Page 9 of Fight For Me

I tug at the end of her pigtail braid. “I don't know, kid.”

“Why not?” She looks up at me with big, blue eyes, so much like our dad’s. “You don’t want to hang out with us?”

“No, I just—”

“Because it sounds like you don’t want to come home to LA, either,” Silas cuts in.

My stomach churns. “It’s not that I don’t want to come home.”

He stares at me. “I don’t get it. You always say the reason you’re away so much is because of work. You aren’t working right now.”

“And you’re sad,” CeCe adds. “You shouldn’t be alone when you’re sad.”

Jesus. I glare over at Dad, wondering if he put them up to this. It’s certainly a more effective strategy than my uncles bugging me. But he holds out his hands, expression innocent.

“We just miss you,” Silas says, his eyes darting between me and Dad. I get the feeling he knows exactly what I’m thinking. It’s strange to realize that he’s getting so intuitive. Sometime in the last few years, my youngest brother started growing up.

“Come home, Wyatt,” CeCe says, her expression far more serious than I’m used to seeing on her. “I promise I won’t be too annoying. I won’t bug you.”

The kid sure knows how to cut me deep. I feel guilty all the time for staying away so much. I just don’t see any other way.

“Wyatt.” The sound of Mom’s voice has us all turning to her but her gaze is locked on me.

Our mother is a strong person, the strongest person I know. She’s been through some shit—loss I can’t even imagine—and she came out on the other side. After everything that happened to her, she put herself through school, took over our family’s charitable foundation, and managed to raise four kids. She’s fierce and confident and pretty much everything a person should want to aspire to.

But she doesn’t look very fierce right now, and she doesn’t look very strong. She looks like someone who suffered a horrible loss. She looks like she’s just barely hanging on. Her familiar brown eyes are swimming with pain as she looks at me.

“I want you to come home,” she says, and I can tell it’s taking all her effort to keep her voice from shaking. Her eyes plead with me, even more than her words. “Please, Wyatt. Come home.”

A weight settles into my stomach. I already know I’ll agree. There’s no way I can say no to her, not when she’s hurting like this. Not when she needs me.

For the last two years and three months, I’ve done my best to keep far away from Alex. The idea of spending the next several months in the same city as her sounds like torture.

But I guess I’m just going to have to deal with it.

“Okay,” I tell my mom. “I’ll come home.”

Alex

“This is such a bad idea,” Everly moans.

I glance over her shoulder to meet Fox’s eyes. I’m sure my expression matches his—barely controlled exasperation.

The three of us are huddled together in the kitchen at Uncle Reed and Aunt Paige’s place—Everly’s parents. The entire family is here for Sunday lunch, most of them out back in the yard. And that makes this the perfect opportunity to do the thing we should have done weeks ago—hold a family meeting.

“What were we thinking?” Everly continues. “A family meeting? That’s crazy. Ourfamilyis crazy!”

“She’s not wrong about that,” Fox says drily, and I narrow my eyes at him.

“You’re not helping.”

He steps toward his cousin, squeezing her shoulders. “It’s time, Lele. We’ve already put this off for too long.”

Too long is an understatement. We were supposed to do this a month ago. We’d made excuses for ages, and then Wyatt’s grandmother had passed and the whole family went to Seattle for a week—

I have to swallow hard to push back memories of brown eyes filled with enough pain to take my breath away. I cannot start thinking about him, not now. The thing I need to focus on is the fact that we’re mere days before the deadline to make our decision, and we haven’t even told the family yet.

“What about tomorrow?” Everly asks hopefully.