Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (26 page)

“Everything is awesome,” he said. “We sold those brownstones, the ones in the Back Bay. All of them. Out of my hands, finally, and off the books. And it was a
big
sale.”

“Matthew, I am so thrilled for you. That’s incredible!”

I knew he’d been dedicating long hours to that project and dealing with all manner of problems.

“Hey, so, whenever we have huge wins like this, we go out and celebrate. And I want you with us tonight.”

I was about to say no—it seemed like something Matthew should enjoy with his business partners and I had a ton of work to plow through this weekend—but I caught my reflection in the mirror and paused. I looked the same as always, but I was different now, somehow more
me
than I was before. With my phone tucked between my shoulder and head, and a half dozen bras under my arm, I decided planetary alignment wasn’t the only reason for a night out.

“Okay. Let me finish these errands, and meet me at my place in an hour.”

“Does that mean you’ll let me stay over when you get hammered and I have to carry you home?” Matthew asked.

“If anyone’s getting hammered—”

“Just say yes, sweetness. I’m happy and I want to spend the night with you and not everything needs to be a debate.”

“Fine. You can stay over. But I’ll definitely want croissants for breakfast tomorrow morning,” I said.

“And I’ll definitely want you sucking my cock for breakfast. Let’s see who wins.”

“Such a caveman,” I groaned.

“You’re bossy. You leave me no choice.”

*

Matthew’s mischievous grin
caught my eye as we walked toward the tiny bistro on Park Street. Almost an hour late to meet his siblings, my skirt was on sideways and there were very distinct teeth marks on my collarbone. We could safely add sex hair to the list, too.

He had been waiting at my door, zeroing in on the Forty Winks bag the moment I rounded the corner, and we barely made it to the bed.

“Good thing you have so many scarves,” he chuckled.

“Yeah, so you can be a little vampire.”

He smirked, and I was tempted to drag him back to my place and beg for his teeth all over again.

“Your brothers and Shannon are going to take one look at us and know,” I murmured.

“No, they’re not. They’re busy getting drunk and talking about how many times I fucked up this build. Far bigger issues than whether I spent the past hour owning your pussy.”

He grabbed my hand, kissing my palm then lacing our fingers together as we joined the group inside the restaurant.

I’d seen plenty of Shannon since returning from my conference travel. We went so far as to calendar drinks and pedicures, and spent the weeks before our appointments harassing each other to get shit done and not cancel at the last minute. So far, it was working.

Riley often accompanied Matthew to Trench Mills, and he occasionally led the progress-monitoring walk-throughs. He was charming and sarcastic, and if my parents had ever given me the younger sibling I requested on multiple Christmas lists, I would have wanted him to be exactly like Riley.

Sam and Patrick were still question marks for me, and Matthew didn’t share much about either. He jogged with Patrick, which was to say Matthew jogged and Patrick—allegedly—complained about it for the duration.

We sat, and after a round of greetings and brotherly ball-busting, the table fell quiet and all eyes were on me. It was painfully obvious I was the only outsider, the non-architect, the plus-one, and it felt oddly similar to sneaking into my brothers’ tree house when I was four.

“Why the fuck did you kick me?” Sam yelled, his glare leveled on Matthew.

“Consider it a warning shot,” he mouthed.

“If I may,” Riley said from beside me, his hand raised for silence. “You shouldn’t be staring at Miss Honey’s tits, Sam. She’s a nice lady, not one of your party girls, and I would’ve kicked you, too.”

“Is that a thing now?” Shannon asked. She passed the white wine to me, the red to Matthew. “‘Miss Honey?’”

Nicknames were a rite of passage for this group. Initially I found them rude and rather cruel—how else can you explain referring to Sam as ‘the runt’?—but I came to see them as part of the Walsh DNA. They were tough on each other, yelling and criticizing and insulting each other easily, and swearing with impunity, but it was how they showed their love. I figured their name-calling was roughly equivalent to the elaborate training operations Wes and Will staged with the Commodore.

“Yeah, I’m taking credit for this one,” Riley said. “I think we should adopt her.”

I felt Matthew’s gaze on me but I couldn’t interpret his preoccupied stare, his slow, measured sips, or the way his eyes lingered on my face.

“Do you adopt many people?” I asked.

“So far? Just Nick,” Patrick said.

Nick was the one person apt to show up at Matthew’s door at six on a Sunday morning and drag him out for a bike ride, or invite himself in for breakfast. The pediatric neurosurgeon and I got to talking several weeks ago, and discovered a shared nostalgia for the West. We missed In-N-Out Burger and street grids that made sense, and admitted to love-hate relationships with New England winters. My Commodore Halsted stories could go toe-to-toe with stories from his superstitious grandmother. We were both the babies—he had two older sisters—and to the dismay of our families, we both ended up staying on the east coast after college.

“What’s his nickname?” I asked.

“Doctor,” Patrick said. “And we aren’t entirely sure he’s earned that one.”

“And what’s yours?” I asked Matthew. Still watching me with his wine glass in hand, a curious expression moved across his face, as if he was trying to understand something complex.

He shook his head. “Never found one that stuck.”

“That is
not
true,” Shannon said. “More like you squirmed out of everything we tried.”

“The Flash,” Sam offered. “He is a brisk runner.”

“Jugger,” Riley said. “For that hard head.”

“None of them worked,” Patrick said.

“We even tried Mitt, you know, for MIT.” Sam shrugged. “I prefer Mitzy, but that one didn’t last.”

“Thankfully,” Matthew muttered.

Dinner was fun, and chock-full of ridiculous stories about the brownstone restorations. The one about the flooded basement. The one about the nest of bats in the linen closet. The one about the frozen grout. The one about the small pet cemetery in the backyard. The one about the ghost because why else would the plumbing materials mysteriously relocate themselves every night?

“You live around here, right?” Sam asked, gesturing toward me and—finally—keeping his eyes above my chest. “Matt said you’re in an awesome building. Good light?”

“Yeah, just over on Chestnut and River. I have really big windows, and these cool ones in the bathroom with little, um—”

“Muntins,” Matthew supplied. His hand was on my upper thigh, and it had been there since he finished eating. I figured he was six seconds away from licking my neck and peeing a circle around me, and if that weren’t tragically gross, it would be endearing. “A diagonal diamond casing, just like the ones we saw in the West End last week, Patrick.”

“Those were old.” Patrick considered this, nodding and staring into his glass. He was a chatty drinker, and I liked it. Much of that cool exterior warmed with the alcohol. “Have you been there long?”

“And can we buy the building because I really want some garden-side restoration action,” Sam added.

“Can we let the cash sit in the bank for twenty minutes, Samuel? God help me,” Shannon muttered.

“I’ve been there about three years, and I don’t know whether it’s for sale, but I will be moving in a few months. The guy I sublet from is finishing a tour in Afghanistan soon.”

I felt it again, Matthew’s gaze on me, weighty and potent. As he watched me, I sensed pieces of me shifting and realigning, my muscles and bones and organs making space inside me to accommodate the immense pressure of his stare.

Sipping my wine, I cut my eyes in his direction, trying to translate the unspoken currents between us.

“When?” he asked. It came out as a whisper, hoarse and pleading, and now I sensed four more pairs of eyes on me.

On
us
.

“In the new year. January or February, but knowing the military, maybe later.”

“And what are you looking for?” Nodding, he added, “I know what you need and I think I know what you want, but I’d like to hear you say it.”

Discussing my apartment search with Matthew’s entire family seemed strange, especially tonight, but I knew they loved talking real estate, and he was responsible for finding my other home: Trench Mills.

“I’d love to stay in this area, and size doesn’t matter to me—”

“It should,” Sam snickered, though he was summarily ignored.

“—and I’d love a bigger kitchen, something open and maybe an island. Lots of windows and natural light. Definitely a tub. I can’t live without one.” I shrugged. “But that’s it. I can be flexible, and I’m not too picky.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he murmured.

Shannon launched into an analysis of every neighborhood in town, and she forwarded me listings from her phone while Matthew sat beside me, his hand on my thigh and his eyes never wavering.

Maybe that odd sensation was just me making space for
him
.

MATTHEW

13:57 Matthew:
im in bunker hill for a few hours and then heading out around 7

13:58 Matthew:
want to grab dinner?

14:14 Matthew:
I can get take-out?

This was the game we played, the battle of wills we fought every day. Lauren was busy being busy and just once, I wanted her to come to me, and I wanted her to stay with me. We were closer after New Orleans, and slipping further into messy, complicated intimacy with each passing day. But for every obstacle we bested, two more stood in our path.

I stared at my phone, knowing it was fully charged and the reception in this part of town was impeccable, and flicked a glance at my watch.
Twenty-five minutes.
Sometimes I thought she read my texts but waited, letting some indiscernible amount of time pass before responding.

I told myself I could live with it, I could handle the need for distance that I knew she saw as self-preservation, but I was greedy and I wanted all of her. Especially today. After another run-in with my favorite inspector and Angus’s most recent renditions of batshit crazy, I wanted an easy night with Lauren. But nothing was as easy as I wanted it, and Angus was making a lot of appearances these days. None of them pleasant.

He threw a crystal paperweight at Shannon three weeks ago, narrowly missing her and bringing down the glass wall separating her office from the interior workspaces. He didn’t give a reason, and more than likely didn’t have one.

There was surprise visit from state auditors the next week. They were following up on a tip about undocumented workers, and needed to see five years’ worth of filings.

News of the lucrative brownstone sales finally made it his way, a month after the fact, and Angus showed up at the bank last week, requesting twenty grand in cash from our business account. He had his own account from back in the day, but bitched out a bank manager for access to our funds. He didn’t get it, thankfully, but Shannon spent the following day smoothing things over with the bank.

We got word from a small-run community newspaper that the original Wellesley headquarters for Walsh Associates cleared escrow this week. They wanted us to comment on centralizing our operations at the Beacon Hill office, and Shannon managed a decent sound bite despite being blindsided by the news.

These were uncommonly public shows of the division within our family. He cared enough about his reputation and the firm’s prominence to keep his assholery at home and under the radar, but between the bank and the office sale, things were taking a markedly external turn.

We later convened in her office, the five of us staring at each other, shrugging and shaking our heads in response to this turn of events. There were plenty of theories about why he sold the office and what he did with the cash and why his stunts were occurring with such frequency, but we attributed it to a new level of bastardhood and went back to work.

I wish I could say this wasn’t typical Angus. I wish I could say his antics were the product of hitting the bottle too hard by all standards, but this was who he decided to be after my mother died: a violently angry man who seized every opportunity to share his rage.

Angus didn’t break windows when we were younger, but in some ways he was worse then. One day while we were at school, not even six months after she died, he destroyed everything with any glimmer of my mother attached to it—pictures, clothes, even the little blankets she knit for Erin’s crib. In his fucked-up, diluted world, we were to blame for her death, and though I hated hearing those words now, it didn’t compare to the way they sounded when I was eight.

Another glance at my phone told me Lauren hadn’t responded, and though I wanted to throw it across the fucking room, I tapped out a message. I was strung too tightly to play the game today.