“Cole?” Brock said, staring out the window. “It was fine. We talked.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Are you going to give me a bullshit run-around, or are you going to say anything to me?”
Brock opened his mouth, had his breath hitch, and shook his head.
“Whatever,” I said. “As long as you got some wits scared into you and you’re doing something, I suppose it’s all good.”
Brock said nothing. I parked the car, got out, and walked straight to my office, ignoring Elizabeth and leaving Brock to smoke a cigarette outside.
And what, exactly, is it I’m trying to scare myself into doing?
To have the same courage he is. To…
You know what.
* * *
The rest of the week passed, albeit without much incident either way.
Brock never told me what happened with him and Cole, but he also talked to me in the morning. Our conversations weren’t especially deep; I told him about a family trip that we had booked for a weekend in Mexico, and he told me a funny story about how Garrett had gotten so drunk recently that he had passed out on an ant hill—something that none of the boys had been too inclined to help with.
The conversations were enjoyable, but that’s all they were. They weren’t anything that was building to something else, weren’t anything that would suggest that I was scaring myself into doing anything. By the time Friday afternoon had come, I couldn’t keep doing this anymore.
Our week of security had ended. There was only so much simple talk I could take before I had to pull the trigger. I suspected that Brock had feelings for me, but so long as he and Steele were close, he would never do anything. His brotherhood code prevented him from doing so.
It was time for me to push him to act like a man. To recognize that guys didn’t have “dibs” on women. To understand that if he was attracted to an ex of a friend, that he could make a move in a dignified way.
Maybe I was being too hopeful. Brock was mature, but guys around other guys acted in ways I could never understand.So get him around just you.
Around three in the afternoon, a couple of hours before I was scheduled to go home, I walked outside when Brock took a smoke break.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed getting paid to do nothing,” I said with a smile.
“It’s not much different from working at the gas station,” he said. “Only difference is I don’t get spat at or attacked as often.”
“Funny that that would be the case as a security guard, huh?”
Brock shrugged.
“I’m glad you didn’t have to worry about anything,” he said. “I’m not sure you still need me, but…”
But he would take the chance to do so.
No, the ceiling of us cannot be us interacting like this.
“Brock, what are you doing tonight?”
Brock coughed on his cigarette puff. I backed up to give him some space.
“Was going to hang with the boys.”
“OK, let me rephrase that. Are you doing anything tonight that would prevent you from doing anything else?”
Brock shook his head.
“Well, Kathryn, Elizabeth, and I were going to grab drinks at Reapers around eight. But I was thinking you and I could grab dinner and some drinks first. Think of it as my chance to thank you for this week. Hopefully, no interruptions from your friend this time.”
“Just interruptions from your girls, huh?” he said, but he did so with a playful smile.
