or feeling guilty for not being there and suffocating him.
At first, he’d eaten up the attention, been so starved for it.
But then work would inevitably become more important, and he’d been shuttled to after-school care or, once he’d become friends with Bas, the Scotts had let him hang out at their house every afternoon.
Sebastian’s mom was the best, framing it like he was doing them a favor so Bas wouldn’t be alone while she shuttled Dev to hockey practice and Kelsey to her extra academic courses. He hadn’t cared why they’d let him stay. Besides Bas being his best friend, meaning extra hang out time was great, he’d also just loved being part of the hustle and bustle of a big family. Cars coming and going, voices talking over each other at the dinner table, laughter and teasing echoing through the halls.
His house was quiet.
Bigger and undoubtedly fancier than the Scotts’, but so much colder.
No soul.
The only good thing his parents had ever done for him, besides the whole feeding and clothing and giving him a safe place to live—because those couldn’t be discounted, even if he had been neglected in almost every other way—was buy him a camera. But after spending fourteen years shooting professionally, nine of those moving from place to place, never settling down, never having a home base for more than a couple of weeks, now he wondered how much he’d missed out on while using his job, his cameras as a shield.
Intimacy for sure.
At first, there had been lots of women, but that had gotten old quick.
At first, he’d loved flitting from place to place without being tied down.
But eventually he’d begun to miss home, to miss the noisy Scotts, to miss Kelsey and her brain that never stopped.
That had been a year before.
That had been because Kelsey had called.
He’d been looking through the lens of his camera, searching for the perfect shot, the perfect composition that would fill the hole inside him, and her phone call had made him see.
It would never be filled.
Not with photography, anyway.
He wanted to come home. He wanted to see his friends, his family—that would be the Scotts, not his biological parents.
And . . . he needed to see her.
To find out if it was the same.
The gnawing need, the draw that seemed to never waver, even though he’d done his best to stretch it to snapping by moving all around the world. Because he’d known at twenty-one, and he knew now.
Kelsey was it for him.
And just like then, that knowledge was absolutely terrifying.
Laughter drew him out of his head, the conversation having carried on while he’d been deep in thought. He reached for his beer and slugged back a fair portion of it.
“Got it bad,” came a voice from his right. It was New York through and through and belonged to a gray-eyed beauty whose blond hair and gorgeous looks no doubt made most men underestimate her.
Tan didn’t, however.
He saw the sharpness in her gaze, the shrewdness in her expression. That, paired with the fact that she was one of the most famous lawyers in the country at the moment—having won a big case against a corporation who was taking advantage of their hourly employees, a case that was currently all over television—meant that he knew Bec Darden to be a very smart human.
“Heard about your case,” he said. “That was huge.”
A flash of white teeth. “Thanks,” she said. “But your pathetic attempts at distraction don’t work with me.”
“Becky baby,” her husband, Luke, said. “This isn’t the courtroom. Let the man enjoy his beer.”
The fierce lawyer wrinkled her nose. “But he’s got it bad.”
“Anyone within a three-mile radius can see that, but still, the man should get to enjoy his beer.”