Chapter 2
FINN
Iwoke up Monday morning with the kind of hangover I deserved and my final lesson learned.
Without my phone, I had no idea what time it was, but the sun glaring in through the guest room window led me to believe it was well into the middle of the morning.
Stretching out my legs, I groaned, annoyed at the way my hip cracked at full extension.
I should have let Smith give me a charger, but I didn’t trust myself to not do something foolish.
Slowly, I extracted myself from the soft and warm cocoon of Smith’s guest bed.
God, I didn’t have clean clothes, I didn’t have my car…
I hadn’t thought this thing through at all.
Cursing my own idiocy, I put on yesterday’s clothes, my watch.
I grabbed my dead cellphone and slid it into my pocket, then debated stripping the bed so Smith could wash the sheets.
In the end, I chose to make it, fearing I’d end up in it again before he even had time to come home from his boyfriend’s house to do the laundry.
I was wrong about that.
I realized that as soon as I got downstairs and found Smith in the kitchen, fresh coffee in the pot on the counter, and two slices of toast fresh out of the toaster. He was in the act of buttering them when he heard me, glancing up with a nervous smile.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“You’re the one with a watch.”
I huffed, checking my wrist. It was almost ten.
“How long have you been here for?”
“Not too long, but awhile,” he answered. “I heard you moving around so I put some toast in. Figured you’d be hungry since you didn’t eat last night.”
“How do you know?”
I climbed onto one of the barstools at Smith’s kitchen counter. He slid the plate of toast toward me, followed by a mug of steaming coffee.
“Everything is as I left it,” he said simply.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I shoved half the slice of toast into my mouth so I didn’t have to.
Smith leaned against the counter and drank his own coffee while I ate, and I hated he’d been right.
I was starving and toast was nowhere near enough, but my head felt like someone was battering on it with a rubber mallet and I didn’t trust my body enough to eat more.
Smith took my plate after I finished eating and washed it, returned it to the cabinet, then reached into a drawer and pulled out a bottle of painkillers.
He passed that to me next, and I took double the recommended dose, grateful my brother had taken after Marshall in the ways I liked and not just the ways I didn’t.
After chasing the pills with coffee—a winning team—I pulled my phone out of my pocket and slid it across the counter to Smith.
“Would you get this enough charge to turn on? Then I want you to go in and block some numbers for me.”
I didn’t need to tell him who, and Smith kept his back to me the whole time he deleted the mark of Neil and Annette from my life. Once finished, he pulled the plug out and gave the phone back to me with a whopping two-percent battery life.
“You don’t have to avoid your phone if they’re blocked now,” he said.
“I know. I kind of just…don’t want it.” I left the phone on the counter. “Not for a forever thing. Just not right now.”
There were pictures that needed to be deleted, but I wasn’t going to ask my baby brother to take care of that dirty work for me.
And it was my own fault they were there in the first place.
I should have deleted them months ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I wasn’t too ashamed to admit I still jerked off to them sometimes, but that wasn’t what I’d been doing on Sunday night.
I’d used them for a trip down memory lane I should have never taken, and both of us knew where that had gotten me.
It was better to stop tempting myself with fantasies that would never really be within my reach.
“That’s fine,” Smith said. “You know, you’re lucky you waited until Sunday to get arrested because Riggs and I were out of town and I didn’t have my phone until we got back to his apartment.”
“It was hardly an arrest,” I countered.
“Wasn’t it?”
“I mean, it would have been. Public intoxication maybe, but the officer who took me in knew Willem.” I snorted, unable to stop a ridiculous smile from splitting my face.
The irony of getting out of my first arrest—which would have only been a misdemeanor anyway—because somebody recognized my name and knew my father…
it was laughable. Beyond his money and his name, it was the only thing he’d ever done for me that mattered.
Maybe I should send him a thank you note, I thought to myself.
“So.” I shrugged one shoulder. “I slept it off, called you, and here I am. Free and clear.”
“Free and clear,” Smith muttered, the double meaning not lost on me that I was, in fact, neither of those things. He cleared his throat. “What’s the plan for the day, then? Riggs and I are at your disposal.”
“Is he here?”
“He’s at home. I didn’t want you to feel overwhelmed when you woke up, but he’ll head to your house whenever you’re ready to start painting.”
I downed the last of the coffee in the mug and it was nowhere near enough to make me as coherent as I wanted to be for the tasks at hand.
“I know it’s getting late, but I’d like to go home and shower and change first. Then I’ll go pick up some paint. Maybe lunch time?”
“Do you want me to come with you?” Smith asked.
“No, but thanks.”
“Do you want me to at least take you home? Your car isn’t here.”
I didn’t want my brother to do one more thing for me than he had to, and he’d already done so much.
Picking me up from the sheriff’s office, letting me stay at his house, renting out his boyfriend on a Monday afternoon to help cover up my bad decisions.
The last thing I wanted from Smith was one more thing to owe him for.
“I’ll call a car.”
“With your two percent battery?” He reached across the counter and tapped the screen of my phone. “One percent.”
I snatched it away from him and used the last of the juice to get a car request into the app. As soon as the confirmation popped up on the screen, the thing died again.
“One percent was enough,” I said with a smug grin that barely even reached my lips, let alone my eyes. I put the phone back into my pocket and climbed off the barstool. My hip cracked again, and I hated it. “Thank you for this, Smith. I—”
He cut me off, “It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“Agree to disagree.”
I looked at my brother, like really looked at him for the first time in weeks.
I’d given him a good study the night he showed up to dinner with a hickey and a tattoo on his arm, when he’d stood up to Marshall and cemented himself as a functioning adult member of the family.
Not to say he hadn’t been either of those things before, but his relationship with Riggs had marked a line in the sand that Smith clearly had no interest in walking back on.
He looked older now, more sure of himself.
He looked like he was in love, held by it and empowered by it, and I loved that for him, but hated it for myself.
Marshall had Silas and Hunter had Lincoln, and now Smith had Riggs and that left me on my own little island of single and potentially depressed Covington brothers.
There was Andrew, though, all the way in San Diego and only marginally interested in having a relationship with any of us.
He spoke with Hunter the most, maybe with Smith, definitely not with Marshall.
There was a group chat for the five of us that had sat untouched for well over a month, and I had no plans to change that.
It was bad enough two of my brothers knew about Neil and Annette and the mess they’d made of my life.
I didn’t want the other two—other three, if we counted the suspected one Andrew had found—to hold me in the same horrible regard.
“Lunch, then?” I asked, suddenly desperate to get out of my brother’s house.
“We’ll see you at twelve. Do you want us to bring anything?”
“Just clothes you don’t mind getting paint on.”
“Okay.” Smith didn’t move from his perch against the counter. I gave him an awkward wave, then left him.
The car arrived shortly after I made it outside and the twenty-minute drive home gave me more contemplative silence than I should have been allowed, all things considered.
The slam of my heartbeat in my own ears was worse than the bass beat of any song I’d ever heard in my life, and I’d never been less grateful for a quiet driver than I was that morning.
Once home, I plugged my phone in and turned it face down on my pillow, then I stripped out of my clothes and tossed them all into the hamper.
I turned on a song that didn’t have a single drum on the track, some modern piano piece I’d stumbled upon by accident, then walked right into the hottest shower I’d ever taken in my life.
The searing hot water was, unfortunately, not enough to wash away my shame, but I scrubbed extra hard in case the shower wanted to prove me wrong.
In the end, I gave up, drying off a body that was far too pink and raw on account of all the scrubbing I’d done.
With some sense of self-preservation, I’d ignored my dick.
I was the kind of man who loved a good shower wank.
Even if I’d just gotten off in the bedroom or the living room or the hallway, there was something so welcoming about the warm confines of a shower that made it impossible for me to not want to get myself off.
But this time, I knew better.
I needed to stay on track…get dressed, get out of the house, get some paint, and come home. Riggs and Smith would be here—oh, I needed to get us lunch also—and the two of them would help me paint over the pink in my office and everything would be normal again.
After finding clean clothes and forcing my aching limbs into the proper holes, I grabbed my keys and my wallet and headed to the garage.
I was halfway there when I made the decision to turn back for my phone.
It was barely past twenty percent when I yanked it off the charger, which was somehow too much and not enough at the same time.
I ignored the work emails, knowing there wasn’t anything that wouldn’t keep until the next day.
I worked in finance, not neurosurgery.
“Thank you for this,” I muttered to myself, hard pressing my thumb onto the only photo album on my phone with a solid black thumbnail image instead of a photo placeholder.
That had been deliberate, because if someone got into my phone, the album with the cover of red lips stretched wide around a thick cock would have been like a tractor beam.
I’d hidden the album for protection, not realizing I’d protected myself in the process.
“Just do it.”
I pulled both of my lips between my teeth and stared down at the pop-up menu on the screen asking me what action I wanted to take.
“Very unfair there’s not a crawl into a hole and die option,” I said, finger hovering over the Delete Album line.
It wasn’t like I wanted Neil and Annette back.
I didn’t hang on to the photos in the hopes that someday I could add new positions and angles to the collection.
I didn’t even really know why I’d kept the photos, why I still jerked off to them sometimes.
The two of them had broken my heart so many times I'd lost count. They’d broken it as a couple and as themselves, and they’d done both of those things more than once.
The loss was monumental, the pain lingering.
There would be no loss if I got rid of the pictures.
The internet was full of porn. It wasn’t like I would have to go without.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I pressed my finger against the screen, and just like that, Neil and Annette were finally out of my life for good.