Page 77 of Sweet Chaos
I was licking the chocolate off my fingers when there was a knock on the door and Shane entered the office.
Shane. My boss. I’d just been making out with his brother-in-law in his wife’s office.
My face heated. It felt like it was on fire. “Hey. How’s it going?” I flashed him a smile, trying to cover my embarrassment and offered him a chocolate which he declined.
“I need you out front. I have a board for you to paint.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” I’d lost all track of time. I shut down my laptop and slid it into my messenger bag as I stood up. “I was just—”
“Hanging out with my brother-in-law.” He ran his hand through his hair and sighed. I got the feeling I wasn’t fooling him. He saw more than he was letting on.
“We were just talking,” I said, rounding the desk to join him.
Shane rubbed his hand over his jaw and studied my face. I tried to school my features, scared of what he might see. Too much, judging by the next words out of his mouth. “I’m in no position to judge. I fell in love with a sixteen-year-old when I was twenty-one. So I’ll just ask you one thing. If you walked away right now, could you move on and forget all about him?”
My first instinct was to lie. Pretend that I was unaffected by Dylan. But I was pretty sure my face gave me away and he’d see right through my lie, so I shook my head. “No, it’s already too late for that,” I said quietly. “It’s hopeless though.”
Shane gave me a little smile and squeezed my shoulder. “Never. There’s always hope.”
I took some comfort in his words. Shane and Remy had beaten impossible odds and their love was still holding strong. But Dylan and I weren’t Shane and Remy. I didn’t know what we were.
Two wrongs that make a bigger wrong.Then why does it feel so right?
“Dylan told me about his mom. Is Remy okay?” I asked, following Shane to the front of the shop.
“She’s okay. She’s more worried about Dylan.”
“Why? I mean, obviously, I know why he’d be upset… why they’d both be upset. It’s a horrible thing. But why is she more worried about Dylan?”
Shane thought about it for a moment before he answered, trying to decide how much he should tell me. “She worries because he holds everything inside. They went through a lot of shit growing up and their mother…” He shook his head and I got the feeling that Shane had not been a big fan. “That woman was a piece of work. But Dylan always felt like it was his responsibility to look after her. Protect her. Provide for her. Pretty sure he did it up until the day she died.”
“It should have been the other way around.”
“In an ideal world, every kid would have loving parents.” He gave me a soft smile and I thought, not for the first time, that Kai was the luckiest little boy in the world to have two awesome parents who loved him unconditionally.
We weren’t all so lucky. But maybe that was the goal in life. Despite your upbringing and circumstances, you just had to rise above and try to become the best person you could be.
28
Scarlett
Ipointed to the liquor store a few doors down as Dylan slid his card out of his wallet, his phone wedged between his ear and shoulder.
His brows drew together. “Cruz. Hang on.” He jerked his chin at me, his way of asking for an explanation.
“I’ll meet you in the wine store.” I gave him a quick kiss and a smile and waved over my shoulder, leaving him to get cash from the ATM and finish his call with Cruz. From the little I’d overheard, they were having problems at work. They’d just lost one of their biggest clients.
I rubbed my hands over my bare arms covered in goosebumps. Summer had come early. It was the end of April and for the past week, the temperatures had hovered in the high eighties during the day. But I should have grabbed my hoodie from the car. It cooled off in the evenings and now the air felt chilly, made worse by my flushed skin from all the sun I’d caught today.
My phone pinged, and I slid it out of my shorts pocket, checking the screen.
Nic: Since you’re ordering Vietnamese, you want to pair it with a Riesling. I’ll text you the info.
I shook my head, laughing, and lifted my eyes from my phone, promptly ramming into a brick wall. I took a few steps back. “Oh God, I’m sorry. I need to watch where I’m going.”
“S’alright. You can run into me anytime, beautiful.” The guy grinned, his dark eyes roaming down my body, over my tank top and cut-off jean shorts, and down my bare legs before they returned to my chest, not my eyes. I hated that.
I folded my arms and sidestepped him.
