“Can’t isn’t really a word in my vocabulary, sugar.”
“It appearsnoisn’t either.”
I grinned. “You learn quickly.”
Another forceful push of air from her mouth. “Carter, I just can’t. Okay?”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. Instead I let her words fill my head, and then the expression on her beautiful, caramel face whenever I got close to her that day in the park. The way her eyes got big and shifted between me and something behind me. Those soft-looking full lips of hers that pulled together when I asked for her number, as if her mouth wanted to blurt out her number but something held her back.
“What are you afraid of?” I knew fear when I saw it.
“What’re you talking about?” she questioned, startled.
“If there’s one emotion that I know like the back of my hand, it’s fear, sugar. Want to know a secret?”
“Wh-what?”
“You can’t outrun fear. It’s bigger than you and faster than you. There’s only one way to really be rid of it,” I paused. “You have to succumb to it. Sit in it and let it wash over you, until you feel like it’s going to drown you. That’s how you make friends with it. Then you realize, it can’t do shit to you. It begins to shrink and recede like the bitch it is, and you’ve won. But you have to confront it first. Now tell me, what are you afraid of?”
I heard a shuddering breath, and it reached through the line and dug down at something deep inside of my gut.
“I-I’m not afraid of anything. I have to go. P-please don’t call me again.”
The click at the other end of the phone signaled that she’d hung up. That only incensed me, not at her but at whatever it was that made her fearful, distrustful of what was happening between us. Try as she might, I knew there was something powerful between us, onbothour ends. I wasn’t in this shit alone. Every day I’d gone to work with her on my mind, and every night I worked up a sweat trying to push myself into an exhaustion-induced sleep. Even on the nights it did work, I’d fall into a dreamland in which she was the star. It was time to quit playing games. I’d asked nicely but I was well past the point of simply asking.
“New friend?”
I sighed and turned to my brother. “Nosey much?”
“I wasn’t eavesdropping, just seeing how your tux fitting was going.”
“I bet. What do you want, Aaron?” He stepped closer. Shorter than my six-foot-three inch body by only an inch, we stood just about shoulder to shoulder.
“You aren’t thinking of skipping out again, are you? Mother and Father nearly ruined my night last year because I had to practically send out a search party for you.”
“I was working during last year’s gala. I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Just make sure you keep it that way.”
“Why? It’s not like you’re gonna get laid after the gala anyway.” I laughed at the V that deepened in his forehead. My brother was as mean as a rattlesnake. I couldn’t imagine the unlucky woman that ended up with him, if even for a night.
“It doesn’t look good for business when one of the family isn’t present.”
“Ah,” I nodded, “business. Right. Can’t have that.” Townsend Industries, my family’s pride and joy, especially Aaron’s. It was just a business to me, a business that I’d passed up. That still pissed my brother and father off.
“Just don’t fuck up tonight,” Aaron snarled.
“You can count on me, baby brother.” I couldn’t help but laugh again at his pissed off expression. He hated when I reminded him that he was still my baby brother. Yes, only by a few months, but still younger. Aaron’s biological father was my uncle, but his parents died when he was young and my mother and father took him in, raising him as one of their four boys. He was my brother in every way, except for the DNA.
“Anyway, why do I have to attend this thing and Tyler doesn’t?” I questioned, of our absent brother.
“Tyler is on his way. He got caught up at a commercial shoot in Miami.”
I frowned. “I’m sure he did.” Tyler was the youngest of us four and he, like me, had opted out of the family business. Instead, he pursued his dreams and was an up and coming quarterback in the NFL.
“He’ll be here. As will you,” Aaron stated, strangely sounding like a warning.
But since I knew he was mean but wasn’t fucking crazy enough to threaten me, I clapped him on the back. “With bells on, baby brother. With bells on.” Chuckling, I moved past him to go back out to the area where Jinks still was so he could finish my damn tux. After I fulfilled my obligation to make my appearance at the family’s gathering, I would give Andy another call to find out everything I wanted to know about Michelle Clarke.
