Lights glowed from the windows of the house behind me. Two stories were lit up like a torch, casting the beach in darkness.
I inched down the smooth sand where the tide had been pulled out to sea. I wanted to shout and rant and rave about how fucking unfair this world was.
Always stealing the good.
Blotting out the beauty and light when the vile was allowed to run rampant.
I stretched my arms out to my sides and let his presence crawl over me.
Julian.
He was always there, waiting for me.
I closed my eyes and let the unending regret consume me.
I froze when I sensed the presence behind me, and I slowly turned to find the lone figure hugging his knees to his chest. He was hunched over, obscured from the stretch of lights from the house where he sat at the base of a dune.
Lost to the dark.
“Austin,” I whispered. The sound was eaten up by the wind. I edged toward him, somehow cautious, hating the fact I’d had little time to take care of my baby brother over the last couple of days.
In the texts I shared with Lyrik after what had gone down with the paparazzi and those fucking repulsive pictures, he promised everything was cool. Said they had Austin covered.
Yeah, the guys were family.
But I wasn’t sure that could make up for my absence.
Only I could understand what kind of brutal blow the incident here on the beach with Kallie had been to Austin.
The memories it’d evoked.
He was back to covering his head with that goddamned hoodie.
Fuck, I hated it. Hated that he continued to hide from the past just the same as he allowed it to eat him alive.
I had the urge to shake him.
To tell him again it was not your fault.
I didn’t. Instead, I slumped down beside him. I pushed out a breath and scrubbed a hand down my face.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, digging his fingers into the sand where they dangled between his knees.
I gazed out over the sea. “You know when you think things are finally coming together…that you know you’ve finally touched on something good? Hurts that much worse when it’s ripped from your fingers.”
Eyes peered intently at me from the side.
“Knew I was going to bring her down, Austin. The first night I saw her?”
My heart sped with the memory—the energy that’d surrounded her—the need to get lost in all her sweet and soft enough to make me lose my mind.
He just watched, waiting for me to explain.
“Thought she had to be the most gorgeous girl I’d ever seen. There was something about her I couldn’t shake…not a damn thing I could do to stay away from her, even though I knew when I went back to that bar I was gonna end up hurting her.”
Confusion wound through his tone. “Thought you two had it all worked out? That’s why we came back here, right?”
I raked the back of my hand over my mouth, unable to contain the bitterness breaking free. “I’ve been fooling myself it ever could. Since we came back from L.A., I thought if I let all those walls down…let her in…everything would be okay. That somehow we could make it when my life was nothin’ but a disaster. But these last two days? It was like they were a warning I couldn’t keep up the charade and everything was going to fall apart. That I was still pretending.”
I blew a strained breath toward the sky, before I cut my attention to my baby brother. “She lied to me, Austin. Kallie’s father isn’t dead. Martin Jennings is her father.”
Quickly, I filled him in on the events of the night, every wicked word bleeding from my mouth.
With each one, Austin’s distress seemed to increase. He jumped to his feet and gripped his shaggy brown hair. “What? Shea is Delaney Rhoads?”
I was surprised he even knew the name, considering he would have only been thirteen when Kallie was born.
He paced the sand, back and forth in front of me, like a partner to the wind. More upset than I ever expected him to be.