The Summer Deal (Wildstone #5)(38)

While I’m in hell.

Eli likes girls even more than last year, and he’s having the time of his life. I hate him. I hate you, journal. And I hate life.

Kinsey

ELI GOT HOME from work and followed the most amazing scent of food into the kitchen. Max had lasagna going and was working on garlic bread while telling Kinsey she was cutting up the veggies for the salad all wrong.

“If I’m doing it wrong, then maybe you should do it yourself.”

“No, because you’re doing it wrong to get out of doing it,” Max said. “Do it the way I taught you, or no lasagna for you.”

Kinsey looked at Eli. “Your brother’s mean.”

Max laughed.

Eli didn’t even try to get in the middle of the two, who’d been bickering bickersons since the day they’d met years and years ago. He snagged a piece of the cucumber Kinsey was currently mangling. “Where’s Brynn? Usually the scent of something cooking lures her into the kitchen with the rest of us.”

“She’s not home yet,” Max said.

Eli looked at the time. Six o’clock. “She wouldn’t still be at school this late, would she?”

This got him a double shrug from the bickering bickersons. He headed to his room to change but stopped in the doorway of Brynn’s room.

Her duffel bag, which had sat on the chair since day one, was gone. The bed was neatly made, odd only because, though Brynn was a lot of really great things, a good bed-maker wasn’t one of them. In fact, there were none of the usual signs of her presence. No sneakers on the floor, no sweater tossed over the back of the chair.

Concerned, he stepped into the bathroom and found her things gone from there too. No toothbrush and toothpaste, no hairbrush, none of her lotions or makeup . . . nothing.

He went back to the kitchen and looked directly at Max. “She’s gone. Did you say something stupid again?”

“Dude,” Max said. “I swear to God I didn’t. I mean, okay, yeah, I might’ve checked out her ass because, well, you’ve seen it, right? But I swear I didn’t say anything or touch her. I’ve been a fucking angel.”

Eli looked at Kinsey, who was now cutting carrots with chef-like precision while remaining uncharacteristically quiet and sarcasm-free. “Kinsey.”

She stopped cutting. “Okay, maybe it had something to do with me.”

“What did you do?”

“I forgot my lunch box and asked her to bring it to me. She snooped and found my meds, and then we were in the share circle and she got upset with me.”

“Explain.”

“Turns out, she’s still mad at me for how I treated her at camp. I mean, talk about holding a grudge.”

“Aren’t you still mad at Kendall, that chick you used to be good friends with at work, because she made fun of how much you spend on shoes?” Max asked.

Kinsey flipped him the bird.

Eli didn’t take his eyes off Kinsey. “So you apologized for summer camp and told her why you were the way you were, and also that you two share a sperm donor for a father. Right?”

“Wrong,” Kinsey said.

“Us guys are always the ones in the wrong,” Max said.

Eli glared at him and his brother held up his hands in surrender.

Brynn was gone. And he wasn’t quite ready to examine why he was so bugged by that fact. Or why he felt every bit as protective over her as he did about Kinsey, albeit in a very different way. He loved Kinsey like a sister.

Nothing he felt for Brynn was sister-like.

Kinsey was back to cutting carrots. She now had a pile of them in front of her that would take them a week to eat, a rare tell from her, and he felt anger bubble up. “Let me get this straight. You had the opportunity to tell her everything and you didn’t.”

“Don’t.” Kinsey pointed at him with her knife. “You weren’t there. And anyway, what did you expect me to do? Tell her that my dad’s a dick who, by the way, cheated on my mom and donated sperm for cash, which makes us sisters? That in spite of what it might look like, no worries, I’m not telling her now so that she’ll give me a kidney? Come on, Eli. She’s not going to buy any of that. Plus, it’s sort of frowned upon to discuss that sort of thing in front of children. ‘Sperm’ isn’t exactly on the spelling list.”

“Wait, you think Brynn’s gone gone?” Max asked, sounding disappointed. “As in not coming back?”

“Would you?” Kinsey asked.

“Hell no,” Max said. “You’re scary as fuck.”

Eli took the knife from Kinsey’s hand before someone got stabbed with it. Like Max. And then he waited until she met his gaze. “You messed this up because you’re afraid to get close to her.”

Her eyes went shiny. “That wouldn’t make me a very good person.”

He let out a breath. “You are a good person. You’re one of the best people I know. You’re just afraid to love even one more person, because you think you’re a walking expiration date, and you don’t want anyone to hurt other than you. Fix this, Kinsey. Fix it for yourself.”

“I can’t,” she whispered.

“Why?”

“Hi, have you met me?”

He looked at her. She looked at him right back, letting him see what she rarely let anyone else see. Regrets. Sadness. Fear. It was the last that squeezed his damn heart and had him shaking his head. Because he knew she wouldn’t make a move toward fixing things with Brynn. He could tell she felt . . . frozen, like it’d been her who’d put a decision-making moratorium on herself, and not Brynn—who appeared to be making decisions just fine.