“Whoa. Holy shit.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: MOLLY
My brother stands in the door to the backyard, snow still breezing in from behind him and piling around his massive work boots. He looks wild this way. His unruly beard has crystallized edges, his eyebrows the same. Hunter takes up most of the doorframe, and the full weight of his looming presence is clearly being felt by Gray as he pulls away from me, the arms I’m touching immediately tensing.
“What the hell are you doing?” Hunter repeats. He steps toward us, to do what exactly, I’m not sure.
Gray is a big guy—just as big as Hunter, and taller, actually—but he shrinks back anyway, breaking from my touch to hold up his hands.
“Shit, Hunter, Gray was giving me a fancy new CPR technique because I choked when I saw your fat ass walking through my yard to the barn.What do you think we were doing?”
I shouldn’t be so aggressive. My voice has taken on a quality one particularly nasty high school teacher used to deem “shrill.” I can’t fucking care. Every biting instinct, every defensive remark is waiting on the tip of my tongue, ready to lash out and somehow stop the train wreck I can sense starting around me.
“I said you could ask her out, not use her. That’s my sister and I’ll expect some decency,” Hunter says dumbly, his dark brow furrowing. “You could at least find some privacy. You could at least respect her enough to—”
“Christ.” Gray is pacing away from me, his hands running through his perfect pompadour to muss it. “Christ, Hunter, I know she’s your sister. I’ve always known—”
“So you’ve done it then? You’ve quit your fancy New York team and committed to staying here and taking care of her?”
“Excuse me!” Shrill has taken over. I’m leaning into shrill, letting it brand my entire identity. I push Hunter in the chest, causing the massive man to step back and look at me with a bewildered mix of irritation and helplessness. “I’m a big girl, Hunter Moore. I’m a big girl who can make her own choices and—”
“I’m watching out for you!” He insists. “Gray might be my friend, but you’re my family. And if the guy who makes out with Nastya Melnik on some Caribbean cruise is going to dare touch you, it’s my job to make sure he’ll stick around to take care of you.”
My chest stings at that one, but I’m in this now. I glance over at Gray, whose face has lost at least an ounce of color.
“He cares about me,” I tell my brother. “Look, we weren’t hooking up as some, like, sideshow between New York models. He was just telling me about his offer to go back to Liberty, and even though it’s a lot to figure out, that kiss you saw was the start of us piecing together—”
“It wasn’t anything.”
My stomach sinks as I turn to look at Gray again. His eyes are carefully trained on my brother, chin up like an act of defiance.
“Look, Hunter, I thought…” He starts, voice faltering.
His chin twitches in my direction, like he thinks of glancing at me but reconsiders. The minute action makes my stomach sour further. Gray sets his jaw. He clears his throat and squares his shoulders. A dry laugh slips between his lips, perhaps the worst of it all in my emotional state. The strange, cold sound leaves me suddenly feeling quite silly.
“You know better than that,” Hunter tells him. “You can take the boy out of the South, but not the South out of the boy. You know that if you touch a woman, you damn well better be ready to take care of her.”
I’m back in high school all over again. I’m crushing on the cute older guy, the guy who only ever had eyes for the future, not for his best friend’s little sister. Not for anything or anyone that could tie him to Little Haven.
“It’s this fucking place,” Gray mutters, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Look, I know who I am, okay? I’ve spent years crafting exactly what I want out of life, exactly who I want to be and what mark I want to leave behind on the world. I come here for a few weeks at Christmas time and it’s like the snow got in my eyes. I can’t see the end goal anymore, and when I’m surrounded by what’s familiar and easy, I lose sight of how big things can be for me. I start to settle for—”
“That’s all this is? You settled for me because I was the only girl you thought was cute this side of Atlanta?”
I hate that my voice shakes. And I hate that I can see my brother out of the corner of my eye, shrinking back like he suddenly realizes something far worse is finding the light than just him learning about our first hook-ups.
Gray clears his throat again, still carefully avoiding looking at me. My cheeks burn; I want tomakehim look at me, want to force him to face what he’s turning away.
“What’s so wrong with Little Haven? What’s so wrong with us?”
There it is again: my voice slipping up a notch. Shrill. Who cares? I step toward Gray, not letting myself look away until he dares to return my gaze.
“I thought you could build something here. The… the inn. The high school basketball team, maybe. You could create something you could be proud of, just like you did with the Liberty. Maybe you could build something with me, too. Stupid,stupidfucking Molly. I really thought that after the first time I loved you, when you were so fixed on getting out of Little Haven and building something for yourself, you’d finally realized you weren’t just a big fish in a small pond here, with something to prove out in the city. You were the reason I liked swimming in the damn pond in the first place.”
Gray finally looks at me.
The color of his eyes lives up to his name. There’s something so tragic in them, something that transcends the weight of our fight. A whole lifetime of struggle I’ve only just begun to understand. His eyes are slate and steel, a wall up to whatever I have to say.
And I know before I’ve even really defended what we had that I’ve already lost him.