Built for Pleasure

by Sarah J. Brooks

  “I think you thought you were doing what you believed was the best thing for the both of us,” I told her gently, speaking softly and slowly the way that I had back when we first moved to the city together and she needed me to guide her through the worst of what followed our parents’ deaths.

  “But you don’t have to worry about us,” Nina assured her. “Really. I know you were trying to help, and maybe you just—maybe you just made it so that we met at the right time when we could actually make something of this.”

  As she said the last few words, Nina looked into my eyes and smiled a little. I smiled back. She reached out to take my hand, and I let her, even though I knew we were risking more of Ant’s wrath by daring to show the barest hint of physical affection in front of her.

  Ant got to her feet, shaking her head. “I just can’t believe the two of you wouldn’t say anything to me,” she muttered, and she headed for the door, pulling it open sharply and letting it close behind her with a crash that seemed to run through the whole house. I thanked God that Erin hadn’t arrived halfway through that conversation, and suddenly realized just how quiet it was now that Ant was gone.

  “I should go,” Nina dropped her gaze to the ground. “I think we both need some time to think.”

  “Agreed,” I nodded, and I opened the door for her. I wanted to say something, something to let her know that I still … hell, that there was still something there between us, no matter what my busybody sister had to say about it.

  “Nina?”

  “Yeah?” She turned foot on the top step already.

  “This is going to be alright,” I promised her, and she nodded back.

  “I know.” She smiled, and with that, she turned and headed back down the stairs. I ran my hands over my face and wondered what in the name of holy fucking hell I had gotten myself into.

  Chapter 13

  Nina

  It was awful, those few days after Ant had burst in on the two of us together. I knew that I had to give her time to cool off, that if I moved too far too fast that she was going to cut me out for good, but I missed my best friend and hated more than anything in the world that she felt like I had betrayed her. I supposed I had—she kept Logan and me apart for a reason all this time, and we had basically just gone and laughed in her face and proved that we didn’t give a damn what her motivations were or why she was doing the shit she was as long as we got to do what we wanted.

  She had seemed so upset when she left Logan’s apartment. When she brought up what happened with her parents, it all seemed to make a hell of a lot more sense. She was so worried about Erin being left with an absent parent figure, and the thought of putting that little girl through the hell that the two of them had been through, no matter if it was in a much-reduced fashion, scared the hell out of her. I couldn’t blame her. The thought scared the hell out of me, and I barely even knew the kid.

  The next day, we sat down at opposite ends of my couch when Erin was at school and an hour before Logan was due to leave for work, so we couldn’t get distracted by just hooking up, and tentatively padded our way around the question at hand. Eventually, we came to the decision that it was best for me to be the one to handle Ant for the time being. If he came to her finger-wagging and telling her how it should be and how she needed to treat us, she was unlikely to take that sitting down. But if I came to her, as her equal and her best friend, and told her the truth, then maybe, just maybe, she would be able to take it from me.

  Logan and I talked about what the hell had been going on between us all this time, which I suppose was a good thing. I mean, if I could, I would have quite happily dawdled in that grey area we had been inhabiting all this time, but I knew he was right to want to figure out one way or another between us.

  “So,” I managed to smile at him, even though I was so nervous it felt as though my heart was going to come bursting out my chest. “What … what are we?”

  “Jesus, I have no idea.” He shook his head and offered me an apologetic grin. “What do you want us to be?”

  “Honestly, I’m just out of a relationship where I got fucked all the way around for so long,” I admitted. “And I thought … I thought when we met, it would just be a little bit of fun to get my mind off what I was going through. I didn’t think I’d be in a place where I could date for a long time, but …” I trailed off and bit my lip. My heart was leaping in my chest, and part of me wanted to just blurt out and say that I wanted to be with him, that he made me happy in a way that nobody had for what felt like a lifetime. He reached over and took my hand, and as soon as our skin connected, I felt a flood of relief wash over me.

  “Look, Nina, I haven’t dated anyone in so long.” He shook his head. “Since Erin came along. So I don’t know if I’m going to be any good at this, but I’m willing to give it a try if you are. I have no idea what it’ll look like for the two of us, but …” It was his turn to run out of words now, and I knew how he felt; there was just this roadblock in the way of either of us coming out and saying what we meant.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and accepted that I was going to need to be the one to come out with it. “Logan, I really like you, and I want to date you,” I told him firmly, looking into his eyes and managing a smile. “How does that sound?”

  “Sounds pretty fucking good to me,” he agreed, and he leaned over and kissed me, softly, on the mouth, and my whole body just ached to curl into him and forget about everything else that was going on out there in the real world. Why did any of it matter when he was right here with me? How could any of it matter?

  And knowing that whatever was between us now was real, I knew that I had to go and speak to Ant about it. She couldn’t just duck it and hope that it went away or that we lost interest in one another; we had made it unequivocally clear that Logan and I were a real thing now, a relationship with a capital R. And either she could hate us for it for the rest of her life, or she could actually listen to me, and we could figure this out once and for all.

  I called her a bunch of times in the week after she first came across us, and she ignored all my calls and sent them to voicemail; instead of crying or begging down the line, I would just calmly ask her to call me back and stop playing games with me. And eventually, she did, her number popping up on my phone as I was making dinner one evening. I snatched it up and pinned it between my shoulder and my ear as I stirred a pot.

  “Hello?”

  For a second, I thought that I had disconnected the call because there was no response, but then I realized I could hear her on the other end of the line and that she was just waiting for me to start explaining myself. I opened and closed my mouth, panicked, not sure how to start this.

  “Where are you right now?” I asked, and Ant sighed.

  “My place,” she replied. “Why?”

  “Come over to mine,” I told her. “I’m making dinner. We can talk.”

  “I’m not going to go over there and find my brother stripped to the waist again, am I?” She asked, and there was a flicker of humor in her voice; just the tiniest hint of it, but it was enough for me to grasp on to, a reminder that the real Ant was there underneath all this.

  “I’ll make sure to get him dressed before you arrive,” I promised solemnly, and she let out a small, grudging chuckle—music to my ears.

  “I’ll be there in twenty,” she told me. “Catch you soon.”

  And with that, she hung up. I focused on making dinner, keeping myself calm, knowing that if I let myself get stressed or overthink this it was going to come across like I was reading from a script when she arrived, and the last thing she needed was insincerity. Ant could see through me like an X-ray, and I knew she wouldn’t take any of that shit, not after I’d been hiding stuff from her all this time.

  She arrived on time just as I was serving up the simple pasta dish into two plates and pouring some wine, which never hurt in greasing the wheels of someone’s forgiveness, right? I headed to the door, closed my eyes, and counted to t
hree, and then pressed the buzzer to let her in.

  She headed up the stairs and greeted me at the door, and I went to hug her, but she held her hands up.

  “Hey, I’m still mad at you, remember,” she told me firmly, and I grimaced and stepped aside to let her into the apartment.

  “I know you are.” I nodded, and I followed her to the dining table. She looked around the place, the flicker of a smile on her face. “It looks so good in here,” she remarked. “So different from when you moved in.”

  “Thanks.” I smiled, and she took her seat at the dining table and picked up her fork, twirling a long strand of spaghetti around it and watching me as I went to join her.

  “Now, are you just here for a free dinner, or can I actually talk to you now?” I wondered aloud as I picked up my wine and took a long sip—liquid courage, and I was going to need it.

  “You can talk to me,” she agreed, and she looked up at me with her lips pressed together. There was pain on her face, that was clear to anyone who was paying attention, and I felt a twist of guilt for having done this to her. The last thing I ever wanted in the world was to hurt my best friend. I just wanted her to be happy and, at the moment, this was the thing I was sure would keep her at her happiest. But finding out about it the way she had … I should have known better. Both of us should.

  “Ant, I just want to say that I’m sorry,” I began, speaking from my heart. “And I know that the two of us hurt you, really badly.”

  “You did,” she agreed, and she put her fork down, seemingly losing her appetite. “I didn’t … I don’t want to be a bitch about this or act like I have dominion over everything you guys have ever done or will ever do, but I just feel like I knew you were a bad fit for a reason, you know?”

  “I get that.” I nodded seriously. “And I get why you thought that. Your parents …”

  I didn’t need to go any further than that; the wince on Ant’s face was more than enough to tell me that I’d made my point. It was obvious that the pain of their loss still weighed heavily on her, to the point where she let it influence almost everything that she did in her life. I wondered why Logan wasn’t the same and then remembered that he had been older when he arrived in the city after their deaths and that it hadn’t been long till he had to plow all his energy into taking care of his daughter. Ant didn’t have that kind of distraction.

  “Yeah, I know,” she breathed, and she looked down at her plate and shook her head, picking up her wine. “I know I shouldn’t let all of that get in the way I live my life, but …”

  “But it’s hard when you’re worried about letting something hurt one of the people closest to you,” I finished up for her. “I know how important Erin is to you, Ant, and I would never do anything to hurt her. She’s a sweet kid, and as far as she knows, I’m just the neighbor who babysits sometimes.”

  “You’re sure?” she asked, and she eyed me with a degree of distrust that seemed born from something other than the situation directly at hand. I nodded seriously.

  “I know I’ve told you I don’t want kids before,” I admitted. “And I know I’ve been pretty firm on that. But I’m not … this isn’t like I’m just moving in upstairs and living there and being her mom right away. I’m just dating her dad and getting to know the two of them a little bit better, alright? It’s not a big deal.”

  Ant leaned back from the table, stared at me for a long moment, and then nodded slowly. “Alright, I believe you,” she sighed and took another long sip of her wine. “About Erin. But what about Logan?”

  “What about him?” I asked.

  “I mean, my brother hasn’t been out on the dating scene in a hell of a long time,” she reminded me. “And whatever reason he’s got back into it with you for, I think it has to be something pretty special.”

  “Yeah?” I swallowed heavily and hoped that she couldn’t see the clear enthusiasm at that notion written all over my face.

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “And I’m just concerned since you guys are at such different places in your lives …” She trailed off, leaving the unspoken words there between us, and I bit my lip.

  “Look, Ant, I know that it’s hard for you to believe,” I conceded, “because I misled you and because I hid things from you, maybe I don’t deserve you to just believe me. Trust me, I get that.”

  “Glad you do,” she replied, a tiny bit sharp. Then she shook her head and softened. I’m sorry I’m acting like such a bitch, this is all just so much for me to take in, you know?”

  “I get it, I do,” I assured her. “And I get that you’re worried about me coming out here and hurting your brother after everything he’s been through already.”

  “If you met his ex, then you’d know where I was coming from.” She shook her head darkly. “That woman …”

  “You can give me the dish on her as soon as we get on to our second glass.” I tapped the wine in front of me. “But Ant, Logan and I had the talk today. You know, the … the big one, about what we are, and all of that.”

  “Oh yeah?” She raised her eyebrows at me. “Can’t imagine that was the most fun conversation in the world.”

  “No, it really wasn’t.” I shook my head. “I never thought … I didn’t think I’d be talking that way with anyone so soon after what happened with my ex, let alone with your damn brother, but we knew that if we wanted you to take us seriously, we needed to actually be sure that we were on the same page.”

  “And you are?”

  “We are,” I agreed, and a smile cracked over my face before I could stop it. “Seriously, Ant, what’s happening between us—I don’t think either of us expected it to end up where it has. When I met him, I never thought in a million years that we would … that this would be something real, you know?”

  Ant seemed unable to keep the smile off her face, and she grinned at me, the expression looking as though it was going to leap right off her head. “I’m so happy that you guys are happy,” she finally admitted. “And I’m sorry I was so harsh. I was just … scared. For all of you. And I shouldn’t have let my own stupid insecurities get in the way; I see that now. You guys are together, and that’s … that’s not what I expected, but I guess that it’s a good thing.”

  “It is,” I promised her. “For both of us, really. You should come spend time with Logan and me, and maybe Erin too, so you can actually see that I’m not just going to throw myself out the nearest window as soon as I get the chance.”

  “Hey, I was pretty sure I was going to be the one throwing you out that window for a hot minute.” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I laughed. I reached over and squeezed her hand, suddenly feeling this swell of love for the woman who was my best friend.

  “You have no idea how much this means to me,” I told her. “For you to accept us.”

  And I realized that I wasn’t exaggerating, not one little bit. And, as what I’d just said sunk in, something else clicked into place as well. Something that made my head hurt a little. As I talked about Logan, a word had been pulsing in my brain, a word that I had been trying to avoid and wriggle out from under all this time: the word Love. And now that it was there, I wasn’t sure I could shake it.

  “Hey, are you alright?” Ant asked, tapping my hand. “You look a little pale.”

  “Yup, doing fine,” I lied to her at once, plastering a big smile on my face. “Come on, let’s eat, I’m starving.”

  And as I tucked into the food, that word whirled around and around my head, and I knew that I was going to have to confront it sooner rather than later.

  Chapter 14

  Logan

  I whistled to myself as I carried the bags up to the apartment. Actually whistled! When was the last time I had wandered around whistling like I was in a movie musical and I was a minute away from bursting into song?

  Well, it had been a long time since I’d had a reason to feel this happy. I was planning a date night with Nina that evening, cooking a nice dinner for her in the apartment, and spending the night togethe
r, while Ant watched Erin for us over at her apartment. It had been a stressful couple of weeks, what with Ant finding out and Nina having to do damage control and coax her back around to our side, but that was over now, and I would be damned if I wasn’t going to enjoy myself as much as I could.

  It was weird, being in a real relationship again. I had nearly forgotten that first sweet flush of love, how exciting it was to feel that thrill run through you when you thought about the person you were with, about what the future could hold for the two of you. In fact, even back when I had been a young man and actively dating, I was sure that I had never felt anything quite like this. Back then, everything had come with an expiration date for when my patience would run out or they would get bored of me staying up all night every night to party my ass off. But now that I was more settled, now that my life was held together at the seams for the most part, now that I had a kid, and a job and an apartment—this thing with Nina felt like it was going somewhere, building to a life that the two of us could make for one another.

  And this was the first time I would really cook for her. Well, cook dinner; I made her breakfast that one time, but that had just been pancakes, nothing special. I was going all-out and putting together this gorgeous pea and mint risotto, a recipe that I picked up and perfected at work. I remembered the first time I tried it, telling myself that it would make an amazing date-night recipe if I ever needed to impress a woman again. And, well, here was the woman for me to impress. I realized that I’d been putting away little relationship tips and tricks that had gone unused over the last few years—that’s what came from working with people older than you who were always happy to dole out sage advice about how to make a relationship work whether you wanted to hear it or not—but now that I was in one again, I could whip them all out and be the boyfriend that I knew I could be. Nina got the Logan two-point-oh, the version of me who could actually pull off this relationship thing without having to spend three nights a week at the club with his friends.