Page 17 of Dirty Like Brody
Brody with the slightest glint of gray in the hair at his temples, which I’d only noticed up close, in his truck, in the daylight. Brody who hadn’t bothered to color his hair, who didn’t give a shit his hair was beginning to turn gray at age thirty, because why would he? Brody would be gorgeous gray-hairedorbald.
Brody with his short-sleeve button-down shirt and his rocker’s tattoos, the mashup of business-meets-pleasure that had always done me in. His sleeves rolled up to reveal the same tribal guitar tattoo he’d had on his left bicep at fifteen, a bicep which was now larger, the guitar surrounded by tribal symbols that swirled down his arm in a partial sleeve. The samegracetattoo, spelled out in Danish runes, that he’d had on the left side of his neck at eighteen. And a tattoo of runic letters spelling something I couldn’t read down the inside of his rightforearm.
I wondered if Amanda knew what those runes said. And there was something so devastating in imagining her knowing, and seeing his tattoos up close, touching them… like she was accessing some intimate part of him that I had never been able totouch.
I should’ve just looked away, but my eyes kept landing backonhim.
Onher.
She was very… compact. Muscular, in a good way. Apparently, she was a yoga instructor with her own yoga space in Kitsilano; I’d learned more about her than I ever cared to know in casual conversation over pre-dinner drinks. Vancouver was lousy with yoga instructors and yet I couldn’t even quietly rollmyeyes.
So she was all Zen and fit and flexible and had her ownbusiness.
She hadBrody.
And even if I didn’t envy her Zen or her flexibility, there was always something to envy, and something to loathe, about a woman who was with the man you secretly wanted for yourself. So I let myself envy her, andloatheher.
And then I tried toforgether.
Itwasn’teasy.
I did not know how Elle did it. Watching the man you always thought you’d end up with in the arms of someone else. I’d met up with Elle a few times for drinks while I was in L.A. these last few months and I knew she was still hurting over the breakup with my brother, even if she didn’t say so; she didn’thaveto.
At least Brody wasn’t marryingthisone.
I took a glass of the port that was offered after dinner, even though I didn’t particularly like port. Would it be wrong to get blind drunk at my brother’s wedding in hopes of blacking out and forgetting the whole thingentirely?
Yeah. Mostdefinitely.
Which meant I was just going to have to grow the hell up and deal with the fact that Brody had moved on. Which, as it turned out, was a really hard pill toswallow.
I knew he wasn’t mine. Had never reallybeenmine.
But that didn’t mean some selfish part of me, deep down—or maybe not that deep down—didn’t still want him. And want him towantme.
Which, until a few hours ago, I actually thoughthedid.
How stupidwasI?
Somehow I’d convinced myself that when I went away, everything had stayed the same. Including Brody’s feelings for me, as evidenced by his continued text messages and voicemails over the years. But clearly, that wasn’t true. A lot of things hadchanged.
Even the band had changedwithoutme.
Seth Brothers, Dirty’s original rhythm guitarist, waslonggone.
Zane had stopped drinking. That was a big one; he’d gone into rehab soon after I left the band, after Seth was kicked out because of his drug addiction, and managed to stickitout.
And my brother… he was so, so happy. Not that he wasn’t happy before. Jesse had always been a pretty happy guy. Like me and like our dad he was prone to brooding, but unlike the both of us, Jesse’s periods of brooding were usually brief and few and far between, and he tended to bounce back to happiness without the traumas of life making much of a dent. He was more like our mom that way—at least, how she was beforeDaddied.
But this… this was different. This was the kind of happiness that only the truest, deepest, most lasting type of love couldbring.
So maybe it was only me who’d failed tochange.
As Roni and I mingled over post-dinner drinks I watched my brother with Katie across the room, chatting with Brody and the lovely Amanda, all four of them smiling, laughing, and looking happy. No; happy wasn’t even the word. Joyful. Brimming with life and love. The way you looked when you were surrounded by the life you belonged in. And how fucking jealous I was, of allofthem.
Because it was supposed to be me standing over there, with them;nother.
It was always supposed tobeme.
