Page 199 of Broken Brothers

“Chance…” she said, saying my name almost like a sigh. “There’s always a chance. But timing means a lot. Right now, I’m not interested. Maybe in the future, but that’s a big maybe, and I have no plans to go to it. You just have to strike when it’s hot. Because if you miss out on it when it’s there, you may never get it again.”

Sarah Hill.

The real, in the flesh.

Well, it wasn’t quite the flesh, but it was the flesh of Sarah Hill who had sent that message. Might I be getting played again? Might I be getting toyed with?

It was definitely possible. Obviously, I wasn’t going to send dick pics, no matter how provocative or steamy this conversation got. It was probably pretty telling that I was very interested in seeing this through despite the past and the inherent risk of getting fooled again.

Maybe this is why you wanted to go slow. To see…

Is that really what you want to do, though? To give up a sure thing for some childhood, middle school crush you never really got over? That’s a big fucking risk.

Still, I didn’t think it was fake. Her flirtation was less, well, flirtatious and more just her being warm. She’d only asked to get coffee, not grab drinks and go dancing. It was very possible, in fact, that her feelings from when she was a rising sophomore were the same today; that this was just a friendly catchup, nothing more.

But if that were the case, there’s probably about a half-dozen other people that she could have asked to meet up if shewanted. And she took none of them. What does that say for you, Chance?

I was confident in saying it was the real Sarah Hill, or at least that if someone was faking being her, they had done a good job of faking it. But the bigger question was if this was a good idea.

I didn’t see how it could hurt to meet her. Again, this wasn’t a date; this was a “meet up once while she’s in town, wish her well, and then talk to her again in like five, six years.” If Layla got upset at that, well…

Layla doesn’t need to know. At least not right now.

I pressed the reply button and started writing back to her.

“Hey!Absolutely. Let’s do Saturday morning/afternoon? Good to hear from you!

-Chance”

I staredat the message for far longer than I ever would have stared at a message for any other woman. The little kid in me who was 12 was overriding the older, more mature Chance and wanting to make sure everything was perfect. I’d thought I’d left him behind as I’d gotten older, but it sure seemed like he was pretty loud right now.

I finally just had to override my nervous impulses, say “fuck it” and send it. I immediately put my phone back in my pocket, my heart racing and the nerves in my stomach flaring, wondering just what was happening to me.Now you should really question if this is a good idea. If there’s going to be anything to get in the way of Layla…

And you really think she’s just going to brush it aside if she finds out you went out with her?

When this happens… you need to either make a hard move for Sarah or push her away for good. If you’re going to go for Layla, you can’t have Sarah over her shoulder, drawing your eyes as she does.

Boy, I really hope I hadn’t fucked up.

It took less than five minutes later before I heard the “ding” from my phone, indicating that she had responded. I saw in the preview on the front screen that she said she’d love to and would let me know where her hotel was when she got in.

I just stared at that message as I walked, almost completely oblivious to my surroundings. It was all I had ever wanted—a chance at Sarah Hill, a chance to atone for myself at 12 years old, to prove that I wasn’t the kid who failed because he wasn’t a true Hunt. And now it was the very thing that was threatening to destroy something special with someone else.

Feeling guilty, I reached into my phone to text Layla. My last message to her had come the day before; she had warned that she was going to have a busy week and her messaging wouldn’t be as frequent as normal, but I still wanted to hear from her. It was fucking stupid, but I wanted the karmic reassurance that agreeing to meet Sarah hadn’t suddenly just pushed Layla away.

I guess I was being selfish. I guess I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. But fuck it—this was the only person I would have made such a request for, and this was not me wanting to have my cake and sleep with it too. This was just meeting for coffee on Saturday like I had with Morgan today.

What the fuck could go wrong?

You, of all people, know better than anyone to ask that question. You know that the answer always extends well beyond what we can anticipate.

I texted Layla and asked the start of her week was going. I was about to shut the phone off when I saw that she had read the message, the read stamp showing up almost as quickly as ithad been delivered. I almost wondered if she’d been reading our conversation from earlier when I sent that; was that a good sign or a bad sign?Damn, getting Sarah back in my life is making me crazy.

“Hey, busy,” she wrote back. “I’m in Chicago.”

Chicago? For that job?

Is it… it is that probable, isn’t it?