to hear as well as he wanted, and he didn’t like swimming, he didn’t like the feeling of the Earth shifting under his feet.
He would have given anything right then to be at home—or literally anywhere else the people who disliked him most didn’t have the upper hand. He knew Will wouldn’t humiliate him in front of his family, but he’d made an ass of himself and he had no one else to blame but his own stupid libido.
It wasn’t love, even if his heart thumped wildly at the possibility of knowing Will well enough to love him. It was nothing more than a crush which would fade given time. He just needed to remember where those invisible lines had been put down, then avoid them like they contained the last traces of a violent plague.
Julian didn’t look up until he felt the vibration of footsteps under his hand where it was pressed to the splintered wood, and he got a whiff of Corinne’s perfume before he could panic about it being anyone else. He shifted over when she sat, and he took some slight comfort in the weight of her thigh against his.
After a long while, she tapped his arm, and he looked over in time to see her sign, ‘What’s wrong?’
It was a language that had atrophied between them. She had followed in his footsteps and taken classes when he began them as a way of showing support. But after his mother’s ban on the language in her presence, they’d both fallen out of the habit.
He only knew it well enough thanks to Ilan forcing him to keep up, but he was surprised to see it casual on his sister’s hands. ‘Nothing.’
She raised her brows and made a cutting motion under her chin. ‘Liar.’
At that, he laughed and shook his head because he was, and as usual, he wasn’t good at deception. “Brooding. What’s new?”
“Have you talked to your boyfriend today?”
Julian’s cheeks erupted into a white-hot flush, and he glanced back over the water. “Of course I have, why?”
She shrugged, her gaze fixed over the water. “Anything important?”
Julian’s face heated a little as he was forced to think of their moment together, and how the conversation between them hadn’t meant anything at all—but the press of their bodies had. “He told me about threatening Bryce, if that’s what you mean.”
She laughed. “No, not that, though I did get to hear some of it and it was pretty good.” She swung her legs under the lip of the pier and said nothing for a long while. “You should get to know him better.”
Julian shrugged. “I think I know him just fine. Anyway, he and I are definitely not meant to last.” When he was brave enough to steal a glance at her, he saw her watching him with a quirked brow. “He’s…not like me.”
“Debatable. And does that matter when he likes you as much as he does?”
Julian closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He let the white noise of the ocean seep in through the way they vibrated in the air beneath his toes, and he leaned his head back gently to rest against the railing. “I’m trying to be realistic.”
“You’re being self-deprecating.”
He opened one eye to look at her. “I love you, very much, but you have no idea the struggle it took me to find that happy medium between hating myself the way Mother wanted me to, and accepting myself as I am.” He sat up a little straighter and brushed two fingers under his nose. “You know she never took a single photo of me before the scars faded, and never let me out of the house then because it humiliated her. And even if I do go to the damn gym, I’m never going to grace the cover of Vogue, and she can’t stand the thought that she didn’t produce some Adonis heir. It took me years to be able to sit down to a meal, or look in the mirror without hearing her voice in my head.”
Corinne’s eyes were shining, and her mouth turned down. “She wasn’t easy on me, either.”
“I know,” Julian said, and he didn’t point out how it wasn’t the same, because his sister knew. And he could see the guilt now in her gaze, and her inability to deal with it properly. “I’m not trying to compete in the terrible mother Olympics with you, Corinne. I just need people to accept me the way I am.”