The Crush

“Sorry, I’m late. Traffic sucked,” she said.

“No worries.” I lifted my drink. “As you can see, I got a head start.”

“Anyone go up there yet?”

“No. They haven’t started.”

The confessionals usually started at nine and would last for about an hour, maybe more, depending on how many people were willing to spill their guts.

“Your brother drove you here?”

“No. Jace gave me a ride.”

“Ah…Jace.” She sighed. “He’s so freaking hot. I ran into him pumping gas the other day. Well, he didn’t see me. He had a girl in the truck with him.”

I rolled my eyes. “Did she have red hair?”

“Yeah, actually.”

“That’s Linnea. He’s been seeing her for a couple of weeks. He’s with her tonight.”

Her brow lifted. “Does that bother you?”

I shrugged. “A little. Yeah.”

I’d never spoken to Kellianne about my recent feelings for Jace. She only knew about my crush on him when I was younger. A hopeless crush was excusable, even cute, at twelve. At twenty-one? Not so much.

But she didn’t seem surprised by my response. “I thought so…”

“I don’t want to get into it.”

“But I want to hear about this.”

“There’s not much to say. You already know I had a crush on him when I was a little girl. Being around him again has brought out some of those old feelings.”

She held out her index finger. “Hold that thought. I need a drink for this.”

She ran to the bar. When she returned to her seat with a rum and Coke, she took up where she’d left off.

“Okay, so…some of the old feelings for him came back…or rather, they just never went away?”

I slurped the last of my drink and shook around the ice. “When he was living in North Carolina, it was easier not to think about him, but now that he’s here again, I can’t help how I feel. It’s like my emotions just picked up where they left off. And, now that he’s living with us, I’m getting to know him on a different level. We never talked much when I was a kid. Back then it was just me admiring him from afar. We’re both more mature now, so it’s different.”

Her eyes brimmed with excitement. “Do you think there’s a chance something could happen?”

“No. I really don’t. He treats me the same way Nathan does—like a sister. Which sucks.”

“Well, you never know. Keep dressing like you did tonight, and that might change.”

“I don’t know. He cares about me. I do know that. I think that’s exactly why he’d never try anything.” I tipped some of the ice into my mouth. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do if he returned the attraction. Nathan would kill us both.”

“Okay, so hypothetically, if an opportunity arose…you wouldn’t go there?”

“I don’t know.” I sighed. “Anyway, that’s a fantasy, not reality.”

“It’s weird to know the person you’re obsessed with cares about you, just not in the way you want. Sort of a unique situation.”

Her use of the word obsessed weirded me out. I thought I’d downplayed my feelings toward Jace, but apparently she could see through me.

Fiddling with my straw, I looked down into my empty glass. “He does care about me. I care about him, too. It’s not just lust. For so many years, he was a big part of my life. He spent a lot of time with our family. When his team lost a football game, he’d lament to us at the dinner table. I had a front-row seat to a lot of important times in his life, like when he and Nathan went to prom and graduated from high school. I watched him grow up.” I closed my eyes. “And of course, as I’ve told you before, he was there when my parents died. He was with them, because he was working for my dad that summer.”

Kellianne shook her head. “That’s so crazy.”

“Yeah. He won’t talk about it. And I don’t blame him.” I blew out a long breath. “I can’t imagine how traumatic that was. It hurts me to even think about it.” Wiping a tear, I said, “Okay, we need to move on to another subject, stat.”

Kellianne clapped her hands. “Okay then. I know what we can talk about. What do I have to do to get you to go up there tonight and confess your secret crush on your brother’s best friend?”

That wasn’t the change of subject I was hoping for.

“Figure out how to make pigs fly?”

Chapter 2

* * *

Farrah

In our house, everyone did their own laundry. We kept our washer and dryer in a corner of the garage, since we didn’t have a separate laundry room. About once a week, I’d wash my clothes after I got back from work, which was before Nathan or Jace got home.

One such afternoon, I carried my items in a basket to the garage and noticed a pile of Jace’s clothes sitting in a canvas bag next to the washing machine. I recognized the red shirt on top as the one he’d worn yesterday. He’d smelled amazing in it while sitting across from me at the table. It had to smell just as good today.