Page 120 of One More Chapter

anthony

At this rate,my place will be move-in ready by New Year’s Eve. Hell, I could probably host the combined River Valley and Meadow Ridge staff with the way things are coming together. Between my brothers and I, and all of the sleepless hours put in between the end of Christmas Day festivities and now, my kitchen is fully outfitted with custom cabinetry and a farmhouse table with benches; my custom built, king sized bed has a matching dresser; and the guest bedrooms are almost all the way complete.

The office on the main floor has remained closed since I got home. I refuse to look at it.

“Ant, buddy, I think we need to take a break,” Ian says. The sound of his buzz saw halts, and all of a sudden, there’s no way to drown out the bees in my head—the ones that have been drilling me since that day; the ones I have been drowning out by going non-stop. I stop what I’m doing and stomp over to him.

“We can finish this dresser,” I insist, taking over for him even though I was in the middle of a task myself. The sound of the saw fills in the cracks, and my muscles unclench.

“Ant—”

“We’re almost done,” I insist. The saw comes to the end of the two pieces, but I push too hard, causing the blade to shift and ruin the cut. I curse, take the broken pieces, and toss them to the garage floor. When I feel my brother’s hands softly guide my shoulders, I know he knows something is up.

“I’m going to shut the power tools down, and then we’re going to eat, crack open a cold one, and figure this out. Okay?”

My heaving breaths apparently aren’t a good enough answer, because he squeezes my shoulder and drops his voice down to a low demand.

“Anthony. Okay?”

The hard edge to my brother’s eyes forces me to surrender. I drop my head, raking my hands through my wild, damp hair, bark out some semblance ofOkay, and stomp inside.

The house is coming together. It’s everything I once imagined as the place where I’d start my family. The day my eyes finally opened with Pen, I knew I was building it for her. But without her, without everything I thought we were building, this place isjusta building—a bunch of walls filled with junk and a sad shell of a man.

The words on her pages gutted me from the inside out, left me bruised and bleeding, gasping for air in outer space without a helmet. I haven’t breathed the same since.

We were supposed to go back to that hotel and order room service at two in the morning while she talked off her runner’s high. I was supposed to tell her how proud I was between kisses and chocolate covered strawberries. Our love was supposed to twine with the champagne to give us the greatest high either of us have ever tasted.

I ruined it all. Again.

Part of me wants to blame her. Part of me wants to say that she knew what she was doing when she took our story and turned it into her livelihood. While I still believe that to be true, Idon’t think she did it in revenge. I’ve seen the peeled back layers of Penelope Barker over these past few months, and while she’s been bruised in the past, she doesn’t act in malice. She protects herself by walling off her heart. When she revealed it to me again, we both had our wounds reopened.

By the time I’ve had a quick shower and changed—a few of my things now stocked over here so I don’t have to go back and forth to Mom and Margie’s old place—Ian has a Bill’s pizza and a six pack waiting for us. He gets right to the point as soon as I’ve downed two slices and cracked open a beer.

“Spill.”

And I do. Starting from the very beginning. He and Grant hadn’t come to Florida, so he wasn’t even aware that Pen and I had a history. By the time I’ve exhausted every end of the story—chock full of side tangents, rants, and a few unnecessary detours—I finally feel exhausted. It’s like the days leading up to now that I’ve buried into work were all piling atop the built up feelings, and as soon as I let out the pressure at the base, it all came spiraling down.

“Shit.” He shakes his head. My brother isn’t a long winded type. We’re polar opposites in a lot of ways, this being one of them. “You two need to fight.”

I tilt my head.

“Did you miss the part where that’s all we’ve been doing?”

“No, you haven’t,” he chuckles, swigging down the last of his beer before setting the empty bottle on the table. “You’ve stored stuff inside and talkedaroundthe problems. You ran, and by the time you were ready to talk,sheran. You two have been addressing your problems in circles and half-reconciliations. If you both keep throwing stones at the glass house, it’s going to fall down twice as fast. You need to set aside the bitterness at eachotherand start fighting theproblemhead on.”

I stroke my chin between my thumb and index finger.

“You know, for a single guy, you sure seem to know a lot about how to handle relationships,” I chuckle. Ian’s silence speaks volumes, only turned up by the deep crease that settles between his brows. We still haven’t talked about Andi. I want to ask him if she’s the one putting that look on his face, but he shakes his head and keeps raking my issues over the coals.

“Can you stop deflecting for a minute?”

The sharp edge, one that doesn’t typically edge into the smooth eb and flow of Ian’s tones, has my head tilting in question.

“This is always your default: Deflecting instead of facing things head on. Your senior prank involved cops? You blamed it on ‘senioritis.’ You got caught throwing a party when Mom and Dad were out of town, and you shrugged and said your friends peer pressured you into it. You got a ticket for underage drinking in college that almost lost you your scholarshipsandcost you the ability to get a teaching license, and all you said was, ‘I’m only a freshman once.’ I thought I saw a change in you when you took on this new job, but you’re doing it again. You aren’t owning your actions, Ant. What gives?”

All these years, I didn’t think he noticed. I thought my family saw my avoidance tactics as my given personality, but my younger brother sees me for who I am. Having all of those childish behaviors chucked back at me when I’m this vulnerable stings like salt in an open wound. I swallow them down like thorns, and when I finally speak, my words are gutted and raw.

“If I deflect, I don’t have to face it head on. And if I don’t have to face it head on, I never have to fail. Even better? I never have to know if I could’ve ever measured up in the first place.”

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