17. Jordan

SEVENTEEN

My wet clothesdidn't bother me. The drizzle soaked them through while I stood still on the edge of the pier. The storm had passed, leaving torn leaves and flattened grass in its wake, but no real damage. The tree behind the house was a freak accident, all in all, and its brief fire was put out by the immense rainfall almost immediately.

Another storm, with far more consequences, had played out inside the house, and my head hurt because of it.

Even as I walked at a grueling pace back to the house, the pain throbbed in my skull. I was tired of this day. I was tired of this life. The anger that ran through me felt like someone had injected fire into my veins. My muscles were bulging threateningly even when I stood all alone.

Yet I could only be angry with myself.

Had I not left my own door unlocked, I could have hidden in his room. Had I done so, Asher could have distracted them. But I had only sat there like a fool, naked, dazed, waiting for my life to fall apart.

If I walked back further, it was still all my fault. Had I not taken the lead, Asher and I would still live in that sweet torture of longing after the impossible. Had I not made him wrestle me in the grass, I never would have discovered his desperate attraction to me.

My whole life, I had done all the right things. When they made me live with a gorgeous guy whose sulky face turned me on without failing, I killed my ability to feel anything for him. When they sent him to Northwood after me, I juggled my forced apathy with the need to watch over him. We had a good thing going on. Why the hell had I imagined a drunken kiss was a smarter idea than doing what had been working just fine for years?

You were alive, the wind whispered in my ears.

Was being alive worth the pain that followed? Asher couldn't look at me without remembering the price we had paid. Dad was still a mystery and I expected an unbearable conversation with him when he returned.

Eileen was a problem I didn't even think about. I couldn't. The entirety of this morning was too absurd for my mind to process. Grooming? Had that been what she'd tried to say? We'd both been kids and I hadn't put a finger on my stepbrother until this summer. I had barely spoken to him. I had made him feel unimportant precisely because he was my biggest weakness and the most important thing in my life.

My fists tightened. My heart sank.

Asher was everything to me, but I hadn't told him that. I hadn't told him how important he was. At first, I didn't want to spook him. Later, some terrible mental fallacy convinced me that he knew. I should have been telling him what he was in my life all along. If I'd done that, perhaps he wouldn't have felt so alone after Eileen had abandoned him.

You idiot, I snapped at myself. Do you really think anything you say could help? You've done enough damage already.

Words. They were all just words. Wind could carry them away like they had never been spoken. Eileen had made actions and words weren't going to help here.

I marched home faster, not entirely sure of what to expect. It was only when I entered the house and noticed the absence of his things that it all made perfect sense. That was what I had been anticipating. That was the thing I had been dreading all day. The cold rock I had swallowed finally made sense.

Asher had left.

In the empty house, I crashed on the sofa in the living room and stared at the black TV screen. A faint reflection looked back at me. A miserable pile of self-pity sitting like a sack of potatoes. Unmoving, barely breathing beyond the necessity, and feeling more hollow than I had ever imagined was possible, I was empty.

Dad found me there several hours later. I had collapsed on my side and fallen asleep in the deathly silence. When the lights came on, they startled me.

"Power's back," Dad said.

I wished he'd kill the lights. I wished he would leave me alone. "Uh-huh."

That silence that followed wasn't particularly awkward. I was beyond awkward. Just this morning, Dad had been staring at my barely covered body in my stepbrother's bed. A little bit of contemplative silence couldn't hurt me anymore.

Dad put his keys on the small shelf near the entrance door and carried a bag of groceries into the kitchen. He then returned to the living room and poured himself a glass of something strong, then picked up another glass and filled it with two fingers of the same light brown liquid.

My eyes were grainy. Blinking hurt. When I straightened my back and observed Dad, he walked over to the armchair and set both glasses on the table.

"Asher?" he asked.

"Gone," I said in a flat voice. Dad pushed the glass a little further along the table.

"That's, uh…"

"If you say it's for the better, I swear to God…" I lifted the glass and pressed it against my lips. The smell of alcohol was almost repelling, but not quite. It burned my tongue, throat, and insides as I swallowed a small sip.

"That's not what I was going to say," Dad replied in a gentle voice. After a moment, he added, "He's a good kid."

I didn't look at him. "You must be bursting with pride."

Dad swirled the drink in his glass. "There's no need to be so self-deprecating, Jordan. That's not how I raised you."

I clenched my teeth and dared myself to take another sip. It was hard to swallow over the knot that was tied in my throat, but the burning was less unpleasant this time around. Still, it felt like exhaling fire when I sighed. "Did Eileen say anything else?" For all I knew, she might be pressing charges against me.

"She doesn't talk to me unless she has to, Jordan." Dad took a sip of his beverage and swallowed it loudly.

"Because you cheated." I tried to make it sound like a question, but my voice was flat as if I were stating a plain fact.

Dad shook his head. "I didn't cheat on her. Ever. This whole business of another woman is just Eileen shedding some of the blame for the divorce." He stared at the side of my face until I turned my head and looked into his eyes. There was a half-smile on his face and genuine honesty in his eyes that I couldn't call him a liar now, even if I thought he was one. I wasn't sure. But Dad could read the uncertainty on my face. "I did not cheat," he said firmly. "The other woman is just an employee and a friend. A lesbian friend, I should add, who has been married for two years and whose wife is carrying their child. But you try reasoning with Eileen when she's fixed on your guilt."

Checkmate. We both knew what it felt like to be on her wrong side now. She was certain that I had seduced Asher, that I had prepared him to be in love with me. "What now?" I asked. "What will you do?"

Dad set his glass on the coffee table and softly rubbed his hands together. "I think I'll lick my wounds for a bit. Work. I'll stay here, of course." He pondered on it for a bit. "It's not all that bad. I've done this before."

I hadn't. My previous relationships had not lasted long enough to qualify for that term. This wild adventure hadn't lasted long enough either, except that I had been obsessed with Asher for years. And the time we had spent together was almost like we had tried to make up for the time lost. It felt like we had been together for far longer than the calendar showed. "How did you get here, Dad?" I asked, not expecting an answer.

Dad leaned back in the armchair, his gaze drifting over the room and rising to the ceiling. "Nobody can predict what the heart will want tomorrow, Jordan. When we met, we were different people. This last year, since Asher left the house, Eileen and I had to face the cold reality. Everything we had put aside for the sake of peace, for you boys, came to the surface. It hadn't gone away. Instead, it was just there, buried, waiting to rise from its shallow grave. We started to disagree on the simplest things and the fights that followed…" He rubbed his eyes. "Vicious. Something as simple as whether we wanted to eat out or stay in carried all the pain in the world. Can asking to stay in really be a sign of fading affection? Can being tired really be a personal flaw?" He shook his head abruptly. "We weren't meant to last, son. It's nobody's fault." He shrugged. "It turned out we both wanted a way out."

I mulled over that for a long time in total silence.

"What she said about you…" Dad hesitated before leaning in again. "It wasn't fair. It wasn't right. And she'll figure that out on her own, I promise."

I snorted. "What Eileen thinks of me is not that high on my list of priorities, Dad."

"Well, the way I see it, so long as she won't speak to Asher, you two don't stand a chance. It's too much to ask him to forget all about his mother, Jordan."

"I know that," I said. I wasn't nursing any hope of rekindling the passion of this summer. Summers ended. Storms carried the heat and excitement away. It was the way things worked.

"Don't give up on him," Dad said. He waited for me to look at him again before he spoke. "Asher's a good person. There was a time when you two couldn't be in the same room without fighting. It never crossed my mind that there were other reasons for it." He let those words linger in the air for a few heartbeats. "If what I think matters, then remember this. It doesn't have to end like this."

I gripped my hands together and wanted to ask him to stop talking. Asher had left. That was it. The best I could hope for was to go back to the way things had been all our lives. We were very well practiced in pretending we had nothing to do with each other. We knew how to show no emotions to one another.

Seeing him again would feel exactly the same way it had always felt. The cool composure on my face would contain all the pain and longing that raged inside of me. Nothing new.

"You have to listen to me, Jordan," Dad said. "If you care about that boy, you won't let it end here."

I looked at Dad. "What for? You couldn't look at me this morning, Dad. Should I lose you, too, just because I…" My voice cut off abruptly. Whatever it was that I felt for Asher was nobody's business but mine. So I shook my head.

"Son, I was surprised. It was terrible timing and it only worked in Eileen's favor. This way, she can pretend like you kids caused the rift. She doesn't have to face the fact that she had made a mistake when she married me." The bitterness in his voice was tangible. "The fact that you two are technically stepbrothers makes absolutely no difference, Jordan. You neither grew up together nor will remain legally related for much longer."

"Yeah, well…" I stopped speaking and held my breath. It's what I've been saying all along and look at what it did to us.

Dad didn't let me think about the irony for too long. "Son, you have to make a choice. I can see that you're trying to build a wall around your heart. It's the thing I've done, too. Twice. And when you finish that job, you'll have all the safety and peace you can wish for. You'll be set to handle your solitude. But before you do that, ask yourself if solitude is really the thing you want the most. Ask yourself if you want to never love again." He paused to let his words reach deep into my soul, planted like a seed. "If the answer is yes, then I won't tell you another thing. But I hope that's not what you'll decide. You're too young to quit, Jordan."

Every word he said made my eyes sting harder and my vision blurred. And when my throat was so tight that I couldn't speak, Dad reached over and put a hand on my knee.

"Go to bed, buddy," he said softly. "Tomorrow, you need to go after him."

Go after him? I wondered if that was possible. I wondered if he would even want me to. My Ash.

"Trust me," Dad said. "He'll be happy to see you if you give it your best."

I nodded. At that moment, I wasn't sure if I was agreeing or simply looking for a way to end this conversation. Dad stood up at the same time as me, pulling me into a tight hug and gently rubbing my upper back. It felt so good and safe that tears almost rolled down my cheeks. I blinked them away and forced a wave of anger through myself to stop me from crying.

When he released me, I couldn't leave the living room fast enough, but I kept the calm exterior that had defined me throughout my life. The tornado of emotions ravaged me as I slowly climbed the stairs and shut myself in my room.

I doubted I would ever have him again. I doubted I could replace the loss I had caused. But I missed him nonetheless. Right now, here, where we had first given in to our wild fantasies, I closed my eyes and let the sob rock me off my feet. I dropped into my bed and buried my face in the pillow, holding my breath again, letting my shoulders shake.

For better or worse, I wanted to see him.

Even if I had no chance to win him back. Even if I couldn't make things right.

Unless…

A thought crept into my mind. It was a ridiculous, ambitious, foolishly hopeful idea that would never work. Then again, for years, I had been in love with him, and I had never expected to have a chance to kiss him.

Maybe — just maybe — I could hope for another miracle.