He goes to the fridge and comes back with two Rush Creek Head Rushes—a hazy IPA brewed locally by some brewers who are friends with the Wilder brothers. He shoves one in my general direction. I crack it, take a slug, and wait.
“I wanted to come tonight.” He lifts a shoulder, a helpless shrug. “Hanna asked me, and you know how it is. I feel like—” That shrug again. “I owe her, right? We all do. You know?”
I do know. It’s how we all got ourselves into these messes, trying to make up to Hanna what we screwed up before. And I’d known Tucker felt it too, but it’s still good to hear him say it, that whatever’s making him lock himself down, he does still care.
I didn’t really ever doubt it. I’ve been pretty sure this whole time that it’s caring too much, not too little, that’s at the bottom of whatever haunts my brother.
“Yeah,” I say.
“And then, I don’t know, I showed up there, and—” He blows out a breath. “I could see everyone moving around, and I could tell even from the truck that you all were having a good time, and I just didn’t want to bring this”—he gestures at himself—“in there.”
“We can handle it.”
“It’s not that,” he says. “It’s—people want to talk. They want to know how I’m doing, if I’m all right. They don’t say, ‘Tell us what happened, we want to hear the story,’ but that’s what they’re saying, right? I couldn’t face it.”
“I get that.” I want to say,Tell me what happened. Not out of some sick need to know, but because you don’t have to be a therapist to figure it might make Tucker feel better to say some of it out loud. Some things don’t bottle up well.
But I don’t push, because for the first time, he’s told one of us that somethingdidhappen. And that’s huge. Everything about his body language right now says he’s shut tighter than a crate packed with illegal cargo. I’ve gotten all I’m getting from him tonight, but for Tucker, it’s a lot, and I decide to be glad he opened up that much.
All I say is, “Well. If you ever decide you need someone to talk to, attorney-client privilege has made me pretty good at keeping shit to myself.”
He gives me a look. I think it might be relief that I’m not going to try to drag anything else out of him.
I hold up my glass tocheershim, and we finish our beers in companionable silence.
37
Eden
Rhys texts to say he’s finishing up a beer with his brother and he’ll be back in a few, so I spend some quality time with Eloise, who has recently discovered hide and seek but doesn’t yet understand that her body—not just her eyes—needs to be hidden. Her favorite “hiding place” is lying on the couch in full view with a pillow over her face. It’s the cutest thing ever.
Eloise eventually has to go to bed, and she asks me to read her a bedtime story, which Hanna gives a nod to. We sit in the rocker-glider in her cute red-and-white gingham room (“No pink,” Hanna says succinctly. “Not my thing.”), and I read her Sandra Boynton’sBarnyard Dance!andThe Going to Bed Book. She insists I be the one to tuck her in, but when I kiss her good night, she panics and says, “Mommy.”
Hanna, who’s obviously been lurking right outside the door waiting for this moment, trades places with me, and I go back downstairs.
I’m still on the stairs when I hear the low rumble of Rhys’s voice, and something shifts and settles in my chest.
He was gone less than an hour, but it still scares me, how glad I am that he’s back. And it only gets more intense when I descend the last few stairs and see him—tall, dark, broad, sturdy, and absurdly, ridiculously beautiful.
His eyes find mine and the corner of his mouth turns up, and I swear my pulse clicks into the comfort gear. It’s like stepping back into your own place after coming home from vacation, and that’s—too soon and too much and all wrong.
But all I want is more of what happened last night. More of his hands and mouth on me, more of the two of us yielding to each other.
“You want to head out?” he asks.
“Probably makes sense.” I drop the words as nonchalantly as I can, given the pictures in my head.
I swear he winks at me, but that can’t be right; the broody, controlled lawyer doesn’twink.
We say goodbye to his family, one by one. I’m enfolded in hug after hug, whispered to, “Anytime, you hear?” and “No matter what that idiot does, don’t be a stranger, right?” It’s too soon and too much and all wrong again—and I love every minute of it.
We head out to his car, and it’s silent between us, and even that feels right. Like we earned the privilege of not talking, all those hours in the car.
“Hey,” I say as we pull away from Hanna’s house. “I freaking love your family.”
“They’re not bad.” Contentment is thick in his voice, and I think about how different he sounds now, basking in the afterglow of their affection, than he did when he talked about being a shark. Two different men. But not. The same guy, maybe just denying himself what he wants a lot of the time.
And I’m a luxury he’s letting himself indulge in, and that feels unbelievably good.
