"You're hardly a child."
"But I'm still a problem," Sean said. "Always have been to you."
"Bullshit," Finn said. "Get your head out of your own ass and stop feeling sorry for yourself. Now what the hell's the emergency?"
Sean paused. "It was more of a pub thing," he said vaguely, no longer meeting Finn's gaze.
And a very bad feeling crept into Finn's gut. "What did you do?"
"It's more what I didn't do . . ."
"Spit it out, Sean."
"Okay, okay. But before you blow a gasket, you should know. It's not as bad as the time I nearly burnt the place down by accident. Let's keep it in perspective, all right?"
"Accident?" Finn asked. "You opened the place after hours to have a party with your idiot friends and were lighting Jell-O shots when you managed to catch the kitchen on fire. How exactly is that an accident?"
"Well, who knew that Jell-O was so flammable?"
Finn stared at him, at an utter loss. "This is a fucking joke to you, all of it."
"No, it's not."
"Yes, it is. You think I'm just the asshole making you toe the line. I'm trying to give you a life here, Sean, a way to make a living and take care of yourself in case something happens to me."
Sean laughed. Laughed. The sound harsh in the quiet room. "You're not dad, Finn. I don't need you to give me a life. I can do that for myself. Contrary to popular belief, I can take care of myself."
"Because you've done a great job of it so far?" Finn asked.
"Fuck you," Sean said and walked out.
"What's the damn emergency?" Finn yelled after him.
But Sean was gone.
This left Finn in charge of the place for the night instead of getting to go back up to 3B where he'd left his mind, and maybe a good chunk of his heart as well.
The next morning was Sunday and despite it being a weekend, Finn was back at the pub. He was working his way through some of the never-ending paperwork that seemed to multiply daily when Sean appeared.
"Where have you been?" Finn asked, hating himself for sounding like a nagging grandma.
Sean ran his hand over his bedhead hair. "Slept on the roof."
Finn shook his head. "Bet you froze your nuts off."
"Just about." Sean paused. "I shouldn't have walked away last night. I'm sorry for that."
"Just tell me the damn emergency already," Finn said.
Sean's jaw went tight, a muscle ticking. A very unusual sight, and a tell that he was actually feeling stressed, something Finn hadn't known his brother could even feel.
Sean pulled two envelopes from his back pocket. "You know how I said I wanted to help you with the business side of things and you said I had to start at the bottom, and I said like the mail room? And you said we don't have a mail room, but yes a little bit like that?"
"It was a joke," Finn said. "Because you think you just jump in but there's a learning curve. So I suggested you start by handling our mail and our accounts payable. And you agreed as long as I didn't come along behind you to check up on you."
"Didn't need dad in the house looking over my shoulder," Sean said.
"Actually, if I'd been dad, I'd have used my fists, or whatever else was handy and just beat the shit out of you," Finn said. "Or have you forgotten?"
Temper flashed in Sean's eyes. Temper, and something else that he got a hold of before Finn could. He didn't speak for a moment, which was rare for Sean. He just stood there, fists clenched at his side, working his jaw muscles. "Fuck it. Fuck this," he finally said and started to turn away but stopped. "No, you know what? Fuck you. Sideways."
"Mature."
But Sean wasn't playing. He shoved a finger in Finn's face. "You think I've forgotten which one of us dad got off on beating up? You think I don't remember at night when I close my eyes that you took it for me, every single time? That I don't know you made sure you were between him and me so I'd be safe? That I survived only because of you? That I'm still surviving because of you? You think I don't know that I'm a fuckup who's only here with a semblance of a normal life because you gave it to me?"
Okay, so the something else in Sean's gaze had been grief and remembered horror. And Finn shouldn't have tried to be glib about it, there was nothing glib about how they'd grown up. "I didn't mean to take this there," he said quietly. "You're not a-"
"I forgot to pay our liquor license." Sean's face was hard. Blank. "I forgot and it was due today."
Finn stared at him. "That was the one thing I reminded you of two months ago when you took on the bills."
"The envelope fell behind my desk and got lost. And it wasn't alone. The property tax on the house was back there too and that one's now past due."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Do I look like I'm kidding?" Sean inhaled a deep breath, spread out his arms and shook his head. "See? You were right. I really am just a fuckup. You should demote me back to-"
"What? Sweep boy?" Finn found his own temper. And hell if he was going to let Sean default to his favorite thing-self-destruction, just because it was easier than growing up. "You wanted to do this, Sean. You wanted in. And now you're telling me what, things are too hard, you're too busy having fun that you can't get your head out of your ass and grow up?"
Sean's eyes narrowed. "Guess so."
Finn stared at him waiting for regret, for an apology, for any-fucking-thing, but nothing came. Just Sean's hooded gaze, body braced for a fight, all sullen 'tude. Finn shook his head. "Fine. You win."
"What does that mean?"
"It means I need some air," Finn said and walked out the door to the courtyard.
It was late morning and unusually warm. Summer was in full swing, which in San Francisco usually meant a sweatshirt sixty-five-ish and fingers crossed for a hope to get into the seventies.
But now, in direct opposition to his mood, it was sunny and warm, and it didn't suit him in the least.
He had no idea where he'd intended to go, only knowing he was going somewhere, needing to vent the ugly inside him, the ugly his dad had bequeathed him.
The gym maybe. He'd go punch the shit out of a bag at the gym.
But to do that, he'd have to walk past Pru standing there watching him, a look on her face that told him she'd heard everything.
Chapter 17.
#ThereAren'tEnoughCookiesForThis Pru stared into Finn's face, wishing like hell she could go back and vanish before he caught sight of her, or barring that, at least do something to ease the pain and anger in his eyes.
"Did you get all of that or do you need me to repeat some of it?" he asked.
"I didn't mean to get any of it," she said. "It was an accidental eavesdrop."
He blew out a sigh, shook his head, and stared over her head at the fountain.
Regret slashed through her. She'd been caught eavesdropping many times, all of them accidental. Once when she'd been young, she'd caught her parents going at it on the dining room table with gusto. It'd been ten o'clock at night and she'd been fast asleep only to wake up thirsty. Not wanting to disturb her parents, she'd made her own way to the kitchen.
At first glance she'd smiled because she'd thought that her dad was tickling her mom. Her mom had loved it when he'd done that, and they'd touched often.
But she'd never seen naked tickling before . . .
Later when Pru had been a teenager, she'd come home from school to find her parents at the table with their neighbor, Mr. Snyder, who was also their accountant, talking about something called bankruptcy. Her mom had been crying, her dad looking shell-shocked.
And then there'd been the night her grandpa had shown up where she'd been spending the night at a friend's. Weird, since she'd called her mom and dad for a ride, not her grandpa. She'd wanted to go home because her friends had decided to sneak in some boys and she hadn't felt comfortable with the attention she'd been getting from one of them. He'd been in her math class, and was always leaning over her shoulder pretending to stare at her work when he was really just staring at her breasts.
The other reason it'd been weird for her grandpa to show up was because she hadn't seen him in years. Not since he and her dad had been estranged for reasons she'd never known. And her dad and her grandpa being estranged meant that Pru was estranged by default.
So why was he at her friend's house?
The night had gone on to become a real-life nightmare, the kind you never woke up from because she'd listened to her grandpa explain to her friend's mom that he'd come to tell his granddaughter that her parents were dead, that her father had been past the legal drinking limit. He'd crossed the center median in the road and had hit another car head on, clipping a second along with the people on the sidewalk.
Pru did her best not to think about that moment, but it crept in at the most unexpected times. Like when she was in the mall and passed by a department store in front of the perfume aisle and caught a whiff of the scent her mom had always worn. Or when sometimes late at night if there was a storm and she got unnerved, she'd wish for her dad to come into her room like he always had, sit on the bed and pull her into his arms and sing silly made-up songs at the top of his lungs to drown out the wind.
Nope . . . eavesdropping had never worked out for her. And when she'd heard Sean and Finn yelling at each other through Finn's open office window, she honestly hadn't meant to listen in. Now she couldn't un-hear what she'd heard. What she could do was be there for them. Because this whole thing, their fight, their being parentless, Finn having to raise Sean, all of it, was her family's doing. She swallowed hard. "I'm sorry, Finn."
He just shook his head, clearly still pissed off. "Not your fault."
Maybe not directly but she felt guilty all the same. But telling him the truth now when he was already lit up with temper wouldn't help him. It would hurt him.
And that's the last thing she'd ever do.
At her silence, he focused in on her. "How are you doing, are you-"
"Totally fine," she said. "The road rash is healing up already."
Something in his eyes lit with amusement. "Good, but this time I actually meant from when we-"
"That's fine too," she said quickly and huffed out a sigh when he laughed. She looked around for a distraction and saw a couple of women talking about throwing some coins into the fountain. Pru nodded her head over there. "You know about the legend?"
"Of course. That myth brings us more foot traffic than our daily specials."
"You ever . . .?"
"Hell no," he said emphatically.
She managed a smile. "What's the matter, you don't believe in true love?"
His gaze held hers for a beat. "I try not to mess with stuff that isn't for me."
She couldn't imagine what his growing-up years had been like or the hell he'd been through but she managed a small smile. "Maybe you shouldn't knock something unless you've tried it."
"And you've tried it?" he challenged.
"Oh . . ." She let out a little laugh. "Not exactly. I'm pretty sure that stuff isn't for me either."
His gaze went serious again and before he began a conversation she didn't want to have, she spoke quickly. "I really didn't mean to overhear your fight with Sean. I was just wondering if I could help with whatever was wrong before I went to work."
"What's wrong is that he's an idiot."
"If it helps, I think he feels really bad," she said.
"He always does."
Her heart ached for him as she took in the tension in every line of his body. "You guys do that a lot?" she asked. "Fight like that?"
He slid his hands into his pockets. "Sometimes. We're not all that good with holding back. We sure as hell never did master the art of the silent treatment."
"My family never did either," she said. "Silence in my house meant someone had stopped breathing-thanks to a pillow being held over their face."
Finn gave her a barely there smile, definitely devoid of its usual wattage. "Was there a lot of fighting?" he asked.
"My parents were high school sweethearts. They were together twenty years, most of them spent in a very tiny but homey Santa Cruz bungalow house, where we were practically on top of each other all the time." She sighed wistfully, missing that house so much. "Great house. But seriously, half the time my mom and dad were like siblings, at each other over every little thing. And the other half of the time, they were more in love with each other every day." The ache of losing them had faded but it still could stab at her with a white hot poker of pain out of the blue when she least expected it, like now.
"Sounds pretty good, he said.
"It was." He'd beaten the shit out of you . . . The words were haunting her and her gaze ran over Finn's tough, rugged features. It hurt to picture him as a helpless kid standing between a grown man and his little brother, taking whatever punishment had been meant for Sean to spare him the pain of it, and she had to close her eyes against the images that brought.
A hand closed around hers. She opened her eyes as Finn tugged her into him. He stroked the hair from her face and looked down into her eyes. "You sure you're okay?"
He'd just had a huge blowout with Sean and he was asking about her. She swallowed hard and nodded. "It's you-"
He set a finger to her lips. "I'm fine."
The two women at the fountain were laughing and chatting. "Think it's really true?" one of them asked. "If we wish for true love, it'll happen?"
"Well, not with a penny," the other one said, eyeing the change her friend was about to toss in. "How many times have I told you, you can't be cheap about the important stuff."
Her friend rolled her eyes and fished through her purse. "I've got a quarter. Is that better?"