Page 6 of Chasing After You (Twisted Desires #3)

Josh

For two years following the incident with Daniel, I’d suffered from sickening nightmares night after night.

I would always be infinitely grateful to the man who had taken me in as a stranger and helped to build me another chance at life.

His name was Paul Antley.

I hadn’t even known of his existence before the night everything had gone to shit. I would later learn from him that he was estranged from both his immediate and extended family, and that he hadn’t had any contact with any of them for years before Victoria had suddenly called him about me.

He had almost hung up on her, but she was quick to bring up a debt he owed to her and suggest that she’d forget all about it if he took me in.

Paul never said much about his own past, but from what I understood, he’d been incarcerated for five years in his early thirties, resulting in his entire family tree disowning him. He’d gone from having generational wealth to absolutely nothing in the blink of an eye.

Victoria was his second cousin.

Maybe she’d somehow known that she would need a favor in the future, or perhaps she used to actually be a decent person.

Still, whatever the reason, she’d paid for a good defense attorney who helped dramatically reduce his sentence, and helped him get his coffee shop off the ground when he was released.

He understood that he would eventually need to pay her back, but he took the risk because it was either Victoria’s help or a twenty-three-year sentence and zero job opportunities on the outside.

Paul had never had any children, so he had no experience in raising a teenager, let alone a traumatized one who’d accidentally murdered a guy. But damn, living with him made me wish that he’d been the one to adopt me all those years ago.

He wasn’t affectionate in the traditional sense—there were no long, comforting hugs, no “I’m proud of you”s—but he gave me the kind of stability I hadn’t even realized I’d been craving.

Quiet mornings with fresh coffee and scrambled eggs.

Nights when we’d sit in the living room together, each doing our own thing, occasionally exchanging a thought or two.

Within the first week and a half at Paul’s, he’d helped me with beginning the process of dissolving my adoption, had my last name changed to his, taken me to the DMV to get a license, and looked into getting me signed up for courses at the community college in the town over.

He introduced me to his friends and neighbors as his son.

Gave them all some story about not knowing he’d gotten an old girlfriend pregnant and only recently learning of my existence.

According to him, he wanted to make up for the years we’d spent apart, which everyone loved.

I was fairly certain that several of his dates had occurred because the women had found him admirable for getting involved in my life.

He gave me a job at his shop, Wild Roast, and helped me move into an apartment once I had a steady income coming in.

A few years in, after I’d graduated with a business degree, he made me a co-owner of Wild Roast.

I wasn’t sure where he was currently, but we stayed in touch. He was living life on the road with some buddies from a motorcycle club.

Sometimes I missed him so fiercely it caught me off guard.

Especially on the quieter days at the shop, when the light would fall a certain way through the window and I could practically hear his heavy boots coming up behind the counter.

I’d turn around out of habit, ready for his joke of the day, only to be greeted by silence.

Paul wasn’t the kind of man people wrote stories about. He didn’t give long speeches or make grand gestures. But he showed up when no one else did and supported me. He gave me a name when mine felt cursed, gave me roots when I’d been nothing but a ghost drifting between disasters.

And now, with the past creeping ever closer, I found myself clinging more and more to what he’d taught me.

Keep your head down.

Keep your hands busy.

Keep your truths close to your chest.

But even that wasn’t working anymore.

Because I could feel him.

Dorian.

And something in me whispered that I’d wake up one morning and find him standing on the other side of the counter, staring at me with hatred and disgust.

Hayes, Hudson, Oliver, and even Greyson and Lane sometimes, stopped by the cafe often to check on me. At least that’s what Oliver told me, because I highly doubted that the Cohen brothers would ever admit to worrying about me.

Greyson always insisted on paying for his and Lane’s orders, while the triad happily accepted when I said it was on the house.

Most days, unless it was my day off, I opened the shop before sunrise, basking in the quiet before the morning rush.

The manager I’d hired two years ago, Kellie, was a godsend.

She was great with our two part-timers, Max and Danielle, and made it so that I wasn’t drowning in work.

She took over the training of new hires, created the schedules, and handled opening and closing tasks in my absence.

I took pride in the small things—wiping down the counters until they gleamed, organizing the syrup shelf by color-coded labels, adjusting the music volume to match the time of day and crowd energy. The shop ran smoothly because I cared, and I loved that people noticed.

Some of our regulars even told me that they could tell when I wasn’t on shift. They made sure to clarify that my workers were doing a great job, but said that I brought a lot of positive energy to the space.

I felt like wagging my metaphorical tail whenever someone complimented me or the shop.

During the slower hours, I experimented with flavor profiles, layering spices and infusing syrups, trying to create something unique that still felt like comfort in a cup.

I kept a small black notebook under the counter, filled with all my best successes and a few disasters I did not want to repeat.

Bubblegum . I shivered just thinking about it.

There was something deeply satisfying about watching one of my workers or a regular take a sip of one of my new creations, pause, and then break into a surprised grin, laugh, or even a confused frown.

I liked remembering people’s names, their orders, and seeing the way their eyes lit up when I handed them their favorite drink on a rough morning. I liked belonging to this place. Being part of someone’s day, even in such a small way, made it easier to carry the weight of my own.

Making a customer smile gave me the same feeling I’d get from a home run.

I’d been on my college’s baseball team for three years. We weren’t that good, to be honest, but just being a part of a team was such a fantastic experience.

That feeling of camaraderie was something I tried hard to recreate inside Wild Roast. I may have swapped out bats and gloves for grinders and milk steamers, but the sense of teamwork remained.

We moved in sync during the busiest rushes, and at the end of it, when the line finally disappeared and we all took that first sigh of relief, I’d glance around and feel that same pulse of pride I used to get in the dugout.

I kept a corkboard in the back office where I’d pin little notes customers left behind—thank-yous scribbled on napkins, drawings from kids. It reminded me on the hard days that I was part of something that mattered.

Every steamed latte, every laugh across the counter, every gentle, repeated routine helped anchor me. Helped keep the fear and anxiety and loneliness at bay even during the times my hands trembled behind the counter when I had to tell the rare rude customer to leave.

The voice of my manager pulled me out of my thoughts. “Earth to Josh. You’ve been cleaning that machine for like fifteen minutes, I think it’s good,” Kellie chuckled, walking around me with a tray of fresh muffins.

I laughed at myself and put the rag down. “Sorry, Kels.”

She shook her head in amusement, her tight brown ringlets shaking with the movement. “What’s got you so distracted these days? New girlfriend?”

I’d broken up with the last one, Quinn, almost a whole year earlier. Dating was the furthest thing from my mind. I loved feeling wanted by someone, I just hadn’t even given it a thought recently since I’d been so focused on my little brother.

“Nah, you wish,” I grinned.

“Everything okay then?”

I nodded. “Yeah, it’s all good. I was just thinking about the fireplace idea again.”

Kellie rolled her eyes at me, giving me a pointed look. “Again? Where would we even put it?”

“Right there,” I said, pointing over at the far wall. If we just rearranged the tables, there would be the perfect spot for a cozy fireplace and two comfy chairs. No one ever seemed on board with my ideas, though.

“Hmm, maybe . You’d have to call a fireplace guy, though. Don’t you dare take a sledgehammer to that wall.”

“A fireplace guy?”

She shrugged. “You know, there’s like car guys and roof guys and rat guys.”

I laughed, “Maybe you shouldn’t call pest control workers rat guys .”

Kellie smirked, “Hey, they know what they are, just like you’re the coffee guy. The syrup whisperer. The espresso king.”

I groaned and leaned on the counter. “Please never say ‘syrup whisperer’ again.”

“Sorry, your majesty.” She stuck her tongue out at me with a twinkle in her eye.

Despite the banter, I was grateful for her presence. Kellie had this way of diffusing my darker thoughts without even realizing it. She reminded me that life could still feel light, that a joke or two could hold up the ceiling on days when the weight felt like it might crush me.

Still, her question lingered.

What was distracting me?

It was the tension that clung to me when the bell above the door chimed. The hesitation before I looked up, always half-expecting to see him—older, colder, staring me down with eyes that remembered everything that I longed to forget.