Chapter 26
FINN
In the end, Andrew had plans Friday and had to pass on dinner, which ended up working out well because I’d planned to stage my own intervention, this time with Marshall as the victim.
Subject.
Whatever.
I made sure to arrive at Cunningham’s first. I’d shared some of my revelations with Smith and Hunter, and the two of them arrived shortly after I’d ordered myself a drink.
The whiskey was not enough to calm my nerves, and by the time Marshall strolled in, five minutes ahead of our normal arrival time, I wanted to jump out of my skin.
It was one thing to be grateful for him in my head or in the privacy of my own home.
It was another to sit across from him and tell him that to his face.
Was it even important?
Did he need to know?
“Yes,” Hunter said under his breath. “He does.”
I must have said that out loud, but I frowned at him just the same, just the way Marshall frowned at us before checking his watch.
Smith slid out of the booth and made room for Marshall to take his normal seat.
Our waiter brought him the same wine Smith had ordered, but even if I’d drunk everyone’s liquor, it wouldn’t be enough.
“Am I late?” Marshall asked, knowing full well he wasn’t.
“No.”
“Am I being ambushed?” My oldest brother leaned against the corner of the booth, undoubtedly so he could keep all three of us in his line of sight at the same time.
I used my teeth to bite the lone cherry on the stainless steel skewer in my drink, hoping it would be enough to get me through what I wanted to say to him.
“No,” I told him again. “Well, kind of. But not in the way you tried to ambush me.”
He at least had the decency to look ashamed.
“Finn has something he wants to say to you,” Smith volunteered, which earned me all of Marshall’s attention.
Suddenly, I was a teenager again, trapped in that cavernous estate with nobody besides Hunter for company.
Marshall would come visit, but he was already in college and well on the way to starting his own life.
Hunter pressed the outside edge of his thigh against mine, and I remembered how we used to sit in the marbled entryway, backs against the door after Marshall left, with our legs stretched out.
I’d always been taller than him, but he’d always had more muscle.
Our toes were the same shape because we were half the same.
We’d talk about Marshall when he wasn’t there, jealous of the life he was building for himself while we were still stuck with tutors and homework.
“I’m listening,” Marshall said.
He prompted.
“I think I probably owe you some kind of apology.”
Marshall huffed out a laugh. “Off to a strong start.”
“Oh, shut it,” Hunter snapped, and much to all of our surprise, Marshall did.
“Is that the first time someone’s talked back to you?” I asked.
The corner of Marshall’s mouth twitched into a smirk, but he was quick to shutter it before it took root.
“I owe you an apology, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact you’re domineering and overbearing and that you want all three of us to live little versions of your own life for you,” I blurted, sucking in a breath.
“But I’ve recently come to realize that while your dreams for us might not be attainable, and we’ll forever be living in your shadow and chasing the vision of us that you have, I know now you meant well with it. ”
Marshall worried his tongue across the front of his teeth, shoulders still pressed against the back of the booth.
“I am the man I am today because of the man you are,” I said, hoping it was clearer. “And there’s plenty I don’t like about how I got here, but I’m glad for it. I’m grateful you’re the oldest of us.”
“Finn.” My name caught in his throat.
“I don’t want to be you anymore,” Smith said softly, and Marshall’s gaze drifted to his left. “But I would be happy to be like you.”
Marshall cleared his throat, and I knocked the toe of my shoe against Hunter’s foot.
“You taught us how to want more for ourselves, how to be a good judge of character—”
“How to be a good person,” I interjected. “You modeled how to chase our own happiness, and I’m very sorry our happiness doesn’t look like yours.”
“That’s not—” Marshall tried to cut me off and object, but I raised a hand to silence him.
“Do not pretend you would have picked a man like Riggs for Smith or a man like Lincoln for Hunter.”
Marshall opened his mouth and snapped it closed. I let the accusation hang in the air, and Marshall took a drink of his wine and shrugged.
“I would have wanted good men for them, and I don’t know much about Riggs.
” He angled himself toward Smith, brow knit together.
“That’s my own fault and I’m sorry for it.
But I do know Lincoln and there’s nobody better for Hunter than him.
” Marshall paused, swallowed another taste of wine.
“But to your point, no. Outwardly, they aren’t whom I would have chosen. ”
“They knew to not settle for less than the best because that’s what you taught them…taught us.” My brother’s face turned blurry, and I blinked hard, annoyed that I was on the brink of crying. That wasn’t how I’d wanted this whole thing to go. “What I’m trying to say is… I want to thank you.”
“We want to thank you,” Smith seconded, and Hunter nodded his quiet consensus.
“For what?” Marshall rasped, staring down into his wine.
“For being the way you are,” Hunter said.
“For being a—” I stopped myself, choked down a wave of spit. “For being a better father than you had.”
Marshall finally looked up from his drink, eyes bright and glassy. “A better father than you had.”
“No. You had him, yeah. But we had you.”
It was rare for Marshall to be speechless, but with those words in the air between us, he didn’t have anything to say. His jaw worked and I watched his cheek hollow as he bit into the soft flesh, probably to stop himself from crying. I guessed the move because it was something I did too.
Something Hunter did.
Smith.
Maybe even Andrew, I didn’t know. I should ask.
“Finn, I—”
“You don’t have to say anything,” I told him quickly, taking a drink of my Manhattan and shivering from the burn. “I just wanted you to know.”
“But may I?”
“I don’t think we could stop you,” Hunter muttered, which earned him a glare packed with far more affection than I’d ever noticed before.
“You talked about your brothers being happy. What about you?”
“Respectfully, Marsh, the point of this wasn’t to talk about me.”
“Well.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Too bad.”
Smith chuckled and swirled his wine around, his lack of defense proof the emotional admission part of the night was over.
I’d said what I had to say, and Marshall had moved on to being Marshall again.
But even though I wasn’t ready to talk about Sophie and Daniel with him, the redirect hurt less than it would have before.
“I am happy,” I said.
And I thought about Daniel and Sophie and how good she looked in yellow.
I thought about Daniel’s late-night sheet pan nachos, and I thought about the way he worshipped the ground his fiancé walked on.
I tried very hard to not think about the way he looked at me with the same heavy intent because I didn’t want to get a boner at dinner with my brothers.
“Can I have a little more than that?” Marshall pressed.
There was no point, I wagered, in keeping the secret anymore.
Hunter knew about my relationship with Sophie and Daniel.
Smith knew I’d ended up in jail over Neil and Annette.
Marshall was blessedly in the dark about the worst of it because the thought of disappointing him was enough to make me want to crawl out of my skin.
“I’m…I’m seeing a couple people.”
“Nothing serious, then?”
I managed a weak laugh. “It’s actually very serious.”
“But you’re not exclusive?”
“We are,” I said. “The, uh, the three of us.”
I could see the conflict flash across Marshall’s face, the need to tell me I was making a bad decision, the domineering worry that always followed his lack of understanding around a choice one of us had made.
But I also watched him open his mouth and close it, eyes a little wide before he asked, “And you’re happy like that? With the two of them?”
My mind wandered to the way water pebbled on Sophie’s shoulders in the shower, to the way she knew how I liked my coffee without being told.
I remembered how soft Daniel’s hair felt in my hands, his hot mouth stretched around my cock as I came in the back of his throat.
I wondered if Marshall would think differently about it if he knew one of the people was a woman he’d met.
“Very.”
Marshall nodded and finished the wine that was left in his glass. “That’s all I can ask for, right?”
“It’s…whatever you’re thinking, that’s not what it is.”
I found myself overwhelmed with the need to tell him everything about Daniel and Sophie because the thought of him not liking them or not understanding what we had was too much for me to bear.
“I’m thinking you’re a grown man who knows himself better than I do.” Marshall picked his words carefully, head inclined to the side. “I don’t need to understand it right now, as long as you do.”
Barely.
Falling in love with a couple who were months away from getting married was not the situation I would have wanted for myself, but they did make me happy and I made them happy, and that might not be enough forever, but it had to be enough for now. But when had now ever been enough for me?
“I’m happy,” I told him again.
“Okay.” Marshall flagged down a waiter and ordered a fresh round for us. “Now that you’ve said your piece, may I speak freely?”
“Again,” Hunter said with a low laugh. “I don’t think we could stop you.”
“My love for you three is not conditional. Of course it made me happy when Smith went into architecture and I rest easy knowing he has good taste in wine, but even if he’d chosen something else…
even if you’d chosen something else, I would have loved you the same.
” Marshall scratched the side of his face and turned his stare onto Hunter.
“The day you passed the bar, I felt it. I felt as proud as a father would have, I think, but we’re so close in age. ”
“I’m barely halfway to forty,” Hunter interjected. “You’re on the other side. We are not the same.”
Marshall gave him an exasperated but kind look, and Hunter gave his empty glass a shake just as our waiter appeared with the second round Marshall had ordered for us. We traded out our drinks and Marshall exhaled a long breath through the corner of his mouth.
“What I’m trying to say is…I heard everything you said and everything you didn’t say. I don’t…I’ve never taken the responsibility of you lightly. Of any of you.”
“We know.” Smith covered Marshall’s hand with his and gave him a reassuring squeeze.
“It’s never been a burden,” Marshall said next, words thicker than I think he probably would have liked. “I hope you know that.”
“We know,” Hunter said.
“I can’t imagine my life without the three of you. I don’t want to, and I’m sorry if sometimes I hold on too hard. I just…” He stopped himself and screwed his eyes closed, an unusual show of emotion from the man who had absolutely always been our most level-headed brother.
“We know,” I told him.
I raised my glass and gestured for my brothers to do the same.
It was a shame, I thought, that Andrew hadn’t been able to come up after all.
He’d not had the experience of growing up a Covington and when we’d first found out about him, I was jealous of it.
But with three of my brothers around me, our mismatched drinks raised in the center of the table, I knew I was the luckiest man on the planet.
I had the love of the three best men I knew, and after dinner, I had an open invitation to go crawl in bed with a couple I adored beyond words.
It might not have been the life Marshall pictured for me, but it was the life he wanted for me.
“To Marshall,” I murmured, knocking the rim of my tumbler into the center of his wine glass.
“To Marshall,” Hunter and Smith echoed.
Marshall looked like he was seconds away from bursting into tears with moisture already gathered on his lower lash line. He cleared his throat and shook his head.
“To being your brother,” he corrected.
“To being your brother.”
“To being your brother.”
“To being your brother.”