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My eyes widened, my heart pounding in my ears. I glanced at the diary and it struck me. Those ruffled pages. Shit, shit, shit. After journaling every day for a week, I wrote my fantasies regarding Aiden on different torn pages. I always tucked them back in the diary, reminding myself to pull them out before I brought it to the session. But I was in such a hurry that I had completely forgotten about them.

Did he read it? I hope he didn’t. I would rather eat raw broccoli than have him read all those pages.

Looking away from him, I lied and carelessly shrugged my shoulder. “I was meditating.”

I mentally winced at my lie. He had tried coaching me to meditate, but I could never do it.

He is right. I am a terrible liar.

Aiden raised his eyebrows. “Is that so?”

I didn’t like the tone of his voice. He seemed serious, and I prayed that the ground would swallow me up. He waited for my answer, crossing his arms over his chest. I got distracted by the way his biceps bulged.

He noticed me staring. I glanced down at my lap, twiddling my thumbs. “Y-yes, Doctor Aiden, I was meditating and I-I focused on my breath like you taught me—”

“Why are you lying to me, Ivy?”

My head snapped at him. I shook my head, “I-I am not lying.”

Aiden tilted his head and my throat went dry when he said, “Then why did I hear your voice moaning my name when you orgasmed with your fingers inside your pu -sy?”

1 - Yes, Dad

Ivy

I was wet.

Completely soaked.

It had to rain today of all days. Maybe the weather reflected my emotions.

My finger pressed on the doorbell, wishing my brother would hurry. Wet puddles formed around my feet as cold water dripped down the tips of my dark hair, trailing down my face. I knew the mascara I had applied that morning was ruined, and my eyes were puffy and red.

“Hayden!” I sniffled, running a hand across my face and pressing the doorbell again and again. “Hurry, please!”

Stupid. I was so stupid. Maybe I deserved it for being such a naïve idiot.

Rain kept pattering around the porch, wetting the freshly cut grass. The scent of wet earth and grass gave me comfort as I stood outside my brother’s house in San Diego. He had told me he would be here, hopefully with Zara, his fiancée, my best friend and Princess of Azmia, who was very pregnant. They were getting married in a couple of months in Azmia, and wanted to visit and meet their friends and family.

I needed to hug my elder brother and hear him curse about stupid boys and coddle me like he always did whenever I was sad. I wanted to hear him talk about his work as a Navy Seal, about Azmia, and his life as a soon-to-be-Prince. Very fitting with our last name.

“Hayden!” I cried out, my voice thick. “Open up. Finally, I thought you’d—oh.”

My lips parted as I came face to face with chiseled abs, water sluicing over each contour of the muscles. Rain muffled into the surroundings as I trailed my eyes over the chiseled chest, my mouth going dry. Licking my lips, I raised my eyes from strong collarbones, lick-worthy adam’s apple, to sharp jaw, inviting lips to very familiar thundering grey colored orbs.

“Petal,” he whispered, his eyes roving over my face, calling me with the nickname he had been using since he met me.

My eyes flickered down to the white towel wrapped around his waist, staying far too long on the perfect vee of his hipbones. The short trail of dark hair leading under the towel made me curious, creating an odd twinge of need between my legs and making my cheeks warm.

He is your brother’s best friend, Ivy. Get your head out of those dirty fantasies.

But I couldn’t. I had been crushing on his symmetrical face since the day he piggy backed me home and stayed with me until Hayden bandaged my bruised knee.

“Aiden.” I licked my lips, my throat dry. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“I missed you…” His eyes softened before he noticed my soaked clothes and wrapped his large, warm hand around my arm, dragging me in. “Come inside, you will get cold.”

I shivered, not from the cold, but from his touch as it singed through my skin. His eyes clouded when mine travelled over the muscles of his body—how the deltoids of his back clenched and unclenched when he pulled my suitcase inside. In just a towel.

I may or may not have checked out his ass, too.

With flaming cheeks, I looked away at the empty hallway filled with our picture frames on the wall. “Where’s Hayden? I thought he would be home by now.”

“He didn’t tell you?” He said, his body closer to mine. “Zara got a flu so they will arrive next month.”

I frowned, “Is Zara okay?”

“If it was serious, I’d know, Petal. Don’t worry about it.” Of course, he’d know. Besides being Hayden’s best friend, he was a brilliant psychiatrist who helped a lot of soldiers and Navy Seal officers going through PTSD or more.

But hearing I wouldn’t be able to meet my brother for a few more weeks made me sad. I tried to hide my disappointment and crossed my arms.

His stormy eyes fell on my chest, and he cleared his throat. “Stay here. I will bring you a towel.”

He walked past me, straight towards the room, keeping the door ajar. I looked down at myself and cringed in horror. My nude bra was visible through the thin cotton top I had worn that morning, my cold nipples poking through the wet fabric.

I tried to cover them as much as I could with my long hair when Aiden came back, handing me the towel, his tall height looming over me. He had changed into a black tee—boo—and grey sweatpants, his feet bare. There was something odd about seeing him like that, with his damp hair sleeked back and the dim light creating shadows on his sharp face.

When I was young and he was in high school, I had always seen him wearing pants and shirts. After a couple of years, when I was in high school and he was busy with his work as a therapist, I rarely saw him in anything but crisp shirts and suits that stretched over his broad shoulders and pants that covered his long legs.

Aiden stepped closer, his hands gently patting my wet hair with a dry towel. He smelled so good. Of musky, sweet cologne and something sharp. I wanted to step closer and bury my face in his chest, take a long sniff and hug him.

But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to seem like a puppy.

His voice was low as he said, “I am staying here until I find a house nearby. I didn’t know you would be back so soon from your university.”

Right. The reason I was soaked with mascara running down my face and the constant ache in my heart.

Images of Jason in bed with Amanda flashed in my head, making my eyes burn and stomach heavy. Was I that naïve that I didn’t know Jason was cheating on me for half of the year we had been in a relationship? Probably. Amanda, my friend and dorm mate, and Jason, my now-ex-boyfriend, used to hang out a lot, and I passed their relationship as platonic, trusting both of them. I was a stupid twenty-one-year old who believed that their relationship was anything more than that.

I came back home with a suitcase as fast as I could.

“Yeah,” I cleared my throat and looked down at my soaked Spirited Away socks, which Zara had bought for me. I felt like that. A wet sock. “Things happened and I…”

Shaking my head, I trailed off and peered up at him. “I never thought I’d meet you so soon.”

His lips quirked. I knew after knowing him from years that it meant he was happy. “Me too.” Stepping back, he said, “I… I had to leave Denver and come here.”

I furrowed my brows at him and waited for him to say something more, but neither of us wanted to talk like that, standing in the hallway, after years of not meeting each other face-to-face.

I took a sharp breath when he tucked a wet lock of hair behind my ear. “I know he made you cry, Petal.” His eyes hardened when he gazed at me as if he could read me like a poem. “But we will talk about what that shit did to you to make your cry after you take a hot shower.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat, not able to meet his piercing eyes. I must be crazy to find his domineering tone hot. But my chest warmed hearing that tone. Aiden always used it with me to make me eat food on time when he was sleeping over at our house, telling me to be careful while I chopped onions and holding my hands under tap when I cut my finger, disapproving of my prom date and telling me not to go to the after party.

I wish I had listened to him because I had called him, not my brother, at two in the morning at the after party of the prom. Crying and asking him if he could pick me up. He had even given me his hoodie that I never returned and bought me ice cream at early morning.

He never once mocked me with his told-you-so look, just took care of me when I needed someone.

I didn’t think he would enter my life once again when I got my heart broken by Jason.

“Yes, Dad,” I teased, walking past him, his knuckles brushing my arm.

I shivered with goosebumps and hurried upstairs to my room when I felt him watching me. Hayden had insisted on having a room of my own in his house because he wanted me to visit him more. After leaving for Azmia, he had given me the keys, but I had lived at dorms to be more social.

Everything was still the same. With beige walls, a twin size bed in the corner with a metal head frame, white lace curtain surrounding the bed, fairy lights all over the walls hanging over Audrey Hepburn’s poster, my half-empty closet, a vanity dresser with mirror and a bookshelf filled with fantasy books and my soft toys from childhood.

I trailed my finger over the picture frame of us three. Me, my brother and Aiden when I was a kid. Being nine years older than me, I didn’t get to hang out with them a lot, but when I did, they treated me like their equal. I was smiling shyly at the camera because I was insecure about my braces at thirteen, my dark hair in two pigtails, my lilac dress flowing in the wind. Hayden was grinning, his blue-grey eyes as bright as the ocean behind us in the backdrop. My eyes averted to Aiden, the person I had been crushing on since I was six.

His eyes were clear, piercing grey, facing the camera with his face stern, his onyx hair tousled perfectly as if he had rolled out of the bed, a lock of hair falling over his forehead and touching his slashing dark brow. The corner of his lip curled just a little. He was amused and happy. I knew it even though some would think he looked bored. After knowing him for all these years, I knew he seemed happy at that moment. I glanced at his arm, his hand pressing against my shoulder, a friendly gesture, but it made my stomach flutter like it did when I was thirteen.

Stupid. That’s what I was. Stupid and naïve that someone like him, like Aiden, would ever return the feelings I have been harboring inside me since we first met. He was smart and poised, treating his patients with kindness and being awarded for his voluntary work in hospitals. Being one of the best therapists in California, he was nothing short of a celebrity in his community. Compared to him, I was a twenty-one-year-old girl who got her heart broken because she couldn’t see through Jason’s sorry excuses.

I huffed and stripped out of my soaked clothes, heading straight to the ensuite bathroom. I would need a warm shower, some food and some alcohol to talk to call my brother and have a chat with Aiden.

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