From Secret Desire for My Stepbrother to Reality novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: What He Wrote

Jem was at the front counter re-keying a padlock when I came in.

He took one look at my face and set the padlock down.

"Your mom?"

"My mom said yes. With conditions."

His shoulders dropped, the tension draining out of him.

"Then why do you look like that?"

"Tom came to the house."

His hands went flat on the counter.

I told him all of it.

The envelope, the gate, the blurred record on Tom's phone.

Forty-one words.

"He's going to put it on the company blog," I said. "Friday. With your name on it."

Jem was quiet for a long moment.

The old key-cutter was pretending not to listen by the grinder.

The apprentice wasn't pretending at all.

"Go to lunch," Jem told them both.

"It's three o'clock," the apprentice said.

"Go to a late lunch."

They went.

He flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED.

Then he took his phone out of his jacket and opened Hush.

I hadn't known he still had it.

He scrolled down his secret list.

There was only one name on it.

Mine.

"I'm not letting him read it to you," he said. "Sit down."

"I'm fine standing."

"Sit down, Lindy. Please."

I sat on the stool.

He stayed on his side of the counter.

He read it in his plain, careful voice, the one he'd used on the woman in Fremont.

"I changed your lock today and kept the old one."

My breath caught.

"I've wanted you since the ferry dock in July, when you got on the Bremerton boat and laughed about it."

He didn't look up from the phone.

"If this ever tells you, I'll say it to your face."

He put the phone down on the glass.

"That's it," he said. "I read it a lot."

"You kept my lock?"

"The old cylinder. It's in a coffee can upstairs."

"Why?"

"I don't know. It was yours. I couldn't throw it in the scrap bin."

"That is a little bit creepy."

"Yeah. Tom's right about that one."

I laughed, and it came out wet.

He came around the counter.

He stood in front of my stool, and he looked at my face.

"I've wanted you since the ferry dock," he said. "I'm saying it to your face."

I stood up.

He was close enough that I had to tip my head back.

"He's going to post it anyway," I said.

"No, he's not."

He picked up his phone again.

He opened the Hush Test stream, the one still running on the counter beside my mother's empty casserole dish.

Six million people had watched that stream.

He typed the forty-one words into the comments himself, one at a time, with his name over them.

Then he hit post.

"Now it's mine," he said. "He can't publish what I already said."

I stared at him.

"You just told six million people you kept my door lock in a coffee can."

"I've been told it's iconic."

I grabbed his jacket with both hands and kissed him against the key display.

A whole rack of blanks swung and chimed.

He kissed me back like he'd been waiting on the other side of a locked door for three years.

He had.

"Upstairs," I said against his mouth.

"Your mom."

"My mom said yes."

"With conditions."

"I'm meeting all of them."

He went to the window, threw the deadbolt on the front door, and came back for me.

We went up the back stairs to the loft.

He stopped at the top and went across the landing to his own room.

He came back with a coffee can.

He took out a brass lock cylinder, dull with age, and put it on the round windowsill.

The streetlight hit it.

"There," he said. "Now it's back with you."

I took his hand and pulled him to the iron bed.

I pulled him down onto the iron bed and he came with me, one knee between mine, his mouth on my jaw, my hands already at his belt.

I had it half open in the workshop a few nights ago and I finished it now.

The leather slid out of the buckle with a sound that made my stomach drop.

"Take your shirt off," I said.

He sat back on his heels and pulled the gray T-shirt over his head.

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