He rolled his eyes again and then sighed. “Loren isn’t like you. He’s not good at sports. I don’t think he’s ever aced a test in his life. He’s wasting his potential by going to parties. If you’d meet him, you could help—”
“No,” I forced. I put my forearms on the table and leaned close. “I don’t want anything to do with your son. So stop fucking asking.”
He took out his wallet and passed me a picture, one he’d shown me a couple times before. Loren was sitting on the stairs of our father’s mansion, where he grew up. I always looked for similarities in our features and felt sickened by them.
We had the same eye color, only his were more amber than my brown. My face was harder cut, but our builds were more alike, lean not bulky. He wore a navy blue tie and a white button-down, the Dalton Academy uniform. He wasn’t staring at the camera, but his jaw was so sharp, unlike anything I’d seen before. He looked like a fucking douchebag, like he’d much rather be popping open beers with his buddies than sitting there.
“He’s your brother—”
I slid the picture back to him. “He’s no one to me.”
Jonathan downed the second glass of scotch, pocketing the photo. And he grumbled under his breath about my “bitch” of a mother. She never wanted me to meet Loren, just the same way that she refused to come into contact with him. As far as I knew, Loren thought Sara was his mom like the rest of the world. Or maybe someone finally told him the truth. That he’s the fucking bastard.
I wouldn’t know.
And frankly, I didn’t fucking care.
What difference would it have made anyway?
NINE YEARS LATER
< 1 >
RYKE MEADOWS
I run. Not away from anything. I have a fucking destination: the end of a long suburban street lined with four colonial houses and acres of dewy grass. It’s as secluded as it can be. Six in the morning. The sky is barely light enough to see my feet pound the asphalt.
I fucking love early mornings.
I love watching the sun rise more than watching it set.
I keep running. My breathing steadies in a trained pattern. Thanks to a collegiate track scholarship, and thanks to climbing rocks—a sport that I sincerely fucking crave—I don’t have to think about inhaling and exhaling. I just do. I just focus on the end of the street, and I go after it. I don’t fucking slow down. I don’t stop. I see what I have to do, and I fucking make it happen.
I hear my brother’s shoes hit the cement behind me, his legs pumping as quickly as mine. He tries to keep up with my pace. He’s not running towards shit. My brother—he’s always running away. I listen to the heaviness of his soles, and I want to fucking grab his wrist and pull him ahead of me. I want him to be unburdened and light, to feel that runner’s high.
But he’s weighed down by too much to reach anything good. I don’t slow to let him catch me. I want him to push himself as far as he can go. I know he can get here.
He just has to fucking try.
One minute later, we reach the end of the street that we were shooting for, next to an oak tree. Lo breathes heavily, not in exhaustion, more like anger. His nose flares, and his cheekbones cut brutally sharp. I remember meeting him for the very first time.
It was about three years ago.
And he looked at me with those same pissed off amber-colored eyes, and that same, I fucking hate the world expression. He was twenty-one back then. Our relationship balances somewhere between rocky and stable, but it was never meant to be perfect.
“You can’t go easy on me just once?” Lo asks, pushing the longer strands of his light brown hair off his forehead. The sides are trimmed short.
“If I slowed down, we would have been walking.”
Lo rolls his eyes and scowls. He’s been in a bad place for a few months, and this run was supposed to release some of the tension. But it’s not helping.
I see the tightness in his chest, the way he can still barely fucking breathe.
He squats and rubs his eyes.
“What do you need?” I ask him seriously.
“A fucking glass of whiskey. One ice cube. Think you can do that for me, big bro?”
I glare. I hate the way he calls me bro. It’s with fucking scorn. I can count on my hand the amount of times he’s called me “brother” with affection or admiration. But he usually acts like I don’t deserve the title yet.
Maybe I don’t.
I knew about Loren Hale for practically all my life, and I didn’t even say hi. I think back often to when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and my father asked every fucking week: “Do you want to meet your brother?”