Chapter 5
OLIVER
“Hello? Earth to Oliver?” Jane bangs something in the background, grabbing my attention.
“What?” There’s an edge of frustration in my voice that I wish wasn’t there.
It’s not Jane’s fault I’m cranky. Even though my date with Colt—well, and Aaron—didn’t end disastrously, I’m still reeling from the experience.
Somehow, I managed to run off two eligible men in one night.
That’s impressive in all the wrong ways.
“Are you okay?” she asks, concern filling her voice. “Do you need me to come down there?”
Nope. Absolutely not. The last thing I need is my oldest sibling in my space, trying to make me feel better about my sex life.
It’s bad enough she knows I have a sex life.
“I’m fine, just a little unfocused. Really.
” As the baby in my family, my siblings have always felt the need to protect me. Sometimes a little too much.
I close my laptop and move from lying down on the sofa to sitting, hoping that will help.
It’s not like I was working anyway. I’d been going through a series of Wikipedia articles when she called.
They started as research but ended up somewhere vastly different.
Hey, you never know when all that useless information might come in handy.
“What happened? Is it the author you work for? Is he working you too hard again?” Spend one family vacation reading and making notes on a manuscript, and everyone starts to think that my boss is a tyrant. Maybe I prefer reading to the interrogation I get when we’re all together.
Or maybe I fell so far behind on my deadlines after the newest Final Fantasy game release that I didn’t have a choice.
“Jane, you work twenty-four-hour shifts in the hospital. I should be the one asking you that question.” All of my brothers and sisters are impressive, but Jane’s the oldest and needs to win everything. Which is why she’s a neurophysiologist—whatever that means.
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because it is,” we say at the same time.
“Little brother,” she warns.
“Everything’s good. Really. It was just another bad date.” I grab my headphones and connect them to my phone. I’m too restless to sit still while we do this. Might as well use the time for something productive.
Okay, semi-productive.
I grab the crochet project I’ve been working on, a rainbow dinosaur, and start working on the body. It’s easy rounds of stitches, so I can listen and work at the same time.
“What kind of bad?” I can practically hear her sitting up straighter.
“Oh. My. God. Leave it alone. I’m fine. He’s fine.
Everyone’s fine. It just wasn’t a good fit.
” I need to stop saying fine, but it’s the only word I can think of.
That’s true with Colt. We got along well enough, but there was no spark.
Nothing to make me believe that it would be anything more than a pleasant evening.
Aaron, on the other hand, I’d felt something with him, a connection that made me think that maybe we could be together.
Romantically. I spent twenty minutes with Colt, dragging out every word of our stilted conversation.
With Aaron, the hours we spent together flew by.
When he left, all I wanted to do was figure out how to invite him back here.
And not even for bedroom activities, but to keep our conversation going.
Though the bedroom activities were a huge plus.
“Let me set you up.”
“Excuse me? Jane, I love you, but there’s no way in hell I’m letting you pick out a date for me.” She’s got great taste in her own husband, David. He adores her and their children. That part I want, but I find David dull as a box of rocks.
“I have a great track record for setting people up. My friend Stephanie’s married to the woman I set her up with.
And you know I found Henry’s wife.” Henry, our brother, is five years younger than Jane, the third kid in the bunch.
His wife is fantastic. Whether Jane actually found her is a hot-button issue in our household.
Henry claims they would’ve gotten together on their own even if Jane hadn’t butted in.
“Yeah, but I’m not looking for a wife.” I throw myself down on the couch.
“Oliver.”
“Jane.” Two can play this game. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as the baby in the family, it’s that I can annoy my siblings into bending to my will.
“Fine. Let me know if you change your mind. I know people at Cardinal Falls Hospital.”
Yeah, so do I. Technically, that’s where Colt works, though I doubt she knows him.
I certainly hope she doesn’t. The last thing I need is for her to hear about the disastrous night through the grapevine.
Or one of his work friends. I prefer to keep far away from my siblings’ friends.
They’re already too involved in my life; the last thing I need is for them to have a reason to get more details.
“So, tell me what my nieces have been up to?”
I let myself close my eyes, dropping my project into my lap, and listen as she describes what they’ve been doing in school recently.
She can go on forever about her twins, and I love every minute of it.
Moving here was a deliberate way to distance myself from them so we wouldn’t be involved in each other’s daily lives.
It’s good for me to be out on my own for the first time, but I miss them like crazy.
“So now my whole backyard is covered in holes, and we have to pay a landscaper to come in and fix the whole thing.”
“They broke it, make them fix it.” Seems fair to me. The twins are adorable, but absolutely feral. I don’t know how Jane and David manage.
“Oliver. Seriously? They’re six. I don’t even think they can do that.”
“They could break it.” I shrug even though I know she can’t see me.
“Yeah, like that ever worked when you were a child.” Hey, being the baby came with a few privileges. Mostly, there was always someone older around to blame. Or to help me fix whatever I broke before our parents got home. And I broke a lot of things.
I don’t know if I was rough or simply clumsy. Probably a combination of both.
“Hey, I gotta run. The girls have soccer practice.” Okay, what I don’t miss is sitting outside on cold Saturday mornings watching them run back and forth across a field.
Calling it soccer is a bit of a stretch.
It’s a bunch of kids chasing a ball back and forth across a field. They don’t even keep score.
I did exactly once. When I reported it to Jane at the end of the game, she gave me a lecture about child development and competitiveness. I tuned out halfway through, but the gist was that I was never to count the goals again.
I did, but I didn’t tell her.
“Have fun,” I say with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. “And thanks.” Just telling someone makes me feel better.
Since that conversation counts as my break, I pull out my laptop again to check my task list. It’s not huge, but it’s getting a little overwhelming. If I did something now, I would feel better about it and avoid waking up in the night thinking about it.
It’s Saturday, though, and I’d prefer to turn on the TV and spend the next several hours watching the new crime drama I found. Relaxation wins out, so I shove my laptop under the coffee table and get comfortable.
AARON
I can’t stop thinking about Oliver. Which is stupid. I spend less time with him than I do with my coworker Barrett, and I rarely think about him outside of work.
Though I’ve never had Barrett’s cock in my mouth.
“Hey, you need help?” Barrett’s crouched down next to me, examining my work on the moving walkway.
“No,” I say far too quickly. I do actually need help with this fix. It’s possible to do it alone, but it’ll take twice as long, which is why Barrett’s here in the first place. He doesn’t deserve to be on the other end of my bad mood. “I mean, can you hand me the comb plate?”
He gives me a questioning look, but hands me the piece I requested so that I can close up the walkway, and we can go back to the office to do paperwork.
I prefer to stay here, tinkering with the equipment, rather than spend the next hour answering a bunch of tedious questions on the computer.
If I was alone, I would draw it out so I could spend a little time thinking.
Since Barrett is out here with me, it’s not a choice.
Or, it is, but I don’t want to be a bad influence. I’m technically the senior engineer between us. I suppose that makes me the mentor or something. I prefer not to think of it that way.
It only takes another ten minutes to finish the job and run a couple of test runs. When we’re both confident the walkway is running safely, we head back to the office.
“You running today?” I stiffen. I know what he’s really asking.
He’s asking if I want to run together. I am running; he knows that, but I was really planning to use that time to process my feelings about Oliver.
I’ve been back and forth between guilt and intrigue—as well as every emotion in between—since Thursday night.
Running is how I work things out, something that’s harder when Barrett’s right next to me. He’s a talker on our runs, constantly babbling about something or other. I’m often not listening, but I can’t completely ignore it.
“Yeah,” I finally say. Maybe distraction is what I need.
The real problem is that my brain has had way too much time to think about this over the last few days.
I’ve put in a few hours of running since then and not come up with any answers.
There’s no good solution, so instead, I’m stuck choosing between the bad ones. “You want to come?”
He perks up like a puppy hearing that it’s time to go for a walk. “Yeah? Can I?”
“Of course.” I might not be the most social person, but even I can admit it’s nice to have company.
I didn’t lie when I told Oliver that I prefer to work out solo, but the next several months include nearly a thousand miles of running in build-up to my next marathon.
That’s a lot of time alone with my thoughts.
Might as well give myself something to do on a few of them.
“Meet me at three?” There’s a great path by the airport that runs along a park.
It’s one of my favorite running places because it’s rarely crowded.
Most parks are full of kids on shaky bikes and slow walkers, but the proximity to the airport and lack of playground equipment keep this one relatively empty.
He nods, a big grin across his face. I briefly consider talking him into running the marathon with me, simply so I can have another person to run with for more of these sessions. He’s told me no before, but it’s always possible he’s changed his mind.
Then I shake it off. That’s my unsettled feelings speaking, not a genuine desire to have someone spend hours a week jabbering away at my side.
Even if it would be nice sometimes, I’ve been wildly unsuccessful at getting anyone else in my friend group involved in running.
Tyler walked out of the room the last time I mentioned it to him. Message received.
Back in the office, we return to our individual workstations. I have to fill out a report for the moving walkway and close out the request. There are very few things in life I hate as much as administrative work.
Walking barefoot on hot sand.
Waiting in line at the DMV.
Using the port-o-potties at a race.
I became an engineer to do hands-on work, not because I like writing. It’s a terrible side effect of the job that a significant amount of my time is spent filling out forms explaining all my work to a bunch of administrators who haven’t taken a single math or engineering course.
Besides, being back at my computer lets my mind wander.
Lately, when it walks, it always goes back to Oliver and our not-a-date.
It’s been a long time since I was attracted to a man, at least five or six years, but sitting next to him heated my blood in the way no one of any gender has in a long time.
Worse, he seems to have stuck with me. My phone buzzes, and I open it, expecting it to be my group chat with Matthias, Tyler, and Nathan.
There’s always someone dropping something in there throughout the day, especially on weekends.
I love the connection it brings us. We might only meet up as a group once a week, but I never go a day without talking to them.
Oliver
Want to get together?