Page 38 of Van Cort

WEST

“Everett?”

I look sideways at her as we cross the lawn back to the house, getting damn tired of that name in her mouth. “Yes?”

She holds up the small nugget. “This is gold, isn’t it?”

I nod. “It’s everywhere here if you know where to look.”

“Wow. You’re literally living on a gold mine.” Yeah. Not much else to say about that. It’s nothing new to me. She’s right. There’s enough under this house to fund a small country. It’s why it was built here.

Looking up at it, I keep walking with her beside me.

Something’s happening to me. All that on the island – the talking, the staring at her, the listening to her soft words about caring, even taking her there in the first place – they’re all changing my intentions here.

Add that into the fact that my cunt brother is letting me back in, relatively happily, and I’m unsure what I should be feeling anymore.

She wasn’t supposed to do this to me. I wasn’t supposed to yearn and be desperate for time with her. I was supposed to hate and amuse myself, nothing else. I was supposed to destroy.

“Thank you. For sharing. Every minute you gave me makes me see you differently. I’m starting to understand now.” She is? Good for her, because I haven’t got a goddamn clue what the hell is going on in my own head. Or his.

We reach the deck, and she stretches up on her tiptoes, kissing me briefly with the gentlest of touches. “You’re becoming quite lovely.”

“I am?”

She drops back down and starts walking into the house. “You are. Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone know.”

“Andie?” I call. She looks back at me from the doorway, a quizzical look on her face. “I wasn’t lovely before?”

“No. You were handsome before, and intriguing, and engaging. And a lot of an ass, to be honest.” She starts walking back to me.

“But since you’ve been here, you seem happier and sadder and more whole because of that.

You’re not just a crisp business suit now.

You’re more. And I like that it’s emotional and complicated, because it means there’s a depth and a reason.

It helps me understand, and I like that.

I like you.” I doubt she would if she knew there were two of us.

She smiles as she reaches me. “And that thing you said yesterday in town? I was surprised, and I didn’t handle it very well.

Don’t think I didn’t like the thought. I kinda did.

Or might. It caught me off-guard.” I’m trying to look like I know what the hell she’s talking about. I don’t. I wasn’t in town with her.

“Okay.”

“Okay.” She smiles and takes a breath, as if that was weighing on her. “I’ll go for that run then.”

I put my hands in my pockets and lean back on the deck rail. “Okay.” Maybe she’ll get eaten by a bear. That would hurt him. Might hurt me now, too. “Andie?” She looks back again. “Stay on the tracks.”

“Two Andie’s? We back to that now, are we?” She laughs. “Okay.”

And then she’s gone, perfect ass going with her. Well Fuck.

I could be screwed.

And what the fuck was she talking about her name for?

Some time standing here watching the water ripple out over the lake and thinking about me – us – being lovely, and eventually brother dearest comes out onto the deck with me.

“What did you say to her in town?” I ask before he reaches me.

“I inferred marriage. Too soon, apparently.” He leans his forearms on the deck rail next to me to stare in the same direction. It takes me right back to a time when I kissed a girl first and he didn’t like it. If I had a bottle of soda, I’d pass it to him. Or hit him with it.

We’re silent, both just gazing at the island in the distance.

“She thinks we’re lovely. And she likes the thought of that conversation because you’re more than a business suit here, better. Happier, sadder, and more whole because of that.”

He looks sideways at me. “She does?”

“Kinda. Needs more work.”

Chuckling sounds from him as he looks back out to the island again. “That’ll depend on you, I suppose.”

“Me?”

He sighs. “Do you like her?”

“To fuck? Yeah.”

“West. Adult time now. She means something to me.”

“The only thing that means anything to you is you.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“I don’t know shit about you anymore.”

“Also, untrue. There’s only one person in this world who does know me. You.”

I fold my arms over each other, pissed, because yes, I do know that.

I know it far too fucking well. I know exactly what things mean to him, and exactly how he reacts when things don’t go his way, regardless of time apart.

That’s the whole reason I’m here trying to ruin something for him, to give him a taste of his own goddamn medicine.

“What the hell do you want me to say, Rhett? Yes? I don’t know.

I’ve been too busy trying to dislike her to even think about liking her.

” Twenty fucking years of pain and I haven’t managed to make the past disappear.

Maybe he can box up what happened and toss it away somehow, but me? No. He deserves to feel that, too.

“And how have you hurt her so far?” I stay silent, refusing to acknowledge that I’ve done pretty much nothing to ruin anything.

I was going to. I just haven’t. Maybe it’s her, or being with him again.

I don’t know, but everything’s turned sideways since we got here and memories keep infecting my mood. “Or me, for that matter.”

“I still could.”

“I know, but you won’t because you’re not like me, West. You’re the goodness in us, no matter how hard you try to persuade me, or yourself, otherwise.”

I kick off the deck rail and head inside. “Yeah, well, I still fucking hate you.”

By the time he’s followed me inside, I’ve poured a glass of whiskey and am trying to work out if we need to fight or not.

He picks up a glass, as I walk away, and pours himself one. “How’s the cabin?”

“Rotten. Broken. Abandoned.”

He drinks and looks at me over the rim. “Do you remember the last time we were there together?” I nod.

“It was perfect before that day. I thought we had the world at our feet and nothing would ever get in the way. We just needed Father to die, and then we’d be fine.

” Yeah, instead, he screwed everything up and we’re fucked like that cabin is. “Do you really hate me?”

I look at his face, recognising the true concern on his features. “I hate what you did.”

“I hate what I did, too. There’s no changing that. There is a chance for us to change us, though.”

I lean on the wall and watch him stare outside towards the cabin. “Into what?”

“Into something I expect we’ve both searched the past twenty years for.

Something we once thought we had.” What?

So he can screw it all up again? I watch him put his drink down and walk closer to me, a sneer on my face.

“I can’t believe I’m about to put this out there, but I’m better because of you, West. I hate it, but it’s a fact, and there’s no outrunning it.

Never has been. You are that part of me that I won’t ever be and barely want to be. You always were.”

“Yeah. I guess that got beaten out of you.”

“To protect you. To keep the best part of us as safe as it could be. I took my punishment a long time ago. You don’t need to carry it on.”

Staring at him, I think. He’ll give me time to do that. It isn’t like I didn’t know this would be coming if I acted decently. I did. The only way this was going to continue in some kind of hostile vein was if I hurt her somehow. I haven’t. Yet.

“Just tell me you don’t want what I’m offering, and I’ll end it now with her by explaining what’s been going on. I have become too invested in her to let this continue.”

“You’d lose her?”

“Yes. And I’ll tell her the truth, too. Here, in this place where it all went so fucking wrong.

I won’t lie anymore. There are too many memories of times before now that interfere with how I thought in Seattle.

Everything here – you, her, us – is burning inside me, and I would rather finish it than carry on pretending I don’t care enough to fall in love again. ”

The sound of that word from his mouth makes me swallow down a small shred of guilt that still lives within me, and I leave the confines of the room to get some fresh air.

Fuck him. Love? I know what love is to him. It’s nothing like my idea of the word or the feeling. He’s cruel when the sentiment grows, and possessive, and completely fucking irrational.

“Do you even like her?” I ask, as he comes outside.

“I talk of love and you ask if I like her?”

“Yes, Rhett. Like. Enjoy. Want to spend every fucking minute with. Do you yearn for her? Struggle to think straight without her? Does she complete you somehow? Does everything feel empty and pointless and desperately unfulfilling when she’s not there?

That’s love. It isn’t having something and ruling it and making it do what you want to when it won’t behave. ”

“It is a little bit.” My glare swings at him, and I find a smile waiting for me. “Alright. I get your point. But that was a long time ago, West. I’d like to think I’ve grown since then.”

“Have you? This fucking game appears to prove otherwise.”

“You started that. I was happy enough to enjoy what I’d organised alone.”

“See? Organised. Passionless, Rhett. Dead.” He smiles and leans on a wall opposite me, staring into a face he knows just as well as I know his. “Do you even know what emotion is?”

“I’m perfectly capable of emotions.”

“I’m not seeing any.”

“Aren’t you? Are you sure? You’re not looking hard enough, West. Include yourself in the mirror, because I can assure you my emotions are high, and both of you are part of them. None of this would be happening if you weren’t.”

“And what happens when the drinking ramps up again?”

“It won’t.”

“And what happens when she knows there are two of us and she chooses?”

“I can’t answer that. Not yet.”

No, I bet he can’t, because he doesn’t know, does he? Neither of us do.

I stare out to that damned cabin again, as desperate as he is, in some ways, to make something beautiful happen for the second time in our lives.

It could be the ending we hoped for, the one that comes from our near identical hearts and leaves every other kind of scenario useless to us.

But those hearts beat so differently. Mine stutters and leaps. His drones and growls.

“Well, you better find an answer I like, because if you think I’m going down this road with you again, without knowing what you’re prepared to give up if it doesn’t go your way, you’re wrong. I won’t.”

He nods and kicks off his own wall, placing his drink down on the table. “Stop fighting me, West. Fall in love if you haven’t already. Don’t lie to yourself to hurt me. I want this. I want you to want it, too.”

“I’m not falling in love until you do.” He holds his thumb and finger up on the way out of the room, barely a millimetre of space between them. That close, it seems.

“Her name is River, by the way. Call her it,” he calls.

It is? Well, that explains the Andie conversation.