“Or maybe it happened before I even saw you again,” he said, appearing to be talking to himself, but that statement didn’t make any sense. His eyes opened and shone like polished obsidian. “Maybe it was seeing you finally relax and laugh the night we went out with your friends. It could’ve been falling asleep with you lying against me. Hell, what we did that night had a lot to do it with it.”
My gaze searched his tense, strained features.
“It could’ve been all those minutes and more, but I knew that morning, when I woke up and found you hiding in the bathroom, that I wanted you. And there wasn’t a damn day that went by that I didn’t think of you, Jillian. I should’ve told you that the first night I saw you.”
Air halted in my lungs.
“I always wondered about you, about what you were doing, how things were going for you . . .” His eyes opened and they were dark. “I wondered if you found someone. And I asked about you—I asked often.”
“What?” I breathed.
“Your mom . . . she kept me, well, informed. You didn’t know that?”
I hadn’t. A burst of anger lit up my chest, because Mom really shouldn’t have been keeping Brock up to date on my life, especially without telling me.
“I knew when you dropped out of college. I knew when you got the job at the insurance firm,” he explained, and my lips parted on a sharp inhale. “I knew when you started dating someone. I also knew you never brought him home to meet your parents, so I knew it couldn’t be that serious.”
Holy crap.
Thunderstruck, the anger gave way to surprise. “Why didn’t she say anything to me?”
“I asked her not to. I was . . . I was sure you wouldn’t want me to know any of those things. You had made it clear the last time we had talked that you didn’t want me in your life.”
A twinge of regret blossomed in my chest. It had been that last holiday I spent with him and my family. “You . . . you brought her to the house.”
I think that was what broke me the most about Brock back then. The girl he’d been flirting with, the girl he’d ditched me for, wasn’t just some one-night stand who was forgotten the moment he walked out. It was the girl he ended up getting involved with. It was the girl he finally settled down for. It was the girl he proposed to.
He turned his head slightly, looking away as if he couldn’t go eye to eye with me. “I wasn’t thinking.”
A knot formed in my throat as that night came rushing back. It had been the Christmas after everything had happened and Brock had come to Christmas dinner. He hadn’t come alone. Roughly four months after he’d broken my heart and my life had literally imploded, he’d brought Kristen to my family dinner, and I . . . I’d lost it.
Face still practically a wreck and healing, my mental state nowhere near stable, I’d come downstairs for one of the rare times to join my family, and I could still remember it like yesterday.
I’d made my way into the large dining room, my weary gaze tracking over the familiar faces, and I’d seen Brock first. He’d been staring at the door, and for a moment, I thought maybe he’d been waiting for me, looking for me. Although he had dealt a death blow to my emotions that night at Mona’s, tiny seedlings of hope had formed in the weeks afterward during his visits.
But then I’d seen who he stood next to, and seeing her, knowing that he brought her to the dinner, meant she was important to him. No one-night stand. No drunken hookup. He’d never, ever, brought a girl to my parents’ house.
Kristen was his girlfriend. Not me. Never me.
I’d pivoted right around and went back upstairs, managing not to flip my shit in front of my entire family. It hadn’t mattered, though. They all knew. And that mortification and raw hurt from the night at Mona’s had resurfaced in a messy explosion of emotion.
Brock had come after me like he had a hundred times before then, like he hadn’t the night at Mona’s.
He’d come to my bedroom, and I’d yelled at him. I was pretty sure I called him a “selfish, conceited whore” at one point and I’d told him that I never wanted to see him again. I’d said other things, terrible things, and I could still see his face and the shock that had been etched into his features. The pain I didn’t want to see, and especially the guilt I didn’t want to acknowledge.
It was like almost dying all over again, but looking back, I knew it hadn’t been all his fault. He shouldn’t have had to live his life worrying about hurting the kind of feelings I had for him. It wasn’t fair to him, and that had taken a whole lot of soul searching to realize—painful, brutal soul searching.
His thumb massaged my pulse, tugging me out of the past. “Jillian?”
“I’d . . . I’d overreacted. I mean, I was . . . fuck,” I said, letting it all out. “I was jealous. I was so jealous, Brock, because I wanted to be her. I’d lo—” I cut myself off as tiny bundles of nerves formed in my stomach. I pulled so his hand was no longer touching my throat. “I just wasn’t in a good place.”
“Don’t take the blame for this,” he told me.
“I’m not. Well, I’m taking partial blame for the . . . the fuckery known as us.” Desperately needing space to think about this clearly, I slipped out of his hold and off his lap. Standing, I thrust the hair back from my face and moved until the back of my legs touched the coffee table. “I was young and—”
“And I didn’t want to see what was right in front of my face.” He scooted to the edge of the couch and stared up at me. “I just wanted you to think of me like you would a brother.”