Damaged Page 3

  I didn’t like where she was going with this so I just said, “Braxton and I are not together, Sarah. But back to the pictures, can I count on you to not publish the ones of me…please?”

  “Sure, Emmi, no problem,” she said.

  I believed her, I knew she had integrity from the short time I’d worked with her, but I still had a feeling there was more to it. I let it go though, happy that she had agreed to that much.

  “Thanks, Sarah.”

  The rest of the afternoon was spent swimming and barbecuing. Zoe and I left before the bonfire. She had plans with Mike who she wasn’t sure if she wanted to reconcile with or not. We were both a couple of hot messes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BRAXTON

  I was uncontrollably nervous when I woke up the day Emmi, Callie and I were going to the beach. It was ridiculous; it wasn’t like it was a first date. Emmi and I had been going hot and heavy for weeks before I kicked her sissy-boy ex-boyfriend’s ass and pissed her off. I guess I shouldn’t phrase it like that when I talked to her about it. I told her I was sorry and I really meant it. She was right that I shouldn’t go around beating people up every time they pissed me off. I was usually better at walking away, but when I heard that guy insulting her, and saw him touching her…I had just lost it. If she could see inside of me and see how I really felt about her, she’d understand. My goal was to prove to her that I loved her. The problem was, this was all brand new to me, and I didn’t really know how to go about it.

  When I finally dragged my ass out of bed I found Emmi in the kitchen. She was packing us a lunch and snacks for our trip to the beach.

  “Hey,” I said, “You don’t really have to do that. Grandma keeps the house pretty well stocked.”

  “Oh, okay,” she said, looking embarrassed. Shit. I made her feel stupid for doing something nice. Great start at showing her you love her, dipshit!

  “It’s okay though, my grandma probably just has all that healthy crap in the house. I’d much rather have one of your famous PB and J sandwiches.” I flashed her a grin. My face was healing and it didn’t hurt to smile anymore. I was hoping it looked a little less frightening too.

  She smiled back, that was a good sign. “Thanks,” she said. “But you’re just being nice. We’ll eat whatever your grandma left us. Are we picking up your sister?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. I looked at the clock and realized it was already after nine. “Shoot, I didn’t realize it was so late already. She’ll be texting me any minute to find out where I am.”

  “Let’s go then,” she said with another smile. Damn she was beautiful. I loved her…whether she believed it or not. If it was the last thing I did, I had to convince her of that.

  We didn’t talk much in the pick-up on the way to get Callie. It had been almost two weeks since we’d had an actual conversation, and I missed that. I had gotten to where I loved talking to her about everyday things almost as much as I loved having sex with her… Almost. I missed that too, a lot. I was to the point of sexual frustration. It was so bad that even when she helped me change my bandages, I could hardly breathe.

  I wasn’t going to sleep with another girl just to get by.

  Callie was waiting outside when we got to the house. Emmi hadn’t ever seen where we lived but she was always so nonjudgmental that it didn’t embarrass me for her to see it, like it might someone else. Either Dad was up and Callie knew I wouldn’t want to see him, or she was afraid that I’d wake him up and she didn’t want to see him. Either way, I was glad that she was waiting outside.

  “Hey, squirt!” I said as she threw her bag in the back and climbed in.

  It was nice because it forced Emmi to scoot over next to me. I could feel the heat from her luscious thigh on mine and God I wanted to put my hand on it. I wanted to rub my palm along the smooth part of her outer thigh, and then slide it along the inside and slip my fingers up under those cut-off shorts and…

  “Don’t call me that,” Callie said, interrupting my X-rated thoughts. “I’m not twelve.”

  “Emmi, you remember my sister, the girl with the attitude.”

  “Hi, Callie,” Emmi said.

  “Hi, Emmi, nice to see you again.”

  “You too,” Emmi said.

  They were excruciatingly polite to each other. It was like a girls club in the truck all of a sudden. They talked and laughed, mostly at my expense. It was nice that they got along, but I had to admit that I was a little jealous. I wanted Emmi’s attention, bad.

  “Your face looks…almost normal again,” Callie said after a bit.

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “The black eyes are almost gone and the cuts healed up pretty good.”

  Callie had come by a few days after my last fight. She was acting kind of callous about it right now, but that day she had lectured and scolded me. She had even resorted to tears to try and talk me out of doing it again. I hated when she did that. There was something about a woman in tears that made me want to do anything to get her to stop.

  “She’s right,” Emmi said. “It does look a lot better. You should be able to resume your modeling career any day now.”

  Callie laughed. “Oh, I bet the phone’s ringing off the hook with offers for that,” she said.

  Emmi laughed too. “What?” I said. “The two of you don’t think I’m hot enough to be a model?” Little did either of them know I had actually gotten offers.

  “Ew, I don’t think Braxton and hot in the same sentence…ever,” Callie said.

  Emmi didn’t say anything to that; she just raised an eyebrow and grinned. I wasn’t sure how to interpret her look, but if I had to place a bet I’d say that at least one person in the truck thought I was pretty hot…besides me, of course.

  We parked close to my grandma’s little house. It was muggy out and I couldn’t wait to get in the water since it would only be a matter of minutes before I was sweating. I grabbed the chairs out of the back of the truck.

  “Let’s swim for a while and then we’ll show you the house, Emmi, okay?” I told the girls.

  “Sure,” Emmi said.

  Callie didn’t answer me but she walked toward the tree where we always set our stuff up and she was already stripping down to her bathing suit. I was glad to see she was wearing a one-piece. The year before she’d bought this bikini that I actually threatened to burn. Every male between the ages of twelve and forty on the beach that day had been checking her out. It was the first day it had become blaringly obvious to me that my little sister was in fact not twelve years old any longer. I wasn’t happy about it either.

  I glanced at Emmi as she waltzed over to where Callie was and I found myself hoping just the opposite about her. I really hoped that she was wearing a bikini…a thong bikini. It had been far too long since I’d seen her body…much too long since I touched it. Keeping my hands to myself was going to be hard, but at least my eyes could have some fun.

  I sat one of the chairs up with the little umbrella on top and dropped down in it. Of course the smart asses had to make a comment about it.

  “You look really cute with your little umbrella chair,” Emmi said with a laugh.

  “He doesn’t want his pretty white skin to burn,” Callie joked.

  “I have another fight in two days. The sun zaps all my energy. I’m going to need it on Friday night.”

  I saw something change in both Emmi and Callie’s eyes when I mentioned the fight. To both their credit, neither of them said anything.

  Emmi pulled off her shirt and I forgot what I was even talking about. Hell, I forgot my own name. She unbuttoned her jean shorts and slid them slowly off too. She had on a light-blue bikini that matched her pretty eyes. It wasn’t a thong bikini, but it only covered half of her sexy ass. I couldn’t stop my heart from crashing into my chest at a fast pace.

  I guess it was written all over my face because my sister, who doesn’t miss anything, said, “Close your mouth, haven’t you ever seen a woman in
a bikini before?”

  In my defense, she started it. “Not one that looks like that,” I said and let out a low whistle.

  Emmi twisted around and her cheeks had turned rosy red.

  “Stop it, you’re embarrassing her,” Callie said, still trying to defend her new friend.

  “It’s not my fault she looks so good. I’d have to be blind not to notice.”

  “Ew, Braxton you’re such a horn dog,” Callie said. “Knock it off, or get a room or something. I’m going to get in. Are you coming, Emmi?”

  Emmi smiled at her. “Yeah, I’ll be right there,” she said. Callie sprinted for the water and Emmi looked at me with those sexy eyes and said, “You really shouldn’t talk like that in front of your sister.”

  I stood up and stepped close to her. She smelled good, like the flower aisle at the grocery store. I wanted to bury my face in her neck and breathe in her scent. “I’ll stop, if you’ll agree to be alone with me so I can talk like that to you in private,” I whispered, hoping that it sounded sexy enough to get a rise out of her.

  Things that routinely worked on other girls didn’t often work on Emmi. She was also becoming an expert at ignoring things she didn’t want to respond to.

  Instead of answering me she suddenly said, “I’m going to get my camera out of the truck. This place is beautiful; I want to get some pictures.”

  I watched her trudge through the sand to get her camera. My palms were itching to grab that sweet ass as it bounced—

  “Are you going to get in the water?” she said as she sauntered by with her camera on her neck.

  I sighed, trying to get my lecherous thoughts under control. The cold water could do me nothing but good right now. Being a guy sucked sometimes.

  I took a deep breath and decided that I was just going to try and have a “normal” day for a change. Emmi and I had a few of those before things got weird. Before I beat up her boyfriend and blurted out three stupid words that could change someone’s life. I was just going to try and let that all go today and have a fun, normal day.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  EMMI

  Braxton pulled off his shirt and went toward the water. I tried to keep my face neutral as I watched the muscles in his chest ripple in the sun. Speaking of hot…I waited until he was walking away and I snapped a picture of his back with the water in the background.

  His sister was tiptoeing in and I didn’t even have to see his face to know what he had in mind. He started running and tackled her, knocking her forward and dunking her under the water. He didn’t do it hard enough to hurt her, but he took her down pretty good. I kept snapping pictures of them as she screamed, got up and chased after him and they wrestled with each other playfully for a while. It was cute, and against my better judgment it warmed my heart toward him a little more. He had a lot of different layers, more than most people gave him credit for. I thought that was the way he wanted it though, like trying to hide the fact that he was practically a genius. He was trying to hide everything that he thought made him a “nerd” in high school. It had started out as a plan to have sex with as many women as he could. I often wondered if that persona had gotten so deeply ingrained that he would have a hard time letting it go someday.

  Callie stood up at one point, and as she was looking off into the distance at a boat or something, some guy about her age walked by on the beach about the same time. The beach was getting more crowded now as it turned into late morning. A lot of families with kids, and a lot of teenagers had started arriving. The pretty teenager caught his eye although she wasn’t even looking at him. He stopped and stared at her, probably trying to work up his nerve to go talk to her. It wasn’t going to be the poor guy’s moment in the sun though.

  Braxton saw him looking and he said, “Hey, Opie! Just keep moving.”

  Callie looked up as the mortified young boy walked away from the crazy, muscled-up guy. She picked up a piece of seaweed and threw it at him. It struck him in the head.

  “Mind your own business,” she told him.

  “You are my business,” he said. “Until you’re eighteen.”

  “Oh, please, you’re not my father.”

  Braxton laughed. “Thank God,” he said. “That’s a frightening thought on so many levels.” He brushed the seaweed out of his hair and looked up at me. “Emmi, come in.”

  “Yeah, Emmi, please come in and distract him so I can hit on some of these hot guys walking around here.”

  Callie stuck her tongue out at him and the look on his face was classic. I could tell she was just messing with him, but her comment had its desired effect. I guess no one knew better than a man who thought about sex every thirty seconds, what a guy was thinking when he looked at his little sister. Mothers, sisters and nieces, were all off limits. I put my camera down by the rest of our stuff and slowly went into the water. Braxton was looking at me with his sex-filled eyes. I could feel my body react. My mind was calling my body a traitor, but it wasn’t exactly empty of carnal thoughts of its own. I got in the cold water all the way so that if he happened to see how hard my nipples were he wouldn’t think it was because of him.

  We swam and splashed around for a while. Callie saw some people that she knew and went over and hung out with them for a bit. It was silly, but I was nervous while she was gone. I should have taken the opportunity to talk to Braxton then about this “Love” stuff, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. We were having such a great day and I didn’t want to break the spell. To his credit, even though he was giving me some smoldering looks, Braxton was keeping his distance even when Callie was gone. He started telling me about his next fight and how important it was to him to win it as we floated on our backs in the water. For a little while it was like old times.

  “I would think that after the last fight you would be a little skittish about getting back in the ring.”

  “You always have that feeling before you go in, that little voice in your head that says, ‘Do I really want to do this?’ But your confidence kicks in and takes over. That’s actually why it’s so important to be confident. You have to know you can win before you get in that cage, or you never will.”

  I smiled and said, “Yes, one thing I have noticed about you is that you’re not lacking in the confidence department, at all.”

  He laughed. “It was well-earned, trust me.”

  “What do you mean? Did you get beat up a lot at first?”

  “Not a lot,” he said, but I could tell by the look on his face that was a fib. “I just mean that I’ve come a long way since high school. You might think it makes me sound full of myself, but I’m actually proud of myself for how far I have come.”

  “I don’t think that sounds full of yourself,” I told him, honestly. “It’s good to have confidence in yourself. I’ve come a long way since high school too, I think. I’m sure that you worked hard for it too.”

  “I did, you’ve met Sam, my trainer, right? The guy is a machine, and he expects everyone else to be too.”

  “You’re not going to still be fighting when you’re Sam’s age, are you?” I asked him.

  I knew it wasn’t my business, but I hated thinking about him getting beat up one more time, much less for twenty more years.

  “No, if all goes well I have two more bouts and then I’m set. Once I graduate I can work on starting my business and send Callie off to college.”

  If he loved his sister this much then he had to be capable of truly loving me.

  Callie came back over and their banter and silliness took over the conversation. That few minutes of talking to him again reminded me how much I had missed it. It was fun to just sit back and watch them zing one after the other at each other though. He was a good brother and I was of the opinion that Callie was lucky to have him. I’m sure that having each other made the things they had gone through a little less devastating. I think she thought she was lucky too, no matter how much she may protest if you asked her directly.

  After we swam for a while he sai
d, “Hey, I brought my football, you girls want to play some catch?”

  “Sure,” I said. I was ready to get out of the water since my hands and feet were beginning to wrinkle.

  “Okay,” Callie said. “But I hope you’re not trying to impress Emmi. She’s going to find out that I’m the athletic one in the family.”

  Braxton didn’t miss a beat as he said, “It’s true. Of the two of us, you’ve always been the most masculine.”

  He sprinted to his truck and got the ball while Callie and I dried off.

  While we did she told me, “You can’t tell by looking at him now, but anything to do with sports used to be the furthest thing from his mind.”

  “Yeah, he told me he was more of a…more studious in high school.”

  She laughed and said, “Nerd is the word you were looking for.”

  I left my T-shirt off, but I put my shorts back on over my bikini bottoms. I was feeling a little self-conscious about running around on the beach with my butt cheeks hanging out. Especially since Braxton had already whistled at me and made me feel uncomfortable once.

  “Emmi, go long,” he said, pulling back the arm that held the football. I put my hands up and he let the ball go. It sailed over my head and landed about ten feet behind me.

  “See what I mean?” Callie said with a laugh.

  Braxton frowned at her and I went to get the ball. He whistled as I bent over to pick it up and said, “Take that, I did it on purpose so I could watch her go get it.”

  “God, you’re disgusting,” Callie shouted.

  I ignored him and threw it to Callie and before I knew it, she and I had a keep away game going against Braxton. He went with it for a minute, running back and forth trying to catch it in the air between us. I hated to admit it, but Callie was right, football was obviously not his thing. If he did get ahold of it, he would almost inevitably fumble it right away. That didn’t take away from his appeal though, he had lots of “things” he could call his own, and as he ran around shirtless on the beach I could appreciate most of them.