Page 115 of Burn Bright (Cobalt Empire #1)

As I go to my girlfriend, I scoot a cardboard box out of the kitchen area with my foot.

Charlie side-eyes me but says nothing. My shit is spilling out everywhere .

Several boxes, a crammed duffel with all my hockey gear, some potted plants.

Not to mention, the queen-sized mattress in the center of the living room.

Where Harriet and I slept last night. The bedframe is in an unopened box, which I’ll unpack and put together once Tom and Eliot choose where I’m going.

All my stuff is here.

My stomach cramps knowing I’m cluttering the living room .

I still don’t love being in the way. I’m not suddenly relaxed about my presence possibly causing Beckett anxiety.

There hasn’t been a flip of a switch within me just because I know my own issues stem from OCD.

So I plan to move all of this to a room today.

Tom and Eliot need to decide. We’re ten days out from Christmas, and we plan to leave for Philly soon to spend the week at the Cobalt Estate.

I pick up my fallen hockey stick on the way to Harriet, watching her adjust silver ornaments and some of the dangling crystal icicles.

“So frosty,” she says of the décor.

“Five sons born from an ice queen,” I smile down at her.

Her lips twitch a little. “You all are on brand, Cobalt boy.”

I rake my fingers through her blonde hair, almost regrettably smoothing it down. The wild strands billow out like she put her finger in a light socket, and it’s just really fucking cute. Her eyes ping toward the kitchen where my brothers talk over each other about the roommate situation.

“You want to join that?” she asks.

“Nah, I’ll let them hash it out for a second.” I rest the hockey stick against the wall. Maybe I’ll play next season. Maybe I’ll be in the NHL someday. Or maybe my life will take a different turn. Thankfully, these are choices I don’t have to make anytime soon. I’m just ready to live here.

To be here.

I smile down at Harriet. She’s partially concentrated on my brothers as Beckett makes a what the fuck face at Eliot, then says, “You think you can be celibate for a whole year?”

She has an expression like she ate a rotten date.

I laugh, but then I think about her spending the night at this apartment. This decision does affect Harriet to a degree. More hushed, I ask her, “Which brother would you rather be my roommate?”

“No way.” She raises her hands, speaking under her breath too. “I’m staying out of this. Eliot has already tried to bribe me, and I don’t need Tom pissed off after I already rejected his band.”

“Eliot tried to bribe you?” I glance toward the kitchen, about to go confront him, but she snatches my waistband, tugging me back beside the Christmas tree.

“With a year’s supply of candy,” she clarifies. “He wasn’t throwing cash at me, and I didn’t take it, obviously. You don’t see me trying to convince you to room with him.”

She has stayed very neutral.

I skim her normal grouchy disposition. “You don’t have strong feelings either way?”

“I lived in my car, dude. I’m not choosy.”

I hold the back of her head more tenderly. She breaks apart her crossed arms and weaves them around me. Rests her cheek on my chest, just as we hear Tom letting out a long, frustrated groan.

She grimaces, then says quietly, “Is claiming rooms during Cobalt vacays this dramatic? Or is there a seniority thing at play? Oldest gets first dibs on the best room.”

“Rarely by age,” I tell her. “If we can’t compromise amongst ourselves, then we’ll settle disputes with games. Even something simple like rock-paper-scissors. You’ll see.”

“I’ll see?”

“You think you’ll only be invited for the holidays?”

Her shoulders lift uncertainly. “I wasn’t assuming anything. There are fortified walls in your family that not even girlfriends can break through.”

She’s not wrong. “Outside of the lake house and Wednesday Night Dinners, you can assume you’ll be invited to pretty much every family event from here on out. Including trips to France. Around the world. The yacht comes out at least once a year?—”

“The yacht.” Her brows spring into her bangs. “As in…I’ll be surrounded by open water?”

I see her bugged eyes, and all I want is to quell her fear.

“You know,” I say gently, my fingers threading through the back of her hair.

“My apartment building has a private indoor pool. I can teach you to swim. Maybe tradeoff? You can help me drive again.” It’s what I’ve wanted to offer.

“But I can’t promise I’ll be a good student. ”

“I can’t promise I won’t sink to the bottom of the pool.”

“I can promise I won’t let you sink.”

Her scowl morphs into a teeny-tiny smile. “And how will you be a bad student?”

“I might have a panic attack behind the wheel,” I admit.

Her face softens. “We’ll start in a parking lot, Friend.” She lets go of my waist and backs up, just to extend a hand. “You have a deal.”

My smile edges higher, and I shake on it. Not letting go of her hand, I interlace our fingers, then bring her closer to the window. I snatch my worn blue ballcap off the couch. I’m about to fit it on her head, but she points at mine.

We agreed to share my hat, but she likes when I wear it more. So I put it on backward. Her pursed lips try to spread into another smile. I engrain every single one of her smiles in my mind. Even if they’re fleeting, I still see them.

I want to kiss her, but the view turns her head. Snow flurries catch the morning wind, and the weather forecast says it’s going to dump about five inches today.

While we gaze out at the winter city landscape, her hand stays in mine.

Lights and garland decorate the balconies of several buildings.

Wreaths and red bows hang on the street lampposts.

Clouds cast a haze over the city, but it’s so far from dreary as snow kisses windows and railings and fire escapes.

“One of the prettiest views in all of New York,” Harriet says quietly.

I look down at her. “Yeah, it is,” I whisper. I could say I’ve fallen in love with New York, but I’ve fallen more in love with the people in this city.

Sometimes life isn’t about where you go but who’s going with you, and where I want to be at the end of the world is beside her.

“You were right,” I tell her.

Her gaze lifts to mine. “About what?”

“This isn’t how we end. You are my entire world, Harriet Fisher. The future I want has always had you in it. For as far as I can see, you are always there. You’re always with me.”

Her chest collapses in a deep, audible breath. “Don’t make me cry in front of your brothers.”

I laugh, my eyes burning with my love for her. “If they tease you for crying, I will be on their fucking case.” I hold her cheek.

Her eyes do well, but after a few breaths, the waterworks recede, and she pops up on her toes to kiss me. Not getting close enough. So I pick her up at the waist, and her legs naturally wrap around me.

“Thanks for the boost, Friend,” she murmurs, her eyes on my lips.

Mine on hers. “No need to thank me. This is where I like you, Friend .”

Her lips curve before she kisses me first. I smile against it, my fingers scrunched into her messy hair.

“Ben Pirrip, stop sucking face!” Tom shouts, pulling our attention to the kitchen. “You’re going to have to choose, dude. We can’t pick.”

I set Harriet on her feet. We join them in front of the barstools. Charlie has spun around to face us, and Beckett is behind the island, telling me, “You’ll need to decide, Pip.”

“They’re never going to agree,” Charlie adds.

It’s a weird statement. Tom and Eliot are almost always on the same side, and I try not to obsess over being the one to cause friction.

They both remind me there will be no hard feelings in whoever I choose.

They just can’t make this choice themselves.

They’re both unrelenting. Unwavering. Steadfast to the bone.

Great, this is going to have to be completely on me. I tip my head and smile at a thought. “Anyone have a quarter?”

“You want them to flip for it?” Beckett asks, then exchanges a shocked glance with Charlie.

“Yeah,” I nod as Harriet retrieves a quarter from her messenger bag. She tosses it to Tom.

“Leaving this to chance, little brother?” Eliot asks while half-seated on a stool.

“To fate, yeah.”

Tom pinches the quarter. “Dad would never.” He shares a gleaming grin with Eliot.

“You call it. I’ll flip it,” Eliot says to him.

That’s how the next step of my life is decided. A coin-flip.

I t takes a couple hours to move all my stuff into my new room.

Thirty minutes are spent putting the wooden bedframe together.

I’m on the floor, barely following the directions, and Harriet keeps shaking her head at me while reading step by step.

We both still haven’t showered. I haven’t even grabbed a T-shirt.

She’s bunched my MVU sweatshirt up to her elbows.

“You’re diabolical,” she says.

“So you’ve said,” I smile up at her. “This is intuitive. Hole. Screw. Board.”

“There are several different kinds of screws.”

“This looks right.” I show her a wide wood screw and the bigger hole in an oak board. “What do you think?”

She double-checks, then nods. “Correct, you may proceed.”

“Merci beaucoup, mon bel oiseau.” I twist the screw into the board and glance up to see her watching me, affection swirling in her ocean blue eyes. It’s hard to tear away. I love that I really don’t have to.

After the frame is built, the mattress carried over (thanks in part to Eliot), and the bed made with my checkered blue and green quilt, Harriet plops down on the foot and I sink beside her, following her roaming gaze around my new space.

We plan to mount a ceiling track and attach a privacy curtain at some point, but for now, my brother’s side is visible, but it’s not cramped, even with two queen-sized beds. He’s always had one of the biggest rooms in the apartment, so it’s honestly perfect that the coin landed on tails.

On what Tom called out.

“Are those just for show?” Harriet points to the guitars perched on the wall.

“No, he definitely plays those.” Tom’s side is closer to the door, mine farther in the room near a floor-length window.

I catch Harriet chewing her lip—her smile , really—at the sight of the framed Green Day poster, at the dark moody walls, at my punk-rock brother’s sticker-decaled dresser and his old school cassette tapes and his ’90s stereo.

“Are you vibing with my brother?” I tease.

“With his personal belongings. Like barely at all, if he asks.” She squeezes her fingers together to show a pinch.

I smile. “Wait till you see Eliot’s raven paintings. You might want me to swap rooms.”

“That dark?”

“It gave me nightmares as a kid,” I laugh. “Or maybe you should tell Eliot you like Tom’s room better. Take his ego down a fraction of a fraction of a peg.”

“Wow, the Fort Knox of egos,” she deadpans, then eyes my elephant ear plants near the oak dresser. “I like your side the best.”

I look her over. “Even if it’s not like you?”

“I like it the most because it’s like you.

Because I love you, and when I look around, I just see Ben.

” Her eyes slow into a stop, fixing on the wall directly in front of us.

On the ginormous oil painting that Eliot and Beckett carried in here and hung.

“That…” she says in quiet reverence. “That is so much like you, and I don’t even know what it is. ”

“The Arcadian,” I name my painting by Thomas Cole.

Sweeping pastoral lands, so much vibrant, lush green as morning light crests behind a jutted mossy mountain peak.

On a hill, a stone building has been built.

Women dance in one corner while another figure plays a pipe.

Fields are plowed. Shepherds tend to their flocks.

An older man draws a geometrical shape into the dirt, new discoveries made.

Boats sailing to shore. Humanity at peace with the land.

I start to smile, and I tell her, “It’s the beginning of an empire.”