Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

CHASE

“ B e honest,” I hedge carefully. “Does it resemble anything to you?”

Poor Kaden just blinks at me, big brown doe eyes confused and a little hurt that I’m not giving him the reaction he was hoping for. Unfortunately for me, there is no nice way to say that the logo he’s designing looks like a vagina. I knew I should have hired this project out. Rookie mistake.

Kaden is about as green as a freshly mowed lawn in spring. He just wants to contribute, but letting him handle the redesign of our company logo is comparable to the chaos of baking cookies with my almost three-year-old niece.

In Sage’s defense, my sister is big on her learning proper names of her body parts so I’m pretty sure she’d be able to see why this is an awful fucking idea.

“You know, the tree of life. But like a play on that from a seed and the ripple effect. That’s what I was going for, anyway. Do you hate it?”

Tricky question. “Um, I wouldn’t say hate exactly.” My mother would have my ass for not being a good feminist if I said that. “It’s just not my taste.”

The kid visibly deflates. Goddamn it, I’m really going to have to spell it out for him. A bark of laughter has me whipping my head around to see Brady with takeout bags hanging from his arm and a couple of drinks in his other hand, cutting up with the CEO, Marianne, like they’re old buddies.

His gaze sweeps over the room quickly before landing on me and striding in this direction. He’s all smiles as he heads this way, but when he crosses the bullpen to Kaden’s desk and catches an eyeful of his screen, he barely manages to cover his amusement with a cough.

“Kaden, my friend, I love the effort for the logo design.”

Brady isn’t wrong. The effort is there; it’s the execution that terrifies me.

He mumbles a thanks, and I shoot my oldest friend the evil eye over the kid’s head. He raises his eyebrow in question. He can break the news to him. I’m officially passing the buck. Kaden doesn’t need my approval, I was just the unlucky son of a bitch that walked by his desk.

The stars must have aligned because Brady passes over our lunch, takes a deep breath, and crouches down next to Kaden. “Buddy, I’m going to just tell you. That logo looks like a vagina, and not even in a vague resemblance kind of way.”

I almost swallow my tongue trying to keep a straight face as Kaden flushes bright red and starts stuttering. “I-I—No. What? No, no way.”

Nodding gravely, Brady stands and tries to offer some encouragement. “Just try again, you didn’t mean for it to come out like that. I really like the color scheme you used.”

“We’ll be more than happy to look at anything else you come up with,” I offer. Kaden nods with his eyes on the floor, so we do him the decency to let him sulk in the privacy of his own space. After we both wish him good luck, Brady steers me to the elevators post haste. We make it until the doors close until we crack up laughing.

“Fucking hell,” Brady rasps.

The elevator pings when we make it to the ground floor. Ignoring some pretty serious side-eyes from the people waiting to go up, we dodge and weave our way to the courtyard garden. Granted, that is a generous term for it. It’s no more than a couple of picnic tables and some scraggly bushes that have seen better days, but it’s summer in Washington and Brady stores UV exposure like a lizard so he can survive the rainy season, so we’re outside as much as we can manage when it’s nice out.

After I plop the bag on the table, Brady starts divvying it up. “What’d you get us?” I question.

“Brocco Lee Bistro,” he returns with a sheepish smile.

I roll my eyes. “Can you please just ask that girl out and get it over with? I miss real burgers.”

“It’s delicious and you know it.” I have to stifle a moan as I bite into the vegan burger he ordered me. He’s not wrong, the place is fantastic, but we’re eating it several times a week so he can flirt with the manager. “Mhmm, that’s what I thought. Quit rushing my process and eat your lunch.”

His process. His process is weeks of flirty banter, a one-night stand, and no repeats. I love the guy, but he’s a man-whore. He’s transparent to his partners about it, not that a fair few haven’t tried to be the one to change him.

“So, any ideas for what you want to do for your birthday this year?” A subject change is better than him continuing to gloat about our food.

He hums around a mouthful, but it’s hard to miss the storm clouds darkening his eyes before he can blink them away. Most things are bittersweet for Brady these days. I hate it, but there’s only so much I can do to fix it.

“Any suggestions? ”

“Well,” I start. “That depends on the vibe you’re going for. We’ve been putting off building your back deck, and the weather is finally up for it so we can do that if you want a project to do. We can go camping if you’re trying to get out of the house. Or there’s always Bottoms Up! if you want to get drinks.”

There’s never any predicting what Brady will want to do for his birthday. As per his request, it’s been a range from going to the zoo to repainting his living room. Sometimes he wants to be surrounded by friends, other times he just wants it to be me. The only common denominator I’ve been able to determine is that he likes to be busy.

I can work with that.

He blows out a breath and sets his burger down on the parchment paper. “I don’t know, Ace. It’s on Monday, right?” I nod in confirmation. “So, the usual drinks on Friday with the work crew and the weekend is open for whatever. I’m leaning towards deck building though.”

Brady and I bought house's next door to each other when we both landed our jobs at TechAll. It wasn’t intentional. He was the one who got an interview here for the web designer job they had open, but Brady being Brady, him and Marianne got to talking and she revealed that there was a cyber security position she was wanting to get filled, and he worked his magic. I was the first one to find a house I wanted to buy; it was a total dump. It needed new floors, a new roof, new plumbing, and a total redesign. I always planned on doing it a little at a time, but when the neighbors came knocking—my literal worst nightmare, but they were nice enough—they revealed that they’d been thinking of selling. They were tired of the rain and wanted to move south, and because they didn’t have kids, they didn’t know what to do with their house. Like mine, it was in bad need of repairs that they couldn’t afford so I introduced them to Brady. Bam. Homeowners.

We have a lot of fun working on our houses, and between the two of us, in addition to an embarrassing amount of how-to videos, we manage doing most of it without having to hire anyone.

“It’s only fair considering we just tiled my primary bathroom.” I shrug.

Brady shudders, causing me to laugh. “If you’re really bad in your life, you suffer an eternity of tiling. Worst thing we’ve ever done, Ace.”

“You just don’t have the patience for it, Bray.”

He throws a fry at me. “No shit. What gave you that idea?”

His loss, that’s mine now.

We finish our lunch and head back inside to our desks. My team is busy enough that I don’t even realize it’s time to go until Brady taps me on the shoulder and startles the fuck out of me.

“Sorry, you about ready to go?”

I dig a hand into my chest over my frantic heartbeat. “Jesus, Brady. Yeah, just give me a minute to get logged out.”

He nods, used to my shit time management by this point in our friendship. It’s a small company with fifteen employees, and only three of those are in my field, so we stay busy with all of Marianne’s clients.

“Don’t want to keep the husband waiting,” Seth, my fellow analyst, teases as I gather my belongings and stand.

I huff a laugh. People have been giving me and Brady shit for too long for it to get under my skin anymore. “Don’t be jealous. You’ll be our first call when we’re looking for a third.”

Seth sputters a bit, blushing heavily. Brady winks at him and we walk away, but Seth calls after us, “I better be! ”

Brady chuckles but is abnormally quiet on the ride down. I try to ignore it, but by the time we make it about halfway home, I glance over at him in my passenger seat with worry. That faraway look in his eye is telling. I can comfortably bet where his mind has wandered off to. “Penny for your thoughts?” I offer.

My friend couldn’t keep a thing to himself if he was getting paid for it, he only ever required the smallest push to remind him that I actually wanted to hear what was bothering him. “I think I need a new phone number.”

He’s been putting it off for four years now, but the phone calls were to a level of insanity that was wearing him down. “If Easton wanted to contact you, there are several other ways for him to do it.”

Even just the name makes him flinch. “I know. Still feels like I’m severing something, though.”

His parents had never been social media savvy enough to make burner accounts, so blocking them had been easier on that front, but they had endless people letting them use their phones to call and text him. “Do you think they’d actually tell you if they had heard anything about him?”

“No.”

Reason never did have much against hope. “It’s up to you, man. I know leaving that door open isn’t easy on you, though. No one would blame you for closing it.”

“Yeah, I guess. I’ll do it soon.” He scrubs a hand over his face as his phone starts ringing with an unknown number, like we’d conjured them up.

Easton was Brady’s greatest failure, and he never forgot it for a second. We don’t talk about it anymore, everything has already been said after he disappeared off the face of the earth without a trace. There wasn’t a thing we could do about it, so bringing it up seemed cruel. I still felt it too. I was the whole reason he had been disowned after all, but I did my best to deal with my guilt away from my friend. He had enough of it all on his own.

If I’d been smarter though, I would have helped him with some kind of backup plan if things didn’t go well. I wasn’t stupid. My own family may have been supportive, but that didn’t mean Easton was going to have a similar experience. If I had listened to my gut, he’d probably have been with us instead of fuck knows where.

My stomach churns with the million awful possibilities of what could have happened to a sixteen-year-old with nowhere to go. That was even assuming that he was still?—

Nope. Absolutely fucking not, no way that train of thought was going anywhere good.

“Who’s turn is it tonight?” I ask instead.

Brady glances at me apologetically. “Sorry, what?”

“Dinner. My turn or yours?”

“Yours.”

Good. I don’t have the words to ease the loss he feels, but the one love language I excelled at was feeding people.

If I inherited one thing from my mom, it was that. She knew me well enough to know that when I was having a bad day, a hug wasn’t the route to take. But her bringing me a homemade chocolate cupcake with vanilla buttercream frosting would make me smile. It was a little routine we developed over the years. She’d go to my brothers’ baseball games and girl talk it up with my sister, but I was more closed off than my siblings and she didn’t know how to connect with me like she wanted to. So, she’d feel guilty about it and make my favorite meal, and I’d light up like it was Christmas morning. When I felt like a shitty son for not visiting or calling as much as I should, she’d get some cookies in the mail.

It might have been a little bizarre, but it worked for us.

When we pull up to my little white house, after parking in the garage, Brady is obviously trying to leave his bad mood in the car. He whistles an off-key tune as he toes his shoes off by the door, making himself right at home in my space.

The dark shadow that follows us around is a friend. The sun-soaked memories keep it alive and well, but absence pushes it to the corners. Just enough to remind us that it should be here with pretty smiles and paint-stained fingers. Sometimes, it hovers at the edge of our lives, no more than a phantom itch that can’t be scratched. Others, it could eclipse the sun.

Today is as bright of a day as they come, but there is no beauty in it. Not like there should have been, and damn, how I missed it.