Page 56 of Sticking Out

She swallows. “You make me feel special. You always have. You’ve always been such a good friend to me, Conner. Heck…” She glances at her pillow. “Look what you’re doing for me now.”

“Dani.” I’m about to tell her I’m helping her have a baby because I fucking love her, but stop when a sob catches in her throat.

“Alec…” She stops and looks at me, and I clamp my mouth shut. “When he started paying attention to me, I just…I don’t know. He was so popular, and older, and then…me.” She snorts out a humorless laugh. “I mean why me?” She grabs a tissue and wipes her nose. “I was flattered. All that attention went to my head. For the first time I was someone, you know. People paid attention to me, and I felt important. Not that you didn’t make me feel important. We were friends, and Alec, he wanted to be more.”

Oh, fuck that, she needs to know exactly who my brother was. “Dani.”

“Let me just finish. My behavior…it was juvenile and embarrassing. But for the first time in my life someone loved me. Then, when your parents said those things the other day.” She looks away, tears flooding her face. She cries for a long time, and I shift, lean against the headboard and pull her to me. I let her cry it out, and fuck there isn’t much I can do about my own tears.

Eventually she pulls away and faces me. “He loved me, right?”

I stare at her, take in the sadness and vulnerability in her eyes, and my heart breaks into a million tiny pieces. How could Alec have done this to her? Used her as a pawn in a game of hatred of me.

“I was…loveable?”

“Of course you are, Dani.”

She nods, and glances down. “I just…I thought maybe he only wanted me because…” Her words break off, and she takes a couple of deep, fueling breaths. “You heard what your parents said, and well, you and me. We were…close.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, my throat so tight, it hurts to breathe. If she knew the truth it would fucking kill her. I hate having to defend my brother’s actions, but I can’t hurt her, I won’t.

“He loved you.”

“Are you sure?”

“Dani,” I whisper, wiping the tears from her face. “I know for a fact that you’re loveable.”

“How?” she asks, blinking up at me with big hopeful eyes.

“Because, baby, I fucking love you.”

She stares at me, her body frozen, all except her eyes, which are moving rapidly over me, gauging me, searching for anything to prove that I’m not telling the truth. Jesus, life and well…my brother…have done a fucking number on her.

“I love you, Dani. Making a baby with you, a family, is what I want. I was reluctant at first. I was worried about my learning disability, and you know you were married to my brother, and that complicated things, but trust me when I tell you this. I love you. You’re loveable. I promise you that.”

She sobs harder because of the loss and hurt. How must it make her feel to know the man she was married to would do this to his own brother? But what I’m seeing are happy tears that fill my heart with even more love. I brush her hair back and kiss her deeply. While I’m telling her the truth that I do love her, I can’t tell her that my brother never did. Nothing good can come from that and we’ve all been hurt enough.

“Conner…I love you too.”

I pull her to me and we hold on to each other like our lives depend on it and in this very moment, I think they do. I inch back and kiss her forehead. “How about we leave the past in the past, and move on with our future?”

She nods. “I like that idea.”

“Me too,” I tell her, because if we leave all this in the past, it can’t hurt us in the future, right?

21

Dani

I can’t stop smiling. My heart is so full. Conner loves me. I love him. It might have taken us many years to get here, but we made it. A part of me is very sad. Alec hurt him deeply. He hurt me too. There’s a part of me that’s still not sure he actually loved me, and in my moment of weakness and vulnerability, Conner assured me he did. He’s a good guy like that.

Did he also tell you he loved you because you were sad and broken?

No, no, no. Conner is not that guy. He’d never do something like that. He cares about me, has always been there for me. I might not have known who Alec really was deep down inside, but I know who this man is, inside and out. Lord knows I can’t be wrong twice, right?

“Oh la la.”

As I stand in the mirror, putting my earrings in, I spot Conner coming toward me, hunger in his eyes. My entire body heats up and my heart swells with the love I have for him. “Is that all you’ve learned?”

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