Finding Him Read online

  I turned off the water to the sink, wiped my hands, and made my way toward the couch. She was sitting cross-legged, her simple black T-shirt clinging to her body like a second skin, and her laptop pressing against her chest like she was trying to hug it for comfort. “It’s going to hurt.”

  I sighed and took a seat next to her. “Your hands?”

  She shook her head. “My heart.”

  “Knowledge of pain is knowledge of life . . . it’s like cutting off your blood circulation, suddenly you feel nothing, you just watch the blood—life itself—leave a part of your body. The pain you feel later, the tiny prick of needles attacking your skin, is the side effect of healing, it must happen for healing to take place. The pain gives life, and one day, the pain . . . it will stop. Today . . . isn’t that day, princess.”

  She looked at me then, her crystal-blue eyes filled to the rim with tears she looked hell-bent on not shedding. “That was . . .” Her voice cracked. “One of the most logical and beautiful things anyone has said to me since the funeral.”

  I scowled. “Funerals.” The very thought of public mourning of the dead made my skin crawl. Never again.

  “Funerals,” she agreed in an expressionless tone, but she seemed to flinch at the word. “Sorry for your loss, Keaton! Like I lost my phone, or my keys, or my mind. The word gains and loses its power based on the phrases on both sides of loss. I’m sorry for your loss says it all, and yet when you hear that, you still hold on to hope that you can find it again. It’s a death, not just a personal loss, it’s never coming back. Never.”

  My chest felt heavy as I listened. I didn’t want to hear her words. I didn’t want to talk about funerals. I was there to forget.

  But the universe had other ideas.

  Apparently, I was cursed to remember.

  And it hurt like fuck.

  What would Mom want in this situation?

  What would she even do?

  Hug her?

  Offer more words?

  I eyed the computer.

  I thought of Mom’s easy smile, of her ridiculous obsession with historical romance, and the way she had always seemed to have the shiniest hair despite the lack of vitamins in her system, and I remembered the times I’d find her on this very couch, reading her books, smiling to herself, most likely wishing for her own happily-ever-after.

  Dreaming.

  Her love for words rivaled her love for life.

  And now that she was gone. All I had were words and memories to survive on.

  Words.

  I didn’t question it. I reached out and grabbed Keaton’s computer while she watched. I opened it, clicked on Microsoft Word, and started a new document. I typed in “Losing Him,” saved it.

  And then I wrote.

  The power of the word depends on the presence of other words in the sentence, but nothing will ever be as powerful as a word. Nothing lasts forever and reveals more of itself over time as you mature—the written word does. These are Keaton Westbrook’s words. Some will hold power, some will take it away, but every single one will bleed with love. Because just like words—love lasts forever.

  “What are you typing?” Keaton finally asked.

  I turned the laptop toward her and whispered, “The beginning.”

  Her tears didn’t fall, but she covered her mouth with her hands and nodded. “It’s perfect.”

  “You’re the one that said it.”

  “Not that eloquently.”

  “Where do you want to go next, Keaton Westbrook?”

  Her eyes flashed to mine, and then a small smile spread across her lips. “It’s going to hurt.”

  “It’s going to hurt.” I nodded.

  “We go to the beginning . . .” She reached for me with her covered hand. “I just may need more support from a perfect stranger to get through it.”

  “Please, strangers don’t sleep naked together.”

  “You really need to stop bringing that up when I’m finally warming to you.”

  I grinned. “You set me up on purpose. The things I could follow that up with . . .”

  “Restrain yourself, Romeo.” She laughed, a delicate yet somehow full-throated laugh that made me feel . . . way too much. “Okay, okay, we’re doing this. This is crazy, but we’re doing this. I guess type out ‘chapter one’?”

  This was insane.

  It was also the only time I could ever remember genuinely smiling while looking at a computer.

  So I forced my fingers to type it out. Chapter One: The Beginning of Us.

  Chapter Thirteen

  KEATON

  I was really doing this, wasn’t I? Telling a complete stranger, one I wasn’t even sure I liked all that much, something this private? Something this . . . what? Beautiful? Ugly? Real?

  He stopped typing and looked up at me. “Ready when you are.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I leaned in. “You aren’t getting anything out of it.” He locked eyes with me, and I wasn’t sure if he was angry or just thinking of a good reason that wasn’t self-serving.

  “It’s a good distraction.” Julian looked away. “Maybe I need one just as much as you do.”

  “A distraction?” My eyebrows shot up. “Can’t you just buy one?”

  His lips broke out into a smile that almost made me choke on my own tongue. “Not this kind.”

  “You mean the sad kind?”

  His lips twitched as he seemed to study me, his green eyes so piercing and intense that I felt like I needed to hide behind something. “You’re procrastinating.”

  “No, I’m not,” I lied to his face, and then cleared my throat awkwardly because I was doing exactly that.

  “Oh.” He grinned. “You really are. Look at it this way: you have to get it out somehow. May as well do it when you have someone who’s going to pour you a shot every time you finish a chapter.”

  I snorted. “So you want me drunk?”

  “No, I just want you relaxed.” He drummed his fingertips against the table and sighed, running a hand through his chocolate hair. “I meant it, about the distraction.”

  I waited a few beats while he shifted in his seat like he was sitting on a secret and was afraid to spill it.

  “My mom.” His words were quieter than usual, his posture stiff. “She just died.”

  I didn’t say “sorry,” mainly because I knew that sorry wouldn’t bring her back, sorry was too easy to say, just like “I love you.” Words so casually and callously thrown around lost their meaning fast, especially when you received them from people who would drive a knife into your back when you weren’t looking. At least that was my experience in life, words were too damn easy.

  “I didn’t know,” I finally said. “Is that why you came up here?”

  He stared down at the table. “It’s a lot of the same furniture.”

  “Here in the cabin?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, walking in here was like stepping into the past. I’m not sure what I expected to find.”

  “Peace.” I couldn’t stop myself from saying it. His shocked expression met mine briefly before he rested his hands on the keyboard again.

  “Well, I’m here.” He jutted his chin at me. “I’m trying to find my peace. Maybe it’s time you found yours?”

  My throat all but closed up as I stared at him, tears in my eyes, tears I fought like hell to keep in. “He stole my breakfast burrito.”

  Julian let out a low chuckle. “Is that the first sentence or . . .”

  I laughed through my tears. “Why don’t I tell you the story and we can decide how to write it down?”

  “Deal.” He crossed his arms.

  And I smiled a real smile, one of the first ones in a long time as I told him how I met Noah and how I fell in love.

  And Julian listened like it mattered.

  Like he cared.

  Not the person I would have expected to be sitting across from me the minute I broke my silence on my grief.

  A rich playboy.

  W
ho refused to let me say no.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JULIAN

  There’s something extremely humbling about hearing someone list the attributes and talents of a person who seemingly had no faults.

  That was Noah to Keaton.

  The perfect man, best friend, confidant, all wrapped up into one shiny package.

  The guy had teased her relentlessly when they first met, stole her food when she was volunteering at the hospital, and then called her out for taking a selfie in the hallway. He told her that it wasn’t appropriate with the patients walking in the background.

  He’d been wearing Hawaiian board shorts and a shirt that said Wicked Cool.

  He always wore flip-flops.

  And he always smiled.

  He was exactly the opposite of who I imagined a girl like Keaton would date. I mean Hawaiian clothes and flip-flops versus a celeb on his private jet? I envisioned her with a celebrity or a male model, maybe even an athlete, not a Hawaiian-shorts-wearing self-proclaimed Star Wars nerd who had a burrito obsession and wasn’t afraid to call her out.

  I finished writing her first chapter. It wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t an author, but it was good enough for her to weed through when the time came. We’d finished over an hour ago, and all I kept thinking was that Noah had been a lucky bastard and where the hell do I get some Hawaiian shorts so she laughs with me like that?

  Her laughter was musical, and when she talked about him, her eyes lit up like shiny blue crystals. That man had earned every single laugh just like she earned every single tear she refused to shed. She held him up on this perfect pedestal, and I wondered what it would feel like to be talked about that way. The way she described Noah, the way I talked about my mom. What would people say about me? The thought was uncomfortable, to say the least. My father had done an excellent job of smearing my name all over even though most people knew it was his jealousy speaking. Bridge and I were doing better financially than he ever did, and he knew it.

  I needed to be alone with my thoughts, so I made an excuse about going outside to check for better cell reception.

  The snow still hadn’t melted, but at least the sun was out, and I wondered how long we would have to wait before we could leave and if it made me a selfish bastard to wish for just one more day, maybe two, where it was just us, no outside world.

  The business side of my brain was panicking that I wasn’t stressing over a quiet cell phone, but my soul for the first time in years felt settled. I had no idea if the feeling would follow me back into the city, but I highly doubted it.

  There was a reason we had a cabin, after all.

  Silence.

  Privacy.

  I looked down at my cell and waited for a bar to pop up. My signal wasn’t strong, but at least I had something. My fingers hesitated over the screen.

  What the hell was I thinking?

  A day ago, I was ready to pay her to leave, and now I was hesitating on calling for help? On finding another place to stay to gather all the fucked-up things in my head?

  Her head was fine, and her hands seemed to be healing, right?

  I cursed and slid my phone back into my pocket then jerked the cabin door open and stomped the snow off my boots. “No signal.” The lie fell easily from my lips.

  Keaton frowned at her own phone. “Me neither. Did it help going outside?”

  “No.” Damn, lying always came way too easy for me, didn’t it? Maybe that was the problem. In all of my efforts to please my dad, I’d also inherited some of his worst qualities, manipulation and lying being two of them.

  I was nothing like Noah.

  I would have destroyed him with one hard Wall Street glance and looked down at him for not owning a suit.

  Which just proved how wrong a man like me would be for Keaton, not that I was tempted.

  At all.

  She smiled up at me and grabbed the bottle of whiskey between her two wrapped hands. “You did promise me a shot if we finished a chapter.”

  I found myself smiling at her giddiness, which I sensed wasn’t just because of the promise of alcohol, but the fact that she’d started their story.

  “Why don’t I check on your hands first?” I offered.

  “Ah, so he’s an author and a doctor now?” she said, looking even more ridiculous with her wrapped hands on her hips than she probably realized.

  “He is.” I sighed and walked over to the leather couch. “Sit and I’ll unwrap the gauze and see how bad the damage is. Does it hurt?”

  Keaton chewed her bottom lip and held out her hands. “Not really. Is that a bad sign or a good sign?”

  “If I had Google I’d be able to tell you that.” I gently grasped her right hand. “But since I don’t, and because I never got my medical license but did something stupid like graduate with honors in business, I’m just going to have to guess.”

  “What every patient wants to hear. Truly,” Keaton muttered under her breath, and an answering smile crept over my face again.

  I quickly sobered when I got my first glimpse of the skin on her hands. Everything was still angry red, and she had small sores on her pinky as well as her thumb and forefinger.

  “I can’t look.” She squeezed her eyes shut while I rewrapped her right hand. “Are both hands bad?”

  I winced when I unwrapped her left hand. It had somehow taken the brunt of the damage. Every finger had an angry red sore on it, and they seemed swollen too.

  “Is your silence good or bad?” Her eyes were still shut.

  “It’s . . .” I quickly wrapped up her left hand. “It’s going to take a while to heal, that’s all.”

  “How am I supposed to do any normal human activity if I can’t even pick up stuff off the floor or take a shower or—” Her eyes went wide. “I can’t just go thirty days without washing my hair!”

  “Careful, your rich girl is showing,” I said in a singsong voice, earning a glare from her. “And we aren’t stuck here thirty days. A few days at most.”

  “Since I’m injured, that means I go back into the city and give you what you finally want.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What’s that?”

  “The cabin all to yourself.” She sounded defeated.

  “I’m not the one who fought with an elk and lived to tell about it. Think about all your Instagram stories!” I crossed my arms and searched her eyes. “Social media gold, right?”

  She wasn’t laughing.

  “Look . . .” My fingertips slid across the leather couch and pressed into her thigh. “Let’s just get through today, tomorrow will have its own worries.”

  She stared down at my hand and whispered, “He used to say that.”

  Of course the bastard did. “So you’re saying he was wise like me?”

  “Yeah, but you have him beat in arrogance.”

  “At least I’m winning at something.”

  “Is that winning, though?” She snorted out a laugh, and then pointed at the booze. “I want my prize now.”

  “Do you want me to just pour it into your gaping mouth since you can’t hold a shot glass very well?” I teased.

  “No, because with my luck you’d just keep pouring.” Her eyes narrowed.

  “What would be my purpose in getting you drunk?” I unscrewed the cap. “Besides, you seem to be one of those people who’d be chatty when drunk, who don’t shut up and decide everyone needs a hug, then after one more shot of tequila and two more rounds of karaoke decide they’re going to join the Peace Corps.” I sighed.

  “Wow.” Her lips spread into a thin smile. “That was both insulting and alarmingly detailed.”

  I lifted the bottle into the air. “I doubt I’m wrong.”

  She opened her mouth and tilted her head back. I studied her chin of all things. It was smooth just like the rest of her. Her snowy white skin was flawless, her lips plump enough to probably give life during a kiss, and yet her chin is what distracted me, maybe it was the angle or just the fact that she was teasing me. I liked it
.

  I liked her.

  And I realized I hadn’t had this feeling in a really long time.

  I, Julian Tennyson, had a fucking crush.

  I took a long drag of the whiskey, wiped my mouth, then quickly poured some into her mouth.

  She choked a solid minute before glaring at me with watery eyes and then kicking me in the shin.

  “What the hell!” I roared. “I gave you your shot!”

  “You didn’t even warn me! I couldn’t see you. I was tilting my head back then suddenly fire-burning whiskey from hell cascades down my throat like a lava waterfall!”

  I made a face. “Okay, first off, it was maybe half a shot, second, you looked prepared, third . . .” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “If you must know, I was distracted.”

  “By what?”

  “Your mouth was open, I was imagining—”

  “I will feed you to the elk outside if you finish that with what I think you were going to say!”

  I smirked and leaned in. “Dirty mind, rich girl. I was going to say I was imagining touching the skin just below your lips.”

  She squinted at me. “So you’re saying you have a chin fetish.”

  “A fetish would mean I have a thing with everyone’s chins, and I can honestly say I’ve never given them much notice, but I noticed yours, and your skin, and the way you look like you want to strangle me regardless of how much I’m already helping you.”

  She rolled her eyes. “It’s because I know guys like you, guys who rule the world one hospital donation at a time.”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat because, yes, I did do that. I donated so I didn’t feel guilty for not doing more.

  “Let me guess, shark in the boardroom, shakes hands at events, takes nice pictures, loves a good tailored suit, and sends food back when it’s cooked wrong.”

  I opened my mouth. Closed it. Then glared. “Okay, first off, if you’re paying for a good meal—”

  “I knew it!” She thrust one of her bandaged hands in my face. “I know your type, I used to date your type. If you tell me you order the most expensive wine on the menu we can no longer have a working relationship.” She crossed her arms while I lazily eyed her up and down then tilted my head back and took another swig.