“You too, superstar.” Michael turned to me and jerked his head at the chair beside Brody. “Sit down and let the man make you look decent. You can’t be getting married with a mop like that.”
I ran a hand through my hair, realizing that it was longer than I usually kept it. I’d always worn it messy and maybe even a little boyish. Usually, I didn’t get it cleaned up until Sterling started threatening me with a comb.
Rolling my eyes, I strode over and dropped into the chair beside Brody’s. “I’ll do it, but only if you stop calling me that.”
“You played D1. That makes you a superstar,” Mason joked before he turned to Louis. “We need a clean shave over there, too.”
“This is Maisie’s fiancé?” Louis asked as he eyed me, waving over one of the younger barbers. “Do we like him? I might really let Jim shave it off if we don’t.”
Matthew let out a soft bark of laughter. “Good lord, she’ll kill me if you shave it all off. Just give him a trim. Maybe a proper shave.”
I shrugged. “I can’t argue with that.”
The cape swept around me and scissors snipped at my hair not long after. The younger guy, Jim, worked fast, shaping and trimming. “This cowlick is horrible. That’s the best I can do, I’m afraid.”
I chuckled. “I’ve been fighting it my whole life. Just let it be.”
The guy nodded. When he finished shaving me with a straight razor, even I had to admit that my jawline felt sharper. I liked it.
As I got up, Louis finally started on Brody. He talked to him like a long-lost friend he’d been looking forward to catchingup with, the two chatting back and forth with either Mason or Michael chiming in every so often.
For the most part, I was happy just to be included, really not feeling like an outsider anymore. Everything was perfectly normal until Brody tipped his head as the clippers buzzed around his ear. Right behind it, small and barely noticeable, was a red birthmark.
Insignificant, really, except that it wasn’t. Not to me.
Because I had the same one.
So did Sterling.
And my father.
My stomach rolled. My heart felt like it was about to stop. Brody and I had the exact same birthmark. In the exact same place.
That couldn’t be a coincidence. That wasn’t just a random smudge. It was ours. I suddenly felt like I’d missed a step on a hundred-story staircase for how instantly my stomach completely bottomed out.
“Darn cowlick,” Louis muttered. “I wonder if you’re ever going to grow out of it.”
I suddenly knew he wasn’t. Because just like the birthmark, the cowlick was mine, too. Also in the exact same place.
Everything Sterling had said about how much he resembled me came tumbling back into my head with the force of a freight train. I looked at Brody then, properly, and it felt like my life was flashing in front of my eyes.
For possibly the first time, I really saw the way Brody’s nose scrunched as he grinned at Louis. I thought about his hockey skills, his height, his appetite.
They were all things we had in common. Along with the cowlick that couldn’t be tamed and the birthmark?
It was mine. All of it. Not only mine, butours. They were Westwood traits through and through.
Brody glanced up at me in the reflection of the mirror, bright eyed, trusting, and completely oblivious, and I tried to smile like nothing had changed. But in that moment, everything did.
I’d snapped a picture that night, wondering why he looked so much like Sterling, butIlooked like Sterling too. If it hadn’t been for the age difference, we could’ve passed as twins. I’d thought about asking him if he was sure he hadn’t run into her about eight years ago, but that suddenly seemed ridiculous.
Eight years ago, Maisie and I had been at college, and to the best of my knowledge, Sterling had never set foot on campus.Ihad, though. Not only had I set foot on campus, but I’d slept with her.
Brody was seven and a bit. I did the math, factoring in the months she would’ve been pregnant, and that put us right around the time of that night. The night she and I had gone home together after a party and she’d ended up in my bed.
Holy fuck. Brody’s mine, isn’t he?
“Callum?” Mason’s voice cut through the static in my head. He leaned against the wall, eyeing me like I’d grown a second head. “Are you alright, man? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
