Hedoes.
Like right now, I try to ignore his overwhelming presence, and I slowly cap the juice jug again.My gaze stays on him. No matter how hard I saylook at the juice.
I’ve had this problem since I was sixteen. Unfortunately, I’ve known Farrow for a long,longtime. I’m talking fledgling teenage years. Before the security team assigned him to my mom, he was just the son of our family’s concierge doctor, on-call 24/7 for house visits and medical emergencies.
So when my little sister Kinney broke her ankle in five-inch-heeled boots, Dr. Keene appeared. With his son Farrow in tow.
I tried to tug off Kinney’s boot, and Dr. Keene told me, “Move away, Maximoff.” Then he gestured Farrow forward. Teaching his son basic first aid. All so he could follow the footsteps of themanygenerations of Keenes before him. A prestigious family of physicians.
Moments like those stoked my competitive nature. If Farrow was pushed to the front, I craved to find a way next to him. If Farrow went fast, I went harder. And he neverlet up. Withanything, he was too headstrong to let me pass without a hard-won fight.
Somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, I started crushing on him. Maybe it’s because he never justgivesme the win. Maybe it’s that he’s five years older and a Yale graduate.
Or that he does thirty pull-ups like it’s a damn breeze. Maybe it’s all the gray and black tattoos that cover his fair skin, even tohis throat.Beautiful inked symmetric wings decorate his neck, crossed swords on his Adam’s apple.
Maybe it’s his four visible piercings: a hoop on his nostril, bottom lip, and two barbells on his brow.
Maybe it’sall of thatcombined together that heats my skin, pools blood south, and attracts me like an idiot. He’s made permanent camp in my cerebral cortex and cock, and I don’t know how to extract him.
The crush was fine when I was teenager, where I was secretly fantasizing about the hot older guy’s lips around my dick. I always knew he was gay, and at eighteen, I told the world I was bisexual. Afterwards I thought there’d be a chance Farrow would look at me with interest.
He didn’t.
Thenhe became my mom’s bodyguard. Exactly three years ago.
Whatever attraction I had towards him became more ethically wrong than it already was. I remind myself that he knowsnothing. I’ve only told my best friend Jane about my crush and lapse in judgment. And she wouldn’t tell a soul.
Farrow enters the store’s doorway and takes a big bite of a red apple.
And then his brown eyes latch onto my forest-green. Instantly, he has aknowinglook.
I attribute it to him being a know-it-all. I must wear my slight irritation because his lips hike upward as he chews and swallows his fruit.
I swig my orange juice before saying, “Look what the wind threw up.” I set down my glass.
Farrow raises his apple to his mouth. “You meanblew in.”
“No,” I say firmly, palms on the pearly counter. “I meant threw up.”
He rolls his eyes into a humored smile that slowly stretches wider and wider. Then he kicks the door closed. And he locks it shut with his spare key.
I go rigid. “Where’s my mom?”
Akarafinallypocketshis cellphone. The one he’s been super-glued to since we arrived here. “Lily’s bodyguard transfer went through this morning.”
Transfer.
Which means…my brain fries, jaw sharpens and breath heavies as I watch Farrow near the vinyl stools, his stride masculine and unconcerned. A kind of confident gait that belongs to people who understand themselves from the core outwards.
Closer, he rests his knee on the stool beside Akara. And he tells me, “I’m your new bodyguard.”
I inhale, staying outwardly composed, but my pulse rages at an abnormal speed.Farrow Redford Keene is my new bodyguard.
I have trouble adding him to my lifethat way.It’s why I’m eerily silent and mentally trying to block out how complicated this’ll make everything.
Farrow stares me dead in the eye. “Excited?” he asks with a peeking smile, like he knows I wouldn’t be.
Excited that my old crush is going to be a permanent companion to my whole life? And we’re ethically bound to remain platonic.
