Chapter 9 #2
I lingered near the door while Smith changed into something more comfortable, then I followed him down to his car and let him drive us the few blocks to the grocery store.
The ride was quiet until we parked, and he turned the car off and grabbed the steering wheel, making no move to get out of the car.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, grateful for a distraction.
He swallowed hard, and I reached over, grabbing one of his hands off the wheel and pulling him toward the center console.
He fought me at first, but eventually I got him into my arms and kissed the top of his head.
It was the same thing I would have done to Silas, the same thing I told Smith to expect.
Instead of pushing away, he melted into me a little and sighed.
“No one was affectionate like this when I was growing up. I don’t know how to…”
“Receive it,” I said.
He nodded, and I smiled into his hair. “Just like this.”
Smith let me hold him for almost five minutes, which did as much for him, I think, as it did for me. My arm fell asleep, but I wasn’t going to pull away until he did. Finally, Smith groaned and extricated himself from my arms, rubbing at his eyes and doing his best to cover the blush on his cheeks.
“You’re just like that all the time?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s nice, right?”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat and made quick work of getting out of the car.
It was fine.
I was committed to being friends with the youngest Covington brother, which meant waiting him out until he became comfortable with the only kind of friend I knew how to be.
Unfortunately, the three orgasms his older brother had given me and the ignored order in my pocket hung between us like an invisible axe blade.
There was no good way to tell Smith I’d hooked up with Hunter, and maybe even no reason to tell him if I wasn’t going to do it again.
Maybe the best course of action was to wait until I figured that part out and then tell him.
Silas would know what to say, but that would also involve telling Silas that I’d hooked up with not one, but two of his boyfriend’s brothers.
“What’s wrong with you?” Smith asked when we reached the front of the store.
I gave him a smile and yanked a shopping cart out of the carousel.
“Nothing is wrong with me,” I said. “Beyond an absolute crisis of character and a dead fish.”
Smith’s eyes went wide. “Betty died?”
“Cassandra,” I corrected.
Smith scrunched his nose and followed me into the store. Once we were through the sliding double doors, I stopped and let him take the lead. He had a list written on paper, because of course he did. He was more Marshall’s brother than Hunter was, that was for sure.
“Tell me about Cassandra.” Smith stopped at the produce, bagging up some lettuce, onions, and celery.
“She died,” I answered with a shrug. “I think she must have been shocked from the transfer. I don’t know. Maybe the water was the wrong temperature, or I moved her too fast, or I gave her bad—”
Smith gestured angrily at me with a carrot. “It’s not your fault the five-dollar fish died on arrival.”
I swatted the carrot out of my face, and he shoved it into a bag.
“That’s what Silas said.”
“Silas is right.”
I snorted and rolled the cart along behind him as he collected his produce before making a left toward the butcher counter at the back of the store.
Propping my elbows on the handlebar of the cart, I rested my chin in my hands while Smith consulted his list and then asked for two ribeye steaks and four chicken breasts.
“Why are you lonely?” I asked, which earned me a sharp glare.
He collected his meat and dropped it into the cart, hooking his fingers around the edge and pulling me toward the chips and crackers aisle. I trailed behind him, frowning at the back of his head until he stopped and grabbed a bag of tortilla chips from the shelf.
“You know, when my mom basically sold me out for a seven figure payday, I was angry.”
“Wait, wait.” I pushed the cart into his hip. “When she what?”
He let out a sardonic laugh. “Do you not know the Covington lore?”
“I don’t know anything about payouts.”
“Our father cares about nothing more than the Covington name,” Smith explained. “Every time a child pops up, he offers a huge like, I don’t know, child support payout or something, and then he ends up with full custody.”
“Normally it’s the other way around?”
“Yeah. Well, we found a new brother recently,” he said.
They’d found out about the new brother the night I’d met Smith for the first time.
“I remember.”
“His mom didn’t take the money. Raised him without ever letting him know shit about our father. Only put it into the will so he could do whatever he wanted with the information after she died.”
Smith reached for a box of Cheez-Its next, then a package of cookies, and another package of cookies, and a third.
“Sweet tooth?” I asked.
He scoffed.
“I’ve always looked at Marshall as being more of a father figure than our actual father, but I really don’t want anything to do with the Covington name.”
“That’s fair.”
We headed into the soup and spice aisle, and Smith collected some boxes of chicken stock and vegetable stock, some bottles of pasta sauce and some dehydrated onions.
“I thought for a while about taking my mother’s name, but she’s the one who got tired of raising me and sold me out, so…”
I knocked into him with the cart again, this time on accident.
“She what now?” I asked, eyes wide.
“I was almost a teenager. She…she’d had the offer for a while but had told Willem no, until one day she just said yes.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think there was anything to say.
“And that’s what happened with all of you?”
“In varying degrees,” he said, frowning down at the contents of the cart before turning his attention back to his list. “Just need hummus and cheese, and we’re good.”
I grimaced, uncomfortable with how easily he was about to move on from admitting all of their mothers had basically sold them into boarding school for some zeroes in their bank account.
My parents had been shit, but at least they kept me. Even when I’d wished they hadn’t.
Smith set off for the last two items on his list, and I followed behind, waiting for him to say something else. When he didn’t, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “You know you didn’t deserve that, right?”
“Yeah,” he said automatically. “But without it, I wouldn’t have Marshall and Finn and Hunter, so it was worth it in the long run.”
He sounded like he wanted to believe it, and I wanted to believe it too.
For him.
“It just…sometimes I just…” He rubbed his sternum, and the ache was so acute, I felt it myself.
“Yeah,” I agreed, not needing him to finish. “I hear you.”