Damaged Like Us (Like Us #1)(4)

Somewhere around my sixteenth birthday, I started crushing on him. Maybe it’s because he never just gives me the win. Maybe it’s that he’s five years older and a Yale graduate.

Or that he does thirty pull-ups like it’s a damn breeze. Maybe it’s all the gray and black tattoos that cover his fair skin, even to his throat. Beautiful inked symmetric wings decorate his neck, crossed swords on his Adam’s apple.

Maybe it’s his four visible piercings: a hoop on his nostril, bottom lip, and two barbells on his brow.

Maybe it’s all of that combined together that heats my skin, pools blood south, and attracts me like an idiot. He’s made permanent camp in my cerebral cortex and cock, and I don’t know how to extract him.

The crush was fine when I was teenager, where I was secretly fantasizing about the hot older guy’s lips around my dick. I always knew he was gay, and at eighteen, I told the world I was bisexual. Afterwards I thought there’d be a chance Farrow would look at me with interest.

He didn’t.

Then he became my mom’s bodyguard. Exactly three years ago.

Whatever attraction I had towards him became more ethically wrong than it already was. I remind myself that he knows nothing. I’ve only told my best friend Jane about my crush and lapse in judgment. And she wouldn’t tell a soul.

Farrow enters the store’s doorway and takes a big bite of a red apple.

And then his brown eyes latch onto my forest-green. Instantly, he has a knowing look.

I attribute it to him being a know-it-all. I must wear my slight irritation because his lips hike upward as he chews and swallows his fruit.

I swig my orange juice before saying, “Look what the wind threw up.” I set down my glass.

Farrow raises his apple to his mouth. “You mean blew in.”

“No,” I say firmly, palms on the pearly counter. “I meant threw up.”

He rolls his eyes into a humored smile that slowly stretches wider and wider. Then he kicks the door closed. And he locks it shut with his spare key.

I go rigid. “Where’s my mom?”

Akara finally pockets his cellphone. The one he’s been super-glued to since we arrived here. “Lily’s bodyguard transfer went through this morning.”

Transfer.

Which means…my brain fries, jaw sharpens and breath heavies as I watch Farrow near the vinyl stools, his stride masculine and unconcerned. A kind of confident gait that belongs to people who understand themselves from the core outwards.

Closer, he rests his knee on the stool beside Akara. And he tells me, “I’m your new bodyguard.”

I inhale, staying outwardly composed, but my pulse rages at an abnormal speed. Farrow Redford Keene is my new bodyguard.

I have trouble adding him to my life that way. It’s why I’m eerily silent and mentally trying to block out how complicated this’ll make everything.

Farrow stares me dead in the eye. “Excited?” he asks with a peeking smile, like he knows I wouldn’t be.

Excited that my old crush is going to be a permanent companion to my whole life? And we’re ethically bound to remain platonic.

I would choose the words: sexually frustrated and fucking complicated. But let’s go with excited. It’ll cause the least amount of friction right now.

“That’s one word for it,” I say and finish off the rest of my drink in one gulp. “What’s the actual reasoning behind this?” I gesture at Farrow with my empty glass. The whole security team has good intentions, and I understand that a lot weighs into bodyguard switches.

I can’t just demand someone new like an entitled bastard. All the bodyguards work together, and they’re people. Not plastic action figures. I respect them enough to trust their choices.

And it’s not like they knew I used to picture Farrow on his knees.

It’s not like they’ll ever know that.

“The usual,” Akara says, “we take into account the location of where you live.” A townhouse in Philly. “Your lifestyle.” On-the-go. “Other security variables, and then we match you.”

“So it’s Bodyguard Grindr without the sex,” I quip and try to ignore Farrow, but my eyes involuntarily flit to him.

Farrow raises his brows at me in a self-satisfied wave.

I want to groan and smile. My features, I’m sure, teeter between the two.

“We’re not going to promote it like that, but sure…basically,” Akara says.

“Basically,” Farrow interjects, “Lily wanted me to be your bodyguard.” Lily is my mom.

Akara zeroes in on Farrow with an intense but padlocked look. I can only assume that Farrow wasn’t supposed to give me that much information.

He even adds, “Word-for-word, she said, Farrow is the best.”

“Bullshit,” I tell him. “My mom would cross her heart and hope to die before saying anyone was better than Garth.” Her first ever bodyguard. I’d never seen her so emotional over anyone’s departure than when he retired.

Farrow rotates his apple for another spot to bite. “Then she broke a kindergarten oath for me.” His matter-of-fact voice is deep and rough, but audibly sensual. Like gravel tied in silk.

My muscles heat from head-to-toe. “Wow,” I say, my tone too tight. My head is somewhere else entirely. On this situation.