“Oh, sorry. Didn’t notice you there, Clover.”
Owen has called me his four-leaf clover, or simply Clover, since I was in the sixth grade. He claims that when I was a kid, if he was having a crappy baseball game, I would show up and he’d hit a homer. If he had been trying to get a girl's number and was striking out, I’d walk into the room and he’d get those digits. And far too often, my embarrassing moments have brought him more luck than I’d care to admit. Like the time we were playing Flip Cup and a bird shit on my head and he got the upper hand and won.
At the start, I was too young for the nickname to be anything other than innocent. The older we got, the more it turned into a tease. As an adult woman, the childhood nickname and Owen annoy me just as much as my brothers Knox, Cal, and Angus do.
To say things between us are complicated would be an understatement.
He's my brother's best friend. A member of our family. And yet, it’s a constant struggle not to reach for him when the pull between us is so strong. Yet, somehow, I manage.
Except when I don’t. Like our stolen moments in the dark.
Or a long weekend in New York. A trip to Los Angeles. Or a week in Hawaii.
Owen parts the balloons, sticking his face through the monstrosity. Being the idiot I am, I turn to face him and his viciously handsome face.
“Missed you,” he says, dimples on display.
“Would you be quiet?” I hiss, refusing to smile back.
His delight doesn’t subside, but he speaks in a whisper. “I’m just so damned happy to see youandmeet the baby.”
My traitorous stomach flips. He’s always so earnest that my heart doesn’t know how to resist him. Still, there will never be anything real between us, no matter how diluted his mind is. So, why tell me he’s happy to see me? Didn’t he say enough in New York?
“Seriously, Owen. Look around you. Is this tiny room the place for you and your crazy?”
“Aw, you missed me too.”
“You need help, my friend.”
Luckily, Sawyer is distracting the other adults in the room. Nobody is paying us any attention.
He bats a balloon out of his face and into mine. “You’re right, I do. Wanna come over later and help me put Aquaphor on my tattoo?”
Owen and his damn tattoo! The man is pushing me to the brink of insanity.
“Sorry, you’re on your own there. Wasn’t it you who taught me that if you make stupid choices... you have to deal with the consequences?”
What a lame-ass comeback.
“As long as you know every time I lube it up, I’m thinking of you.” He places his hand over his heart, where his new inkresides. “And you loved fucking around and finding out. Those are facts.”
My mouth falls open, but I’m not sure why I’m so surprised. This is what he does. He pushes. I tell him to watch what he’s saying around my family, and he pushes it as far as he can.
“You’re deranged.”
“And you love it.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“Have you given any thought to what we talked about in New York?”
I roll my eyes in reply. Hoping he can’t see through my bullshit, because the truth is it’s all I’ve thought about. There’s no way I would ever confess that to him, though. I wish I could live in the same fairy tale world he lives in, but here in reality, this thing between us will never work.
“Take all the time you need. We’ve taken this long. Like I told you, I’m stuck. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ve been stuck on you for years now. There’s no one else for me. I’m fucking stuck. Waiting for you.”
His words from three days ago hurt my heart, so I shove them to the back of my mind.
