Happily Ever After: A Romance Collection

by Amelia Wilde

  Brandon pursed his lips before venturing another guess. “I got it. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Since you’re from Brooklyn and all.”

  “Isn’t that sort of akin to me guessing Good Will Hunting since you’re also a prodigy out of Southie?”

  He smirked. “Dorchester, not Southie. One neighborhood away. Okay then, Ms. Unpredictable, answer the question.”

  I gave him my best wide-eyed gaze. “To Kill a Mockingbird, of course.”

  “You’re kidding. Really? How is that less clichéd than Legally Blonde?”

  “Because Mockingbird is a legitimate classic,” I said. “Come on, what lawyer wasn’t partly inspired by Atticus Finch?”

  “Hmm. Okay, I’ll give you that. So, you like old movies?”

  I nodded after finishing my cannoli. “I grew up in a house that appreciated fine arts and cinema,” I said through a mouthful of ricotta and pastry shell, which I washed down with the last bit of my tea. “Plus, our TV reception was terrible, so all I ever watched were Bubbe’s old VHS tapes. Gregory Peck was a fox.”

  “Figures,” Brandon said. “You are definitely a save-the-world type. It’s a good thing I didn’t hire you after all. I think you just earned yourself another nickname, Scout.”

  I blanched. “Another nickname?”

  “Well, we could go with Boo Radley, if you want, but I figured you’d prefer the narrator.”

  “All right, all right, your turn,” I said as I shoved against his shoulder. “Favorite movie.”

  “You’re not gonna guess?”

  I didn’t respond, just gave him a look that hopefully told him he’d better answer, or I’d push him into the harbor. Brandon popped the last of his cannoli into his mouth and took an agonizingly long time to chew and swallow. He opened his lips as if he were going to answer, and then lifted his coffee cup instead.

  “Oh my God!” I cried, tossing my now-empty cup at him.

  He laughed as it fell onto the pavement, then scooped it up and tossed it into a nearby receptacle along with his trash. “You are way too much fun to rile up, Red.”

  Brandon grabbed my hand and tucked me comfortably under his shoulder again with my arm wrapped around his waist. I eagerly burrowed into the space, inhaling Brandon’s scent with something close to ecstasy while his big form shielded me from the icy breeze coming off the water.

  “It’s Goodfellas, by the way,” he said. “I’m a sucker for Scorsese. I almost guessed that for you too, actually, since it takes place in Brooklyn.”

  “East Brooklyn,” I corrected him almost automatically. “Yeah, it’s a good movie.” I didn’t want to tell him that Scorsese’s film was a little too close to home to be enjoyable, considering my dad’s involvement with people like that.

  We walked for a bit in comfortable silence. Usually when a lull in conversation hit, I wondered if my date was bored or what he might be thinking—it was often the first thing that turned me off. But with Brandon, it didn’t seem to matter if we were talking or not. The comfortable grip of his hand on my shoulder and the way he occasionally rested his nose in my hair made me feel at ease without a single word. Why he felt like he had to shower me with extravagant gifts was beyond me. His company was the best thing he could offer.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to believe that so many legendary things happened here,” I remarked as we passed a sign marking the Paul Revere Trail.

  A group of tourists posed for pictures beside it, and Brandon nodded at them pleasantly, though his arm around my shoulder tightened.

  “Well, that’s why Boston is the greatest city in the world,” he said.

  I snorted. “I think that’s my line.”

  Brandon smiled, then stopped walking. “Hold on a second.”

  Before I could stop him, he swiped a bit of stray ricotta from my cheek before sucking it off his finger. I stared at him, half disgusted, half aroused.

  “I can’t believe you just did that,” I said, in response to which I received another toothy grin.

  “Oh, believe me, Red, there are a lot of things I wouldn’t mind licking off you,” Brandon said as he nuzzled his mouth against my ear, nipping my earlobe in a way that sent shivers down my spine. “I think you taste best of all, though.”

  The flush that ran up my neck was immediate, as was the sudden bolt of desire in my belly.

  “Well, fair’s fair, Mr. Sterling,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. His hand had drifted down my arm, and I toyed with his fingers. “I should probably get a taste of you sometime soon too, don’t you think?”

  One side of his face quirked up into that sly half smile. He leaned in again, so I could feel his warm breath against my neck, and growled into my ear, “Anytime, Red. Any. Time.”

  It was becoming clear that I wasn’t going to be able to play this game very well with him. He would always out-fluster me. So instead, I took the coward’s way out and changed the subject. We walked by Faneuil Hall and back up to the cobbled streets of Haymarket as we chatted amiably about our lives, retelling small stories from our experiences at school and the different careers we’d had. Brandon was curious when I told him about my decision to leave investment banking for a career in law—in that way, our choices were quite similar.

  “Why didn’t you ever leave Boston to play the market in New York?” I wondered. “Later, I mean. After you had started Ventures.”

  “Boston’s my home,” Brandon said as he kicked a can out of our way.

  “Do you ever go back to your old neighborhood?”

  He pressed his lips together, but shook his head. “Not—not really. Sometimes I might check on some old friends of my mother’s, the ones who used to look in on me before I lived with the Petersens. But that’s it.”

  He said it so casually that I might have missed the reference to his upbringing. Like most people who had had a shitty early life, Brandon tended to talk around the hard facts of his childhood rather than recall them directly. I didn’t want to push him to say more than he wanted—I understood the desire to keep some things firmly in the past. But I also didn’t want to hide the fact that I knew things he thought I didn’t.

  “But honestly,” Brandon continued without noticing my tension as we crossed the street, “most people I knew back then don’t even live there anymore, and the ones that still do don’t want to see me.”

  I frowned. “Why’s that?”

  “Probably because they think I should have come back when my ma got out of jail.”

  Wait. That was completely different from what I’d been told. “What? I thought she was—”

  “Was what?”

  I gulped. Shit, I’d been caught. “Um, well, Kieran might have mentioned a few things to me. About your parents.”

  His feet came to a sudden halt, stopping us in front of King’s Chapel, its famous cemetery eerily dark and silent in the heart of the city. “Kieran?”

  “She’s your friend, right? She was there the night you and I met. Well, she’s the director of—”

  “FLS. Yeah, I know.”

  Brandon didn’t move, standing as still and tall as the Corinthian columns holding up the front of the church. His arm around my shoulders now felt like a vise. I continued in a rush, hoping to diffuse the awkwardness.

  “Kieran just said that you grew up together, that’s all. In the same building, and that you were friends. And that your mom is—”

  “Dead.” The word fell between us like a stone.

  “Um...yes,” I confirmed with a shaky nod. “And she mentioned that your dad—”

  “Is finishing up his second ten-year sentence.” His arm fell from my shoulders, and he shoved both of his hands deep into his coat pockets. His eyes were made of steel. “For beating up his last girlfriend with a wrench.”

  I said nothing, but my stomach dropped at his icy tone.

  “Oh, she didn’t tell you that part?”

  “Brandon, I’m sorry. Kieran just—”

  “Has a way of butting in where she shouldn’t.�
�� He pressed his lips together so hard that they nearly disappeared, then exhaled a long breath toward the sky. “What else did she say?”

  “Um, well, she also said that your mom was a—had some issues with drugs.”

  Brandon pulled his hands out of his pockets and threaded them through his hair.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, not really.”

  He darted a suspicious blue glance at me. “You sure?”

  “Brandon, yes, I’m sure.”

  I took a step toward him, hoping he might pull me back into the nook between his arm and his solid body. But instead, he took another step away.

  “Well, I guess it’s for the best,” he said, his tone resigned. “You should know what I really come from.”

  We stared at each other for what seemed like a full minute, and it felt like the busy downtown street was completely silent. His eyes were hooded yet direct; I begged him to see openness in mine. I wanted the truth, whatever it was. So, I waited.

  “She’s dead,” he finally said again. “A year after she was released after serving time for felony possession. I was fifteen. She wanted to regain guardianship, but the judge asked me what I wanted.” He shrugged, as if testifying against his own mother weren’t a massive deal. Only the rising accent indicated otherwise. “Life with the Petersens was good. I was about to graduate high school, something neither of my folks ever did, and they had already offered to send me to MIT if I could get in. I had enough to eat, and no one was coming home wasted or beating the shit out of me on a daily basis.”

  I couldn’t imagine someone as tall and strong as Brandon being beaten by anyone. A vision of one of the kids from the clinic immediately rose to mind. A woman and her daughter had both came in today with bruises all over their arms; the little girl had a nasty cut over her right eye.

  Suddenly I was choked up, imagining Brandon as a blond-haired little boy, with the same kind of bruises and cuts. Brandon started to walk toward the Commons without checking that I was with him. I had to trot to keep up, but I was there while he strode the last three blocks past the Granary cemetery and the Park Street Church. It wasn’t until we were well inside the Commons, in the relative peace of the bare-branched trees and lights linings the pathways, that he finally slowed down to finish his story.

  “So, I chose Ray and Susan,” he said, quietly enough that I had to strain to hear him. “And two days after the judge maintained their guardianship, she was dead. Heroin overdose. You wanted the truth, and this is it: I killed my mother.”

  “Oh God,” I breathed out, more to myself than to him. A few tears fell down my cheeks before I could stop them. “Oh God, Brandon. That’s...not true.”

  As if finally realizing that I was still there, Brandon stopped and turned to look at me in surprise. With both hands, he cradled my face and forced me to look into his fathomless blue eyes while his thumbs wiped away the remnants of my tears.

  “Skylar, listen to me,” he said, in a calm tone, his slight Boston accent and slight lines across his forehead the last signs of his distress. “Are you listening?”

  I could barely speak, so I just nodded. Brandon sighed.

  “I know what it sounds like. Math kid, deadbeat parents, rescued by an MIT professor. I do sound like that damn movie, just fast-forwarded a few years.” He gave a crooked smile. “I even got a Skylar now, don’t I? But, baby, I dealt with all of this shit a long time ago, and honestly, I got it pretty good in the end.”

  “But Ray—” I started to protest, thinking of that oddly cold man in his office piled with papers.

  “Ray was fine,” Brandon cut me off gently. “He gave me a chance to make something of myself, and I took it. Some people in the old neighborhood couldn’t handle it, so I just said fuck ’em, and I don’t waste my time there anymore.” He breathed out, a slow, steady breath as he released my face. “Do you remember what I said?”

  I screwed my forehead up, momentarily confused. It couldn’t be as simple as that, not after what had happened with his mother. Brandon clearly had issues he hadn’t dealt with properly. But before I could say anything, he pressed his forehead against mine and hummed.

  “I don’t need to be fixed, Skylar,” he reminded me. “Please understand that.”

  I didn’t. I was screwed up enough from my relationship with my mother; I couldn’t imagine anyone could be truly okay after all of the hardship he’d endured as a kid, even if it was more than twenty years ago now. Could a person ever really get over being betrayed by a parent? I wasn’t so sure.

  But I nodded my head anyway to show him that I had at least heard what he said. I could see his deep desire to please others, as well as the guilt from his decisions in his own self-interest. These things which now caused him to go so over-the-top, trying to make others happy. Well, at least the others he cared about.

  The thought brought an unexpected smile to my lips, and Brandon cocked his head in question.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  I stood up on my tiptoes and gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “I just realized something. You like me, Brandon Sterling. You like me a lot.”

  His mouth quirked up with a surprised smile. His eyes shined brightly with pleasure.

  “Well, I’m glad that’s finally getting through,” he murmured, then pulled me into a soft, sweet kiss that, while lacking the fury of the others, was just as potent.

  I wanted to kiss him again, but Brandon straightened up and led me down a path across a wide expanse of grass and then across Beacon Street. We had walked through the entire Commons. I had been so engrossed in his story that I hadn’t even noticed.

  “Will you come in?” he said, gesturing at the familiar gray townhouse where I had already spent one memorable night. “There’s one more thing I’d like to show you.”

  The boyish hope on his face made it clear there was no ulterior motive. Even if there were, my answer probably would have been the same.

  “Lead on, sir,” I said and held out my hand.

  22

  We were met by a gust of warm, inviting air, a stark contrast to the increasingly frigid night. Right down to the time (it was nearing midnight), the house looked the same as I remembered: the same impeccably clean surfaces, the same plush carpeting and glossy floors, the same warm lighting and crackling fireplace.

  “You have a fetish for fireplaces, don’t you?” I asked as Brandon removed my coat and draped it on a rack by the door. “Your office and here. They’re always lit.”

  “I was cold a lot as a kid,” he replied.

  Oh. Shaking away the image of a blond boy shivering in the snow, I looked around again.

  “So, does it always look like this when you come home?”

  Brandon glanced around. “Like what?”

  I gestured at the living room, with the dancing flames and the couch piled with soft blankets and throw pillows. “Oh, just waiting for you to curl up with hot chocolate and watch the snow fall. You know, like it’s waiting for you to live here.”

  “I do live here.” He chuckled. “But I don’t do a lot of curling up.” Brandon peered up and down his large frame and then back at me with a smirk. “Maybe I should start.”

  “Maybe you should,” I joked.

  “Seriously though,” Brandon said, “this place can feel like a tomb when everything is shut down. So I ask Ana to keep it alight, so to speak. Nicer to come home to.”

  Huh. Who’d have thought that big Brandon Sterling was afraid of the dark?

  He pulled my gloves off for me and set them on the small console by the door. Then he took one of my hands in his and brought it to his lips.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Red,” he said softly and pulled me close. “You look good in my house.”

  I blushed. “Do I?”

  “Definitely. That was the first thing I thought when I found you sitting on my windowsill like you owned the place. It wasn’t just that this beautiful woman had magically appeared
in my living room. I remember feeling like it was déjà vu—like you were always supposed to be here. I thought, it’s crazy, I don’t even know this girl, but I don’t want her to leave.”

  His words made my throat catch. Then I thought of something.

  “Wait. Were you really unable to get me a car that night?”

  “No. But it was the best excuse I could come up with to get you to stay.” Brandon grinned guiltily. “Come on, Red. What I want to show you is upstairs.”

  It was all the way upstairs: three full flights. The house was even more enormous than I’d thought. The second floor, where I had stayed, boasted three other guest rooms with en suite bathrooms. I caught a glimpse of what looked to be his enormous bedroom on the third floor, along with two other rooms that looked like an office and a home gym. Well, that explained his physique.

  The top floor was a massive loft styled as a rec room. In one corner was an enormous entertainment system in front of the biggest sectional couch I had ever seen. Behind that was a wet bar framed by neon beer signs and Red Sox paraphernalia. In the middle of the room was a polished pool table, and on the other side of that was a ping-pong table.

  It was the ultimate bachelor space. Everything was pristine, without a speck of dust, like it hadn’t been occupied for a while. Or maybe not ever.

  “Did you want to watch a movie or something?” I asked.

  I wasn’t sure why a rec room was so important to show me, but I’d heard worse excuses to get a girl to stick around. Maybe this was just his way of telling me that he didn’t like craft beer as much as he claimed.

  Brandon flipped his gaze over the room briefly. “Oh, no, although we can if you want. This is mostly shit I had set up for friends. I don’t really come up here that much.”

  The way his voice shifted ever so slightly on the word “friends” made me wonder if he was talking about his friends from the old neighborhood. This was the kind of place I could imagine any twenty-one-year-old putting together for his friends to come over and watch the game. Except Brandon was thirty-seven.