Page 198 of Theirs to Desire (Club M: Boxed Set)

JULIAN

I walk through Kincaid Castle again when I get home from the fundraiser and take a cold, hard look at the task I have in front of me.

It's daunting. The place is in terrible shape. At dinner, I started wondering if I was overstating how bad the mess was. If anything, I was understating things. It’s a disaster.

I've been living here for almost nine months. All that time, I’ve avoided dealing with my house in favor of work. There’s always something else to do. But I can't avoid it any longer, not unless I want to let down my sister. Yet again.

Damien suggested the greenhouse. Instead of drowning in despair at the magnitude of the problem in front of me, I head there and turn on a light switch. Shockingly, it works. Sort of. Weak flickering light illuminates the space in front of me.

Once upon a time, this was my favorite part of the house.

It was always warm, even in the dead of winter.

Tropical plants filled the area. Glass panes let in sunlight, and the air was scented with the fragrance of hundreds of flowers.

Potted orange trees grew here when the ground outside was covered in snow, and golden koi darted in a pond dotted with lotus blossoms.

Hannah and I would come down here to feed the fish when we were young.

I even had a pet turtle, Harry. To me and Hannah, the greenhouse, or the conservatory, as my parents liked to call it, was a place of refuge.

My mother occasionally tended to the plants, but my father never bothered. Here, it was just the two of us.

I can’t romanticize the past. Hannah's memories of this place are undoubtedly very different from mine.

But it wasn't just Hannah who was unhappy. Even as a child, I could see the disparity in how we were treated. Children have an innate sense of fair play. I knew it was wrong, and it bothered me, and I didn't know how to change things.

My turtle is long-dead. The pots are cracked and broken, and the plants are withered husks.

The glass panes are filthy and caked with dirt.

Some of them are cracked, and some have shattered, letting in air from the outside.

The glass roof is wrecked. The floor is covered with a moth-eaten carpet and littered with debris.

I don't have to be a therapist to understand why I haven't done a damn thing to fix Kincaid Castle. Restoring it to its former grandeur seems wrong somehow. As if I’m putting a glossy veneer over our childhood.

If it were up to me, I'd let the place fall apart. But Hannah wants to get married here, which means I need to push past my emotions and do this for my sister.

I look around at the mess. This is going to take a lot of time. I need to keep searching for a contractor, but I can't rely on finding one. My initial search hasn’t yielded any results, and I can't afford to wait much longer. I need to get started.

I kneel down and roll the faded carpet aside.

There's terracotta tile underneath, the tile I remember from my childhood.

Under-floor heating kept the tiles warm, even on the coldest days of the year.

I remember my father saying something about it in one of our rare phone conversations.

He put down the carpet because the heating had stopped working.

I pull out my phone and start to make a list of all the things I’ll have to do.

The under-floor heating needs to be fixed, as does the plumbing since Hannah’s wedding guests will need hot water in the bathrooms. I need to replace the broken panes of glass.

The roof needs attention, as does the pond.

And, if I manage to get all of that done, I’ll need to buy plants to fill the space.

One thing at a time. The tile floor is the first thing to tackle. I need to go to a hardware store as soon as I wake up tomorrow.

I work on the greenhouse all of Sunday and most of Monday morning. I make very slow progress. It takes me all of that time to just clean the place up. I make five trips to the dump.

And I try not to think about Sophia. About the night we spent together. About what might have been, if only we hadn’t lost touch.

But it’s impossible to scrub her from my thoughts.

Seeing her at the fundraiser has torn the veil and yanked the memories back to the forefront.

When I met Sophia, Kingdom Night , one of my comics, had just become a runaway bestseller.

Meander Games paid me a six-figure advance to storyboard their upcoming video game. My career was taking off.

There were many wins that year. Even so, that night with her was the best night of my life. That night, real-life was on pause, and the air was alive with magic.

Then everything went to shit. My mother received her cancer diagnosis.

I told her to call Hannah. “She would want to know,” I said.

“She would want to help.” Of course, my parents wouldn’t hear of it.

There had been arguments. So many appointments with so many doctors.

Oncologists. Specialists. Chemo. My father broke his leg, and he couldn’t put any weight on it for three months. Caring for both of them fell to me.

I tried to hold onto Sophia. I desperately wanted to see her again.

But when I called her, she wouldn’t answer the phone.

She wouldn’t return my texts. I got the message.

She wasn’t interested in staying in touch, and even though I didn’t understand why, I needed to respect her decision. So I let her go.

I should have gone up and said hello to her at the fundraiser. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe it was the sense that if I did, she would upend my life again.

Or maybe I didn’t talk to her for the same reason I’ve avoided Hannah. I like to steer clear of hard conversations and difficult, inconvenient emotions.

Shaun Zhao, my agent, calls me Monday afternoon. “Are you sitting down?” he asks, his voice vibrating with excitement. “Because I have news.”

I've managed to vacuum up most of the dirt, but the floor’s certainly not in any condition to sit on. There’s not a chair in sight either. Not that it matters; Shaun’s question had been rhetorical.

“What's going on?”

“Levine Entertainment has bought the film rights to Revenant .”

Revenant is a comic I made four years ago.

It’s set in a magic-friendly, post-apocalyptic world and is my biggest hit to date.

It was made into a wildly popular game, and I’ve attended conventions where women cosplay as my protagonist Lola.

People write fanfic about her, shipping her with Cavuto, the assassin who’s hired to kill her.

Hollywood has expressed interest in the comic before, but nothing’s come of it. Until now.

“That’s great.” I do my best to sound thrilled, but honestly, it doesn't seem like a big deal. Studios have bought options for my comics before, but things never move to the next stage. Still, selling the option should yield a nice sum of money, which I could use to renovate the house.

“No, Julian, you don’t understand. This isn't great. It's stupendous . Levine has secured funding for a six-episode series. They want you to co-write the screenplay. They’ve sent me a preliminary contract. They plan to begin filming early next year. This isn’t just an option. Revenant is getting made, my friend.”

I shake my head in disbelief. Shaun was right; I should have been sitting down. “No way.”

“This is the big one. Can you be in LA for the pitch meeting on Friday?”

My head is still spinning. “Fly to California? It can't be done remotely?”

“The producer wants to meet with you personally.”

I run my hand over my face. Holy shit. This is real. I’ve had comics made into games, but this is a show. This is big. “Yeah, yeah. Sure thing. Send me the details—I'll be there.”

I hang up, then I realize where I am. The greenhouse. I thought I had nothing going on for the next four months. I thought I had all that time to do the renovations. But if Revenant is getting made into a show. . .

It doesn't matter. I refuse to let Hannah down. I'm just going to have to make it work.

Damien shows up unannounced with a box of pizza shortly after seven. “I sent you a text,” he says. “You didn't respond.” He looks around at the now bare room. “I see why.”

“Yeah, sorry. My phone is upstairs.” I survey the space through his eyes. “When you suggested holding the wedding here, I didn’t really think it would work. But now that I’ve cleared out the junk, it’s actually bigger than I thought.”

We take the pizza into the kitchen. I open the refrigerator, hand Damien a beer, and take one for myself. “What's going on with you? Tell me what your doctor said.”

He waves off my concern. “It's not a big deal.”

“Don't give me that, Damien. I'm not a fool. You haven't taken a day of vacation since your father died.”

“I thought I had a heart attack. I didn’t. Still, Dr. Zambrano recommended time off. I’m following his advice.”

“How many meetings did you attend today?”

“Just two. I didn’t come here to talk about that. I had lunch with Sophia today.”

I go still. A flash of jealousy surges through me, almost immediately followed by remorse. Am I going to sulk if Damien pursues Sophia? No way. I refuse to be that guy. Damien can go out with whomever he wants.

Damien takes a look at my face. “It wasn't a date, you idiot. We discussed the community health center.”

I tell myself that the emotion I’m feeling isn’t relief. “I'd forgotten about your insane plan. How did that go?”

“As expected.” He looks at me. “We tried to call her, do you remember? And then her phone was out of service?”

“Yeah?”

“Her phone was disconnected because she didn't have enough money to pay the bill.” His expression is troubled. “I had my team investigate. After she got fired ten years ago, Sophia spent a month living out of her car.”

Shock slaps me. I put down the slice of pizza I was eating. She was homeless? While I lived in my comfortable, heated New York apartment, Sophia lived out of her car. Yes, I had problems. But I had shelter. I had a place to live, a roof over my head.

“I thought she was avoiding us because she regretted the threesome,” he continues. “Instead, I find out she was struggling. At the fundraiser, Sophia said I had no idea what life is like for the little people.” His expression is bleak. “She’s right.”

I’m not paying attention to him. I’m still reeling.

Sophia mattered to me. That night meant something, but you'd never know that from the way I acted. Yes, I didn’t know that she got fired, and I certainly didn’t know she was forced to live in her car, but that’s no excuse.

What does it say about me that I didn’t bother to find out?

Nothing good.

Damien sticks around after dinner and helps with the greenhouse.

We start to pull up the tiles, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

We make it through less than a tenth of the area when he has to leave.

“I have to attend yet another conference call,” he says wearily.

I open my mouth to say something, and he holds up his hand to forestall me. “I'm working on it.”

He lets his family walk all over him. Then again, who am I to point out his flaws when I have so many of my own?

I wake up on Tuesday morning, determined to make serious progress on the greenhouse before flying to Los Angeles.

But the problem with working with your hands is that it doesn't always still your mind.

I could sink into the drawing if I were working on a comic.

I could think about what my characters were saying and doing and tune out the world.

But it's not the same with the greenhouse. Over and over, my mind returns to Sophia.

I drive to the hardware store to pick up some supplies. On the way back, I pass the community health center. On impulse, I pull into the parking lot.

A heavily pregnant young woman is seated at the front desk. She stares at me for a long moment. “Can I help you?”

I glance down at myself and realize that I'm covered in tile dust. Crap. I should have showered. Changed. Run a comb through my hair. Too late for any of that.

“Is Sophia around?”

“Yes,” she replies. She gives me another once-over. “Let me get her.”

Sophia comes out a few minutes later. She’s wearing a navy-blue dress that skims her knees. Her legs are bare, and she’s wearing brown sandals on her feet, with toes painted a pretty shade of pink.

She looks like she’s ready for a garden party, and I’m covered in dust from head to toe.

Then she notices me, and her eyes widen. “Julian?”