Draw (Gentry Boys #1)(16)

“You never told me,” he finally said in a mild tone. “What you majored in.”

I exhaled, feeling calmer. “No, I didn’t. English. Creative writing.”

“Yeah,” he said with a slow smile. “I remember that about you. You were always scribbling in notebooks and shit.”

“And shit,” I agreed.

The knock on the door was jarring. I suppose I was still a little uptight because I jumped half a foot in the air.

“Come in,” Cord called. “It’s open.”

After all these hours riddled with pain, anger and uncertainty I hadn’t shed a tear. But the sight of my cousin’s face crumbling when he saw me sitting there with a swollen jaw caused me to burst into wracking sobs.

“Brayden,” I cried, jumping up. As I felt his warm arms around me I was home. We’d been born two weeks apart and had always been an inseparable set. Say and Bray. He was the protective brother I never had, the only true friend I ever needed.

“I’ll kill that mother f*cker,” he swore. As I pulled back and looked into his eyes I saw that he meant it.

I hadn’t fully realized how much I’d missed my cousin until he was right in front of me. He was the same he’d always been; wiry and slight with huge green eyes behind thick glasses.

“I’ll be fine, Bray.” The tears fell unchecked. “God, I should have listened to you.”

He hugged me again, patting my back as if he were a comforting parent. “It’s all right now. It’s over. It is over, right Say?”

“It’s over,” I confirmed. “I’m not going back to him.”

The flash of white material in the background caught my attention and I looked at someone I recognized from pictures.

Millie smiled at me. “Hi, Saylor,” she said as if we were long acquaintances who were simply meeting again. She had the glossiest black hair I’d ever seen and the warmth of her character was written all over her face. She reached for my hands and I took them gently.

“Nice to meet you, Millie. You’re even prettier in person.” I touched my face self-consciously. “Bet you wish you could say the same about me.”

Millie smiled and then looked carefully at my face, the smile disappearing. She touched my cheek with a maternal kind of tenderness. “At least you got out,” she said quietly.

“Yeah. Took me longer than it should have, but yeah.”

Brayden had begun to look around the Gentrys’ living room. I didn’t know what Cord had or hadn’t said in his note but it seemed to finally occur to him that it was startling to find me here. I could see him noting my makeshift bed on the couch and he looked at Cord with a question in his eyes.

For his part, Cord had retreated to the kitchen and was talking quietly to Creed. He noticed Brayden’s confusion and stepped up.

“I ran into Saylor last night when she was looking for you.” He shrugged. “It was late. She crashed here on the couch.”

“I was in sorry shape,” I told my cousin. “It was actually pretty cool of Cord to look out for me.”

Brayden was visibly surprised by this piece of information. I could hardly fault him for the shock. It was still a little unsettling even to me. Yesterday I couldn’t have imagined spending ten minutes in any room belonging to Cord Gentry. Once, when I was mildly drunk and feeling particularly dramatic, I had described him as ‘the nemesis of my formative years.”

The former nemesis was staring at me from several feet away. I found myself wondering what was going on behind his blue eyes then shook the thought away, figuring I might not want to know after all.

My cousin had apparently decided to take it all in stride. He slapped Cord affectionately on the shoulder and I remembered that they had actually already made peace before I showed up.

I cleared my throat and took Brayden’s arm. “Anyway, cuz, it seems I’m quite homeless right now. I can’t imagine going back to Emblem and being that-“

“Stop,” he raised his hand. “Just stop it, Saylor. Of course you’re going to stay with us.” He hugged me and again I felt the blissful relief of being with family.

“You might want to ask Millie,” I whispered.

Millie came around and squeezed my waist. “Millie says she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Brayden grinned at her and she winked, pulling me away a little. She had the slightest of accents and I wondered where she was from. “You, my dear, are the most prominent fixture in Bray’s recollection of his tortured youth in the scorching dungeon of a small town. It was all ‘Me and Saylor, Saylor and Me.’” Her laughter was like the peal of a silver bell. “I can’t believe it’s taken so long for us to meet.”

“Yeah, well,” I blushed. “I was lucky. He’s always been there for me, as much as any brother could have been.”

She squeezed my arm with affection. “Well, I’m glad you’re here, although I wish the circumstances were different.”

My mood darkened as I thought of Devin back there in California. I wondered what he would do with the rest of my things. I had the uneasy feeling I hadn’t heard the last of him.

Chase wandered in just then wearing nothing but a towel and the ink on his chest, similar to Cord’s. He stretched, smiling at everyone.