Always Have: A Bad Boy Romance(5)

“Yeah,” Kylie says, as she types. “We had fun. And he was definitely f*ckable. I’ll see where this goes.”

Hearing her say f*ckable makes my back clench and I almost drop my fork. I hate this guy already. I don’t know who he is, but I’d like to smash his face in right now.

She puts her phone away, still smiling. “Awesome. Now I’m excited for Friday.”

“Hey, if you guys hit it off, we should triple date,” Selene says. “Maybe in a couple weeks?”

“Triple date?” I ask, raising an eyebrow. “Who the f*ck is the triple? Because, hey, single again.”

“Whatever, Brax,” Selene says. “Like you won’t be screwing some girl by then.”

I shrug my shoulders. I guess she’s probably right.

We finish our dinners, Kylie and I taking bites from each other’s plates. I ask if they want to go out for a drink, but they both have to work in the morning, so we part ways outside. Kylie drove, so I watch until I see her get in her car.

Selene gets a call from Nathan and she waves at me absently as she walks away. I’d walk her home, but she only lives a few blocks away, and it annoys her when I try to do stuff like that. She says I’m overprotective, but that’s total bullshit. She’s my sister. There’s no such thing as overprotective when it comes to her.

I’m restless and I don’t feel like going home, so I round the corner and pop into a bar. Kevin, the bartender, knows me, and he tips his head when I walk in.

My gaze immediately lands on the group of women sitting at a table on the far side. I’ll bet a thousand dollars it’s an anti-Valentine’s Day outing. Group of single girls, showing their we don’t need men solidarity by going out drinking on this bullshit holiday.

They might think they don’t need men, but one of them is coming home with me.

I sit down at the bar and order a beer, but angle myself so I can watch them. I don’t bother to hide that I’m checking them out. Three of the four are hot enough to take home, but one in particular catches my eye. Long legs, straight hair, full lips. She’s exactly the type of girl I usually go after: tall, blond, nice boobs. It’s an easy sell for me. You might think that’s my type, but the truth is, it isn’t. But it is the type I go for to get my mind off my real type.

Because my real type—the woman I want more than anything—I can’t have. She’s my best friend. And she’s always been off limits.

I fell for Kylie, hard, when we were teenagers. Fuck, it was before that, but at ten or eleven years old I hardly knew what the feeling was. I knew I loved it when she came over. I found out where my Aunt Cindy kept her day planner, and I’d sneak it to look for the appointments with Mr. Winters, our family lawyer. If Mr. Winters was coming over, that meant he’d bring Kylie. He always did.

I’d wait for her at the top of the staircase like a f*cking puppy. She’d walk in the door and the world would get a little brighter. The pain of losing my parents wasn’t quite so bad when she was around. It was the only time I was really happy.

By the time we were teenagers, the three of us still hung out all the time, although we went to different schools. I watched her developing body with keen interest and a fair amount of confusion as to what was happening to mine when I thought of her. And that’s when it started—the shitty timing. She came over one day and pulled Selene aside, the two of them talking in excited whispers.

Kylie had a boyfriend. He’d kissed her on the mouth. With tongues. I pretended I didn’t care, that it didn’t cut through me like a f*cking butcher knife. I made a joke about the size of her new boyfriend’s dick, and she was mad at me for weeks. So I never commented on her boyfriends again.

Relationships came and went, for both of us. I started dating girls; they weren’t her, so nothing lasted. I got a reputation as a player, and I went with it. Might as well. It’s all part of the facade, the mask I wear to be the man the two women in my life need me to be. Selene needs me to be her strong guy, her rock, her protector. So I am. Kylie needs me to be her friend. So that’s what I am for her. And if that’s all I ever get to be, then I’ll take it and consider myself f*cking lucky. Because being her friend is a hell of a lot better than not having her in my life at all.

That’s what I tell myself, at least.

But as time goes on, it’s getting harder to keep it inside. I love every second I get to spend with her, but at the same time, it’s torture. I’ve watched her date *s who don’t appreciate her, and some who almost do—and those are the ones who scare the f*ck out of me. We’re both nearing thirty, and one of these days, she’s going to meet the guy who will capture her heart and take her from me forever.

I have no idea what to do about that.

I don’t interfere with her relationships. Just a text asking for a date, like the one she got at dinner tonight, is enough to send me retreating back behind my protective wall. I live behind that wall, never letting the world see the man I am inside. It’s tall and thick as f*ck, built of hard stone and painful loss. I’m the man my girls need me to be. Nothing more.

So instead, I look for happiness, or some version of it, and usually just find a lot of empty sex that makes me feel like shit when it’s over. I don’t talk to my girls about that either. They see what I want them to see—the big, confident * who can turn any woman into water in the blink of an eye. And I am that guy. He isn’t an act or a lie. But he’s not all of me.