“I know.” I sighed and swiped a palm over my face. “I do love them. I guess it’s just kind of hard to hear that your brother is having the same kind of conversations about settling down with his seven-year-old son as his twenty-four-year-old brother. Am I really such a baby to you?”
He held my gaze for a long beat before he shot me a teasing grin. “Of course, little bro. When I was your age, I wasn’t thinking about getting married or settling down either.”
“What if I am?” I asked, the question out before I could reconsider talking to him about this.
Callum’s head jerked and he frowned, then he burst out laughing. “You’re kidding, right?”
“No, I, uh…” I trailed off and swiped my tongue across my ice cold lips. “Have you ever wondered why Dad hasn’t started in on me yet? About marriage, I mean.”
“Nope. Just consider yourself lucky and move on with your life.” He moved like he was about to get into position again, but when his gaze came back to mine, he paused. “Wait, are you notfeeling lucky? Because I distinctly remember you saying, not so long ago, that you were absolutely sure you weren’t next and that you had more time. You seemed pretty fucking happy about it.”
“Yeah, well, happy isn’t what I feel,” I admitted. “For what it’s worth, I’m not feeling lucky, either.”
“What are you feeling?” He unclipped his helmet and pulled it off, swiping a hand through his sweaty hair as he slowly started gliding to the door. “Come on, man. Talk to me. This is clearly eating at you. You haven’t scored a single goal all damn day.”
“I don’t know.” I followed him off the ice, unsnapping my own helmet and tossing it into my open bag next to the benches. “Maybe I’m just feeling left out.”
Callum looked at me like I had a gyrating unicorn horn growing out of my head. “Are you really complaining that Dadisn’tbreathing down your neck about settling down?”
I shrugged, bending over to tug at the laces of my skates. “It’s not that. I just feel like it’s because he doesn’t think I’m capable. Of running the company. Of starting a family. Any of it.”
Callum pulled his skates off, head shaking before he looked up at me from underneath the messy, sweat-slick hair falling across his forehead. “Sure, okay, but marriage isn’t a game. It’s not a competition about who gets there first, either.”
“Yeah, I know, but?—”
“No, Harrison. With all due respect, I don’t think you do know. You were on a yacht off the Amalfi Coast or somewhere when Sterling found out Dad expected him to get marriedandhave a baby before next summer.”
“Yeah, but then he found Laney and look at him now. He’s never been this happy.”
Callum scoffed quietly. “Sure. I agree with that, but do you really think it was easy for the rest of us? Because it wasn’t. Dad pushed, sure, but there was a lot of other stuff. Stuff we had to figure out on our own, the hard way. It was a shit show.”
I looked back at him for a long minute, seeing the sincerity and even the hurt in those traditional Westwood blues. He, Sterling, and Dad shared those. Jameson had Mom’s hazels almost exactly, but me?
Once again, I was the odd one out, even my eye-color a weird mesh between Mom and Dad. Some people saw the Westwood blue, others Mom’s interesting hazel. Very few realized that it was a little bit of both.
“Okay, I hear you,” I said after thinking it over for a beat. “Maybe I’m oversimplifying things. I know it was a shit show. I know that there was a lot of hurt and a lot of stuff you all had to work out, but it just feels like, by not including me in the ultimatum, Dad still sees me as a kid. The baby who’ll never grow up.”
“You are the baby, bro,” Callum said, grinning. “Embrace the Peter Pan of it all andnevergrow up.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the baby.”
“Hey, man. I’m the true middle child. I’ve got my own issues to deal with. Besides, whatever he thinks, you can still prove him wrong.”
“Yeah?”
“Of course.” His expression finally softened. “You’ve just got to stop trying to be one of us and figure out what it means to be you.”
With those sage words of non-advice, or perhaps just super cryptic, but good advice, he pulled his sneakers back on and slung his bag over his shoulder, already starting to back away from me. “Trust me, Harrison. Take it slow. I’ve got to run to meet Brody, but I’m here if you want to keep talking.”
He spun around and jogged to the main doors, quickly disappearing through them just as a swarm of kids came in. Obviously, the school day was over, which meant I had to get out of here fast unless I wanted to risk getting trampled.
I left the rink with sweat freezing at my temples and my chest tight in a way that had nothing to do with cardio. My problem with Callum’s advice wasn’t necessarily that it was cryptic as fuck, but because contrary to what they all believed, Iwascapable.
It really just felt like I needed to do something big to prove them all wrong—once and for all.Like get married. It shouldn’t be too difficult.
Each one of my brothers had gotten married within this last year, and they were all disgustingly happy. Marriage wasn’t some impossible hill to climb. Not in our case, anyway.
It was a business deal, a merger of lives. All I needed was the right partner.
