Page 83 of Wilder Love
He snorted and plopped down on the lounge chair next to mine, closing his eyes and basking in the last of the evening sun. I hadn’t seen much of him in the weeks that I’ve been here. He always seemed to be working. Last night he hadn’t come home at all and I wondered if he had a girlfriend or if he was still seeing Sienna who lived in LA. Not that he would ever confide in me. His personal life was still private, and I had no idea what he did outside work or who he did it with. Prying open Dylan and getting him to talk was still a chore, made worse after he’d let Sienna in and she had burned him. I didn’t know the full story but the last time I saw them together, I could see that their relationship was toxic. Yet they kept going back for more.
Were Shane and I toxic? I’d never thought of us that way before but now everything had changed so much that I wasn’t sure what to think.
“Why didn’t you ever like Shane?” I asked.
“What makes you think I didn’t like him?”
“Seriously? The dagger eyes. The attitude. You were never exactly friendly toward him.”
“Guess not.”
“Why? What did he ever do to you?”
He was silent for a moment. “Shane was the guy I wanted to be back then.”
My brows shot up, but he didn’t notice because his eyes were closed. “What do you mean?”
“He was this chilled-out dude. So cool, you know. An awesome surfer. I fucking loved to watch him surf. It was like… he was at one with the ocean. I’ve never seen anything like him. Even now, he’s still got that extra something that a lot of guys don’t have. Not even Travis.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I knew that. I’d always known that. It killed me that Shane was forced to give up the thing he loved most. But I never expected to hear those words come out of Dylan’s mouth. It almost sounded like a case of hero-worship which was so unlike Dylan. It also surprised me that he’d watched Shane so closely.
“I admired him,” he admitted. “It used to piss me off though. I hated it that he was always trying to take care of things. Like paying the bills and shit. That was my job.”
“It wasn’t your job, Dylan. It was Mom’s.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t around, was she?” He sounded bitter. Hurt. I didn’t think Dylan had ever gotten over Mom leaving us like that.
“No.” Mom was in Santa Fe now. Or, at least, that’s where she’d been the last time I spoke to her, about six months ago. She only called occasionally—when she was drunk and feeling low or when she needed money. Mom hadn’t changed much over the years. She was still a drifter and still delusional enough to believe that if she moved to a different town or city everything would be different. Whenever she asked for money, I gave it to her because she was still my mother and I had the money. I didn’t want her to end up homeless or dead in an alley somewhere. I suspected that Dylan gave her money too. Despite his insistence that he didn’t give a shit about her, I knew he was lying. He cared. So fucking much. He hid his fragile heart under his tarnished armor of ink and defiance.
She once told me she was proud of us, that she knew we’d go on to do big things. In her own twisted way, she loved us, but some people just aren’t cut out to be mothers. Sometimes it still surprised me that she’d kept us, and that she’d hung around as long as she had when it had always been clear that she’d rather be somewhere else, doing something different.
“I knew Tristan was bad news,” Dylan said. “I fucking knew. But I didn’t do anything about it. I just let you deal with your own shit because I was so fucked up with mine. It should have been me. I should have been the one to confront him, not Shane.” His jaw locked, and his fingers curled into fists. Dylan always thought he could punch his way out of any situation, and that was why I hadn’t told him about Tristan.
“No. Dylan. I didn’t want either one of you to get involved. I wish I’d never told Sienna that night.” I chipped away at the polish on my thumbnail then forced myself to stop and fiddled with my camera settings instead. “Why did Shane show up at the worst possible time? I mean, I hadn’t talked to him in six weeks…”
“It was me,” Dylan said quietly. “I went to talk to him that morning.”
My eyes widened, and my gaze snapped to Dylan who was staring straight ahead. “What?Youtalked to Shane?”
He scrubbed his hands over his face. “Yeah.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him to make it right. That you were a wreck.” Dylan shrugged. “I guess he came over to talk to you.”
Having dropped that little bomb, Dylan disappeared inside the house, leaving me to mull over that new information. I’d never known that. It made me feel even worse. If Dylan hadn’t gone to Shane, he might never have come over, never heard what I told Sienna, and never gone after Tristan. But you couldn’t think like that. What was done was done. You just had to deal with what was and not what could have been.
He returned to his seat, a beer in his hand and a cigarette clamped between his lips. I watched him light the cigarette and take a drag, blowing the smoke out of the side of his mouth and resisted the urge to ask for a drag. “I used to hang out with Jimmy sometimes,” Dylan confided.
What? I sat up straighter in my seat, my head swiveling to look at him. My twin, the keeper of secrets. “When? You never told me that.”
“You were gone. Shane was gone. I used to see Jimmy surfing. Or I’d stop by the surf shop. A few times I stopped by for dinner. I brought my own six-pack and hotdogs.”
That made me laugh. Dylan was laughing with me.
“That’s just… so weird.” I laughed again at the thought of Dylan showing up at Jimmy’s house with a six-pack of PBR and hotdogs. “Why don’t you ever tell me anything?”
“I don’t know.” He squinted at something in the distance and took another drag of his cigarette. “I guess he was kind of like a father figure.”
