My Bossy Protector: A Best Friend’s Brother Romance

by Charlize Starr

  Eventually, it had gotten to be too much. I couldn’t see any of the people I once had in him. I was miserable all the time, and the idea of spending time with him started to make me feel sick to my stomach. I broke it off, hoping it would be clean and easy. I’d told him to run away without me if he needed to. He’d called me a bitch and told me I’d be sorry. I had no idea how true that was. I wasn’t sorry for breaking up with him – I was sorry I’d ever had a conversation with him in the first place.

  I was sorry that I jumped every time my phone rang, sure it was him threatening me again, demanding money he knew I didn’t have. His threats were getting worse and more menacing, and I was getting scared that one day he was going to do something about them.

  My phone rings again, and this time, tired of the missed calls and voicemail and of everything, I pick it up without even looking at the screen.

  “Go to hell!” I yell into the phone.

  “Brooke?” A cautious voice that is very much not Jeff’s is on the other end.

  “Anthony?” I ask, feeling an entirely different rush of emotion at his voice, still so familiar after all this time. It’s warm and deep, rich and comforting, something that’s clearly only grown with age. I feel myself blush as I think of how we’d run into each other earlier and hadn’t known what to say.

  “It’s me,” he says, still sounding cautious. I flush again, thinking of how I’d answered the phone.

  “I thought someone else was calling. That greeting wasn’t meant for you,” I say quickly. He laughs.

  “I’m glad,” he says, still laughing. I smile too. I can’t get over how he looked in the store – how good time has been to him. I had always thought Anthony was really good-looking, but now it’s more than that. He’s distinct-looking now, head-turning and memorable for how handsome he is. He’s hot now in a way that made my breath catch a little when I saw him.

  “Sorry,” I say, shaking my head.

  “I’m sorry someone is pissing you off that much,” Anthony says, and it makes me grin even wider because it’s such an Anthony thing to say.

  “You have no idea,” I say. I can’t quite believe I finally got the courage to yell at Jeff and it wasn’t even him on the other end, but I don’t regret that it wasn’t. I’m thrilled it’s Anthony, to be honest.

  “Tell me about it at dinner?” Anthony offers. He says it casually, like we never fell out of touch, and it makes me laugh a little.

  “Dinner?” I ask, biting my lip.

  “I was thinking that I should celebrate being home by buying my oldest friend a drink and some food,” Anthony says. “It would be good to catch up.”

  “Yeah, it would,” I agree, “I’d like that.”

  “Are you free tonight?” he asks. I smile again. Dinner with Anthony sounds like the perfect evening.

  “I am,” I say. I’m already thinking about what I’ll wear. Maybe it’s silly, but I want to look my best. Anthony has grown up to be so attractive, and I want him to think that I have too. That I’m more than the gangly teenage girl I used to be.

  “How is the food at the Purple Hog these days?” Anthony asks, making me laugh again. The Purple Hog is one of the oldest restaurants in town. It’s more a pub than anything, dimly lit with sticky floors and sticky music emanating from the speakers.

  “Still the best breadsticks in town,” I say. “And they have five kinds of soup now.”

  “I did always like that French onion soup,” Anthony says, and he’s laughing too. In high school, we used to sneak off to the Purple Hog on weekday evenings and share cheese sticks, soups, and other appetizers while we were tucked away in a corner booth, making plans for the future.

  “You liked the cheese, I think,” I point out, remembering. In my mind, I can see Anthony pulling the cheese off his soup and letting the rest go cold while we talked in our booth.

  “Good point,” Anthony says.

  “You should try the new soup tonight,” I say. Talking to Anthony feels as easy as it always had been, and I feel lighter. I feel more like myself.

  “I’ll have to,” Anthony says. “Is seven okay?”

  “It’s perfect,” I say.

  I start getting ready as soon as we hang up, and I hardly think of Jeff at all as I shower and change. I take care picking out an outfit and doing my hair and makeup. The idea of spending the evening with Anthony brightens my mood and makes me hope this is the start of a really good thing in my life. The start of getting a friend back. The start of a positive change.

  Chapter Six - Anthony

  I’m weirdly nervous as I’m getting ready to meet Brooke. I don’t know why, but my thoughts are racing. I feel like there is a lot riding on tonight, somehow. I leave a long list of instructions for Lilly, my cousin and David’s temporary nanny. I’m still working on hiring someone here, so while Lilly is home from college until September, she’s agreed to be David’s summer nanny. I peek in on them, and it looks like they’re already getting along well. I smile as I watch them and slip on a light jacket. I think again that moving David home to be surrounded by family was a good idea.

  I drive to the Purple Hog, still nervous. It’s ridiculous. I’ve been on countless dates with countless beautiful women in the countless high end bars in Manhattan. I’ve ordered expensive top-shelf cocktails for models and television actresses. I’ve had VIP sections roped off just for me and drank with women sitting on my lap. I’m usually confident about dating and sex – about women in general – but something about this meetup with Brooke, who I’ve known my whole life, at this pub that mixes its cocktails with whatever liquor is on sale at the distributor that week, has me shaken. I can’t stop thinking about how fantastic she looked earlier or about the sound of her laugh over the phone, a sound I haven’t heard in far too long.

  I get there first, snagging us one of the back booths we’d loved so much as teenagers. I can almost see us in it, remembering what it felt like to sit here, talk for hours, and never want the evening to end. Brooke shows up a minute later, and I stare again because she looks even better than before. She’s wearing a yellow sleeveless shirt tucked into a skirt that makes her legs looks amazing. Her eyes are bright and her hair is shiny. I stand and pull her into a long hug. I feel her pressed against me, taking in how good she feels and smells.

  “Hi,” I say.

  She squeezes me back just as tight. “Hi,” she says. “I’m so glad you called.”

  “Me too,” I say. She pulls back from the hug and we both sit down, smiling at each other from across the booth. “You look amazing.”

  “Thanks. So do you,” she says, blushing a little, her eyes lighting up even more. We make small talk about the food, mentioning what has changed since I was last here and what is exactly the same, and order before we really get to talking. Once we get started, it’s like we can’t stop – like we’re making up for lost time by pouring out stories to one another.

  It reminds me at once of the year I’d gone to sleepaway camp for three weeks. It was the longest we’d ever been apart, so we’d spent a whole weekend hiding in my basement, talking until morning about the four weeks without each other and the upcoming school year. I’d forgotten how easy it always was to talk to her, how it had always made me feel. I’m glad to have it back. I want her to know about every moment of my life she’s missed. I want to hear about every detail of her life.

  “You should apply somewhere else, or at least try to transfer to a different department,” I say, frowning after she tells me a story about work. Brooke has always been so smart. She always had one of the quickest minds of anyone I knew, and it seems like a shame she isn’t getting to use that.

  “I’ve thought about it. There’s a marketing and development position open, but . . . ”she says, shrugging. We’re both drinking a lot, long gulps of beer disappearing as we eat and talk.

  “You should go for it. You can’t be stuck in scheduling forever,” I say. She nods but looks unsure.

  “I’m just afraid th
at if I don’t get it, everyone in my department will be mad I tried and they’ll find a way to fire me,” she says, popping a piece of breadstick in her mouth.

  “First of all, they can’t do that. You could sue them if they did. Second, what if you do get it? I could help you prepare, if you want,” I say, shaking my head. She frowns slightly, then grins.

  “That’s right, you are a business expert now,” she says. I grin back. I haven’t really told many stories about my professional life yet, and I’m glad she knows. It seems that the town gossip about my success has made its way back to her. It feels important that she knows. I wonder if, when she heard about it over the years, she was happy for me, or proud, to see me do so well.

  “I am,” I say, “and in my expert opinion, you should apply for it.”

  “I might,” she says. “Are you really living in that huge house on Hart?”

  “It’s all mine,” I say. I’m tempted to ask her to come see it, but I hold back. I’m sure we’ll get there – to her coming over all the time, even. I want her back in my life. I want our friendship back, and I want her to meet David. Tonight already makes me feel like we might be building to something even more than that. I already think I want something even more than that. But this feels too much like a date to ask her back to my house without it being loaded with implications I don’t know if I want to make. Yet, anyway.

  “That’s amazing. You’ve done amazing,” she says, shaking her head slowly, like she can’t quite believe it. “But now you’re back here.”

  “I needed a change,” I admit, “and I think it will be good for David. You know my mom. It’s been driving her crazy to have a grandson so far away.”

  “I’m sure,” Brooke says, smiling. She looks down at her food for a minute before saying softly, “Anthony, I heard about – I don’t know how much was truth or gossip, but I heard about David’s mother . . . that she died. I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” I say, nodding and taking a long drink. It’s not as raw now, not as sharp, to talk about Michelle. There was a time when I couldn’t really talk about her, so I didn’t. Now it feels less like an actively painful wound and more like the way a once-injured limb aches in the rain or the cold.

  “That must have been so hard,” Brooke says. She’s frowning and looking at me with her wide eyes – the same ones I used to confide everything to.

  “It was,” I admit. “David doesn’t even remember Michelle. He was only a few months old when she died, but he looks a lot like her in his eyes and forehead. There were days where it was all I could see. He looked like the ghost of her to me, and it was pretty fucking awful.”

  “It’s better now?” she asks, grabbing my hand over the table.

  “Now when I look at David, I see David,” I say.

  She frowns again, looking troubled. “I’m so sorry,” she repeats. I squeeze her hand back.

  “Are you okay?” I ask, studying her face.

  “I was just thinking, and maybe it’s silly, but that if we hadn’t lost touch, I could have been there for you during that. You probably could have used a best friend,” she says. My heart catches somewhere in my throat at an unexpected rise of emotion. I swallow it back down.

  “We can make up for it now,” I say, squeezing her hand again.

  “We should. You should tell me about her,” Brooke says. I nod and start telling Brooke all about Michelle: how we’d met, David’s birth, her death, about my life with David in the city since she died. We talk for hours, and it turns away from death and into lighter subjects pretty quickly. I’m grateful for even if I appreciate the way she asked about Michelle more than I can say, even if it made me realize just how much I’ve missed Brooke.

  She talks more about her job and about her life in town, about how close she and her sister, Autumn, have become now that they’re adults. We make each other laugh, and I find myself hanging on her words, wanting to hear about every detail of her life since I’ve been gone. We sit and talk until our food plates are empty until we’ve had several rounds of beer. Her eyes are a little less focused with the beer, but she still looks absolutely breathtaking.

  “You want to see something ridiculous?” she says with a laugh, reaching for her purse. I watch the way she moves, feeling captivated by it.

  “Show me,” I say. She pulls out a piece of paper, creased and a little faded. I know what it is right away.

  “I found this,” she says, presenting it to me, a bit of blush on her cheeks as she does. I take it from her and read over the words I wrote so long ago, our contract, our pledge to marry each other.

  “I can’t believe you still had this,” I say, meeting her eyes again, seeing her at once as she looked at that night after prom. I still have things from then too, of course, in boxes I’d just looked at, filled with yearbooks and awards and memories of Brooke.

  “How could I ever get rid of an official document?” she asks, gesturing to the faded blood stains on the paper.

  “It is incredibly official,” I say, smiling. I’d meant it the time, I’d wanted Brooke to marry me. Part of me thought it would really happen, that one day we would.

  “We had no idea,” she says. “That was so long ago. Thirty sounded so old like it was a million years from that night.”

  “Four months, now,” I say, nodding in agreement. That night, I had felt like I would never in my life know anyone better than Brooke. I’d thought by signing a piece of paper I could hold onto that, and to her.

  “Me too,” she says, catching my eye and holding my gaze.

  “I know,” I say. Our birthdays are only two weeks apart. More than once as teenagers, we’d thrown joint birthday bashes. We used to joke and tell people it was how we’d become friends, even though it wasn’t. We didn’t even discover our almost-shared birthdays until we’d been friends for months.

  “But we’re sitting in this booth again,” she says, “so maybe not that much has changed.”

  “You know what this means, right?” I say, looking at the contract again, and then at her face. I’m more than a little drunk, and I’m having more fun with her than I’ve had with anyone in a really long time.

  “What’s that?” Brooke asks.

  “We have to do it. In four months. We have to get married,” I say, laughing. She lets out a surprised little laugh too, eyes lighting up.

  “Neither of us is married,” she says, playing along right away.

  “And we’re about to turn thirty,” I point out, “and we signed this. In blood.”

  “I guess we don’t have a choice then, we have to do it,” she says, smirking.

  “We can’t possibly go back on a contract we wrote drunkenly as teenagers,” I say, and she laughs again.

  “Of course not. I’m pretty sure it’s legally binding,” Brooke says.

  “So we have to get married,” I say. Being able to joke with Brooke like this feels amazing, like something I’d lost without even knowing it, like something I’ve been wanting.

  “In four months?” she asks, finished her last gulp of beer.

  “We have to,” I say, reaching out shake her hand, a little awkward and drunk over the table, “we made a deal.”

  “Let’s do it, then,” she says, shaking my hand back. Her skin is soft and smooth, and I can feel her pulse thrumming in her wrists.

  We make fake wedding plans until the last call, all the way up until the Hog is closing and we’re being nicely kicked out.

  Chapter Seven - Brooke

  I wake up to a message from Anthony and I smile before even reading it. I haven’t had fun like I had last night for so long, and I needed it. I feel like maybe I really can have my best friend back like my life is going to be better now that Anthony is in it again.

  Good morning! Wanted you to know I booked a venue for our wedding this morning!

  I blink at the message on my phone, head spinning. I was almost sure we were joking last night. I’d been pretty sure we were playing a game. I’m pretty sure we
still are. I think he’s keeping it up, still carrying on the joke. It had been like that when we were teenagers. We could hold onto a single joke for months, running it all the way into the ground but delighting in it every time.

  In our junior year, we’d spent months planning a fake road trip, complete with a fake car and fake motel stops. Of course, we couldn’t actually afford a road trip, and we probably wouldn’t have been allowed to take one anyway, but that hadn’t stopped the planning. We’d talked about it so much that people had thought we were actually going, and that just made us talk about it more. It became our favorite joke – our favorite thing to talk about. For high school graduation, I’d gotten him a stack of postcards from all the places we never visited and put them in a cheap album that said “memories” across the front. I had wanted the joke to last forever.

  I think that’s what’s happening now, but even if it’s not, I don’t want to back down or out. If he wants to keep this going, then I do, too. I decide to rise to the challenge in his message. I sit down, smiling, and start searching the internet for bargain wedding dresses.

  Part of me thinks it’s ridiculous to spend even fifty dollars on a wedding dress with the shadow of Jeff over me, demanding fifty thousand. I tell myself that it doesn’t matter – dress or not, I can’t afford to pay Jeff’s demands, and I really want to keep this thing with Anthony going. I want to see where this goes. Anthony feels more important than Jeff ever did.