Next Stop Love, #1

by Rachel Stockbridge

  He held the dark vindication against himself like a shield. But it did nothing to soothe the tearing pain in his chest.

  He knew he shouldn’t have come to this damn dinner.

  Fifteen

  Beatrice sank into the nearest chair. Her legs shook too much to support her any longer. This wasn’t like the arguments she mediated at home, where she could function as a neutral third party. Where she could shut down her own feelings and steer the fight into some semblance of rationality.

  She was smack in the middle of this one.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, pressing cold fingers to her cheeks. She couldn’t look at Greyson. A weird combination of guilt, nerves, and resentment made it impossible to look at anyone. Her eyes settled on the pepper mill near the end of the table. “You—You never told me you had a step-brother.”

  “It’s a sore subject,” Greyson replied, gripping the back of one of the other chairs. He tapped a hard staccato rhythm with one finger. “We . . . don’t get along very well.”

  “Really,” Kinsey said, crossing her arms beside Beatrice. “You seemed so happy to see each other.”

  “I don’t understand,” Beatrice said softly, trying to sort the chaos into some kind of pattern. How hadn’t she known they were step-brothers? She’d mentioned Greyson to Julian before. She was sure of it.

  Except, now that she thought about it . . . maybe she hadn’t. Whenever Greyson came up in conversation, she’d just referred to him as her boyfriend. And the one time Julian mentioned having a step-brother, he hadn’t offered a name either.

  Greyson released the chair and crouched at Beatrice’s side. “I’m sure this wasn’t your fault,” he said in a low voice, freezing her in place with his gaze. “I know Julian. He has no trouble convincing people he’s just a good guy who’s down on his luck. But he’s bad news. You shouldn’t be hanging around with him.”

  Beatrice flushed. She wasn’t stupid. She knew Julian had a rough past. He got quiet and tense as they neared the city every day—he’d stop drawing, his pencil tapping a rapid rhythm against the paper as he scanned the faces of the people around them, and it took him an extra beat to respond if she asked him a question. That tension tended to still be with him when they got on the train back home. For goodness’ sake, they’d met because he was fleeing a guy he claimed was capable of killing both of them. That didn’t exactly scream wholesome lifestyle.

  “What do you mean, ‘bad news?’” Beatrice asked, gripping the seat of her chair with both hands.

  Greyson sat back on his heels, a warning flashing in his eyes. “I guess he didn’t mention to any of you about how he got in trouble with the FBI for running drugs for a gang.”

  “Are you serious?” Nath asked.

  “No,” Beatrice said in flat denial. She didn’t care if Greyson got angry. Julian may have had a tough life, but he wasn’t a criminal. He just wasn’t. “No way.”

  Greyson’s expression softened into something close to pity. Beatrice turned her head sharply and blinked away an unexpected onslaught of tears.

  “Okay.” Greyson stood, rubbing his face. “Maybe I’d better explain. I was thirteen when my father married their mother—him and his sister. We got along at first. It was good having other kids around the house, after so many years of being an only child. I considered both of them real siblings. But . . . things started going wrong after their mother passed. The trauma—it was so sudden. She was driving home from work one day and got hit by a drunk driver.”

  Beatrice touched her fingers to her lips, fighting the well of sympathy pushing against her lungs. Greyson was so upset already, and she was afraid of what he would do if he thought she was taking Julian’s side. But she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like to have your mom snatched away from you so quickly. She swallowed, keeping her expression as still and neutral as she could.

  “Julian, in particular, started acting out after that,” Greyson went on. “It was like he became a completely different person. He got mixed up with these guys at school who were always getting in trouble. I tried to warn him about them, but he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t want anything to do with me. I think he resented me for still having my dad when both his parents were dead. And he was always so stubborn. There was nothing I could do.” Greyson picked up a spoon from the table and turned it over in his fingers. “One day these guys he was hanging around turned on him and messed him up pretty bad. Broke his collarbone and a couple of ribs. Punctured a lung. Shattered a few bones in his hand by closing it in a car door.”

  “Oh God,” Beatrice said before she could stop herself. Julian had told her he’d broken his hand in high school, but she had no idea it was that serious.

  Greyson nodded, his frown somber. “It was awful, but . . .” He dropped the spoon and turned to Beatrice, a chilly sort of anguish twisting his expression. “It sounds terrible, but part of me was relieved when it happened. I thought he would see that messing with those guys was a bad idea, and he’d calm down, and come back, and everything would go back to how it was before. My dad was going to put him in physical therapy so that he could start drawing again. He could’ve gotten into an art school. He could’ve done something with his life.

  “Instead, somehow he came to the conclusion that I was the one to blame for those guys attacking him. I think he resented the fact that I’d warned him about them. He refused the physical therapy. He stopped talking to me at all. And then he left. Packed up his things and left the day after he was released from the hospital. We kept tabs on him for a while, but he kept getting in trouble—drugs, gangs—and then the whole thing with the FBI . . .

  “I’m—I’m sorry if I seemed not quite myself,” he said, smoothing his shirt front. “I haven’t spoken to him in years. It was a shock, seeing him after all this time.”

  Beatrice dropped her gaze. She didn’t know what to say. She was having a hard time parsing how much of Greyson’s story was fact and how much was . . . not lies, per se, but . . . embroidered. Skewed. She’d been the complaint receptacle for her own family long enough to know that when things got emotional, the story of what happened didn’t always line up with the facts. Memories shifted. Some more than others. And this wasn’t something that happened a couple weeks ago. This was years.

  She kept seeing Julian’s face in her mind’s eye. That terrifying moment when she thought he was going to fight Greyson right there in Kinsey’s dining room. How the color had drained from his face when he saw Greyson standing in the doorway. You didn’t look at someone like that just because you had some misplaced anger at them from three years ago that you hadn’t worked out yet.

  Greyson took her hand. “Can you understand why I’d be worried to find out he’s been trying to get close to you?” he asked, his voice oh-so-gentle.

  No. I don’t understand any of this. “I—I guess.”

  She looked up at him, but she couldn’t read him. The tilt of his head, the furrow of his brow, should have signaled understanding. Sympathy. A hint of guilt for how he grabbed her, even. But there was something in his eyes—a sharpness that wouldn’t blunt—that unsettled her.

  He pressed his lips to her knuckles. “I just don’t want you getting hurt.”

  “I appreciate that,” Beatrice said, sliding her hand out of his grip and wrapping her arms around herself. “But I can take care of myself. I don’t—”

  The front door banged open. Beatrice pushed back from the table and darted to the foyer. Sasha blew in the front door with a gust of air that smelled of oncoming snow. She was flushed and breathless, and there was no way she’d had enough time to take Julian all the way back home.

  “Sasha?” Beatrice said, meeting her at the coat rack by the door.

  “He got a cab,” Sasha said, without even waiting for Beatrice to ask. She kicked her shoes off but didn’t remove her coat before touching Beatrice’s shoulder and searching her eyes. “Everything okay here?” she asked in a whisper, as though making sure the others couldn
’t hear.

  Beatrice nodded, surprised at the seriousness in Sasha’s expression. But before Beatrice could ask her what Julian had said to make her look so worried, Sasha plastered on a smile and swept into the dining room.

  Beatrice glanced at the front door before she followed, hesitant to go back in. Part of her wanted to slip out the door and catch up to Julian, even though it would just make Greyson angry. But what could she say that would make up for how much she’d hurt Julian by putting him in a situation where he felt so cornered?

  Chest tight, Beatrice slid into the dining room behind Sasha.

  “Sorry about all this, Greyson,” Sasha was saying, her tone too bright, as though it was forced. “I don’t think any of us realized you two knew each other. I mean, you don’t seem like you would have run in the same circles.”

  “No, it’s not anyone’s fault,” Greyson said, all his earlier agitation gone. He even offered up an apologetic smile.

  “What do you say we all get some pie and think about something else?” Sasha suggested briskly, cutting Kinsey off when she opened her mouth—probably to say something sarcastic, from her expression.

  A look passed between the two of them, and Kinsey narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, fine,” she said, picking up the dish of stuffing and heading into the kitchen. “Pie it is.”

  Greyson volunteered to help clear the table, and that was it. They were all going to have dessert and act like nothing had happened.

  But Beatrice didn’t want any stupid pie. She shut her eyes and tried to breathe. For all her doubts about her relationship with Greyson, she never thought he’d try to hurt her. She wanted to go home so she could lock herself away and have a good cry. She felt agitated and confused and guilty and unaccountably sad.

  “Bee?” Nath asked. He’d come to stand next to her, his arms crossed, his eyes big and worried.

  “I’m fine.” Beatrice forced a smile. “Let’s get these dishes cleared, okay?”

  Her gaze wandered to the window as she collected a butter dish and the gravy boat from the table. Outside, in the yellow light of the streetlamps, it had started to snow.

  * * *

  A few hours fighting public transit to get home hadn’t improved Julian’s mood. He didn’t even feel human anymore. Just a sack of skin containing a dense vortex of angry, confused devastation. He couldn’t get his movements under control. They were too fast, too violent. He forced his way through the sticky door of his apartment, letting it bang against the wall.

  “Fuck!” Fabiana was perched on one of the wobbly kitchen chairs with one leg drawn up, a bottle of nail polish in her hand. A hot pink streak slashed across her bare foot. She grabbed for a napkin as Julian slammed the door and wrestled his coat off. “Look what you—” She cut herself off when she looked up at him, her frown sharpening. “The fuck happened to you?”

  “Thanksgiving fucking happened to me,” Julian spat, shoving his coat in the closet. His sketchbook fell out of the pocket. Fucking useless piece of crap. He was fooling himself thinking he could get out from under a lifetime’s worth of shitty luck with one sketchbook of shitty art. He snatched it off the floor and hurled it at the trash can. It hit a cabinet instead and landed pages-first on the linoleum.

  “Hey, whoa,” Fabiana said, eyes wide. “Chill.”

  Julian rounded on her before he could think better of it. “I thought I told you to text me when you left Walter’s.”

  “I forgot,” she said, wetting the napkin with nail polish remover and dabbing at her foot. By the looks of it, she’d been home for a while. She had changed into yoga pants and a sweatshirt, and her long hair was tied in a high knot. “So sue me.”

  “How hard is it to type two words on your way out?”

  “Shit, Jules. Give me a break. You’re not the only one who had a rotten night, you know. I was counting on Greyson bringing his new girlfriend to dinner so he couldn’t be as much of a dick, but she was—”

  “In White Plains?” Julian finished for her. “Having dinner with her friends? Yeah. I know.”

  “You—What?” Fabiana lifted her head, napkin suspended in midair. “How?”

  Julian spread his arms. “Guess who else was there.”

  Fabiana’s lip twisted in confusion. “In White Plains?”

  “I take it Greyson left dinner early? Maybe said something about dropping in on his girlfriend?”

  “Wait. You were there? With the girlfriend?”

  “Yep.”

  He could see the moment the realization dawned, her expression going slack. “And then Greyson—”

  “Yep.”

  Fabiana paled. “Fuck. Fuck. Are you serious? How do you even know his girlfriend?”

  “She lives up here. We take the same fucking train. Every fucking day.”

  “Holy . . . Since when?”

  “I don’t know. Since I started at the art center. About three weeks.”

  “You’ve been screwing around with Greyson’s girlfriend for the past three weeks?” Fabiana’s bare foot hit the floor as she leaned toward him in her chair. “After all that shit he pulled with you in high school? Are you stupid?”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t screwing around with her. It wasn’t like that. We’re just—We were friends. That’s it. Commute buddies.” Julian tangled his fingers in his hair, his frenetic, directionless anger leeching out of him.

  Were.

  Beatrice was the first person he’d allowed himself to get close to—to trust—in years. And look where it landed him.

  He sank to the floor and let his head fall against the wall behind him. “I didn’t know she was dating him. I knew she was dating someone, but I never . . .” He let out a low growl, pressing his hands over his eyes. How hard was it to ask what her boyfriend’s fucking name was? He could have put a stop to this ages ago if he’d asked one simple question. “I’m such an idiot.”

  Fabiana didn’t say anything for a few long moments, just tapped her little bottle of nail polish on the table. Doubtless because he was so pathetic that even she could find no joy in arguing with him any longer.

  Then, with a sigh, she pushed to her feet and padded to the fridge. After retrieving a couple of the Italian sodas she’d splurged on after her first paycheck—the ones she’d warned Julian not to touch, on pain of death—she shut the door with her heel and dropped down next to Julian on the floor, stretching her legs out in front of her. She cracked open one of the bottles and passed it to him.

  A hard lump formed in Julian’s throat. Fabiana could be difficult to deal with. She was blunt and demanding, and she was even worse at talking about feelings than Julian. She hid her kindness and affection under so many insults and judgmental comments that it was sometimes hard to see. But it was there. You just had to know how to spot it.

  Sometimes it looked like sitting on the floor, sharing one of her jealously hoarded drinks, and not saying anything at all.

  He hadn’t expected her dinner with Walter to go well—when had their step-dad kept his promises to either of them?—but part of Julian had been hoping Fabiana could convince Walter to take her back. Not to get her out of the cramped apartment, but because she deserved better than sleeping on an old mattress in a shitty apartment. She deserved better than being let down by the Sayer-Crewes again and again.

  At least one of them should be allowed to be happy.

  “I’m sorry Thanksgiving didn’t go the way you wanted,” he told her, staring at the fizzy drink in his hands.

  She shrugged, opening the second bottle for herself and taking a swig. “No big loss. Didn’t care much for the new ultimatum.”

  Ah, yes. Walter’s infamous schemes to ‘better Fabiana’s life’ by threatening to disinherit her if she didn’t get accepted into competitive colleges in fields she had no interest in pursuing. “What crazy program did Walter want you to get into this time?”

  “No program. He wanted me to cut off contact with you. I guess they found out I’ve been crashing here. Greyson thinks y
ou’re a ‘bad influence.’” She cut air quotes around the last two words and scoffed. “Ridiculous.”

  Julian’s heart sank. He didn’t want to be the reason she was trapped here with him. They had a hard enough time dealing with each other without adding another layer of resentment. “Fab—”

  “I said it was a shitty ultimatum,” she said, in a false, light tone that meant she didn’t want to talk about it. She threw him a half smile, one brow lifted. “They clearly don’t know either of us very well if they think you’re the evil twin.”

  Julian wasn’t willing to blow past it so quickly. Not this time. “I’d understand,” he said, even though it hurt like hell, “if you wanted to—”

  “Too late. I already told Walter to shove it.” She elbowed him, but not hard. “You’re stuck with me, jackass.”

  Julian knew the routine. He was supposed to elbow her in turn and call her a brat. And it would mean he loved her, too.

  Instead, he looped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into a hug. Fabiana made a gagging noise, but leaned her head on his shoulder. He didn’t know how to tell her how much it meant to him that she was still here, with him, when she could have been reveling in the reacquisition of her upscale Brooklyn apartment instead. He didn’t know how to tell her how much he wished they could dispose of all the broken things between them and go back to when they didn’t spend half their time bickering. He didn’t know how to tell her how much he cared about her.

  So all he said was “We sure know how to celebrate a holiday, don’t we?”

  “Fuck ’em,” Fabiana said, slipping out of the embrace. “Fuck ’em all.”

  Julian let his head fall back against the wall. He still couldn’t think about Beatrice without his chest aching. But it was nice to feel like he and Fabiana were in sync again, at least for tonight. It was nice to feel like he had someone in his corner.