Page 143 of The Young & the Sinner

Mason

Two weeks passedby in a blur.

Two weeks filled with Olivia, work and little else. There was a time in my life when she was nothing more than a stranger—someone I knew existed but knew very little about. Unlike Max, I wasn’t close to Grace or Michael. I was ten, almost eleven, when Grace gave birth to Olivia.

At the time, I was still too young to understand why everyone was so upset about Olivia’s birth, why Grace had moved out of her house to live with Michael and his family, and why my brother looked so sad most of the time.

Max kept seeing Grace and Olivia throughout the years. He had convinced himself that he was in love with Grace, but at fifteen, what did he even know about love?

By the time I was out of high school and knew a little bit more about my brother’s relationship with Grace and her family, I was ready set out to have my own life. A life where I wasn’t living in Max’s shadow. A life where I wasn’t known as Max’s little brother, but a whole other person unto himself.

I didn’t see Grace again until my senior year in college. And by then, both of us had grown up. Olivia was twelve at that time, though I still didn’t know her. I wouldn’t have even known what she looked like had Max not kept so many of her pictures around.

And I hated that. I hated the thought that Max might love another’s man kid, and all he got was to watch from the sidelines while Grace and Michael enacted out the perfect marriage and the perfect family.

But everyone knew the truth. There was nothing perfect about that family.

And then I did something terrible.

I betrayed my brother for the first time.

And because I was young and stupid, and I didn’t want to face the consequences of my actions, I moved across the country, as if that would allow me to escape my mistakes.

I moved back home when Max asked me to. He asked me to be there for him when he realized Olivia would be the only thing between him and Grace, and he had to deal with what all that meant.

What Olivia didn’t know was Max fell out of love with Grace a long time ago. But he stayed because he never stopped loving her. And Grace was all too happy to take advantage of his love for her daughter.

And for the longest time, I hated Olivia for it.

I hated her for capturing my brother’s heart, making him stay and trying to make it work with a woman who would never love him back, or at the very least, love him the way he deserved.

But all that came to an end when I finally met Olivia again. At only seventeen, she fascinated me. There was just something about her soft demeanor, the way her eyes lit up whenever she smiled, those innocent brown eyes that called to me beyond what I could understand.

I had belonged to her from that moment on, and every moment we shared after only cemented it.

Loving Olivia was my second betrayal to my brother.

One I hoped wouldn’t break us.

One I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop or control.

The weekend before her final exams at school, Olivia was going to be spending the night at my apartment for the first time. It was the first time she ever outright lied to Max. She told him she would be spending the night at Lizzie’s.

We both knew we couldn’t keep our secret for much longer, but before we could come clean to Max, I needed to come clean to her about my first betrayal to Max—and inadvertently, to her—and hoped, just hoped, that we were strong enough to make it through it.

I hoped that she would love me enough to try and work through it.

Because that was what Olivia was: in love with me.

She never said it, but she was never good at hiding her feelings. Every thought she ever had was on display in those innocent brown eyes of her. She looked at me as if I hung the moon, and I hated that there might be a chance I would shatter that image she had of me forever.

I sat down on my couch, nursing a glass of scotch while I waited for Olivia to show up, wishing I could keep her here with me forever. The way I felt about her was uncontrollable, and it drove me crazy to think she might not feel the same way.

That she might be in love with me, but that she would always love Max more.

And it was selfish of me not to want that. I wanted to be the most important man in her life, but I didn’t see how that could be possible.

A knock on the door brought me out of my thoughts. I almost smiled when I got up, chugging the rest of my drink before heading to the door.

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