All I could do was keep taking that risk, keep looking for the answer that might gain me a brother but cost me a father.
CHAPTER 24
“Ready?”
In answer to Chase’s question the following afternoon, I knelt down and grabbed the handle to lift up the door to his garage. Fading sunlight spilled into the space, althoughspacewas an inaccurate word. There wasn’t any actual space, just stuff, more stuff, and stuff that hid behind and underneath yet more stuff.
“Whoa,” I said. “You can’t even walk in here.”
Chase wrapped a hand around my hip and pulled me until I was standing in front of him, my back to his chest. A fire kindled to life, heat spreading through me until I burned all over. The more time we spent together, the more he’d started touching me. Not like he was looking for opportunities to put his hands on me, but like he was growing comfortable enough with me that he could reach out without having to think about it. And even though I still felt a startling burst of warmth every time we made contact, I was growing more comfortable with him too, when the opposite should have been true.
Ahead of me was a sliver of a path to the back of the garage, but it was so narrow that I couldn’t imagine Chase fitting through it.Imight not fit. I could feel him dwarfing me from behind, taller, wider. The hand he still rested on my hip could have spanned my entire side if he moved it up an inch. That thought sent another pulse of heat through my body, and I spun away.
“So when you said your mom was a bit of a hoarder, you meant she was the queen of all hoarders?”
Chase didn’t smile.
“Oh, bad joke.”
“A little, yeah.” He was staring into the open garage. “Inside the house isn’t this bad, but it’s not that good either.”
If it was a fraction of what the garage looked like, it was far from not good.
“She wasn’t like this even a year ago, or I would never have moved out, you know?”
I nodded. Chase was finishing his freshman year of college, something that was taking him longer than I knew he would have liked because he was managing Jungle Juice full-time to pay for school.
“My uncle thinks it’s empty-nest syndrome, that she’s hanging on to everything she can because she knows she won’t be able to hold on to me much longer. Plus, once Brandon leaves for college, my uncle is planning on moving out of state, and I know losing them is going to be hard on her.”
There I was, listening to him talk about sad stuff with his mom, and the first thing I asked about was Brandon. I was not a good person.
“When is he going to college?”
“In the fall.”
Four months. Panic scratched over my skin at that timeline. What if I didn’t know the truth about my dad by then? What if I did? What if Brandon left before we ever got to know him, or he us?
“Hey, you don’t have to do this.” Before I could respond, Chase was stretching up beside me to pull the handle down. With our height difference, the only safe part of him I could reach were his ribs. I pressed my palm against him and he stopped, glancing down at me and the place where I was touching him, at the warmth zinging from my body to his. Or was it the other way around?
I was much more reserved in initiating physical contact with him. In fact, this might have been the first time. I’d thought about it, but I always killed the impulse before I could act. It was getting harder to pretend that I wasn’t lying to him. I lowered my hands.
“I’m still up for this if you are.”
Chase didn’t say anything about me touching him or how abruptly I’d stopped touching him. It was a stretch to hope he’d think I was being shy, because I hadn’t exactly fled from his touch a few minutes before. Whatever he thought, he didn’t make an issue of it. I was relieved and a little surprised. Chase was a pretty forthright guy. He didn’t back away from uncomfortable topics, even about himself. He didn’t pretend one thing when he thought another.
I wished I could be like that.
“Yeah. I need to before my mom changes her mind.” Chase released the garage door, pushing it back the few inches he’d pulled down. He brushed the back of my fingers with his, sending invisible little sparks dancing along each one. “Thanks, Dana.” It was the smallest of touches, but I felt it everywhere, and I missed it the second there was space between us again. Rather than dwell on my increasing awareness of him, I turned back to the garage.
* * *
The garage, it turned out, wasn’t as bad as it had first looked. Most things were organized and carefully boxed. I’d been expecting to find chaos and junk mixed together, but Chase’s mom had been meticulous in her storage. That wasn’t to say there was nothing to throw away. We filled Chase’s truck with boxes of old magazines and old toys. There were tattered board games and an entire trunk of self-help books that went too. And Chase’s stuff had been scattered throughout, wherever he’d been able to find room when he moved back. We set his stuff aside to bring in later, not wanting to waste what little daylight we had left.
An hour later and I was, if anything, more aware of Chase than ever. I was aware of the way he breathed when lifting a heavy box. I was aware of the way the muscles shifted in his arms when he raised them, and the glimpse of exposed skin below his T-shirt when he reached for anything high. But I was more aware of the way he laughed halfway through the jokes he told, like he’d already reached the punch line in his head and couldn’t help himself. I was hyperaware of the way he talked about his whole family with such easy love. He held nothing back. His openness made it easy for me to ask questions and harder to look at him when I did.
It also made the process go the other way. We talked about softball and how I wanted to play in college and maybe even beyond, if I could.
“Why couldn’t you?”
