Page 72 of Crossing the Brooklyn Briggs
It’s nearing nine. If he’s not home yet, he probably won’t be home for a while.
As I head up the stairs, my feet dragging beneath me, I can’t help but imagine what a future with Brooklyn would look like if we moved forward with things as they are now. She’s so broken, and she would absolutely wait up for me. What would happen if business continued to grow? What if I kept working late nights? She would lose sleep waiting for me and be exhausted in the morning when she got up for school, and her teaching would suffer. She would blame that on herself and get more and more miserable, and I would be too busy working to notice, and it would be Natalie all over again.
I can’t do that to her.
I run into Mateo in the hallway between the stairs and the bathroom, and we both freeze. He looks ready to bolt, but he has nowhere to go except back to the bathroom where he just came from.
I pull my eyebrows together. I’m probably too tired to have this conversation right now, but when else am I going to see him? “You skipped classes?”
He rolls his eyes, his deer-in-the-headlights look shifting to a scowl. “What do you care?”
“What’s going on with you?”
“I’m not having this conversation with Mr. Perfect.”
His words hit me right in the gut. “What? I’m not perfect.” I’m so far from perfect it’s laughable.
“Sure you are.” Since he can’t run, he folds his arms and leans against the wall. “Star athlete, college graduate, bigshot job in California. Your only flaw is that you came back here because your wife got sick of you.”
I take a step forward out of reflex, not really sure what I plan to do. Mateo flinches, his eyes dropping down to my fists as he turns slightly pale.
Nausea washes over me. Did he think I was going to hit him? “Matty.”
He clenches his jaw. “Can I go to bed now? I have school in the morning.”
“Are you actually going to go?”
“Do you actually care?”
Of course I care, but he doesn’t give me a chance to answer. He pushes past me, knocking his shoulder into mine, and then slams his door shut behind him.
Well. That went about as well as I expected.
I stand there for a minute, debating if it’s worth barging into his room to continue the conversation. But I know it won’t make things any better, so I trudge the rest of the way to my room and collapse onto my bed, wishing it was a lumpy thrift store couch on the other side of town.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Brooklyn
October 17
I don’t know what Iexpected when it came to Mateo, but it wasn’t a miniature version of his brother. When he steps into my classroom, I have a sudden flashback to high school and the first time I met Jordan.
I was waiting for Houston under a tree in the quad after school and trying to ignore the kid who decided he should sit with me and talk my ear off about how he was so good at basketball. Part of me thought it might be a good idea to tell him I needed to use the restroom, but I didn’t want to be rude. Still, I wasn’t into sports at all, and whoever this kid was, he seemed to think I wanted to know all his stats even though the basketball season had just ended and our school had finished dead last in the district.
“And I scored the final three-pointer,” he was saying, while I focused on my chemistry homework. Why was he still here? School ended hours ago, and the only reasonIwas still here was because Houston had baseball tryouts. “It was awesome, and I totally killed it during that game.”
“You mean the game we lost?” Houston said, appearing on the quad.
Sighing with relief, I gathered up all of my things and stuffed them into my bag. Houston could be annoying, but he certainly came in handy sometimes. My new buddy had gone mute after Houston’s comment.
I only noticed the kid next to my brother when I was on my feet and suddenly face to face with him. “Oh. Uh, hi.” I’d seen him before, but only ever in passing, so I had no idea who he was.
He grinned at me, and I couldn’t decide if it was a friendly smile or a cocky one. It reminded me a lot of the way Houston smiled, and I couldn’t decide if I liked that or not. It was hard enough to deal with one self-important ladies man.
“Brook, this is Jordan.” Houston waved a hand toward the new guy, glancing between us. “We just tried out for the baseball team together. Jordan, my twin sister, Brooklyn.”
Jordan’s smile got wider as he held out his hand for me to shake. What kind of person greeted someone with a handshake? This wasn’t a job interview. “That’s a cool name. Brooklyn. It’s like Manhattan or The Bronx.” He chuckled at his own joke. “So you’re both named after cities?”
