An Accidental Gentleman (21 page)

Her tomato burst, juice and seeds spurting over the sliced-open pillowcase he’d turned into a tablecloth in a last-minute rush.

“I bet they’re dealing with it better than you are.” Fuck, now he’d done it. Words no amount of apologizing would take back. None of his business.

She sat as frozen as the lake in the depths of February, her surface cloudy and the goings-on below murky and sluggish. The ever-present fire around her pupils, once a safe haven, seemed too dim and distant now to warm either of them. Closing her eyes, she shuddered as she exhaled through parted lips.

“I’m not saying this to hurt you, Katherine.” He had hurt her, though. Tired and defeated and out of options, afraid he’d lose her by staying silent or by speaking up—but the words had been necessary. The conclusion of all of his data gathering and analysis, his formal summation of her. Painful because no one had spoken to her so bluntly, maybe. But he loved her fiercely, and she refused to fucking look at herself, to see how she tore herself up every damn day and how her self-harm wounded him along with her.

“Can you guarantee you won’t hurt me?” She sat hunched in the dress she’d worn for him, her body a compact bundle with her arms tight at her sides and her hands shaking. “We go out and you disappear a few months later, after you’ve made me care about you.”

The embrace he ached to offer wouldn’t be a comfort until she wanted it. Wanted him. Or didn’t hate wanting him. Fierce hurt, sometimes. “I’m not him. You keep trying to force me into the framework you’ve got in your head, and it doesn’t fit me, Katherine. If I did what you’re doing, I’d assume every girl I met was using me to get my brother in bed because he’s the popular one and I’m the fucking clown. Second-goddamn-best every time.”

“Are you sure you aren’t doing just that?” Her voice vibrated. As she leaned across her plate, the fire back in her eyes, she curled her hands into fists. “Going through women the way I go through men?”

Sonovabitch. Her cracking ice dumped him into the chilly, churning waters. One-night stand after one-night stand, and he’d never questioned why. Boys-will-be-boys. Keeping score, bragging with the guys—normal. Not some dysfunctional reaction to one shitty weekend at the end of fucking high school, for chrissake.

Shaking her head, she laughed. “And now you’re testing me. I was wrong, Brian.” She stared him down, her jaw tight and her trembling fists thudding on the table. “You’re not a nice guy. You’re a selfish, manipulative ass trying to make me love you so you can finally one-up your big brother.”

Losing his first steady girl to his brother had stomped his heart into pulp. Losing Katherine to his own stupidity would hurt a thousand times worse, and it felt just like this. Like she’d torn his heart from his chest and sat deciding whether to let it beat again.

“Fuck, Katherine, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing any more than you do.” As if he had all the answers. Not a one, not since a chunk of shredded rubber had whipped past his windshield.

She pushed back as if the tire had nearly clipped her, too. Her shoulders dropped, smoothing taut muscles. Under drawn brows, she studied him. “You don’t?”

“I was doing the same damn thing, living the same day over and over. Keeping my distance so I couldn’t be betrayed.” He’d always known he’d never be the star athlete like Matt. He’d worked hard to be the one who made women laugh and relax. Pleasant, fun, and fuck-worthy. And he never, ever, wanted more from them than they wanted from him. Until Katherine. What a sorry pair they were. “Then I saw you and I didn’t want to do that shit anymore. I wanted to move forward instead of running in place.”

She squinted with the gorgeous pixie squinch she used at her worktable, her nose wrinkling and her lip disappearing between her teeth.

Waiting for his pulse to return ached, but a clean restart depended on her. “I want us to move forward together.”

“But why me?” Loose fists falling open, she implored him with her palms spread wide. “I don’t understand what changed for you. I’m not some glamorous woman who mesmerizes men, Brian.” Waving at herself, she flicked auburn strands from her forehead. “When smudges land on my face, they’re machine grease, not mascara. I fuck when I want to, who I want to, and I’m comfortable with that.”

Bullshit she was. Her words and actions didn’t line up in the comfort column. But what had changed for him, well—“You liked me.”

“Of course I like you, that’s—”

“No, I mean the day we met.” His thoughts jumbled and unfocused like the pixels in a low-res satellite image zoomed into incomprehensibility. He dove deeper, hunting for the words to make him transparent to her. “I was so far off my game, knocked on my ass and impressed by you, playing fetch-and-carry for you—and you still liked me. You didn’t look at me like Brian the fuck-up, or Brian the class clown. You saw me, and I saw you. Changing that tire together, I felt comfortable, Katherine. I finally understood what the hell Sherwood rambles on about, because I could’ve spent hours kneeling on the damn roadside just to be next to you.”

He had been testing her, except not the way she thought, and not from some all-knowing plan. Making her wait for the sex—making himself wait—he’d been testing the friendship, not the romance. A did-she-care-about-him test.

She did. She fucking did, or she wouldn’t keep breaking her own rules to spend time with him, whether they labeled them dates or not.

“Yeah, and I felt comfortable up against a wall with your fingers inside me.” With her shrug, she shed his love the way she did whenever their talks veered too close to real depth. “That was a good time. Uncomplicated. More than that is messy.” Sweeping the room with her gaze, she rambled in all directions but his. “We fight every time we try for this ‘more’ that you want. What’s comfortable about that?”

Everything. Every goddamn thing, because they weren’t fighting against each other. They were fighting for each other. If he had the least chance of showing her their truth, he’d fight to the last breath in his body. “I dare you.”

She tipped her head, as sweetly confused as if she’d cracked open a radio and found a toaster’s guts inside. Beautiful, kissable confusion in her pursed lips. “What?”

“I dare you to step out of your comfort zone and take a fucking chance on me.” His heart pounded. A sign of success for sure, because she had to be squeezing it in her hands, bringing him back to life the way she did a dying motor. God, if only his love would do the same for her. “You think you’re some kind of rebel, but you’re a coward, Katherine.”

* * * *

Fuck him. Fuck him and his fake nice-guy act and his judgment. His Prince Charming romantic dinner with his ridiculous tie-dyed shorts under his formal jacket. With his upfront confession about the takeout and his so-obviously-a-pillowcase tablecloth. Fuck.

“I like sex, Brian.” She’d ruined the fabric. The split-open tomato stained the ivory linen with splashes of red. At least nothing had been real. The damage wouldn’t matter. “I’m not going to be ashamed of that.”

Laughing through his nose and shaking his head, he knocked his knuckles against the table. “Do you hear yourself? If you aren’t ashamed, then why do you hide your sex life from your family?”

Jesus God, his eyes. He begged for an explanation with a sad smile and pale green tendrils of new life rising from once-frozen earth. He piled his hopes in her inadequate hands, as if she knew the difference between the seeds to nourish for strong roots and healthy growth and the spoilers to pluck out before invasive weeds choked their dreams. Her hands didn’t know nurturing. They knew hex wrenches and offset gears. Percussive maintenance, rough and dirty.

Clean-shaven Brian, smooth-cheeked and pristine, would forever be too good for her.

He spread his fingers wide, one palm up and inviting. “Why no dates? Why treat guys like an ugly secret you can’t take home?”

She would ruin him. Her sister’s bitterness had soaked into her soil. Those first two years of terror, when she’d been unable to imagine dating anyone in high school because love landed you on suicide watch in a hospital bed, your cheeks drawn and your voice thin when you spoke at all. When the big sister who’d once let her stay up late and watch scary movies together, and soothed her nightmares after, no longer lived behind those hollow eyes. When two little girls crying for their mother had to make do with their sixteen-year-old aunt instead. Love did that.

“Maybe I am a coward.” She abandoned dinner. Brian’s stuffed tiger with its ragged ear stump watched her from the coffee table. She’d have to pass the silent guardian to reach the door.

Brian had shown her his tender underbelly tonight. The boy who’d grown up to be the man at the table now. Not a stranger, not blank and faceless the way she imagined the men she fucked, because who they were never mattered so long as they gave her the escape she sought for an hour or two.

Needing the sex didn’t make her ashamed. But wanting more, tangling lust with the wires of love and loss and regret dead-set on strangling her when he walked away—she shivered.

“Maybe I am.” No maybe about it. “But I still want to fuck you. I would’ve fucked you weeks ago if you’d let me.” And dropped him before he became a real person, one with feelings and desires she’d have to consider. Jesus, she should be ashamed. “You think I move too fast. That I’m a disgusting—”

“No. Fuck, Katherine, no, that’s not what I’m saying.” Brian launched himself up. His chair tipped to the rug. “I would never tell you to be ashamed of wanting sex. I don’t divide women into Sunday school virgins and lying whores. I’m trying to show you
you
do, or at least you act like you do.”

The girls didn’t need to meet the men she fucked, to have their aunt’s example of how not to find love. Her parents didn’t need to see the Kit who cavalierly plucked a man from the crowd for his broad hands and his smile filled with sharp, dangerous thoughts.

Creases lined Brian’s forehead, and behind them lay nice-guy thoughts she didn’t deserve. The man who’d nearly turned down a blowjob because he wanted to know all of her, not just the skills that made him come.

He eased toward her, his slow steps as gentle as his voice. “You have a good-girl life around your family, and then you treat your desire like it’s something filthy you can’t take home with you.”

More than her desire. All of her, stained, torn, and unstitched. The way she’d always be. Because Erin, fuck, she didn’t need to see the opposite—a goddamn genuine nice guy, a man who stayed when he said he would.

Bringing a happy relationship home, she might as well hand her sister the pills all over again.
“It’s just a headache from the girls crying, Kit. Would you toss me that bottle from the counter and watch them awhile? I need a nap.”

And then not being able to wake her. The frantic calls and the begging. The lights and sirens competing with the girls’ wailing. Her fault for missing the signs.

For so many years, she’d put everyone else’s needs first. Pinned herself in a vise between fulfilling the bare minimum of her own needs, but only where no one would see her, and rejecting any hope of something better, because her sister’s dreams had crumbled.

Brian twined their fingers, his right in her left, and raised her hand. “You treat yourself like something filthy. Unworthy.” Kissing the bare underside of her wrist, he locked gazes with her over the top. “It burns me up, because you are so incredibly beautiful, all of you, and you refuse to see it.”

His soft kisses stung. He wounded her and healed her in some simultaneous impossibility, teasing away with lips and tongue the injury she’d gotten in the softball parking lot. When his crack about wedding rings had hurt more than the throbbing pain of wrenching her arm.

Swift and sure, he stitched her up now with his mouth. The hurt fell away, leaving the happy memory of them covered in mud and laughing together. The kind of fun she never allowed herself with the guys she fucked. She lusted and she took, but they weren’t men she liked. They weren’t men she wanted to talk with. Laugh with. Love with.

Clasping her bare shoulders, he rubbed the wide straps of her borrowed dress with his thumbs. Under his steady gaze, he inhaled and exhaled with unhurried calm. “I want you to be one woman, whole and complete, not just for me but for you. Because you should love yourself.”

His lips, pale pink, called to her. Her favorite piece of him, because he delivered so much kindness with them, even in his cruel challenges to be more. To be better. To be his Katherine and allow him to be her Brian.

“I’m—I want—” Throat closing, she choked on nothing. What he wanted for her, she wanted for him. Whole and complete. The risky love, the one where you had to love yourself first or the rest wouldn’t fall into clockwork rhythm. Real love. Fuck, so much bliss should be joyful and together, not damn scary. “I’m afraid you’ll break my heart.”

His exhale skipped into a shaky smile. “I’m afraid you’ll break mine. That you’ll let fear hold you back.”

He cradled her cheeks with the delicacy of a man holding an irreplaceable part. Without her, unbroken and ready to work, the machine would never run. And their awkward contraption might turn with grace and precision if she found the courage to let it.

He swiped beneath her eyes. God. When had she started crying?

“I don’t know how to make the scariness disappear all at once. I would if I could.” Pushing tears into her hairline, he trembled. Braver than her. He stood with his innermost pieces exposed and vulnerable. “I think maybe the fear fades over time. Until someday you realize you haven’t worried in years, because we’ve been showing each other day in and day out by still being here. I love you, Katherine.”

Warmth flooded her, warmth and urgency to move with him as a unified whole. To taste his mouth and the promises on his tongue. He nestled his heart in her hands. A trust she hadn’t known she’d needed until she felt the comforting weight. Whatever tinkering she did would have to be her best work. A new challenge, a new dare, but one they would solve together.

Bowing his head, he clenched his jaw and nodded half sideways. “If you can’t believe the words yet, if you can’t hear them, then tell me how I can make them real for you.”