CEO’s Dirty Vacation

Chapter5

Christian POV

Then Will appeared, and after him Jace, and the living room became what the Hendrick living room always became when everyone was in it at once loud, overlapping, and warm in a way that reached some part of me that four years of San Jose had not managed to reach.

Will shook my hand with the gravity of a man who considered hugs a peacetime concession. Jace announced that he hadn’t missed me that much, then immediately asked if I’d watched his last match. Hailey, who had Mom’s dark eyes and an MBA she wielded with alarming precision, bypassed all preamble and hugged me around the neck like I’d been gone a decade.

“Two weeks,” she said. “Actually two weeks. What do you want? I’ll get you anything.”

“Dinner,” I said. “That’ll do.”

We sat around Briar’s table the way we always had elbows touching, conversations splitting and overlapping and doubling back on themselves. Brier had made turkey, Mom’s recipe, the one she’d been perfecting since the year she and I came home from Harvard and found five kids looking at us like we had answers.

Jace had been nine that winter. Young enough that the details of that period had blurred at the edges for him what things tasted like, what our parents’ voices sounded like when they weren’t on the phone. Brier and I remembered everything. We’d been nineteen, mid-semester, already talking about which professional clubs might draft us, and then the phone call came and none of that was the point anymore.

What I remembered most clearly was not the grief, which had come later in private, but the logistics. The sheer unrelenting volume of what needed doing and the speed at which the decisions had to be made. Our father’s pub had been paying the mortgage. Our mother’s cosmetics work was more of a passion than income. Brier and I withdrew from Harvard within the week, enrolled at the nearest city college, and started running the pub on a schedule that left almost no hours for sleeping.

The hard part had not been the work. The hard part had been Lori, who was fifteen and would not eat for eleven days. Jace, who stopped talking for a while. Will, who was sixteen and decided abruptly that he was an adult now and did not require looking after, which was the most exhausting kind of grief to manage from the outside.

I looked at them around this table. Will, who had quietly become one of the best detectives in the city. Jace, who played professional soccer and called me after every match to debrief. Lori, who had built her event agency from a weekend side project into something real and was raising Milo alone with a lightness that still amazed me. Hailey, who was sharper than anyone in any room she walked into and had never quite let any of us tell her so. Brier, who ran the company they’d started together on the kitchen table at twenty-two and had turned it into something that stocked shelves in department stores.

I still felt responsible for all of them. I suspected I always would. Hailey liked to remind me, with some frequency, that they were all functioning adults who did not require monitoring. She was right and it made no difference.

After dinner, Milo climbed onto the couch beside me and fell asleep with one hand fisted in my sleeve, which I took as a reasonable endorsement of my uncle's credentials. I sat still so as not to wake him.

Hailey dropped into the armchair across from me and studied me with the quiet assessment she usually reserved for her clients. “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’m keeping you busy. Fair warning.”

“Doing what?”

“Things that do not work. I’ll improvise.”

Brier, from across the room, raised her glass. “For the record, I’ve also given Charlotte standing instructions to flag any laptop-adjacent behavior while she’s on the property.”

I looked at Will. Will looked at his drink.

I looked at Jace. Jace smiled pleasantly and said, “Leave me out of it. I’m just here for the turkey.”

Lori patted my arm. “You can’t win this one. Just accept it gracefully.”

The thing about being outnumbered by people who loved you was that the argument was never really about winning.

Later, after Lori carried Milo out to the car and the others filed out in twos, I stood on the back porch with what remained of the bourbon Brier had bought and looked out at the dark yard. The night air was warm and dry, carrying the faint smell of rosemary from somewhere along the fence line.

I thought about Charlotte in that red dress at the door, her hair loose, the slight stiffness in her left ankle that she was pretending wasn’t there. The way she’d looked at me when I kissed her hand was not startled, exactly. More like someone who had been caught off guard by something they weren’t sure what to do with. I knew the feeling.

She’d sided with me on the supplier question without blinking, then turned it into a joke at her own expense before Brier could get too comfortable with her loyalty. Quick. Easy with herself in a way that suggested she’d had to earn it at some point. People who were naturally at ease rarely worked that hard to see it.

I wasn’t going to do anything about any of this. I had been here for two weeks, and she was there to terrace the yard, and I had no business starting something I wasn’t capable of finishing properly.

I finished the bourbon.

I went inside.

I did not think about the way she’d shuddered when my lips touched her hand, or the way she’d tipped her chin up to look at me after, or the fact that I’d wanted very much, in that one unreasonable moment on the porch, to find out what she’d do if I kissed her properly instead.

I did not think about any of it.

Not much, anyway.