Outside Looking In (Browerton University Book 6) Read online

“Our unit was caught in a dust storm, and it was hard to see our target on the ground. Hell, I could barely see out my windshield. My mate…he wasn’t so lucky. His plane was shot down and…” Nathan put a hand over his eyes. “Excuse me. This is not proper bar chatter.”

  “Don’t be.” The guy rested his hand on Nathan’s knee. “You are a hero.”

  “Am I though? What is a hero?”

  The guy’s mouth puckered with concern. “Let me buy you another drink.”

  “No. I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t try to dull the pain.”

  “Well, maybe there’s something I could do to cheer you up.”

  It was almost too easy.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Nathan skillfully untangled himself from his latest sexual encounter without waking him up. The guy slept soundly in Nathan’s bed, his baby arm of a cock sticking up under the sheet. Nathan gave it a salute and headed into the kitchen.

  The entryway had been rimmed in gold, or something painted gold. His stepmother loved the Palace of Versailles aesthetic, even if her design budget couldn’t compete with royalty. She set out to turn their flat into a tacky monstrosity filled with gold and marble and lots of things from catalogues. Nathan found a note on the kitchen table from his father.

  Here is the name and number of the hotel in case you need to reach us, but only for emergencies please. Don’t eat the lasagna in the freezer. We are saving that for when we come home. Love, Dad.

  “Happy to be back, too,” Nathan said to the note. His father had been bought out of his company for a tidy sum and was enjoying an early retirement visiting every cruise and five-star resort in the world.

  They never talked about his mother, his real mother. Whenever Nathan used to ask, his dad would just tell him to forget about her, even though he was the one who dropped the bombshell on his son. “What she did…she’s not worth looking for,” his dad had told him, his voice going cold at the mention of her.

  When Nathan had first found out the truth, he tried finding her. He looked on YouTube for recordings of the Oasis concert in Knebworth and searched the footage for his father. It was the largest outdoor concert in the UK, with over 250,000 attendees, but Nathan pored over each frame he could find, hoping to locate his maternal needle in a haystack. Needless to say, it was a giant failure, and soon, Nathan took his dad’s advice to heart. She wasn’t looking for him, and he wouldn’t look for her.

  Nathan could never get fully on board with this plan, though. He hated her, yet he also felt a connection to his real mother. Maybe she had a good reason for doing what she did. It was a possibility that squatted in the darkest corner of his mind and was impossible to evict.

  Why am I thinking about this now? he asked himself. He’d been thinking about her more in the past week than he had in years. Stupid counselor getting into his head. Maybe that was part of the plan. Purposefully screw up recovery to ensure repeat business.

  Nathan beelined to the liquor cabinet, but it was locked. His father never locked it. “What? You think I’m some addict who you can’t even trust?” he said to the cabinet. His dad never attended a performance or major event in his life, yet because he dropped Nathan off at rehab, he thought himself fucking father of the year.

  He was going to find that key. He didn’t even want the alcohol anymore. Sure, he could go to a nearby liquor store, but he wanted to take from his father’s precious stash, as a very personal and special kind of fuck you.

  Nathan rummaged through the kitchen drawers with no luck. He took out his parents’ precious lasagna and ate it during his search. Oops.

  Over the fireplace was the same enlarged photo of his extended family taken at Christmas when he was nine. Nathan and his uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents. The sick taste entered his mouth as if on cue. They all looked the same, with their thick chestnut brown hair and chocolate chip eyes, their stocky builds. And then there was the literal redheaded stepchild Nathan kneeling beside the tree, his light hair and pale skin practically glowing. Before they took the picture, his cousins shoved him around in a circle outside, calling him Ginger and asking if he knew the Weasleys, like they loved to do. Their lack of creativity ceased to amaze him. Nathan’s insults weren’t that much more creative. He called them a bunch of braindead cocksuckers (ironic in retrospect). His eldest cousin punched him in the stomach before pushing him into a puddle of mud, where he landed on his ass. Hence the kneeling position.

  Still a bunch of braindead cocksuckers.

  Nathan stormed into his parents’ bedroom and tore through their dresser and nightstand drawers. He came up empty. He recoiled at the canopy bed with thick drapes and the gold sparkly walls of the bedroom. His stepmother had a gay stepson at her disposal yet still churned out rooms like this.

  Next, he searched through his father’s desk drawers in his office. He leafed through papers and envelopes and files. Steam filled his head, and the whites of his eyes glistened with purpose.

  “I know you’re in here,” he muttered. Nathan popped open the locked bottom drawer of his father’s desk, like he’d done as a teenager when he needed some cash.

  He found the cabinet key sitting atop an old checkbook. Whenever he broke into this drawer, he always went for the checkbook. After forging his father’s signature on permission slips, it was only a natural progression. Not like his father cared or even noticed the money Nathan had taken from him. When he did discover the stealing, Nathan thought he’d be in for it. Yelling. Punishment. Wondering about what kind of downward spiral his only son was on. But all his father did was get him his own credit card. “That should make things easier,” his father had told him before going out to some swanky benefit.

  Nathan picked up the checkbook. He had this urge to rip it into pieces, or sign all the checks and hand them to homeless people on the street. Something else far more interesting grabbed his attention. At the bottom of the drawer, the corner of a paper peeked out from under a stack of more important documents. Or at least it looked like paper, but thicker. Nathan had never noticed it before, since his attention had always been drawn to the checkbook.

  He pulled out the important documents and folders piled to the top of the drawer. They stacked up to his calf muscles. His dad never liked to throw anything out. This delicate paper wasn’t a paper at all. It was a Polaroid photo, weathered and frayed from being stuck down there for so long, but the image was still clear. A young man and woman smiling at the camera in the middle of a gigantic outdoor concert.

  The photo began to shake. That was Nathan’s hand, and his body, quivering with a realization. The young man was his father. He had far less hair now, but his gumball-sized eyes hadn’t changed a day. And the woman…with her red hair…Nathan just knew. He knew it in his heart, in every synapse in his brain.

  “Mum?”

  “Nope.” Mr. Baby Arm hung on the doorframe wearing nothing but boxers. His sexiness did nothing for Nathan. “But I can be your daddy.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry about this, but I have to cut our morning short.” Nathan could barely get the words out. His fingers traced the picture over and over. “I have some business to attend to.”

  “Early flight?”

  Right. I’m a pilot.

  “I have to file a flight report. It’s the unglamorous part about my job. Can you see yourself out?”

  The guy’s face dropped. Nathan didn’t mean to be so sudden. But playtime was definitely over. He gave him money for breakfast and a cab and promised to call him, whatever his name was.

  Nathan stared at the picture, stared at her face. That was his fucking mum!

  He had spent the past six years trying to follow his dad’s instructions. Forget about her. Push the sad feelings down. Nathan had taken the extra step to cover them with a thick layer of sarcasm, sex, and alcohol. But the wound pushed through.

  Maybe this was a sign. He found this picture for a reason. In rehab, they talked about signs. Well, they were referring to signs of addiction taking over your life, but signs nonetheless. There had to be a better family out there for him, one with redheads or just people who cared about him, and he intended to find them.

  Chapter 2

  LIAM

  When Liam went to sleep last night, he had made a promise to himself. No going on Facebook. He didn’t even like Facebook and believed it to be one of the worst inventions known to man.

  The next morning, he threw on the same pair of weathered jeans from yesterday with his boxers peeking above the waistband and got his day started. As he cooked himself scrambled eggs while brushing his teeth, careful not to get any foam in the skillet, he thought of other things. More important things. He had a lengthy to-do list, just as he did every morning. Perhaps he should add “clean the house” to his list. Though it wasn’t that dirty, more just old.

  He walked past his computer en route to the kitchen. No stopping. He scratched at his thick beard as he cooked himself some eggs. Liam had always been clean-shaven, but after the major life overhaul of the past year and a half, he decided to grow it out. He needed the change. He was a rancher now, not a city boy. He was living out in the wops, practically the middle of nowhere, with lush, rolling hills of green grass laid out before him. His shaggy black hair puffed out in wild bushels, making his eyes appear even bluer in contrast. With the beard and his muscular chest, not to mention the thick arms and legs that came from manual labor, he was the definition of rugged.

  Liam lived in a shed that he and his oldest brother converted into a studio apartment for him. The bedroom was next to the kitchen, which flowed into his living room and the corner where his computer resided. He was only one guy. He didn’t need extra space.

  It was during breakfast that Liam just happened to remember that he had to email one of his buyers. Right that instant. It
had nothing to do with it being Kelly’s birthday yesterday.

  Liam went on his computer, emailed the vendor, and…

  “Fuck,” he said under his breath. “Fucking Facebook.”

  He clicked onto Kelly’s page. She smiled at a dinner table in a fancy Wellington restaurant surrounded by their mutual friends, their faces aglow from the birthday candles. And Craig was sitting right next to her, his fucking arm around her fucking shoulders. Liam wished he were born one hundred years ago, in a time without social media, in a time when if your girlfriend left you for your best friend, you didn’t have to keep seeing pictures of them. You wouldn’t be able to compare social media updates to determine if they’d been having a long-term affair. They could be truly out of sight and out of mind.

  Liam couldn’t escape it. Even after defriending them, Kelly and Craig kept popping up as “People You Might Know.” Their pictures showed up in their mutual friends’ statuses.

  He heard familiar yelling coming from outside the shed.

  “Yeah, I know!” he yelled back. “I only went on to email someone.”

  The yelling continued in its constant dull tone.

  “I really did!”

  The yelling gained voices and volumes. They sounded more desperate than usual. Liam stuck his head out the window into the dark of early morning. Five of his nosiest sheep baaa’d up at him. He looked out on a sea of wool.

  “Fine. I checked.” He shook his head. “Be lucky they haven’t invented Facebook for sheep.”

  Some ranchers had roosters crowing to wake them up. Liam had sheep. He came from a line of sheep farmers here in New Zealand, a country where sheep outnumbered people. After being cheated on in the most unbearable fashion, he found refuge in the sea of non-judgmental wool.

  He put on one of his flannel shirts, buttoned halfway up, and greeted his Greek chorus. One of them, Matilda, named by his nephew after his favorite book, seemed to shake her head at him.

  “Don’t pack a sad,” Liam told her. “I didn’t wish Kelly a happy birthday.”

  He patted Matilda’s distended belly. “It’s almost that time, isn’t it?”

  She let out a short bleat and walked away.

  “Don’t be embarrassed! You’re glowing! You’re all glowing!” he called out to his bevy of pregnant sheep. “Lambing season is just around the corner.”

  He knew on some level that animals were not this perceptive, but when you worked with sheep all day, every day of the year, you started to wonder.

  The sheep continued baaa’ing, though. Usually they stopped when he approached, but their noises still rang with desperation.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. Like with any relationship, over time, he’d become an expert at deciphering what sound meant what. And he recognized this baaa. “You’re hungry?”

  Liam ambled into the hoof house, which was a large greenhouse-looking structure with a half-moon roof where the sheep ate. It reminded him of those large tents under which he’d attended weddings with Kelly or craft beer festivals with Craig. He mixed together the feed. Every spring, he mowed the grass when it was most nutrient rich and saved it for the rest of the year. Dozens of sheep watched him with anticipation. He poured the food into the feed troughs, and they descended upon him like he was their god.

  Liam had a small farm of about eighty hectares. When his parents passed away, he and his four older brothers inherited their much larger farm, which was divided equally, King Lear-style. Minus the murders and intrigue. Three of his brothers rented their land to other farmers with dreams of selling, while his oldest brother Mark lived on his share in their parents’ old house.

  Liam had originally thought of selling, too, but held on for years even as he worked as a visual effects artist for movies and lived in Wellington. He had always looked up to Mark, who was twenty years older, and Mark wasn’t selling, even though he wasn’t a farmer. Something inside Liam told him not to sell, that it was his birthright.

  It turned out to be fate when he decided to leave the bustling metropolis of Wellington behind a year and a half ago to get away from his breakup. Mark let Liam use his land to expand his farm. He used his savings and took on freelance graphic design projects to supplement his income until the sheep farm turned a profit, which other farmers warned him could take years. Liam would wait. He had no intention of going back to the city. Kelly and Craig could have Wellington. He preferred sheep.

  LIAM HAD BUILT an outdoor shower attached to the shed to avoid tracking dirt into his home. He let the water cleanse him after another long day in the fields. Every muscle inside him cried for mercy. He had to work double time in anticipation for lambing season in July, which was only a few weeks away. He had barely survived his first lambing season a year ago and wanted to be more prepared, repairing the sheds and equipment, making sure he had enough supplies.

  He washed the smell of mud, hay, and sheep off him as best as he could, though after eighteen months of full-time farming, it was baked into his natural scent.

  He put on clean clothes and walked across the field to his brother Mark’s house. It was nice having family just across the field, and in a bigger, more updated house for those rare times when the shed got to be claustrophobic.

  “Gidday, how ya going?” his niece Franny said to him when he arrived. He remembered when she was a little girl, screaming his name and running into his arms whenever he came over. Now she barely looked up from her phone. We were all teenagers once, Liam thought.

  “How is my favorite niece?” He mussed her hair, which he knew she hated. Mark bemoaned how much time she spent in the bathroom every morning.

  She smoothed her thick waves of brown hair back into place. Franny had the tall, gawky look of puberty. She was becoming a woman, which was so strange to the uncle who held her in his arms when she was born.

  “You can’t say that, Uncle Liam. You can’t pick favorites!”

  “Says who?”

  “It’s the rule.”

  “Weren’t rules made to be broken?” He sat down on the tan couch; its weathered, lumpy cushions could put him to sleep faster than his own bed. Franny hopped on, too, though she was too old for his lap.

  “Uncle Liam!” Walt ran in and punched his arm a few times. With his bright red hair and pale skin, he reminded Liam of a lit match, which was an appropriate description in more ways than one. At ten, Walt was at the age just before it became uncool to like your family.

  Liam hauled him over the couch and lobbed soft punches at him.

  “Uncle Liam, can I help you when you shear the sheep?” Walt asked.

  “You’re a little bit too young, but maybe next year.”

  “I’d be really good at it. I cut my own hair!” Walt pointed to his head and uneven lops of hair missing. He was at that age just before he thought about trying to look good for girls. Liam remembered those high school mornings where he put a gallon of product into his bushy black hair.

  “Dinner will be ready in five,” Mark called out from the kitchen. “Walt, why don’t you set the table tonight?”

  Walt hit Liam once more in the stomach, with more force than he was expecting, and buzzed off to the kitchen.

  “How’s school?” Liam asked his niece.

  “All good.” Even glued to her phone, he noticed her expression change slightly.

  “Is it?” He made sure the kitchen door swung shut. “I won’t tell your dad.”

  “There’s just these popular girls. They like to say mean stuff.”

  Mean girls. Some things never changed. Liam didn’t know them, but he hated them.

  “What kind of mean stuff?”

  “About my hair.” Franny touched her roots self-consciously. Her natural red hair was starting to grow back, giving her head an awkward two-toned look.

  “I like your hair. Red, brown, you’re beautiful.”

  “Thanks,” she said, unmoved. “They also call me the farmer girl who lives in a barn. They all wear these designer clothes and shoes and live in nice houses in town.”

  Some things really never did change. Even though they live on a farm, the school district is part of this posh suburb. When Liam went to school with those rich kids, he was also teased for being a farm boy, as were his four older brothers. Except they called him Sheepfucker.