Page 28 of Nothing to This (Nothing to… #8)

JD was making notes in a report when his office door opened. He didn’t look up, he didn’t need to when he recognized his sister’s voice.

“I need to borrow your wife,” Brenna said.

“For what?” he muttered.

Coming into the office, Brenna took her time closing the door. “That’s an interesting turn, you’re not going to ask who I’m talking about or deny that I know what I’m talking about?”

“You’re talking about Rylee,” he said, scrubbing out a whole section. He glanced up when she stopped on the opposite side of the desk. “You think you’re the first person to make that kind of comment about our relationship?”

Brenna took a seat; he went back to his report.

“Guess you and she talked last night.”

“We did.”

The air around Brenna was uneasy, yet eager, like she didn’t know how to approach the situation or exactly what to say.

She wasn’t nervous, his sister never was, she just wanted to maximize results.

Brenna was an efficient woman. He tried to concentrate and avoid getting sucked into his sister’s obsession.

“I tried calling her this morning. Her phone went to voicemail… I guess she was busy.”

“She has better things to do with her time than sit around waiting for your calls. Don’t you have a girlfriend of your own to bug?”

“I’d rather bug yours… So… you talked…”

“Mm hmm.”

He sensed the expectation. Brenna was waiting for him to say something else, to leap in and answer the question she hadn’t posed.

He wasn’t going to do that. For one thing, his head was still so fucked by what Rylee said last night that he couldn’t think about it without getting a sharp pain in his temple.

“Well? Come on!” Brenna screeched.

On a breath and a slow blink, maintaining his calm, he raised his eyes from the paperwork, contrasting his mood to his sister’s hysterical mode.

“What?”

She glared at him. “Don’t play dumb. Tell me what happened!”

“We talked, you said it yourself.”

“What did you say?” She bounced to the edge of her chair. “What did she say? Is she pregnant yet?”

Slapping a page of the report into the done pile, his restraint wavered. “I am not going to gossip with you, Nana. If you want details, talk to Rylee.”

She growled. “She’s obviously not open to talking, or she would have called me back.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to live in wonder.”

Growling again, she pushed back to slouch in her chair, wearing a sulk that Sky would be proud of.

“You are the most infuriating couple ever!”

“We’re not a couple,” he muttered, trying to concentrate on his reading. “We won’t ever be a couple.”

In his peripheral vision, he noticed her spine uncurl slowly until she was sitting upright. “Guess that tells me all I need to know. You fucked it up, didn’t you? Shit, Jame, why did you have to lie to her about California?”

“This has nothing to do with California,” he said. “We talked about it and concluded it wouldn’t make sense to ruin our ability to tolerate each other for the sake of sex.”

She spat out a breath of disgust. “That sounds more like something Rylee would say than you. Did you kiss her?”

“What? No, I didn’t kiss her.” He would have.

He’d wanted to. And Rylee had pushed him away.

“She did say it and she’s right. We live together now, we get along, the kids love spending time as a family.

It’s not right of us to screw with their heads by screwing each other; that would take our focus from them.

We’d have to deal with all the usual relationship issues rather than just being good parents. This way we can—”

“What? Grow to hate the sight of each other?” she asked. “You think everything will carry on being hunky-dory if you just ignore what you feel for each other? Are you insane? Whoever heard of unresolved sexual tension just evaporating through sheer will? Are you moving out?”

“No. That’s the point. Things will continue exactly the way they are.”

“With you two showering in the same apartment, sleeping in the same apartment, jerking off in the same apartment.”

He screwed up his face. “Bren! Jesus!”

“Hey, I don’t like thinking about you touching that part of yourself any more than I like thinking of anyone touching one of those things you have,” she said and shivered.

“My point is, no matter your mood, or hers, you’re going to be living in the same apartment, the same close quarters.

So, those nights when you’re feeling a little hot, a little twitchy, you have to walk past her bedroom… maybe she’s getting dressed…”

Although she was trying to build a picture, it was so insane that she thought it necessary.

The glimmer of a smile he failed to contain quickly grew until he was laughing.

“Fuck, Bren, I want her every second of the goddamn day, you think I need to be in the mood or near her bedroom to want to have sex with her?” That shut his sister up fast. “I want her in the office, every minute, even when there are twenty other people in the room and we’re dealing with some corporate disaster.

Sometimes she comes over to the desk and the smell of her perfume gets me hard.

Every time we’re in the kitchen at home, she moves in close, helping the kids with something or giving me a hand and her hair falls against my arm.

Shit, Bren, it takes every ounce of strength I have not to grab hold of her and kiss the life out of her, even in front of our kids. ”

For a few seconds, his sister just looked at him, her expression becoming more solemn.

“And you think not acting on that will make it go away? Think about the logic of that. I know there’s a chance that you will jump in and the relationship won’t work out, there’s always that chance with a new relationship. ”

“And then we’ll lose what we have now, which is why—”

“You’re going to lose it if you do nothing.

If you don’t try, it’s going to eventually get weird.

You’re going to stop getting close to her so those things you just said don’t happen.

You want to be near her and horny all the time?

It will frustrate you both. You’ll be anxious, and angry, and you’ll just start avoiding each other.

The way I see it, you can try to have a relationship and there’s a chance it will work out.

If you don’t even try, you may as well move out now, and go back to never seeing each other. ”

He couldn’t imagine anything more sickening than never seeing Rylee again. It already pissed him off that he’d missed out on so much of his kids’ lives, now he was coming to realize he’d missed out on so much with their mother too.

“The night I met her, I knew she was different,” he murmured, picking up his pen to divert focus. “Being with her felt different…”

“But you didn’t pursue it.”

Because he’d given up, taken the easy way out and gone back to life as he’d always known it without putting up a fight.

“She said it was a one-night thing. Obviously, she didn’t feel what I felt, but I don’t know… She didn’t have a lot of experience. She was twenty-three when we met, for God’s sake, she was just starting out.”

“So you let her go.”

“If it had been supposed to be something, we’d have figured it out by now.”

“I disagree,” Brenna said. “Neither of you have ever bothered to spend any time getting to know each other until now. Mom and I love Rylee, and she loves us, but that didn’t happen in a flash of lightning.

We’re family. We’ve spent half a decade getting to know each other, spending time with each other, being there for each other.

Rylee knows she can rely on us, and we can rely on her…

She’s raising the next generation of Dawes and doing a fucking amazing job, I don’t know if you noticed. ”

Pride and appreciation for both the mother of his children and his sister rose within him. “I know she’s a good mom… But she doesn’t know if she wants more kids.”

“And you do?” she asked and exhaled, slouching back in the chair again. “You don’t get it. God, I don’t know how any woman can have a relationship with a man, you’re so upside down.”

“Thanks.”

“Rylee doesn’t want to be a single parent again.

She adores her children. Although she’d never say it, raising them has been hard work and she’s done it basically alone.

I only know from stories she’s told after the fact, pregnancy was a slog for her.

She had all sorts of issues to work through and she had to track you down and deal with your lawyers too.

She hasn’t had it easy. So, when you say more kids, all she thinks about is the Everest she’s just got through climbing. ”

His sister was trying to help, but irrational offence surged through him. “It wouldn’t be that way. If we were together, she wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’d get her a staff, anything she needed for—”

“You didn’t for the last two.”

“I didn’t know she needed it,” he argued.

Brenna waved a hand up and down. “Calm, brother, don’t get defensive. I’m trying to explain why she’s hesitant.” Straightening again, she licked her lips. “Sky makes you watch her Disney movies, right?”

“Yeah,” he drawled, not sure where she was going.

“You know what happens right before the narrator says they lived happily ever after? Right at the end, the princess and her prince, they kiss.” Eyeing him, she nodded like she was trying to convey something. He didn’t get it and shook his head. “Damnit, brother, you have to kiss her!”

“You think that will make everything better?” he asked, recalling what Rylee once said about his kiss.

“I think the movies you watch with Sky represent everything you’ve been through with Rylee so far. Every kid grows up with fairytale movies. It’s only when you’re an adult that you appreciate the real story is what we don’t see. The real story happens after that kiss at the end.”

“Bren—”