Chapter 5
FINN
When I got home from the paint store, Riggs and Smith were there.
I knew they would be. I’d agreed to it, and Smith was a Covington, which made him a man of his word.
He had on a pair of jeans and a black t-shirt, a fair match to the outfit his boyfriend wore, though Riggs—with his long hair and tattoos—made it look much more rugged than my brother ever could.
The first time I’d met Riggs wasn’t great.
I’d been on the tail end of an argument with Neil and wasn’t in the best mood when I ran into the two of them.
I’d had maybe a little too much to drink, and I’d honestly been very surprised coming face to face with the man Smith had just told us about.
I’d had a picture of him in my head which didn’t come close to matching the actual man, and I’d acted immaturely about the whole thing.
That was months ago, and Smith had refused to bring Riggs around, so I’d had no chance to apologize.
Rather, I could have, but searching out his name to find his tattoo shop and showing up unannounced felt like stalker behavior, and I didn’t think I’d acted egregiously enough to warrant that kind of groveling.
I knew if Smith was really serious about him, he’d show up again sooner or later and I’d have my opportunity.
“Can you take this in?” I asked my brother, shoving the cans of paint into his waiting hands. He grabbed them with ease, stepping out of the way so I could get the key into the front door.
“Are you not coming?” he asked when I kicked the door open.
“I want to talk to your boyfriend first.”
“I’m not—”
“It’s fine,” Riggs said before Smith could protest.
“It’s fine,” I told Smith, who looked between both of us with a pursed mouth before Riggs gave him some unspoken sign that must have confirmed he wasn’t going to murder me on my own porch.
Smith took the paint into the house, and I shoved my hands into my pockets, suddenly unable to look Riggs in the eye.
“Thank you for coming over on your day off,” I said.
“I’d do anything for Smith.”
I swallowed hard. “I know, and so would I…I also…” Fuck, this was unnecessarily difficult.
It wasn’t like I’d never apologized for bad behavior before.
I’d done plenty of it with Neil and Annette, and back further to Marshall and Hunter.
I wasn’t one of those men who didn’t have it in him to admit he’d been wrong, but there was something about the embarrassment of the whole thing that made this specific apology much harder to get through.
“I’m sorry,” I finally blurted. “There’s nothing else to say and no way around it.”
Riggs arched a thick, dark brow at me. “Sorry for what?”
“Are you serious?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, and he nodded.
Oh, Smith had his hands full with this one. Or maybe it was the other way around. I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think I wanted to be.
“I just appreciate specificity,” Riggs said. “It helps avoid confusion.”
“Marshall would love you if he could get over himself,” I muttered, scrubbing a hand down my face. “I’m sorry for the way I acted the first time we met. And while we’re at it, how I’m acting now. I’m not…not the best version of myself.”
“Forgiven.”
Riggs held his hand out, and I shook it quickly before tangling my fingers together at the small of my back. We stood there awkwardly for a minute until Riggs said, “How are you doing, Finn?”
“I don’t think we know each other well enough for the real answer.”
“I plan on marrying your brother,” he said, glancing toward the open door to my house. “He doesn’t know it yet, but…the point is, I plan on sticking around awhile. Is our relationship always going to be at arm’s length?”
Smith had played me, I realized.
He knew I was weak about the breakup and the lingering feelings associated with it.
He’d seen how avoidant I’d been of his attention and also Hunter’s.
He knew me well enough to see I needed to talk to someone, but understood it wouldn’t be anyone who had the same last name as me.
And he’d brought his stupid boyfriend over to my stupid house, knowing sooner or later I would spill my guts to one or both of them.
“I’m just nursing a heartbreak,” I said, hoping a summarization would be as much of an olive branch as it could be. “I drank a little too hard over it, and now I’m coming out the other side.”
“A man or a woman?” he asked. “I don’t want to assume.”
“Unfortunately, both.”
Riggs chuckled, an honest to God look of surprise flashing across his face. “Double the trouble, then.”
“Basically.” I gestured toward the house and Riggs headed in. I followed after him and closed the door. He waited for me to lead the way, and I headed to the office with him on my heels.
Smith had already spread out a drop cloth and had busied himself with getting the cans open and the rollers laid out.
He shoved a brush into my waiting hand, and I couldn’t help but stare at it like it was a seven-headed snake.
The reality of covering the paint suddenly much more serious than it had been in theory.
This was a level of commitment Neil and Annette had never bothered to offer me, and painting them out of my life was much more than figurative at that point.
It was a commitment to moving on, to forgetting them, to not being weak when they had a fight and went their separate ways and called me again, begging for attention.
I dragged the brush through the rich reddish-purple paint color I’d chosen—with a stranger’s help—and raised the coated bristles to the wall.
My vision went a little blurry when I made the first pass, and Sophie had been right.
Pelt was dark enough to cover Sulking Room Pink, and for that I was grateful.
“That’s a beautiful color,” Riggs said, and I nodded, dragging the brush down the wall until the color started to streak. “It’s very rich. Layered.”
Sophie’s voice rang like a bell in the back of my head, and I snorted, passing the brush back to Smith.
It had been symbolic, of course. The room was too large to paint with a brush alone.
He set it down on the drop cloth and ran a roller through the tray, handing one to Riggs and taking one for himself.
“Why don’t you sit down?” Smith said to me, jerking his chin toward the window seat. “Let us take care of this.”
“I didn’t call you over here to do the job for me.”
“I know.” He gave me a shove toward the window.
Riggs set to work on the far wall, and I watched as he skillfully applied a fresh start to the walls that had already started to haunt me.
“I don’t want to sit here and do nothing,” I protested. “At least let me make lunch or something.”
“Lunch is good,” Smith said. “But don’t worry about this, alright?”
Smith’s face was the next thing to go blurry, so I nodded my agreement and left him and his boyfriend in my office before I did something overwhelming and unwarranted like crying in front of him.
This change was a good thing. There was no reason to cry over it.
I’d cried enough about those two, and this fresh coat of paint should have felt more like a rebirth than a death.
“It can be both,” I told myself, opening the fridge and staring hard at the items inside until I was able to visualize them into something that felt like a coherent meal.
I needed to go to the store but had been doing much more moping than eating. Smith and Riggs carried on some sort of jovial conversation from the other room, intermittent bursts of laughter echoing down the hallway as I set to cooking up some marinated beef for rice bowls.
Maybe I should have called Marshall over the whole thing.
He would have verbally dressed me down so thoroughly I would have never thought about Neil and Annette again.
He had a way about him, of getting what he wanted in his life, not just for himself but for the people around him.
I’d watched him do it for his boyfriend, Silas, getting the man out from beneath his father’s controlling thumb and into a firm that appreciated his talents.
There wasn’t a single thing Marshall wanted that he couldn’t have for himself, which was apparently a trait inherited from his mother, not our father.
I’d inherited my mother’s ability to make anything a joke, pretend emotions weren’t real or at the very least weren’t worth feeling, and I’d done it all with an avoidant attachment that could have been in the textbooks for how shocking it was.
I clearly wasn’t ready for that much of a come-to-Jesus moment, which was why Smith had been the one to get the call.
I had to admit, it had been the right decision.
Smith saw me without making me feel naked, and there was a quiet kind of peace in that.
It also didn’t hurt, having a tall boyfriend to reach the top parts of the walls.
“Drinks?” I hollered through the house after I’d finished plating lunch.
“Beer?” Riggs called back.
“Two?”
“Yes, please!” Smith answered.
I dug a serving tray out from a cabinet and set all three bowls on top of it, silverware, three bottles of beer, and a bottle of hot sauce.
When I caught up with the two of them in the office, it was already halfway painted, the purple more of a relief than I’d expected.
I put the tray on the desk and carried one of the bowls to the window seat Smith had tried to send me to in the first place.
I tucked my legs underneath me and sat in the same position I would if Hunter had been here.
“Do you like how it looks?” Smith asked, sinking into a chair and stretching out his legs.
“Very much,” I admitted. “Thank you.”
“It’s a really beautiful color,” Riggs said with an appraising frown. He sat down beside Smith and kicked his foot against Smith’s ankle. “Very elegant.”
I chewed and swallowed.
“I’ve never been fond of the pink,” he continued. “It felt pretentious to me.”
Smith made an amused sound in the back of his throat, and I dared myself to glance at the remaining pink wall. I wasn’t sure if pretentious was a word I would have used for it, but there was certainly something much more refined with the purple.
“I really can’t thank you enough for coming over today and helping.”
“That’s what friends are for, right?” Riggs asked, shrugging one shoulder toward his ear.
“Family,” Smith corrected.
The two of them shared a look so sweet it made me want to throw up in my mouth a little.
I couldn’t hate it, though. I should be happy my brother had found that kind of love.
Marshall had it with Silas, and Hunter definitely had it with Lincoln.
I wanted all of my brothers to have the best things in their lives, but it was hard to not feel like Smith might have deserved happiness a little bit more than the rest of us.
He’d had a really hard go through the early years, and it was jarring almost to reconcile the quiet peace of him at Riggs’s side with the angry and tempestuous teenager I remembered.
That was the kid Marshall saw when he looked at Smith, and I made it my duty in that moment to make sure Riggs found acceptance in our family—if he wanted it.
Smith wanted it; I could tell by the lovesick look in his eyes, and Riggs had already told me he wanted to marry my brother.
I needed to make sure that when the two of them got to that point, that Marshall would handle it well.
“Speaking of, don’t you think it’s time you started bringing Riggs around more?”
Smith’s head snapped up and he stared at me with wide and nervous eyes.
I appreciated the feeling, because I’d spent the past eight or ten months carrying it myself.
Back when things had been good with Neil and Annette, I’d stayed up late many nights wondering how I would ease my brothers into the idea of me being with more than one person.
I’d never found an easy way to do it, which had worked out in the end because this whole thing would have been much more embarrassing if my brothers had met Neil and Annette before things had gone to shit.
“I don’t know,” Smith said, chasing the words with some beer.
“What are you scared of?” I asked.
Riggs worried his lower lip, stare solely focused on the movements of Smith’s face, absolutely and completely tuned into whatever my youngest brother was feeling and processing.
“I’m not scared,” he said.
“He’s a good man,” I assured Smith, even though I was confident he didn’t need a reminder of it. He wouldn’t have settled for less, not the way I did. “And if you plan to keep him around, you have to socialize him.”
“He’s not a pet.”
“I know.” I shot a sidelong glance at Riggs, who smiled at Smith like he hung the moon. “I think you should give them a chance. Give us a chance.”
Smith sighed.
“I’ll talk to them first. Soften them up.”
“Would you?”
“I would do anything for you, Smith.” The words sat heavy and true in the pit of my stomach.
Maybe that sort of devotion was my downfall.
I’d do anything for my brothers, would have done anything for Neil and Annette.
I needed to get my heart off my sleeve and back in my chest where it belonged before someone stole it for good… whether I liked it or not.
“That would be nice of you, Finn,” Riggs said, angling the neck of his beer bottle at me in a long-distance toast. I mirrored the pose and we both took a drink.
This was something new. This was good. I could focus on Operation Make My Brothers Like Riggs in an attempt to get my mind off the natural disaster that had overtaken the rest of my life. I swallowed down the rest of my beer and set the bottle on the floor.
“It’s the least I can do,” I told them both.
And when they finished their meals and set back to painting Annette out of my life without another word, I realized just how true it was.