He blinks.
“Twenty,” I repeat. “I was a kid. A kid who’d just accidentally bonded with his best friend and didn’t know how to process it. Of course I fell apart. What twenty-year-old wouldn’t?”
Dom opens his mouth, then closes it.
“I’m thirty now. I run a fishing operation. I pay a mortgage. I kept this family afloat when the industry nearly collapsed underus.” I can hear my voice getting rougher, an edge to it I can’t smooth out. “I’m not a boy who doesn’t know how to manage his own goddamn emotions anymore. And the idea that you and my sister have been sacrificing your futures because you think I’m still that fragile?—“
Dom winces. Actually winces, his shoulders coming up around his ears like he’s bracing for impact.
“When you put it that way,” he mutters, “it sounds pretty patronizing.”
“It soundsentirelypatronizing.”
He scrubs a hand across the back of his neck, silver rings catching the neon light. His jaw works through something that might be embarrassment, might be relief, might be both at once. “I didn’t mean it like?—“
“I know you didn’t.” The anger drains out of me as fast as it arrived, leaving behind something heavier. Something that aches. “But you need to hear this. Whatever dreams you’ve been putting on hold for me, we are going to sit down and discuss. And Mabie is going to take this yacht job if that’s what she wants.”
Dom stares at me. The flush has crept up past his ears now, spreading across his cheekbones.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “Okay.”
Movement catches my eye across the room.
In the far corner, half-hidden by the growing crowd, Mason crouches behind a camera tripod. He’s adjusting the angle, tilting the lens toward the makeshift stage. Phoenix must have asked him to film Atticus’s set. His hands are steady on the equipment, his face composed in that focused expression I used to love to see—brow slightly furrowed, lower lip caught between his teeth.
My chest tightens with something that isn’t pain. Something warmer. More terrifying.
I turn back to Dom and drain the rest of the cocktail in one long pull. The mezcal burns clean and bright all the way down.
I set the empty glass on the bar with a loud thunk on the wood. “In the meantime, there’s another important conversation I need to have.”
I push through the crowd, weaving between bodies and conversations, my eyes locked on Mason’s position in the corner. Each step feels heavier than the last, but I force myself not to slow down.
It’s time to resolve this, for better or worse.
I stop three feet away. Close enough to smell chamomile and black pepper beneath the bar’s ambient cloud of hops and old wood.
“Hey.”
Mason’s hands still on the camera for just a moment before he continues adjusting the settings. “Hey.”
The greeting is neutral, as if we’re meeting up for coffee.
I wasn’t expecting that.
I’d been bracing for resistance. For the clipped tone and averted eyes that I’d been getting from him since his heat ended.
“One of the legs keeps slipping.” He nods at the tripod. “Can you hold the camera steady while I fix it?”
“Uh…yeah, sure.”
I step forward and wrap both hands around the camera body, keeping it level while Mason drops to one knee, making me very aware that his face is at the same level as my belt.
Then I realize that it’s my flannel shirt that he is bunching up the sleeves of as he works.
Fuck, seeing him in my clothes does something to me.
The leg clicks into place. Mason tests it, pressing down with both hands, then stands and checks the viewfinder one more time, close enough that I smell how much his scent has saturated the fabric of that damn shirt.
