Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 84227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 421(@200wpm)___ 337(@250wpm)___ 281(@300wpm)
“I didn’t mean it like that, Twerp. Nothing against you. Jesus, you’re Griff’s little brother. I’ve known you most of your life. Your brother is going to kick my fucking ass.”
“I won’t tell him if you don’t.” I shoved to my feet. “I hate you.” I was fully aware I was acting like the child I’d told him I wasn’t, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
“Twerp…”
“You just came in my mouth. You can at least use my name.”
He closed his eyes again, and I knew, fucking knew, he regretted it. That he regretted me. It was my fault, but my heart shattered into a thousand pieces.
I walked away and locked myself in my room.
Chase didn’t come after me.
He didn’t say goodbye when Griff got home the next morning.
I didn’t see him the whole week, and then the next weekend he was gone. He’d joined the Marines, Griff said.
And all I could think was he’d left to get away from me and hadn’t said goodbye.
After that, Chase Hawthorne didn’t return to Havenwood, though he talked to Griff often. My brother would tell me stories about where Chase was and what he was doing, about all the girls he was hooking up with—and Griff would shake his head at that, because hooking up wasn’t Griff’s thing.
I hated Chase Hawthorne.
I still loved him too.
CHAPTER ONE
Kellan
Ten years later
“Be careful not to press too hard,” I told Annabella, one of the little girls taking my pottery class. “We use gentle fingers. Remember when we talked about gentle fingers versus firm ones?”
She nodded, getting back to work, her tongue sticking out cutely as she concentrated. She was one of the kids I could tell truly loved art, loved to create, and I got that, as I felt the same about it. Art was my constant in a lot of ways. It was the one thing I’d always been good at. No one had to fix it for me, or tell me how to do it, or what I was doing wrong. Art was mine.
I finished up the class full of eight- to-ten-year-olds, and then signed them all out as their parents came to pick them up.
“Annabella did great today,” I told her mom, Tracey. “She’s really talented.”
Annabella blushed, but I could see how much the compliment meant to her. She was shy, quiet, didn’t seem to have a lot of friends. I’d been there. I’d never totally been the quiet type. Most of the time I didn’t know when to shut up, but I hadn’t had a lot of friends growing up.
“Thanks, Kellan. She loves your classes. They’ve been good for her,” Tracey replied.
It was my last class of the day, so once the building was empty, I turned the sign to CLOSED, locked the door, and cleaned up. My buddy Josh would be there in a few minutes. He was my best friend outside of Natalie. Josh had moved to Havenwood a few years back, when his grandmother got sick. He used to visit her during the summer when he was a kid, but I never knew him. When she passed, she left him her house and some money, and he’d never left. Josh owned a local gym, and we’d met when I started working out there. Josh was hot—thick arms, brown hair, and a Marilyn Monroe beauty mark. I’d noticed him right away, and he’d noticed me, and then guess who I found on Grindr not long later?
We’d met up, and I’d blown him, because I was quite fond of giving head and good at it, thank you very much. Then we went out for ice cream, and he’d been my best friend ever since. Josh was a bit more dude bro than me, but somehow we fit, so that was that. It was sad really, that I couldn’t see Josh that way, because he was one of the few people in my life who didn’t spend their time telling me what to do, or thinking they had to take care of me, but life had never been quite fair, had it?
Just as I finished, Josh knocked on the glass door of Safe Haven, my art studio.
I grabbed my shit, set the alarm, locked up, and saw that he’d met up with Nat somewhere along the way. “Oh, look, my posse is here,” I teased. Josh rolled his eyes as Nat kissed me on the cheek. “I need a drink. Please tell me there are drinks in our future.”
“When aren’t there drinks in our lives?” Natalie asked, and the three of us laughed.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a gay bar in Havenwood, and we nixed the idea of driving into Richmond because we were lazy-asses, which meant I knew what they were going to bring up next.
“So, Griff’s?” Josh asked, and I groaned, because of course Griff’s bar was the next best option. It always was. And yes, he was my brother and I loved him like crazy, but he still forgot sometimes that I was twenty-eight years old.