Unbroken (11 page)

My heart starts pounding with increasingly more speed with every step I take toward his table, and it takes all I have not to turn around and trade sections with someone just for the night. He has me all tied up in knots, and I hate that he affects me this way when I don’t even know him.

“Welcome to
Le Chateau D’If
,” I say as I approach Brody’s table, pulling my order pad out and taking the pen out with it. “What can I get you guys this evening?”

As I speak, I realize there’s one other person in his party tonight. There’s a girl who’s basically the younger, female version of him, sitting right beside him, seemingly tucked away for safekeeping. She’s so strikingly beautiful, and the way she clutches onto him, I can tell they’ve got a strong bond with each other.

“Guys, this is my good friend Sabrina,” Brody says with a timid smile, questions in his eyes. He looks like he’s asking permission to even call me his friend. “Sabrina, this is my little brother Cason,” he gestures to the boy across from him, completely immersed in a cell phone, “and my little sister Dalis.” He gestures to the girl beside him.

I smile, giving him my nod of approval about the whole friend thing. “Hi, Cason.” He just nods, but doesn’t look up from the phone. “Hi, Dalis.”

She peeks up at me from beside her brother, a timid grin etched on her face. She gives me a half-wave, then averts her gaze almost immediately. I raise an eyebrow and regard Brody inquisitively, taking in his appearance.

He wears a hoodie, jeans, and Vans sneakers. His hair is disheveled like he wasn’t expecting to be in a restaurant like this one when he woke up this morning. The right side of his face is swelling, and fast, and I make a mental note to bring him some ice for it as soon as possible. And, if we really are
friends
like he labeled us as, maybe I’ll get him to tell me what happened, and why.

“So what brings you guys here tonight?” I ask.

Brody shrugs, but gives me a lopsided smile, which may just be my new favorite thing in the entire world.

“We’re celebrating a momentous occasion. Today we decided not to let assholes run our lives,” he says.

The way he says it sounds like there’s a double meaning somewhere in there, but I don’t ask him to elaborate. I look over at his brother, and then at his timid little sister, recalling when we saw each other last week. He has secrets. This whole family does. And from the way they act, I can tell that once I
do
find them out—if I do—I won’t like them a single bit.

“Well, congratulations. That’s a huge accomplishment. What can I get you guys?”

Dalis leans over to whisper in her brother’s ear, and then he grins. “She’ll have chicken tenders with a side of mac and cheese. I’ll have the spaghetti and meatballs—extra meatballs please.” He turns to his brother. “Case?”

Cason looks up at his brother for a mere second, and then looks back down at the phone in his hands. Brody leans over the table and snatches the phone out of Cason’s hand.

“Hey!” Cason objects. “I was texting someone!”

“From
my
phone! That
I
pay the bill for! That I
allow
you to use so you can communicate with your friends! When I speak to you, you fucking answer me. Do you understand?”

Although Brody looks riled up, he orders his brother around in a hushed tone, not wanting to cause a scene. His brother doesn’t respond, just stares at Brody incessantly. Brody leans forward on his elbows, pinning Cason in place with a glare of his own. I want to look away, but I know I can’t. I want to get to know Brody, and it looks like this is him in his element. I don’t know how or why he got put in this position, but this is him. And I like it. I like it a lot.

Cason looks up at me, breaking the staring contest, and rolls his eyes. “I’ll have the LCD Classic Burger with loaded fries.”

He hands me his menu without looking at me, then folds his arms over his chest and sits back.

As I write their orders down, Brody grabs his and Dalis’s menus, handing them to me with an apologetic smile.

“Great. Your food should be here shortly,” I say.

I make my way back into the kitchen, sticking their order up and heading for the cabinets. I take a Zip-Lock bag and fill it with ice. Squeezing the excess air through a small opening, I wrap it in a couple paper towels and march back into the dining room.

I care so much about him, and I don’t know why. He’s under my skin, embedded in my heart and soul already. I feel attuned to him, like I can feel what he feels, and I don’t like it. Because it’s pain. There’s nothing but pain in his eyes, in his demeanor, in the way he speaks sometimes, like he feels like he needs to apologize for everything.

His eyes widen when he sees me marching toward him, and then light up with a million questions when he sees what I’m holding in my hand.

I stop just short of his table, then extend my hand to him.

“Put this on your face, or you’ll look like a blowfish before the night’s over.”

He nods appreciatively, and obliges a second before I walk off.

Thirty minutes later, I’m balancing all three of their entrees in both my hands and walking back to their table. Dalis doesn’t waste even a second before digging in to her food. Cason mutters a quick thank you in my direction before doing the same thing. Brody glances down at his plate and then looks up at me momentarily. After a second, he averts his gaze.

“Okay. Let me know if you guys need anything,” I say.

I’m walking away when Brody pushes away from the table and follows me. “Hey, Sabrina? I’d really like to talk to you. About what happened last week.”

I glance toward the kitchen, where Ms. Archer is looking at me through the window, and I sigh. I don’t want to get in trouble at work, especially when I’m still in my probationary period.

“I already had my lunch break an hour ago, and my shift doesn’t end for two and a half more.”

“I’ll wait.”

Those two words stop me dead in my tracks. They don’t say much, but at the same time, they say
everything
. He’s willing to wait two and a half hours for me, and for what? I don’t know. And although I’d usually object to something like this, I want him to wait more than I’ve ever wanted anything in the world.

“Okay. Enjoy your meat. Enjoy your balls.” I smirk at his confused expression when I walk away, and hold that look in my mind as I head back to finish my shift.

…

ALL I’VE DONE IS THINK about Brody for the remainder of the evening. That look on his face, him holding that ice up to the space just beneath his right eye, the way he said, “I’ll wait”.

I grab my purse out of my locker, then close it and make my way back into the dining room to say goodbye to everyone. I scan the room for Brody and his siblings, a feeling of bottomless disappointment taking over when I don’t see them anywhere. I held onto hope because of those two words he said to me, and now I feel like a complete idiot for it.

Fighting back tears, I sling my purse over my shoulder and walk out of the restaurant wordlessly. I grab my car keys and press the unlock button on my remote. I get to my car and open the driver’s door. I take one last longing glance toward the restaurant when my heart stutters.

I close the driver’s door and walk over to the front of the restaurant.

We have these benches on the outside, for our patrons to sit on should we ever get overcrowded and the wait time is too long. There, on the bench just to the left of the restaurant, sits Brody. Dalis has her head in his lap, her knees pulled up to her chest, and she’s sound asleep, his jacket thrown over her sleeping figure. Cason is sitting on the opposite end of the bench, cell phone in hand, and Brody’s steel grey gaze draws me to him.

With a smile, I wrap my arms around my middle to hold my waterfall cardigan closed against the wind.

“Hey. You waited,” I say.

“I said I would, didn’t I?” he responds slyly. His lopsided grin returns, and he looks me up and down hungrily, appreciatively. “
Easy A
.”

His words catch me completely off guard, and I take a few minutes to myself before giving up. I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. “What?”

On a laugh, he elaborates. “Enjoy your meat. Enjoy your balls. That was a quote from the movie,
Easy A
.”

I can’t help it, now I’m laughing. Most times, book, movie, and T.V. show quotes come second nature to me. I spit them out without even thinking about them half the time, but usually, no one knows what I’m talking about. The fact that Brody does is an extreme turn on. It also makes him a worthy opponent.

“I totally forgot about that. It just sort of…came out,” I tell him.

Cason looks over at us like we’re insane and then resumes whatever it is he’s doing on that phone. I give him a once-over, and it’s right then that I notice the bags. I don’t know how I missed them before, while they were in the restaurant. Probably because they were under the table or something, I don’t know. But it’s a bit suspect to me, and I wonder where they’re planning on going. And then, I start to wonder if they even
have
anywhere to go.

“Hey,” I say, before I can even think of what I’m saying, or the possible repercussions of me saying it. “Do you guys need a place to crash tonight?”

Brody’s gray gaze pins me in place, and both his eyebrows raise at my question. His lust-filled gaze eats me up, drinking me in like he’s a blind man seeing the sun for the very first time.

“Why would you ask me that?”

I gesture to Dalis’s sleeping figure and then to the three bags sitting at Cason’s feet. “I’m guessing you didn’t sit outside for three whole hours with your bags and two minors just for the Hell of it. Where were you planning on going before you ended up here?”

He shrugs halfheartedly, and averts his eyes. “I was going to crash at a friend’s place for the night. But then I decided that I wanted to see you, and I ended up here.”

I make the decision before I have time to process it. I don’t even tell him that I’ve made a decision, because it’s just second nature. This is one of those moments my mom prepared me for when she talked about how she fell in love with Daddy all over again. It’s one of those moments where someone needs you so much, but they’ll never admit that they do. And half the time, you don’t need them to admit it, because when souls are so attuned to each other like mine appears to be with Brody’s, we know what the people in our lives need long before they know it themselves. Right now, he needs to let go of his foolish pride and let me help him.

I kneel down and grab two of the bags. I sling one over my shoulder, and put the other in the corresponding hand. With my free hand, I pop the trunk open and head toward the car.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asks, half-shouting—I assume because he doesn’t want to wake his sister.

“You’re coming to my place tonight. Whatever happens next, we can decide in the morning.”

He shakes his head as if to object, and I put a hand up to silence him. He looks at my perfectly manicured hand like it’s some foreign object, and he proceeds to speak anyway. Damn. That normally doesn’t happen.

“Sabrina, you’re nice and everything, but…But I could never ask you to do that for me. I could never ask you to do that for
us
.”

I laugh. “You didn’t. I’m not going to wait for you to, either, because it’s fucking freezing out here. I’m not taking ‘no’ for an answer, so why don’t you just say, ‘thank you’, and get in the car before we all freeze to death?”

He stares at me long and hard, and I can tell he’s weighing his options. By the fact that they’re carrying their bags around with them, and they’re sitting out in the chilly weather, I know he doesn’t have a car. So they’re on the bus. There’s no way he can pass up a free ride in a car with an amazing heating system, just because of foolish pride.

“Only if you let me make it up to you somehow,” he says, still shaking his head in disbelief.

“I’ll make sure to hold you to that. Now come on before we all get sick.”

I head over to the car, pushing the trunk door open and tossing their bags inside. Cason follows behind me with the last of the three bags. He climbs into the backseat wordlessly.

I’m left watching in awe as Brody gathers his sister’s sleeping body into his arms and stands up. He grabs her arms and drapes them around his neck as he cradles her to his chest. Walking slowly, he finally makes his way over to the car. He gestures to the door, and, broken from my trance—I mean, that was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen—I run around the perimeter of the car and open the door for him. He sets his sister down on the seat, and her eyes flutter open. She gazes at the two of us momentarily, and then grabs the seatbelt and buckles it around herself. Brody closes the door once he sees she’s coherent enough to secure herself, and I watch through the window as she sleepily pulls her knees up, and then nestles against the door.

“Hey, Brody? What’s your favorite cake?” I ask, a mischievous grin etched on my face.

“German chocolate. Why?”

I pull out my cell phone and type out a quick text to my mother.