God, I loved my stupid, noble defender, even if I did worry for him.
He wasn’t the only man who’d defy trouble to guard me, though. Relieved we’d been able to keep the worst part from my brother, I glanced at Reese. “Are you going to tell Mason?” I asked. “About the kiss or the c-word?”
Reese sighed and looked momentarily torn. I knew she hated keeping stuff from him, but for me, she’d done it a few times. “I can forget about the kiss, I guess,” she finally answered, “But...probably not the other.” She winced at me and said, “Sorry.”
I nodded. “It’s okay.” He was still in the dark enough that I was sure he wouldn’t try to do something big brotherly.
Brandt, on the other hand... Yeah, I didn’t know what I was going to do there.
BRANDT
I had to be the stupidest motherfucker on the planet.
I hadn’t just kissed my best friend, I’d freaking inhaled her. I’d tasted the forbidden and it’d been the sweetest damn flavor to ever grace my tongue. In return, she’d branded a piece of herself into me permanently.
Seriously, how the hell was I supposed to kiss another woman after that without comparing her to Sarah? Without wishing...
Fuuuuck. This was not good.
What if she wanted more? I would so give it to her, but then I’d so lose her, and that was the one thing I couldn’t do. Sarah was my steady when everything else felt unstable. She was the voice of reason when I was being unreasonable. She was just...there, always there for me, whenever I needed her. I trusted her more than anyone else on the planet, except I guess I couldn’t trust her with the one thing I trusted no one with.
She had my heart, but I couldn’t give her my fears. They’d twisted a part of me, and I was too ashamed to let her see that part, because I was deathly afraid that might be the one thing to send her running for good.
“It’s CP, right?”
I jumped and glanced around to find Julianna watching me scrub beer stains from the countertop of the bar with a vengeance.
Internally cringing, I decided that agreeing to go on a date with a girl on the night before I was supposed to work with her again probably hadn’t been the smartest thing I’d ever done. But hey, with the decisions I’d made lately, smart had abandoned me long ago.
Like it’d been idiotic of me not to beat Seth’s face in last night when I’d been at his apartment to pick Sarah up.
The douche was a wily one. I’d paid a visit to apartment 5A earlier today and no one had answered the door. I’d been sure I’d heard someone inside too. But the little pussy bastard had been too scared to face me.
He should be.
I really wished I could’ve been able to bash his face in, anything to help me stop thinking about what Sarah and I had done last night.
Which reminded me Juli was blinking at me, waiting for an answer.
Shit. What had she said? Shaking my head, I murmured, “I’m sorry?”
“Your Sarah?” she prompted, making my heart thump at that title. My Sarah. “She has cerebral palsy, right?”
“Yeah,” I said slowly. Suspiciously. “How’d you know?”
She shrugged. “My cousin Benny has it. But it took me a bit to realize Sarah did too because she’s a little different than he is. While she moves more, he has a lot worse posture than her.”
I nodded, dropping the rag I was using to face her fully. “He probably has spastic CP, which is the most common type. Sarah’s is athetoid.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize there were different kinds.” She opened the glass washing machine under the counter to find that, what do you know, the crew who’d worked last night hadn’t emptied the last cycle.
So as she began to remove the dishes, I answered, “There’s a different kind for just about everything out there.”
Lifting her eyebrows, she murmured, “Touché.” She turned briefly to stack glasses with the others lining the back wall and then turned back. “My, uh...Benny. He has problems reasoning and thinking things through. I was surprised that Sarah seemed so...”
“She’s incredibly smart,” I said. “Only about a third of CP people have reasoning problems or seizures. Sarah will get seizures but has no problem thinking. In fact, last year, she cried when she got her first C in a freaking biology class.”
“She’s in college? What’s her major?”