I turned around and headed back up to find Luka and Vladdie waiting at the door along with Luka’s wife and baby—and an unexpected sight for sore eyes. Nicky Ericsson was standing directly behind them, his blond hair longer than normal and looking like it hadn’t seen a comb in a week.
I welcomed them all in, taking their coats and sending the Russian contingency downstairs so I could pull Nicky into a hug.
“How are you doing, man?” I asked, slapping him on the back because I was so glad to see him I didn’t know what else to do.
“Good,” he said. “Better.” He backed away a step and shrugged. “I just got out of rehab again yesterday. Kally said everyone was going to be here and that I should come.”
“Fucking right, you should come.” I started making mental calculations as to how much alcohol I had around and how I was going to keep it away from him.
“I’m not drinking,” he said, as though he could read my thoughts. “And I haven’t taken anything. I need to start getting back to life as usual. Kally and Noelle are going to stick right by my side the whole time I’m here,” he added. “It’ll be fine.”
Kally had arrived about fifteen minutes before. I nodded, and a big grin spread across my face. “All right. Sounds like a plan. I’m just so fucking glad to see your ugly face, I can’t even tell you.”
“My ugly face?” he scoffed. “Have you had a look in the fucking mirror lately?”
He headed down the stairs toward the sounds of the party. I went with him and helped him find Kally in the sea of faces. In no time, pretty much all the boys realized he was there, and he was surrounded by well-wishes and good-natured ribbing. The doorbell rang again, and I left him under Kally’s watchful eye.
Half an hour later, everyone had arrived and the party was in full swing. I was finally able to head downstairs and join everyone, and I immediately looked for Brie in the crowd. She was easy enough to find with her strawberry-blond hair. It called to me like a beacon, and I headed across the room to where she was seated near the fireplace in the corner. She had a plate of appetizers on her lap and a glass in her hand, and she was smiling like she always did in my dreams at night.
It was only when I reached her that I realized who she was sitting and talking to. She’d found Colesy, for which I was glad. He was someone she already knew, at least. But Shane was sitting with the two of them, and it was him she was smiling at.
My heart plummeted. It wasn’t that I didn’t want her to know my brother. I wanted that more than I could say. The problem was that I didn’t know what he might say to her, and I had no idea how long he’d already been sitting there talking with her. There was no telling how much he might have already told her.
She might never want to have anything to do with me again if he’d revealed how much I’d bullied Garrett, all the things I’d said to him and called him. If she knew how it was the way I’d treated him that had led to him taking his own life.
I swallowed hard, waging an internal debate over whether I should go over and join them or make myself scarce. Before I’d made up my mind, she looked up and her eyes fell on me almost immediately.
She smiled.
There wasn’t a chance in hell that I would be able to stop my feet from heading in her direction right then. She patted the seat beside her when I got close, so I sat—although not as close to her as I would have liked.
Shane gave me a look I couldn’t interpret. “Brie was just telling us how she’s going to be choreographing and dancing in a music video for The End of All Things.”
“Are you?” That was something I would have definitely remembered if she’d mentioned it.
She gave me an apologetic look. “Apparently so. It’s all happening out of the blue.”
At least that meant it wasn’t something she’d been keeping from me. There were definitely things I hadn’t been able to tell her, but as far as I knew, she was only prone to hiding her body from me.
“That’s exciting,” I said. “We should celebrate.”
“It’s terrifying, is what it is.”
“But well earned,” Colesy put in. “If you can teach me to dance…”
“You’re learning to dance?” Shane asked him.
“A little here and there to help my core and balance for skating.” He shrugged. “Some ballroom, a little ballet.” He kept his voice down.
I understood his caution, but I doubted anyone who wasn’t right here with us would hear him. “And it’s already paying off,” I said.
I felt Shane’s eyes fall on me, a thousand painful questions roiling under his stare. So it’s okay for your teammate to dance, just not your brother, huh?
“When’s the next class you’re going to?” I asked. “I might join you again.”
That caused both Shane and Brie to turn sharp looks on me.
“You’re going to dance classes?” Shane demanded.
“He’s come to one,” Colesy said, definitely unaware of the tension between me and my brother.
“The academy is closed for the rest of the year for the holidays,” Brie said, but her tone had turned wary. She wasn’t so sure she wanted me to come to any of her classes, then.
Distance. Just friends. Fuck, this was going to kill me.
“I guess that means you’ll have plenty of time to work with Devin,” I said, trying to ease into a safe subject. If we were still seeing each other, it would mean plenty of time she could spend with me, too. She could come to my games. She could get to know my friends, the people in my life.
She could be a buffer of sorts between me and Shane. Not that I’d use her as one. There was already too much between my brother and me to warrant putting anyone or anything else in that chasm if I could avoid it.
“Yeah, I should. Thank goodness, too, now that we’ll be working on this project with The End of All Things.” She spent a few minutes telling us how that had come about, how they’d been at the concert last night and danced for the band. How it still felt surreal and she couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that something like this was happening to her.
Having watched her dance with Devin that day, I knew exactly how it was happening. There was no reason she shouldn’t still be dancing professionally as she had before her health had turned on her other than her own inability or unwillingness to see that she was still entirely capable.
I hung around with the three of them for a while, wishing that I could take Brie somewhere alone for a bit but not daring to try it. She didn’t seem inclined to ask Shane any questions about the past. She didn’t bring up Garrett. She made no effort at all to get him to tell her all the things that I’d been unable to. The conversation stayed on the present—her work, our game against the Wild yesterday, how embarrassed Babs had been at Darcelle XV last night—fully focused on safe subjects. At some point, I stopped worrying about what Shane might tell her and started noticing instead little things about my brother…and my teammate.
They’d stuck together a lot last night, so it was only natural for Shane to gravitate toward Colesy today. Out of everyone here, besides me, Colesy was probably the one that Shane already knew the best. But there were little things in the way they looked at each other that made me start to wonder.
After a while, I had to get up and mingle with the rest of my guests, playing the host. I went down to the game room and made sure that all the kids were having a good time. I brought more food down from the kitchen, making sure we wouldn’t run out of anything. I moved from group to group, from room to room, spending a few minutes with everyone that was here.
Even though Webs was one of the coaches now, not one of my teammates, I’d invited him and his family to come today, as well. They’d been part of everything with the boys for a long time, so it only seemed natural.
I found him hanging out with a couple of the older, married guys and their wives in the TV room, sipping on a beer. The TV was on, and it flashed to one of the images from last night of Katie with that guy on the red carpet. Web
s glared at the TV. “Fucking dipshit better get his fucking hands off my little girl. She should have fucking stayed here and dated Babs.”
“I thought Babs was a dipshit, too,” Zee said. “At least you called him one a bunch of times.”
Zee’s wife, Dana, got up so she could stretch and walk around. She was seriously pregnant, near to bursting, and it looked like she couldn’t get comfortable. She put both hands on the small of her back for support, which made her belly stand out more than it already did. “You said she had to make her own choices,” she reminded Webs. “And she has.”
“I never said she should make stupid choices like getting involved with that asswipe,” he said, pointing at the TV screen. “He’s nothing but trouble.”
I took a look at the screen and made a note of the guy’s name—Jesse Carmichael. I hadn’t heard of him, beyond seeing him with Katie on TV a bit and knowing that he was going to be in a new show with her. I didn’t really keep up with any of the Hollywood stuff, though. I was more focused on things that affected me directly. Although, I supposed now that Katie was in Hollywood, things like that did affect Webs directly, if not me.
“And you’re not there to beat the snot out of him,” Laura Weber said, rolling her eyes. “We know.”
“She’ll be all right,” Dana said. “Katie has a good head on her shoulders. She might make a few mistakes along the way, but she’ll come out of it okay.”
“If she doesn’t,” Webs said, “you can fucking bet I’ll beat the snot out of that motherfucker. And I’m going to have a few things to say to her when she gets home tomorrow. You can count on that.”
“Don’t be too hard on her, Webs,” Soupy said. “You’ve got to let her live some.”
Webs snorted, but he didn’t say anything else.
I stuck around with them for a while before moving on again.
Babs was hanging out with a few of the younger guys on the team, blissfully unaware of what he’d been missing in terms of seeing Katie with Jesse Carmichael hanging all over her again.
Vladdie and Radek “Radar” Cernak were sitting together in the den, trying to come up with some sort of common language they could use with each other. Radar was the only Czech player on the team and spoke very little English—only slightly more than Vladdie did. I doubted anyone else would be able to understand the pair of them, but at least they seemed to be getting along.
With the kids otherwise occupied, I caught Soupy making out with Rachel in a quiet room. They probably didn’t get a ton of time for that kind of thing. It only made me want to do the same with Brie, though, so I quickly moved along.
I dropped in here and there, talking for a few minutes, sharing a laugh, but I felt as alone in my big house as I was when it was only me and my dogs.
I’d bought this house a few months before Garrett died. I’d hoped it would be a place that my parents and brothers would come to spend time with me when they could. None of them had ever seen it until now—until Shane had shown up a couple of days ago.
After a while, people started to take their leave. I saw them all out to their cars, making sure everyone got away safely. Since I’d left Brie and Shane talking while I made sure everyone got to their cars all right, I didn’t worry about taking a few extra minutes talking to Nicky before he headed home. He didn’t seem drunk or high or anything else of the sort, so I was able to go back inside breathing a little easier about that, at least.
I still didn’t know how it would be when Brie and I were alone together in my car, and I wasn’t entirely sure I trusted myself not to try to kiss her. Nevertheless, I’d asked her to let me take her home, and so there was no more point in putting it off. I headed back inside to grab the package of lingerie from upstairs and steal her away from my brother.
A bump against the wall in the stairs leading to the upper floor stopped me in my tracks, and I turned to see if maybe she was up there. It wasn’t Brie I saw, though, but Shane. And Colesy.
Kissing.
Colesy had pushed Shane up against the wall, and their hands were all over each other in a touch-and-grab frenzy of movement. I felt like a voyeur watching them, especially when Shane opened his eyes and met my gaze. Colesy broke off the kiss. Shane stared me down, daring me to look away, as though trying to will me to let my disgust show.
I wasn’t disgusted, though, and I refused to let him think I was. I kept watching for a few moments more, and then I backed away with a nod and a smile. There was another set of stairs I could use to get up to my room. I didn’t need to disturb the two of them and embarrass Colesy, just to get the sexy bits I’d bought for Brie. Granted, he was making out with my brother in my house, so he must not be too worried about me discovering them.
Still. One step at a time. One of these days, Shane would know that I loved him and accepted him exactly as he was.
KEITH WAS PRETTY quiet the whole way back to my place. He didn’t seem upset, exactly—pensive was probably more accurate. I wasn’t sure what I could say to draw him out, or even if I should say anything at all, so neither of us talked the entire ride until right before he turned onto my street.
“I miss talking to you,” he said so softly that I almost didn’t hear him over the constant sound of the car radio. “I know it’s only been a couple of days, but I like being able to hear your voice.”
I thrummed my fingers on my thigh, weighing my response. “We can still talk, you know. Friends talk.” Friends often talked about a heck of a lot more than the two of us ever had. With all the friends I’d had over the years—the ones who were more than merely acquaintances—I knew about their families, their pasts, their hopes and dreams. Those were the kinds of things I knew from their own mouths, not little bits and pieces I had gleaned secondhand from someone in their family who had unintentionally let a secret slip.
If Keith and I hadn’t already been sleeping together from the start, of course, and had instead begun as acquaintances working our way toward friendship, it wouldn’t bother me so much that he couldn’t talk to me about his family and his past yet. We hadn’t known each other very long at all. That was further proof that we’d jumped into the deep end of an icy pool without bothering to learn how to swim before taking the plunge.
He gave me a half-grin, definitely of the cheeky variety. “I just can’t go all grabby hands while we do it, huh?”
He was trying. I could appreciate the fact that he was making an effort, not pushing me away now that I’d insisted on getting to know him beyond the confines of the bedroom.
I chuckled. “Exactly.”
“I love your laugh, Brie.”
A desperate heat welled up in my belly and spread to my limbs. I had to find some way to quash that response to him or I’d never stick to my guns.
He pulled into a spot near my apartment and put the car in park. “Thank you for coming today, even if I didn’t get much time to spend with you. I wanted you to know the people in my life, if nothing else.”
Which only served as further proof of his efforts. I had a ton of respect for that. He wanted a real relationship even if he didn’t know how to have one anymore.
“I want to know them, too.” I chose my next words cautiously, fully aware that I might be opening a can of worms Keith wasn’t ready to face. “It was good to meet your brother. I didn’t know he would be here.”
He let out a snorting sort of laugh. “Neither did I.”
“Shane made it seem like he hadn’t really seen you much in a while. Several years.”
Pretty much since Garrett died, actually, based on what little I’d managed to piece together from what he’d said—and what he’d neglected to say. Shane didn’t seem any more inclined to talk about the past than Keith was, or at least not with me. But why should he tell me anything? All he had wanted to do was keep me entertained and try to sort out if he liked me at all during his brother’s party. It was kind of sweet, actually. Shane had stuck right by my side the whole time I’d been there, him and Cole, and it had
seemed as though he was vetting me to determine if I was good enough for Keith.
The Burns brother with me now stayed silent.
“He said you two don’t really see each other even over your summers off when you go back to Nova Scotia,” I added, cautiously testing the waters a little more.
Everything about Keith tensed now—his jaw, his shoulders, the grip of his fingers on the steering wheel. I’d pushed too hard.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have—”
“How much did he tell you?” There wasn’t even the slightest hint of anger in his voice. Only pain, deep and raw and thoroughly unrelieved.
My hand itched to reach across the divide and soothe him, but I couldn’t do that. That was against the rules, and I’d been the one to set them in the first place; I couldn’t cross that boundary. “Not much,” I finally said. “Only that he doesn’t get to see you very often.” I’d read between the lines and had formed my own conclusions, but there were still a ton of gaps in my interpretation.
The tension surrounding Keith was only growing. Nothing I had said was doing a darn thing to ease it. I should have left talk of his family alone and kept our conversation to lighter topics. I shouldn’t have tried to get him to talk about his past the very first time we’d seen each other after insisting we’d been moving things too fast, skipping too many steps.
“Do you—” I broke off, not entirely sure if inviting him up was wise of me, considering the circumstances. But there really wasn’t anything else to be done, as far as I could see. “Do you want to come upstairs and talk for a while?” I’d have to be sure to keep some distance between us physically. I might be able to use BC for that, actually. My cat would be all over us, and the cat could keep Keith’s hands busy.
His lips quirked up the tiniest bit at my invitation. “As long as you’re sure it doesn’t break any of your just friends rules.”
“If you keep your hands to yourself, everything will be fine.” I gave him a wink.
“There are plenty of things I can do without the use of my hands, you know. My lips and tongue have some skill…” Even as he made the lewd joke, he shut off the engine and got out of the car, grabbing the package he’d tossed in the backseat when we left his place. He came around to open my door for me, but he made a show of not reaching for my hand, merely sweeping an arm to the side in an overly grand gesture, indicating that I should lead the way.
In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) Page 18