“Is this Brant?” I ask, even though it must be. As far as I know, Brant and Bri only have a sister, no other brothers.
Her voice is warm. “Yep, that’s him. We were eight years old. I was there, too, but I was the one taking the picture.”
“Your mom didn’t come?” I ask absently, leaning forward and smiling at the image of tiny, adorable Brant. It’s crazy to see him as a kid.
“Our mother wasn’t around.”
There’s a guarded edge to her tone that steals my attention from the photo. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
Heaving a sigh, appearing to take on a little more weight, Bri tells me, “That’s sort of where Brant’s history with cheating women begins. Our mom cheated on our dad and left us to run off with the other man.”
“Oh, shit,” I murmur, looking down at the picture again.
“Our dad never remarried. He always loved her, never really recovered from her abandonment. He was a lot like Brant in that way, held on to things he would’ve been better off letting go.”
I look back up at her. “Was?”
Bri nods. “He passed a few years ago. Heart attack. They tried to operate, but he had another one on the table.”
“Oh, God, that’s awful. I’m so sorry, Bri.”
“He was a good man. Brant took after him in a lot of ways.”
“I wish I could’ve met him,” I tell her, looking down at the picture again. This time I look at the man in the photo, the one with Brant’s mouth and jaw. Now that I know heart disease might run in their family, I’m gonna get a lot pushier about making him eat some healthier meals.
I might have to learn how to prepare fish, after all.
“Anyway,” Bri says, reaching forward and grabbing a big chunk of pages. She flips them, glances at the page, then flips one more. “This is all of us when we were teenagers, a few months before that night.”
I lean over to get a closer look, and my heart immediately fills with warmth at the image of Brant at my age. “Wow, he was even hot back then.”
Bri snorts. “I guess. I’m obviously the wrong person to ask.”
“Look at that clean-shaven face and roguish smile. Oh my God.” His hair is a little longer in the picture and covered with a beanie. He’s wearing a coat, too, with a blue denim shirt underneath, unbuttoned to show a bit of his chest. Right at the base of his neck there’s a freckle I want to kiss, and I vow to, as soon as we get home tonight.
I would have crushed hard on him at my age, too.
My attention drifts from Brant in the photograph to the girl he has his arm wrapped around. She’s blonde, a little shorter than him. Pretty, too. Even knowing he’s currently sitting outside and has his arms around no one else, the image of him holding her like that sends a little surge of jealousy straight through me.
Mine.
“That’s Nicole?” I ask.
Bri nods, looking down at the picture. “She was pretty high-maintenance. Fun to be around, but she had a hard time staying in one place, and Brant, he’s as reliable as an old oak tree. Once you plant him somewhere, he’s there to stay. They were a terrible match,” she confides.
“Seems like it,” I murmur, looking away from her and back to the album. I want a copy of this photograph, but I want to crop her and the rest of them out. I just want the image of young Brant smirking at me with no one else around to make me jealous.
“Anyway, so that night we decided to go out on the boat. We were already drunk, so we shouldn’t have. Not only because it’s a bad idea to drink and drive a boat, but because Brant’s an angry drunk, and he and Nicole were already sniping at each other.”
Frowning, I look back up at Bri. “Really? I’ve been around Brant drunk before, and he didn’t seem angry to me.”
Bri shrugs. “I suppose it depends on what’s going on in his mind when he’s sober. Maybe he was just angrier in general back then.”
Or maybe Nicole brought it out in him. Brant isn’t the nicest guy in the world now, so it’s hard to imagine him being angrier back then.
Or maybe I haven’t really seen him angry.
I think back to the night he was so drunk he doesn’t remember it. I recall some of the things he said. I guess they could have been interpreted as angry, but I just thought of them as sexy.
Maybe that’s the difference. I don’t inflame Brant’s anger, I don’t throw fuel on the fire when it’s already stoked. Maybe it goes back to what he said about how I’m loyal and supportive and unlike anyone he has ever met before. I don’t fan the flames of his crazy just for sport; when the fire is raging, I let it go until it burns out, and then I’m still there for him when the flames die down.