Page 40 of Fearlessly Us

I grin at him. “You know me so well.”

He shakes his head. “Your Tom Clancy addiction is…disturbing.”

I scoff. “It’s better than your screwball comedy obsession. At least in my movies someone brilliant saves the world. Yours are just movies where men do stupid shit to make other men laugh, and there’s nothing brilliant about that.”

“Aw, look, Hal, the kids are arguing about whose movies are better, again.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CAITLIN

Jack and I both look over as my dad saunters out onto the porch, arm slung casually around my mom’s shoulders. I think, for the millionth time, how good they look together. How in love. In sync. How well they know each other. How my dad is always turned towards my mom, like she’s the sun, and he’s just happy to exist in her light.

He told me once he fell in love with her when they were eighteen and knew instantly she was it for him forever, even though he waited more than eleven years to tell her. Ben Parker is a family man right down to his core.

“We’re not arguing,” Jack and I say at the same time, and my dad grins.

“Sure, you aren’t. Happy to see your face, Cait,” he says, dropping down onto the swing on my other side and kissing my cheek, studying me like Jack did earlier. That same supportive, all-knowing gaze.

With his blond hair and piercing blue eyes wrinkled just slightly at the corners from years and years of smiling, my dad is the best person I know. He passed all his goodness straight down to Jack, another Pittsburgh boy happy to settle down in the city where we were raised and run the bar my dad started years ago with his best friend.

Everyone in my family is loud in their love for each other. I love them all, too, and I know they love me, but I can’t help but feel like I live on the outskirts sometimes, even among my people. Like I exist apart from them in a way I don’t entirely understand and don’t know how to change.

“You okay baby girl?” my dad asks, the intensity in his words making me wonder, not for the first time, if all the men in my family are a smidge psychic.

I shrug, jolting just a little as I feel my phone buzz in the pocket of the bag pressed to my side, my brain immediately leaping to Drew and what he might have said, and my fingers practically twitch with the urge to grab it. “I’m good.” I manage to keep my voice casual despite the fact that my heart is hammering from just the thought of Drew’s message. Who the fuck even am I? “It’s been a busy week. Work and everything.”

“You still working on Drew’s stuff?” my mom asks. His name sends a bolt of electricity straight through me, and I guess I’m now a person who can be affected just by hearing a freaking name. Apparently, I’m now also a person who doesn’t totally hate that, even as I try to school my expression into something that doesn’t say I kissed Drew Ellicott in my office and he saved me from practically dying in a hospital bathroom and I liked it.

Is there an expression to say that?

No one knows.

While my brain twists itself up into knots, my mom takes the spot next to my dad on the swing, but before she can sit, he tugs her down onto his lap, wrapping his arms around her waist. “Nu-uh, Hallie Girl, you sit with me,” he says, pressing a kiss to her temple as she settles back against him.

My parents have always been like this, and even though I grew up around couples who are wildly happy and crazy in love, I’ve always figured that kind of love wasn’t in my future. That there couldn’t possibly be a match out there for someone like me. But then I think about the night on my couch. The way Drew wanted to take care of me and I let him. The way I let him see things no one else ever has and the way he opened up to me too, and I wonder if maybe, one day, someone could love all the broken parts of me.

If maybe he could.

Too soon, Caitlin, I mentally chastise myself. Too fucking soon.

Besides, I’m maybe not done hating him just yet. Or maybe it’s just that I hate that I like him.

“Drew’s your client?” Jack asks. “What does he need? Is he okay?”

His fucking name again. Another jolt to the system.

I really need to get a goddamn grip.

“Hey, who moved the party out here?” Before I can answer Jack—or, rather, not answer him—my uncle, Noah Wyles, comes trotting out of the house. “Cait!” With a giant grin, he strides over and tugs me off the swing, wrapping me in a hug. “It’s been way too long, kiddo. We missed you.”

“Missed you too, Noah.” Pulling away, I look at him and can’t help but smile back. Noah has that effect on people. Married to my mom’s middle sister Hannah, he’s an oral surgeon and one of the most cheerful men on the planet, rivaled only by Tyler and Tyler’s dad Asher, golden retrievers all.

“Cait’s here?” My mom’s youngest sister, Jo, flies out of the house, followed by Hannah and Jordan, making a beeline for me. “Move it, Noah.” She elbows him out of the way and throws her arms around me, bouncing a little on her toes as she squeezes me tightly. “I can’t believe Jordan got to see you first!” When she finally lets me go, her smile is a mile wide. “I hate that for me.”

“Deal with it, Hurricane,” Jordan says with a grin, leaning down to kiss Jo and then hugging me. “It’s not my fault the hospital needed my brilliance, and Cait happened to be there to see a client at exactly the same time. Sometimes the universe wants me to beat you for a change.”

Hannah snorts, leaning over to hug me. “You sound like Cece.” Cece is Sarah and Emmy’s great-grandma in Boston—Jordan and Noah’s grandma—and even though I don’t actually believe in stuff like this, it’s possible she’s legitimately a witch. “You look amazing, Cait,” she says, kissing my cheek and stepping back with a smile.