Page 194 of Off Limits: The Firsts

“Yes, you do.”

My guard is up, my defiance front and center. “Name someone.”

“Chad.”

“What-the-hell-ever. Next.”

“I’m being serious. You were fine with Chad—content with him—because you didn’t feel anything for him. He was safe. He allowed you the appearance of having someone without you having to get emotionally involved.” She picks up a trinket on the corner of my desk—a hockey puck given to me from a client a long time ago—and weighs it in her hand. “Chad is the latest casualty. Before him that software salesman who wore his pants too tight—”

“Come on. He wasn’t that bad.” She eyes me until we both start laughing and I nod. “Yes, I guess he was . . . but his pants were too tight for a reason,” I say to try and get the focus off me.

“At least he had that going for him,” she says and shakes her head. “And before him was the baseball player. Then Gene Harsket. I never understood what you saw in him.”

“Brex—”

“No, I need you to hear me. To listen to me. I need you to see that you make a habit of being emotionally unavailable because you refuse to put yourself out there. You refuse to be hurt.”

I open my mouth and close it, because it hits me how very right she is. And then to make matters worse, why can she see that when I can’t?

“Look.” She waits until I meet her eyes, and then it’s a struggle for me to keep them there. But I do, and she continues. “It’s okay to have feelings, Dekker. Mom died, and we all retreated into ourselves. It’s natural to pull away and not want to be hurt when the last time you really loved something, you were devastated.”

I clear my throat and rise from my chair, needing to abate the restlessness her words cause me.

“You’re making me think I failed at this big sister thing. You’re the one giving advice.”

Brexton steps up beside me but we both stare at the streets below for a few seconds. “That’s the thing, Dekker. We love that you’re our big sister, but you became our mom and in doing that, you never allowed yourself to grieve. You never allowed yourself to rage. We did, and you were too busy holding us together to be able to do it yourself . . . so of course any kind of attachment scares you.”

“I grieved.”

“Sure,” she says. It’s her way of telling me she doesn’t believe me.

“I did. I raged and screamed but I had to do it in a pillow so you guys wouldn’t hear me.” The wave of memories hits me. The loneliness. The fury. The unknown. The sadness.

“Okay, then why don’t you let yourself love?”

I laugh despite the tears welling in my eyes. “Grieving for Mom and falling in love with someone are not mutually exclusive.”

Her arm goes around my shoulder. “It never went away, did it?” she asks again.

I blink away the tears, but one escapes down my cheek as I think of how heartbroken I was three years ago when I walked away from Hunter, and how similarly I felt this time with his nonchalance and nod. “The first time, he didn’t ask why the abruptness of it all. Why we went from seeing each other as much as we could to nothing.”

“Maybe because he had feelings for you and felt scared about them too. If you bailed that easily, why is it hard for you to believe that he could do the same? If you’re afraid of love, why is it unfathomable that maybe he’s afraid of it for other reasons?”

I lean my head on her shoulder and breathe deeply, hearing her words but not wanting to believe them.

“What happened this time, Dekk?”

I let the silence settle as I struggle with telling her the truth. Their problems are my problems but my problems are no one’s problems. So, I usually keep everything close to the vest.

“What happened this time?” I repeat. “He’s like kryptonite to me.” I give a self-deprecating laugh. “There’s something going on with him he won’t talk about, and of course, I want to try and fix it.”

“No surprise there.”

“No, I mean . . . I went there to do my job as an agent—what Dad asked—but when I saw him, I knew he was wrestling with something.” I continue to explain his acting out, his hot and cold, his being completely burned out and finally admitting it.

“So you slept with him.”

“Mm-hmm.”