Page 34 of Messing With My Brother's Best Friends

I shoved Finn away from me, and for once, he looked shocked by that, and I couldn’t tell why. Was it because he found himself comforting me for once, or was it because I dared to push him away?

“I don’t want to see you or your fucking mates ever again. I don’t give a shit if you are my brother, I don’t want—”

“Makes sense.” The fact he was agreeing with me, eyes downcast, his tone getting quieter, not louder, had me going still.

“What?”

“It makes sense, Kendall.” His eyes met mine then, and I saw a mix of things in them that I couldn’t seem to decode. Fear, anger, but also… Regret. “I let them in the house. I let them do this to you.”

What I felt then for my brother’s best friends was just as complex as his emotions now. They were big, strong, the golden boys of school, so when I started noticing guys that way, how could I stop myself from looking at them? They roamed around our place with all the arrogance, all the grace of big cats, completely unaware of how cruel they were.

Nor how beautiful.

Half the reason why I started reading romances was because when I was out staying at my grandmother’s place, I’d delved into her boxes of Mills and Boons and found tales of cruel men who were turned gentle by the power of love. I’d eaten them up voraciously, trying to read between the lines to work out what the secret was. What did I need to do/see/say to turn the guys from my tormentors to my…?

Lovers felt like too big a word for it when I was eighteen, but… that, that was what I wanted. My experiences with it had been furtive little make-out sessions with boys from school, neither of us able to put words to what we were doing because we were struggling to even do it. To dare to touch, to kiss, to make ourselves vulnerable to strip bare and fuck.

“They’re always hurting you,” he said. “Always coming up with ideas for new ways to embarrass you, and I admit, most of the time I think it's pretty funny, but this…” He grabbed the broom handle decisively, scooping up the ruins of my dreams and tossing it into the bin, each splatter of icing and cake making me shudder. “Do you have a friend you could stay with?”

I did. At his urging, I’d run down the hall, packed up all of my most important stuff into a suitcase, just like I had when I was a little girl. But this time, I wouldn’t get halfway down the street, announcing to everyone that I was running away from home. Instead, I’d actually go, never spending another night in my childhood bedroom.

And I didn’t. I blinked, this room slowly bleeding back. I stayed at my friend’s place just long enough to get a job at a bakery a couple of suburbs over. Not in the back making bread, but out the front, serving customers and making coffee. The woman who owned the place seemed to think that because I was young and a girl, I’d bring guys into the shop, and I did. I got full-time hours, then enough to cover the rent of a single bedroom in a share house with other young women. Only women at that point, I couldn’t bear the thought of living with guys.

“Hey…” Van appeared at the door, looking like an apparition from my past, not the guy I was currently sharing my house with. He had an old footy jersey on, the fabric half gone to holes, one I thought he was wearing when he still played with my brother. “Gage said you didn’t want to have any of the pasta, but…”

Those long, sensitive fingers picked at the nail on one hand. Girls had written poems about how beautiful his hands were, or wrote on the girls’ toilets walls how good he was at fingering them, but right now, they didn’t seem to know what to do.

“Gage always makes too fucking much Bolognese, and then we’re left eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, until I’d just about murder a burger. Anything but damn pasta.”

I snorted despite myself at his heartfelt plea, and that had him smiling. Golden and bright, just like the sun, it was hard to see the darkness in it.

“Look, come and have a bowl with us. At least there’d be some intelligent conversation for once.”

My head moved, shaking back and forth, the word no ready to trip off my lips, but instead I said, “Sure.”

“Oh, thank fuck…” He moved into the bedroom, steering me out the door before I could think twice. “You like garlic bread, right? Like if we’re gonna stink tomorrow, we may as well do it together…”

“Yeah.” I shoved my phone in my pocket. “I like garlic bread.”

Chapter 19

Van

Take your hand away. Take it the fuck away, a small voice shouted inside my skull, but it was nothing in comparison to the sheer fucking pleasure that came from directing Kendall towards the dining room.

We’d downed tools when she went inside and got cleaned up, and Connor was standing there, hair brushed back from his face and a clean t-shirt on, though the combined stink of beef stock and sawdust still clung to him. He’d wanted to have a shower, but I’d determined we didn’t have time for that. Instead, we’d joined Gage in the kitchen, ready to help, only to get a whispered recount of what had gone down.

Something had completely turned Kendall off cooking.

That bakery she was working at? The food was all right, but it was nothing compared to the culinary excellence I knew she was capable of. The sausage roll didn’t explode with flavour on my tongue, making me want to gorge myself on that pastry and then another. If they had any idea of what they had standing behind the counter, they’d have dragged Kendall into the kitchen forcibly. Instead, she made coffees and took people’s money, a fragile kind of sadness flickering in her eyes, there and gone again when she made herself smile at the customers.

But why?

I thought we knew what had happened. Connor’s dad had been pissed about the whole thing, so he’d drilled Kendall’s parents about what went down. Kendall’s details had been passed along to the wife of one of his business associates when she tasted some of those little tarts our girl had made for Connor’s mum for one of her fancy dinner parties. Mr. Woods had puffed himself up, thinking he was the big man, brokering an apprenticeship for a girl on the street with a bakery that was far swankier than anything around us. Kendall’s success was somehow a reflection on him.

Just as her failure was.

I shook my head, never liking dwelling on the past, the room coming back with a snap.

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