Page 2 of Wrapped Up In You
“Ow. Shit. Motherfucker.” I clutched my hands to my chest, pressing my left palm across the right and applying pressure to the gash I’d just stupidly given myself. I wasn’t sure whether it was the effects of the alcohol making me sloppy or Hayden’s bulge causing too much of a distraction, but I’d been careless, and now my dominant hand was bleeding all over the damn place. It was already oozing from between my hands and running down my wrist.
“Jesus. Let me see it.” Suddenly, Hayden was by my side, gingerly taking my hand in his to get a better look at the cut. His hands were chilly from the cold but surprisingly gentle as he lifted my right hand to examine my injury. “No idea if you need stitches, but I don’t think we’re going anywhere in this weather, so we better wrap it up as best we can. Do we have a first-aid kit?”
I stared at him intently, surprised at how quickly he’d gone into caretaker mode. I’d never seen him like this, though I supposed I rarely saw him much at all. I’d been twenty-four when our parents started dating, twenty-five when they married. When Hayden had graduated from high school, I’d already been several years into my first job as a corporate accountant. He’d gone off to college three states away while I’d been trying to climb the corporate ladder and find the perfect spouse. In the eight years we’d known each other, I didn’t think we’d ever spent more than a day or two together, and those instances had been holidays and family gatherings when there were a lot of other people around. I honestly couldn’t remember if we’d ever had a serious conversation. My perception of him had always been that he was an aimless kid with no direction who never took anything seriously. Not only were there eight years between us, but we were also seriously mismatched in personality. We had nothing in common.
When I didn’t answer his question, he looked at me, eyebrows raised. The genuine concern I saw reflected in his eyes gave me pause. When was the last time anyone had looked at me with that kind of care? It filled me with warmth, even as it made me uncomfortable.
I nodded in the direction of the bathroom. “There’s a kit in the cabinet under the sink.”
Wordlessly, he guided me toward the bathroom and gestured for me to sit on the toilet while he searched for the first-aid supplies. He pulled out the kit and set it on the counter. Rummaging around, he produced gauze and tape and set them aside. I sucked in a breath as he carefully took my hand and brought it closer to the sink. “Sorry,” he said, wincing in sympathy. “I just want to make sure there’s no glass lodged in it.”
I held my breath while he inspected the wound. He gave a nod, as if satisfied, then began cleaning it. His movements were gentle yet efficient as he cleaned the cut and then wrapped it with gauze. “How do you know how to dress a wound like this?” I asked as he tucked in the end of the gauze and began taping it up.
“I went through a skateboarding phase in high school. I banged the shit out of myself often enough that I learned how to dress a cut properly.” I vaguely remembered a skateboard or two in the mudroom at our parents’ house when they’d first started dating. I hadn’t paid it any attention at the time, but I supposed those had probably been Hayden’s boards.
He brought my palm to his lips and placed a soft kiss over the bandage. Our eyes caught, and he blushed. “Sorry. Habit.” He released my hand and made himself busy organizing the supplies back into the first-aid kit.
“You make it a habit of kissing other people’s wounds? Is this something that happens often?”
“I mean, I guess not. But Mom always did it for me. Just felt right, I guess.”
“Do you always do what feels right?” It was a loaded question, but one I couldn’t help asking.
“Mostly.” He let out a self-deprecating chuckle. “I mean, it almost always ends badly, but I can’t seem to help myself.” Our eyes held, and my pulse quickened. I watched in fascination as something like heat flickered through his eyes, but it was quickly extinguished before he turned away abruptly, putting the supplies back under the sink.
We left the bathroom and crossed to the small kitchenette, where Hayden opened the fridge. “What’s for dinner?” he asked, shifting things around this way and that, finally coming up with a bottle of my favorite IPA. He opened it and handed it to me before opening another for himself. I probably shouldn’t drink any more tonight, but the thought of spending the evening with my flighty stepbrother while sober was incredibly unappealing.
“You never answered my question,” I stated, leaning against the counter adjacent to him, sipping my beer. He was a few feet away from me, yet I could feel the heat radiating off him. If I leaned into it, would I get burned?
He eyed me as he took a long pull off the bottle, mirroring my stance, though much more relaxed. “What?”
“I asked you earlier…what are you doing here?”
“Oh.” He shrugged. “I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“What’s wrong with your apartment?”
“Nothing. But my roommate is proposing to his girlfriend on Christmas Eve, so he asked if I could make myself scarce.”
“Your roommate is proposing to his girlfriend in your apartment?” I’d been to his apartment exactly one time. He lived in a nondescript, nine hundred-square foot, two-bedroom apartment with a guy he’d gone to college with. It was your basic bachelor situation. There wasn’t a single romantic thing about it.
He took another pull on his beer and shrugged. Again. Shrugging was basically his personality in a nutshell. “I think he was going to do a candlelit dinner kind of deal. We didn’t really talk about the details.”
“What about your dad? Why not spend Christmas with him?” Our parents—his mom and my dad—were spending the holidays in Jamaica, but as far as I knew, his father still lived in the city, and I thought they got along all right.
Something almost like pain crossed his features. It was a look I’d never seen on him before. I was surprised to find I didn’t like it. “He, uh…we had a fight.”
2
HAYDEN
“You had a fight? About what?”
“You don’t want to hear about that. Why don’t I work on figuring out dinner? You probably can’t cook with your hand like that.” I set aside my beer and began rummaging through the cabinets, assessing what we had on hand that I could put together for dinner. I didn’t want to talk about the fight with my dad. The wound was an old one that had been reopened over and over again, leaving an ugly scar. This time around, it was still too fresh, too raw to bear examining further, especially with the oh-so-perfect Jonathan.
“You know how to cook?” Jonathan asked from behind me, disbelief evident in his tone. I stiffened as I grabbed some ground beef and moved over to the stove, pulling out a sauté pan and setting it on one of the burners. I was tired of the people in my life assuming I couldn’t do anything. I’d played the part of the happy-go-lucky, affable son/stepbrother/best friend/roommate for so long that no one bothered to look further. But I wasn’t stupid, and I wasn’t helpless, and I was tired of people thinking that was the case.
“Yeah, I went through a cooking phase last year when I started working at Olive & Vine.” I tried not to let his judgment get to me. I was used to it, but for some reason, it bothered me a little more coming from him. “On slow nights, I used to watch the cooks on the line. I was fascinated with the way they could have so many different things going at the same time and have everything come out perfect and on time. I wanted to learn how to do it myself.”
