Just one hour ago he’d been reading a book in sweats with a tear at the knee and a Warrant T-shirt. His favorites were the Metallica, David Bowie, and Linkin Park ones, but other than those, I hadn’t seen him wear the same shirt twice.
“Can I ask you a question?” I asked. His beautiful green eyes met my dull blue ones in the mirror.
“Of course.” He smiled. We were all making more of an effort to be honest with one another.
“You’re obviously more comfortable in jeans and band tees. Why do you dress like an Abercrombie and Fitch model every time you’re in public?”
He rinsed the hair product off his hands. “You think I look like a model?”
“Well, yes, but that wasn’t my point.” I smiled smugly.
He laughed, his eyebrows rising in surprise, then dried his hands off on a towel and pressed a sweet kiss to the tip of my nose. “Don’t you want to go down to the party?”
Not really. “I want to know more about you. I thought we all promised to be more honest, answer each other’s questions.” I looked at him expectantly.
He grabbed my hand and gently pulled me into his room. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
He led me to the impressive bookcases on the opposite side of the room and stopped in front of the complicated sound system. The shelving reached almost to the top of the twelve-foot ceilings, and neither one of us could reach the top without a stepladder. He pointed up, and I craned my neck. The entire top shelf was lined with identical brown leather-bound spines without titles.
“Those are my dad’s journals. He used to write in one every day.” Josh’s arms circled around me, his chest pressing into my back. “When our parents died, I was so lost. The only people I would even talk to were the guys. Then I hit puberty, and I was just angry all the time. Some of that anger was directed at my parents. I nearly threw all these out. I packed them up and dragged them all the way down that ridiculous driveway”—we both chuckled—“to dump them on the curb. I figured if they weren’t going to be around, I didn’t want to get to know them any better. But Alec saw and dragged them right back, and then a few years later, he gave them back to me. It was right around the time he and Gabe were getting heavy into the fighting scene. Kid and I started tagging along, getting mixed up with shady people. That’s when they got their shit together and Alec pulled these out of his closet. I was so happy he’d saved them I cried like a little baby.”
I didn’t speak, riveted.
“I started reading them and couldn’t stop. It’s what started my obsession with books. I inherited all the vinyl from my dad, but all the books were my mom’s. It’s funny that reading my dad’s journals is what got me to start reading at all. Anyway, my dad was dirt poor growing up. He lived in a trailer with his aunt and went hungry more than a few times a month. But he studied hard, stayed out of trouble, and got himself a scholarship to Bradford Hills Institute. That’s where he met my mom. But everyone judged him for his worn, old clothes. No one took him seriously. People constantly dropped jokes about how he was punching above his weight with my mom, wondering what the hell she was doing with him.”
I frowned, my heart aching for Josh’s dad. I knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of derisive comments about who you were dating—I’d been subjected to months of it from Ethan’s exes.
“My dad wasn’t a vain man, but he firmly believed in making a good impression—that if you presented well, people were less likely to judge you on what you looked like and more likely to listen to what you had to say. He got pretty successful in the music business, made his own money, and dressed in a three-piece suit every day of his life. He was only relaxed and casual with his family.”
“Like you,” I whispered, and he smiled.
“Yeah. I didn’t grow up poor like my dad—they left me a lot of money—but I learned a lot reading his journals, and this place . . . much as I love Bradford Hills and my family, Variants can be judgmental, bitchy, and gossipy. I refuse to give