“Me, too,” Mikey chimed in.
“I’ll bet you’re in the same boat, Logan. Especially now that Mallory’s boobs are getting baby-ready, if you know what I mean,” Noah joked, waggling his brows.
Logan pointed a finger at him from his corner of the treehouse — which was filled with books — and narrowed his eyes. “Talk about my girl’s baby-ready boobs again and we’ll be fighting, brother.”
Noah threw his hands up on a laugh. “I told you, I’ve got my own boobs.”
“Can we change the subject?” Mikey interjected. “Now I’m thinking about both your girl’s boobs and I don’t like it.”
There was another shuffle of laughter, and then Noah was refilling the whiskey in our glasses. We were drinking a bottle from one of the single-barrel releases last summer — on the rocks, of course, Noah’s favorite way. And Mikey was indulging in his favorite drink, a rootbeer float, since he’d volunteered to be our designated driver.
The conversation flowed on, and I stayed mostly quiet — which no one questioned me about since it wasn’t unusual, thankfully, even though tonight’s silence had more weight than my norm. My chest was still tight from Thanksgiving, from the night I’d spent with Sydney, from the feelings for her that were growing and stirring in my gut with the need to tell her and to hear her reciprocate, too.
I knew when she opened up to me about Randy last night that it wasn’t the time, but I hadn’t seen her today, either, and Noah’s wedding was tomorrow. She would be in our family photographs forever. She would be there for one of the most important days of my little brother’s life. This wasn’t a family dinner or a public date, it was more.
Having her there as my plus one meant something to me.
And it was driving me mad that I didn’t know if she felt the same.
Part of my brain told me to shut up and relax, to take her actions as reassurance. She’d spent the entire day with my family yesterday, and then we’d spent the entire night wrapped up in each other after she came to me with something she didn’t go to anyone else with. She trusted me, felt comfortable with me, opened up to me. And over the last two months, we’d explored each other, discovering just as much about one another as we did about ourselves in the process.
But this was new for me.
I’d never opened my heart to someone before, and I worried about what I was feeling, what she was feeling, and where we would go from here.
If we would go anywhere, at all.
I wondered if I read all the signs wrong, if I was in too deep when she was wading in the shallow end, if we would be able to survive working together if whatever this was between us didn’t work out.
And I knew she was wondering how we would survive working together if whatever this was between us did work out.
I was worried about one thing, and she was concerned about another.
How could we meet in the middle with those two facts being true?
This was the constant whirl of my thoughts over the last twenty-four hours, and I couldn’t shake loose from them, no matter how I tried.
“So, Jordan,” Mikey said, snapping me back to the moment with my brothers. “You going to fill us in on the Sydney situation willingly or do we have to beat it out of you?”
I blinked, trying to think of the right words to assure them that there was nothing to talk about, but Logan rolled his eyes before I could speak.
“Oh, come on. Mikey told us that you kissed her earlier this season, and though he also told us she didn’t want it to ever happen again, I think it’s pretty clear after yesterday that it has.”
“A lot, I’d wager,” Noah added with a smirk.
I narrowed my eyes at Mikey, who threw his hands up. “Hey, we’re brothers. Don’t act like y’all didn’t talk about me behind my back when I was going through my shit with Bailey and Kylie.”
I sighed at that, because it was true, and because if my brothers didn’t worry about me, I’d be worried. We were a family unit tied together with bonds as strong as steel, and we watched out for each other, ready to fight if necessary or be there as a shoulder to cry on.
And we hated to cry.
But we were never too proud to. It was one of the many things our father had instilled in us — that it was okay to have emotions, and it didn’t make you less of a man.
“Come on, guys,” I said on another sigh, looking through the binder of old football rookie cards I’d once collected. It felt good to keep my eyes there instead of meeting their gaze. “You know I’m not a man of many words.”