Page 43 of Flirting with Forever

“No,” she said aloud. “You don’t get to make me doubt myself.”

She wasn’t sure if she was talking to her mother or to John.

She gave herself one long moment to picture the hug that Cora would have given her at that moment, so tight it hurt, her chin digging into Mary’s shoulder, her voice in Mary’s ear.

Mary Freaking Trace. That was what Cora had always called her in moments like this. MFT for short. She wouldn’t let herself be cut down by the perceptions of others. She was MFT.

It would have been great if John had reciprocated. Dandy. But it hadn’t happened and, in the end, that didn’t really change anything at all. Because she’d been MFT long before she’d met John, and she was still MFT now.

Mary took one more deep breath, fixed a smile onto her face and went back out to her party.

CHAPTER TEN

“YOUKNOW,IFyou hadn’t refused Dad’s money, you could be doing this disgusting little performance in your own penthouse.”

Maddox leaned lazily against his kitchen island, watching John take a bowl of preheated pasta straight to the dome. Despite the towel John had wrapped around his waist, water was pooling at his feet where it dripped from his bathing suit. He swallowed a huge bite and glugged half a glass of seltzer that Maddox had just made him in his seltzer-maker thingy.

John rolled his eyes at his brother’s words, but he didn’t deny them. When he’d first come back into his life, his father had repeatedly tried to reimburse him for the trust fund he would’ve gotten access to at age eighteen, like Maddox had. But John had refused over and over again. Maybe it was the same stubborn streak that Estrella had, the one that had kept her from marrying Cormac after all these years. But John had felt that taking the money would be too transactional. As if his father were paying to exonerate himself from the guilt of abandoning John and Estrella.

Besides, there was something symbolic about a trust fund. It was something you set up for a kid you acknowledged as your own. Like Maddox. It wasn’t just a blank check from an overstuffed bank account twenty-odd years later. The whole thing offended John.

Still, principles had limits and John’s stubborn streak didn’t stop him from coming over to his brother’s house and swimming in his saltwater pool and eating the food his housekeeper stocked the fridge with.

Finally, John finished his food and grabbed a dish towel to mop up the pool water at his feet. “Thanks, man. I needed that.”

“The food or the swim?” Maddox asked, his arms crossed lazily over his chest, his head lolled to one side.

“Both. All. It’s been a hell of a summer so far.”

“Big caseload?”

“Always. And my clients have had some shit luck with grand juries lately. Everything has been getting indicted. And I mean everything.”

“You’re seeing a lot of court time?”

“No.” John shook his head. “Lots of plea deals and kissing ADA ass to keep these kids out of court.” John sighed, suddenly feeling ten years older than he was. “Sometimes I wonder why I even do this whole Sisyphus thing.”

Maddox laughed. Now he was the one rolling his eyes. “John, are you kidding me? You’d never be happy if your job was even a smidge easier. You feel like Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill? Well, did you ever stop to think of what would happen if you actually got to the top of the hill?”

John opened his mouth, closed it and cocked his head to the side, looking a lot like his brother in that moment. “Good point. I guess if you get to the top of the hill, there’s nowhere else to go.”

“Or you’re like Dad, and you make yourself a new hill.” It may have sounded like a compliment, but Maddox’s face was tight when he said it.

“You’re talking about ambition.”

“You don’t become the DA of Manhattan without it.”

“Yeah, well, apparently you don’t become the mayor of NYC with it.”

The two of them cracked into a grin. It was petty that they both still got so much joy out of their father’s mayoral disappointment. But yeah. As different as their upbringings had been, Upper East Side versus Crown Heights, they were both still New Yorkers to the core and neither of them had believed that their father’s proposed changes to policy would have been good for the city.

Plus, their dad was an ass who pretty much got everything he wanted, and it had felt good to see him lose one.

“So, that’s it? That’s the whole reason for your mood? Work?”

John shrugged and strode over to the small bag of clothes he’d brought to change into after the swim. Standing in Maddox’s living room, he started changing under the towel, thoughtfully looking out at Maddox’s—literal—million-dollar view of the East River, Queens and Brooklyn.

“I always thought it was ironic that the richest people in New York are forced to have the working class in their view at all times,” he said after a minute. “All the money in the world and you still live in New York City, surrounded by all walks of life.”

---