I shook my head. “It’s kind of stupid. But… never mind. Thank you for what you just said. It means a lot. Cheers, Brice.”
I lifted my drink and he touched my wrist. An electric pulse surged through my body. I’m talking head to toe reaction. The hair on my head tickled. My toes curled in my shoes. My thighs trembled.
Oh fuck…
“Talk to me. At least let me be here for that much. Right?”
“What you said is sort of true. I mean… dream job. It’s amazing what I do. But…”
“Oh, it’s not the dream job then? Why not?”
“It’s mostly dogs and cats,” I said. “That’s great and all…”
“You want to work with animals,” Brice said, reading my mind like an open book. “You want to work with horses, Kins. And having your own place is like you settled for something else.”
“Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing what I do,” I said. “I love it.”
“It’s just not the dream,” he said.
I opened my mouth and hesitated. “Yeah. It’s not the dream.”
“So, go get the dream,” he said. “What’s holding you back? You’re smart. You’re beautiful.”
I tilted my head and raised an eyebrow. “What does beautiful have to do with anything?”
“Just making sure you heard it at least once today,” Brice said.
I exhaled and did all I could not to groan.
Brice always made it a point to tell me I looked beautiful at least once a day.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I just had to slip that in.”
“Thanks for that,” I said.
“So, what’s holding you back then?”
“I didn’t say…”
“You just said it wasn’t the dream,” Brice said. “So, get the dream.”
“I’m good where I am.”
“Oh, Christ,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
He walked away, which meant he stopped touching me.
I turned and curled my lip. “You know, I’m not some broken person or something, Brice. I’m not here looking for redemption or something.”
“I didn’t say you were,” he said. “I just thought we could talk openly to each other. You’re lying to me and yourself right now.”
Brice always stood up to me. He challenged me. He made me want to slap him, and I did that many times in the past.
I took a drink of the cold beer and stepped away from the fireplace.
“Fine. I am where I am, okay? Would I love to work with other animals? Sure. But that would mean giving up everything I have. I made commitments and stuff…”
“You mean Ben,” Brice said.
Hearing Ben’s name coming from Brice’s mouth was strange. It made me uneasy and it made the guilt worse. My eyes looked to the front door. That’s where the right thing to do waited. To sneak out of here and get back in my SUV and go home.
Remember that place, Kinsley? Your perfect home. The place where you got the chance to finally start over. Not to forget, but just a chance to not remember for a minute. To breathe.
“You can leave if you’d like,” Brice said.
“What?”
“You’re staring at the door, Kins.”
I blinked, chasing away tears. “Ben owns the building. Where my practice is. He’s essentially my landlord. I have a lease. With him.”
Brice raised an eyebrow. “Well that should make for some interesting dinner conversation. Ask how your day was and you ask him to check the toilet that’s leaking.”
“Funny,” I said. “But seriously…”
My lips fluttered.
“What?” Brice asked. He took a few steps toward me but stopped.
“It’s how we met.”
“You and Ben?”
I nodded. My cheeks flushed. It was weird feeling guilty now around Brice, when I had no reason to feel that way. I didn’t break any promises to him.
“Oh,” Brice said.
“He was flipping the building,” I said. “You know, buy a shitty place and make it nice.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen the TV shows.”
“I wanted my own practice and was looking. Someone told me about an office that someone was going to be offering soon. There are some places Ben sells and some places he hangs onto.”
“He met you and decided to hang onto it,” Brice said. “Smart move.”
He gritted his teeth and looked away.
My heart raced and ached all in the same breath.
“He helped me get everything going,” I said. “Not just the office either. He was actually going to make it into two offices. But when I told him what I wanted to do, he kept it as one big office. For me.”
“And then he charged you for it.”
“Not him personally. His company.”
“Right. Of course. I can’t envision you cooking him dinner and then slipping him a rent check.”
“Brice…”
He showed his hands again. “Sorry. This isn’t exactly easy for me to hear. I mean, the story of the woman I love meeting and falling in love with someone else.”
“I’ll stop,” I said. “You’re right. This is rude of me.”
“No, Kins.” Brice closed in on me again. I backed up as far as I could, until I felt the heat of the fireplace hitting my backside. “It’s not rude. There’s more to this story. We were talking about horses and now we’re talking about Ben. Because of your commitments to him. You don’t want that office now. Maybe you never did. Now you’re stuck.”
I couldn’t break my stare from Brice.
Then he made a gentle move, touching my hair, tucking it behind my ear.
“What am I supposed to say to that?” I whispered.
“Admit it,” Brice whispered. “This is your safe spot, love. You can admit anything or do anything and it’ll never leave the front door.”
The tension was like a weight on my chest. But what worried me more was the sense of passion between us. In some messed up way, it was like we were never apart. I could still sense him as a broken man trying to fix me. And I stood before him feeling desperate… desperate for everything.
“This is my new life,” I admitted. “And just because it doesn’t fit into the life you wanted for me, that doesn’t make it a bad life.”
“I never said that,” Brice said. “But to be fair, you’re the one trying to explain it to me right now. It’s your life, Kins. You don’t need to explain a fucking thing to anyone.”
“I know that,” I said. “You just keep asking. You’re so worried about it.”
“Only because I care. And because I see that look in your eyes.”
“What look?”
Brice touched my jaw. The roughness of his fingertips made me shiver. He was always the smartest guy in the room. He could have been anything he wanted in the world. But all he wanted was to be near me. Without exaggerating, he could have been a brain surgeon. He was the guy that could skip school until the cops came to force him to go, and then he could do all the work, take the tests, and get a perfect score on each one.
But his fingertips were rough from working. Always doing some kind of weird job to get by and enjoy life. How he did that, I’d never know or understand.
And he’s always right…
“That look right now,” he whispered. “You’re one second from asking for help. But I’ll pretend I don’t see it. For now.”
He lowered his mouth down, pushing away the distance between us. My lips tingled with that burning need to feel his kiss again. My brain and heart agreed that all I needed was just one more kiss to know everything. The devil on my shoulder smacked her lips and cackled. And even the angel on my other shoulder… she was quiet, knowing this was why I came here.
I tasted his breath and wanted to shut my eyes and lose myself to everything, but I couldn’t do it.
I turned my head at the last possible second. “Pictures…”
Brice growled under his breath. His breath hit my cheek and I
ached in a way that actually hurt my heart.
“Pictures,” he said. “Right. Grab a seat and I’ll go get some of them for you.”
My hand touched the hardness of his chest through his shirt. My fingers curled, shaking as I wanted to scratch his bare chest as he took me.
“Thank you,” I whispered, not sure what I was thanking him for.
But Brice being Brice, he had it all figured out.
His hand gently touched the back of my head and he pulled me toward him. He planted a kiss on the top of my head.
“No worries, love, I’ll always be here for you.”
At some point, Brice brought out a bottle of whiskey. I had a feeling he was sipping that more than his beer. I was still nursing my first drink, temptation in the back of my mind telling me that if I had too much to drink, I would definitely have to spend the night. The plan was to look at pictures and go home.
Home.
Where the fuck is that?
That house in a cul-de-sac that has everything done to it where I just reside for right now?
I swallowed the thoughts and had to work hard to keep them silent.
“Oh, here’s one for you,” Brice said as he dug through what was a glorified shoebox. “This is from the lake. When we went camping that one time.”
I took the picture from him and it was of me sitting in a camping chair with my feet on another camping chair. On the edge of a wide river that had probably been moving way too fast to be that close to it. But Brice insisted that we set up our tent right there and listen to it all night. He had the perfect clearing picked out so we could see the stars at night too. The picture was of me with a book resting against my chest as I stared at the water.
“I didn’t know you took this,” I said.
“All I did was take pictures of you.”
“That’s a little creepy.”
“We were together, Kins. It was perfectly acceptable.”
“And yet you saved them all?”
“Of course,” he said. “Shit goes crazy in life and we want to destroy all our memories. That’s okay to feel, but you don’t do that. I love that picture of you.”
“Why?”
“First off, look at those legs,” Brice said. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Kins, you could give a man a heart attack with those legs showing.”
I blushed at the picture. My bare feet sticking up in the air and I wore my bikini bottoms with a white t-shirt. So, in a way it looked like I was sitting naked from the waist down.
“Anything else you like about it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“What?”
“It always comes down to sex with you.”
“That’s wrong?”
“Maybe.”
“Look at that picture,” he said. “Holy fuck, you are gorgeous. The legs. The way you’re sitting. Holding that geeky ass animal book. But you’re staring at the river. You were watching it, feeling relaxed, thinking clear thoughts for once. Your hair was messy, knotty, desperate to be washed. But you didn’t care. And I loved that you didn’t care. Because you were being you. Genuine. Real. And that was fucking sexy.”
I swallowed hard. “And now?”
“Now what?”
“My legs don’t look like that anymore,” I said. “I don’t sit in nothing but panties. My hair isn’t messy and greasy. I don’t read those books anymore. And I don’t watch a river flow and pretend I’m floating in it.”
“Why not?”
“Because life moves forward, Brice.”
“Fair enough,” he said. He plucked the picture from my hand. “That’s why these pictures matter then. So you can see what you once were… and what you can be again.”
I opened my mouth and Brice touched my hand, which instantly stole my words.
“As far as the way you look, you’re even more beautiful now. Time has done things to you that seems impossible. You were a young woman in that picture, love. But now you’re a real woman. A hardened look in your eyes and a way about you that makes me feel like I’m going crazy. And near you, it’s worth it. So, if you’re secretly trying to ask me which version of Kinsley would I prefer to be with? The answer will always be the same.”
“Which is?”
“The one sitting across from me,” he said.
If there were any last strands of my heart up for grabs, Brice just claimed them all. The sinking feeling that went through my body was the complete opposite of how I felt about him. Truthfully, all I wanted to do was dive across the couch at him. Cry on his chest. Make fists and punch his chest. Scream until I had no more voice. And he was the only one who would let me do that and understand it.
Only I sat there like a stone.
“That was also the trip where it rained,” Brice said.
“Ohmygod, that’s right,” I said, smiling.
“At like two in the morning,” he said. “The skies just opened. Our tent leaked. The river looked ready to flood.”
“Scrambling to clean everything up and throw it into your truck.”
“Getting stuck on the way out,” he said.
“Taking an hour to get back to the main road.”
“Going to that twenty-four-hour diner,” he said. “Sitting across from you as we were wet, dirty, smelly.”
My eyes moved to the box of pictures.
Hundreds of moments. Memories captured.
But that’s what they were. Memories. Moments. They had already happened. And I had worked hard to shove them away so far in my mind to create something new. Because every picture in this box led to another, which led to the moment I found out I was pregnant. There were probably boxes of pictures that showed that too. My belly growing. My cheeks getting fatter. My body changing in a way that it would never change back from. Brice even brought the camera to the hospital… and we left with the same amount of pictures as when we arrived. We were offered the chance to take pictures but I refused. I couldln’t do it and I couldn’t allow it to happen. Which I now regretted with all my heart.
“Kins, you okay?” he asked.
I suddenly stood up. I looked down at him. At the pictures.
“Hey,” he said as he slowly rose up. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?” Brice asked.
I blinked fast and forced myself to catch my breath. “I love you, Brice, but I can’t… I can’t be here with you…”
16
A Dangerous Road
Brice
She was going to slip through my fingers. Again.
Afraid of her own feelings. Afraid of hurting in a way that made her look vulnerable to me. Believe me, I didn’t ask her to come here for this. I only wanted her to see the pictures that she thought were lost.
I love you, Brice…
The words tickled my heart, but I knew that tickling was just from the very tip of a deadly knife that Kinsley planned on pressing harder to me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can stop looking at pictures. I don’t want you to get upset.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why keep everything? Why know everything?”
“Know everything?”
“How can you not try to forget?” she asked.
“Kins,” I said as I stepped toward her.
She made a move away from me and walked to the fireplace. She stood with her back to me. Staring down into the flames.
I kept my distance.
“Why would I ever want to forget?” I asked. “Everything we had was real. Maybe it wasn’t perfect all the time, but nothing is. And if you think you’ve found perfect, you’re lying to yourself. There’s no such thing.”
Her right hand touched her stomach for a second.
The visual was enough to make my knees weak.
How many times did I catch her doing that? Sitting or standing, her hand touching her belly… she never talked to me about it though. Maybe she thought that everything that had happened was a dream. Or maybe she thought that one day it would just all
be okay. That our baby would still be inside her belly, waiting for a better time to come out.
“Is that what you’ve done?” I asked. “Forgotten? That’s your new life?”
“You were right what you said before,” she said. “About the horses.”
“What about them?”
“That’s what I want,” she said. “With other animals and doing more. Going to help them. Become someone better than I am right now.”
“So then go do that.”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Of course it’s not. That’s an excuse.”
“Fuck you,” Kinsley said.
I stepped toward her. “I don’t forget anything. I don’t have to tell anyone about my past though either. There’s a big difference there.”
“I’m with someone else now.”
“Who you haven’t said anything to. How does that work?”
Kinsley turned her head. “You really want to know?”
“No. You not telling him proves that whatever you have isn’t the right thing.”
“I’m not like you. I don’t have pictures. I don’t jump right into the memories.”
“But you’re here with me now,” I said. “You’re telling me and yourself the truth. You’re selling yourself short because of fear.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
I slowly reached for her hand and took it. “No, Kins. It’s not. But without fear, you never really know how much you love something or someone.”
“It’s all there, Brice,” she said as she turned to face me. “It’s all still there. I don’t forget anything. I can’t forget anything. I’m still wearing the scar…”
Her chin quivered.
“You’re not happy,” I said. “That’s all I’ve ever wished for you. Happiness. I’m not telling you to come running back to me. But us not talking for years? That’s not right. Someone you say you care about not knowing about us? That’s not right.”
“It’s what I needed at the time,” she said.
“I get it. But now… you’re the one…”
My hand eased from her hand and touched her waist. My fingertips teased for a few seconds as I found the bottom of her shirt. Maybe kissing her lips was wrong right now. Fine. I didn’t want her to be in that position again. Not that what I was doing now was any better.
Somebody Else (Somebody, Nobody Duet Book 1) Page 18