Damaged Like Us (Like Us 1)

The last person I wanted to see today enters Superheroes & Scones. I refill my glass of orange juice and watch the familiar face open the door.

Towering at six-foot-three, his black V-neck is tucked in black jeans, a leather belt buckled. The hilt of a handgun sticks from his waistband, and his dyed bleach-white hair contrasts his thick brown eyebrows.

Most people find Farrow Redford Keene intimidating at first sight, but I’m immune to most kinds of intimidation.

It’s called being a Hale.

I can describe Farrow in three meaningful ways.

1. Frustrating.

2. Aggravating.

3. Piss in my hot tea.

Since he’s my mom’s bodyguard and she stops by the store frequently, I expect she’s not far behind his self-assured, unflustered demeanor.

Farrow carries himself like he owns the world, but amusement constantly rests behind his brown eyes. I sometimes think he’s purposefully channeling James Franco circa Freaks & Geeks—minus the weed and multiply the Franco smile by a billion.

It shouldn’t capture my attention.

But it does.

He does.

Like right now, I try to ignore his overwhelming presence, and I slowly cap the juice jug again. My gaze stays on him. No matter how hard I say look at the juice.

I’ve had this problem since I was sixteen. Unfortunately, I’ve known Farrow for a long, long time. I’m talking fledgling teenage years. Before the security team assigned him to my mom, he was just the son of our family’s concierge doctor, on-call 24/7 for house visits and medical emergencies.

So when my little sister Kinney broke her ankle in five-inch-heeled boots, Dr. Keene appeared. With his son Farrow in tow.

I tried to tug off Kinney’s boot, and Dr. Keene told me, “Move away, Maximoff.” Then he gestured Farrow forward. Teaching his son basic first aid. All so he could follow the footsteps of the many generations of Keenes before him. A prestigious family of physicians.

Moments like those stoked my competitive nature. If Farrow was pushed to the front, I craved to find a way next to him. If Farrow went fast, I went harder. And he never let up. With anything, he was too headstrong to let me pass without a hard-won fight.

Somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, I started crushing on him. Maybe it’s because he never just gives me the win. Maybe it’s that he’s five years older and a Yale graduate.

Or that he does thirty pull-ups like it’s a damn breeze. Maybe it’s all the gray and black tattoos that cover his fair skin, even to his throat. Beautiful inked symmetric wings decorate his neck, crossed swords on his Adam’s apple.

Maybe it’s his four visible piercings: a hoop on his nostril, bottom lip, and two barbells on his brow.

Maybe it’s all of that combined together that heats my skin, pools blood south, and attracts me like an idiot. He’s made permanent camp in my cerebral cortex and cock, and I don’t know how to extract him.

The crush was fine when I was teenager, where I was secretly fantasizing about the hot older guy’s lips around my dick. I always knew he was gay, and at eighteen, I told the world I was bisexual. Afterwards I thought there’d be a chance Farrow would look at me with interest.

He didn’t.

Then he became my mom’s bodyguard. Exactly three years ago.

Whatever attraction I had towards him became more ethically wrong than it already was. I remind myself that he knows nothing. I’ve only told my best friend Jane about my crush and lapse in judgment. And she wouldn’t tell a soul.

Farrow enters the store’s doorway and takes a big bite of a red apple.

And then his brown eyes latch onto my forest-green. Instantly, he has a knowing look.

I attribute it to him being a know-it-all. I must wear my slight irritation because his lips hike upward as he chews and swallows his fruit.

I swig my orange juice before saying, “Look what the wind threw up.” I set down my glass.

Farrow raises his apple to his mouth. “You mean blew in.”

“No,” I say firmly, palms on the pearly counter. “I meant threw up.”

He rolls his eyes into a humored smile that slowly stretches wider and wider. Then he kicks the door closed. And he locks it shut with his spare key.

I go rigid. “Where’s my mom?”

Akara finally pockets his cellphone. The one he’s been super-glued to since we arrived here. “Lily’s bodyguard transfer went through this morning.”

Transfer.

Which means…my brain fries, jaw sharpens and breath heavies as I watch Farrow near the vinyl stools, his stride masculine and unconcerned. A kind of confident gait that belongs to people who understand themselves from the core outwards.

Closer, he rests his knee on the stool beside Akara. And he tells me, “I’m your new bodyguard.”

I inhale, staying outwardly composed, but my pulse rages at an abnormal speed. Farrow Redford Keene is my new bodyguard.

I have trouble adding him to my life that way. It’s why I’m eerily silent and mentally trying to block out how complicated this’ll make everything.

Farrow stares me dead in the eye. “Excited?” he asks with a peeking smile, like he knows I wouldn’t be.

Excited that my old crush is going to be a permanent companion to my whole life? And we’re ethically bound to remain platonic.

I would choose the words: sexually frustrated and fucking complicated. But let’s go with excited. It’ll cause the least amount of friction right now.

“That’s one word for it,” I say and finish off the rest of my drink in one gulp. “What’s the actual reasoning behind this?” I gesture at Farrow with my empty glass. The whole security team has good intentions, and I understand that a lot weighs into bodyguard switches.

I can’t just demand someone new like an entitled bastard. All the bodyguards work together, and they’re people. Not plastic action figures. I respect them enough to trust their choices.

And it’s not like they knew I used to picture Farrow on his knees.

It’s not like they’ll ever know that.

“The usual,” Akara says, “we take into account the location of where you live.” A townhouse in Philly. “Your lifestyle.” On-the-go. “Other security variables, and then we match you.”

“So it’s Bodyguard Grindr without the sex,” I quip and try to ignore Farrow, but my eyes involuntarily flit to him.

Farrow raises his brows at me in a self-satisfied wave.

I want to groan and smile. My features, I’m sure, teeter between the two.

“We’re not going to promote it like that, but sure…basically,” Akara says.

“Basically,” Farrow interjects, “Lily wanted me to be your bodyguard.” Lily is my mom.

Akara zeroes in on Farrow with an intense but padlocked look. I can only assume that Farrow wasn’t supposed to give me that much information.

He even adds, “Word-for-word, she said, Farrow is the best.”

“Bullshit,” I tell him. “My mom would cross her heart and hope to die before saying anyone was better than Garth.” Her first ever bodyguard. I’d never seen her so emotional over anyone’s departure than when he retired.

Farrow rotates his apple for another spot to bite. “Then she broke a kindergarten oath for me.” His matter-of-fact voice is deep and rough, but audibly sensual. Like gravel tied in silk.

My muscles heat from head-to-toe. “Wow,” I say, my tone too tight. My head is somewhere else entirely. On this situation.

Our new reality.

Him.

Farrow lowers his apple, and my cheekbones must sharpen because his brown eyes brush my most distinct feature.

I seize his gaze, and in our sudden quiet, a thick tension brews. Both of our lives are going to change from this transfer, and there’s an unknown factor.

I can’t even conceptualize what Farrow as my bodyguard looks like. I sense Akara glancing between us. Gauging how well we’re getting along. But his answer is as good as min

e.

And I have no answer.

I have no idea what it’s like even cultivating a new relationship with a bodyguard. I’ve had the same one for practically twenty-two years.

Farrow tosses his apple core in a nearby trashcan. Then he drops his knee off the stool, his shoulders noticeably loosened unlike my squared ones. “Let’s start with the basics, wolf scout.”

“Out of all the things you can call me…” But it never stops Farrow from choosing this. My aunt created the Wolf Scouts as a wilderness & survival scouting organization that includes all genders. It gained national recognition, and yeah, I still help in the summer as a troop captain. “And what basics?”

“The basics.” He edges up to the lip of the counter. His face only a few inches from my face. “Every time you leave your townhouse, I’ll be escorting you. I walk in front of you. I enter rooms before you. I go where you go until you return safely home.”

I slowly blink, my skin scorching. Imagining Farrow with me all day, every day this quickly is like digesting a gallon milkshake in one gulp. I have a fucking brain freeze. I rub my jaw that’s a razorblade.

Farrow tilts his head. “Okay?”

“I’m making a revision.”

“To the basics?” He glances at Akara, and they share a look that I can’t decipher.

I bypass their exchange and continue, “You walk into places beside me—”

“No,” Farrow rejects immediately. He runs two hands through his bleach-white hair, combing the strands completely out of his face. Sometimes he does this to give himself more time to answer. Other times, I think it’s a sign that he’s getting serious.