4. Rex
FOUR
REX
My house was quiet and empty when I got home. It always was. For a long time, I liked it that way. I could listen to my music on full blast, watch sports in my underwear, and keep the toilet seat up. But after a while, bachelor living got old. That’s when I started volunteering as a firefighter. It was the best way to keep me busy. That, and I missed the action.
I started out as a firefighter in my early twenties, when my college communications degree hadn’t brought a mountain of job offers and money at home was tight. My mom and brother had needed help, and I had to do what I always did: step up.
But as I got into my thirties and thought I might be settling down, I decided to get out and became the fire marshal—a career that wouldn’t worry my future wife.
Of course, there had been no future wife. Still wasn’t—again, the reason I had to pretty much blackmail a friend into pretending to be my girlfriend at my brother’s wedding. I doubted I would admit it to anyone else, but I hadn’t given up on the possibility of a white picket fence and a couple of rocking chairs on the front porch.
I’d grown up taking care of everyone else—doing what a kid could to keep the family together until Dad died, and then I really was keeping the family together—and part of me always wondered when I would find someone who wanted to take care of me . Selfish, maybe, but I always seemed to get myself into one-sided relationships. I’d end up with a woman who demanded the world and never seemed that appreciative when I did my best to deliver it. I didn’t want a 1950s housewife; I just wanted… I just wanted someone who cared . Someone who smiled when I got home and noticed when I took out the trash. Someone who didn’t complain when I asked for a backrub.
Hell, maybe that was selfish. But these days, it was easier to be on my own than to go out looking for someone who’d reciprocate.
My stomach growled the moment I hung my keys up. It had been a long afternoon at Sebastian and Charlie’s demolition zone. I was pretty sure there was leftover fried chicken in the fridge. I trudged over to the kitchen and grabbed the bucket and a chilled soda can. I settled on the sofa and flipped on sports highlights.
I watched for all of thirty seconds. Who was I kidding? Abigail must have been on my mind, because it felt like a guilty pleasure kind of day. I put on an episode of The Bachelor and settled in for some trashy drama that I would never admit to enjoying.
Just as the episode was getting good, my phone rang, my brother’s name on the screen.
“Hey,” I answered. We’d just talked the other night, but my little brother seemed kind of on edge about the wedding.
Sure enough, I could hear a thread of tension in his voice when he said, “Hey bro, how’s it going?”
“Going well. What’s up?” I asked, then took a bite out of a crispy, cold chicken leg.
“Nothing, man. I just wanted to call and say hi. I’m looking forward to seeing you this week.”
Uh-huh. “Me too.”
My relationship with Donny had been strained after Blair got together with him. Not that we ever really talked about it. There weren’t any hard feelings, but there weren’t no feelings, either. He was ten years younger than me, and I’d always taken care of him. Him dating my ex had been a shock in a lot of ways. It was the first time I realized he was grown up, despite me still feeling like I needed to look out for him. That, combined with the vague sense of betrayal that came with his dating Blair, meant that my feelings toward my little brother were complicated.
But now that they were getting married, it seemed like a good time to officially put the past behind us. I wanted things to go back to normal between Donny and me.
I put my show on mute, turned on the captions, and hit the play button. The bachelor had just kissed one of the contestants behind a bush, and the other ladies were going nuts about it. It was messy as hell.
Donny cleared his throat. “So, just checking if there's still a room available for me and Blair?”
Huh? On the TV, the main shit-stirrer was in the confessional, telling the camera about how she’d exposed the kiss on purpose to make a third girl look bad. She was awful. “Yeah,” I said distractedly as I read the captions. “Sure.”
“Cool. Abigail’s house is so close to the venue, you know. And there are no hotel rooms available at such short notice.”
“Makes sense,” I said, brows arching when the wildcard girl barreled onto the screen and threw her glass of champagne at the bachelor. That’s something Abigail would do if she thought it was justified. This shit was so bad and so good. Like watching a slow-motion car crash.
Then Donny’s words registered.
“Wait. What? Abigail’s house?”
“She still has that place on Persimmon Road, right? The one that backs up to the botanical gardens?”
I fumbled the remote to pause my show, then cleared my throat and wiped chicken grease off the corner of my mouth. “Yeah. So what? What’s that got to do with you?”
“You said it’s serious between you two, right?”
I cringed. “Yeah.”
“So you must sleep over at her place all the time.”
Abigail had warned me about the sticky web of lies. The problem was, she didn’t know the half of it. I hadn’t exactly been honest with her, either.
“Yeah, I sleep over,” I lied.
Donny said, “Well…” and I tried to stop my shoulders from hiking at the sound. I knew that tone: it was the one that told me that pretty soon I’d have to clean up his mess. I always did.
“Come on, Rex. You’re not going to let me crash with you? It’s my wedding!”
“Why do you need to crash with me? What happened to the bridal suite at the Briarwood Hotel? ”
“It was all booked up.”
“It was booked a year ago when you started planning the wedding?”
Donny groaned. “Look. I forgot, okay?”
“You forgot to book a hotel for your own wedding?”
“There was a lot going on!”
“Donny.”
“Rex. Throw me a bone, here, bro.”
I looked at the chicken bone I still clutched between my fingers. No friggin’ way. A fake date was one thing. Inviting myself—and my brother and his fiancée—to stay with Abigail was quite another. There was no way she’d agree to that.
“Stay with Mom.”
“No, she lives in that tiny one-bedroom senior apartment. We’d be on top of each other the whole week.”
“What about Blair’s parents?”
“They moved to San Antonio to be near her when I got drafted.”
“Did they get a hotel room?” I asked. “Stay with them. Hell, get a tent!”
“C’mon, Rex, what’s the big deal? Abigail has a decent house, and it’s right next to the botanical gardens. It’s perfect.”
Except it wasn’t perfect. And it wasn’t an option.
When I was sixteen, I’d gotten a job at the local grocery store stacking shelves to pay for my brother’s peewee football equipment. When he made it to the varsity football team in high school, I worked my firefighting shifts and then worked nights at Sullivan’s Bar with Gabe on my days off to pay for the tournaments and extra coaching and physio that he needed .
When he went off to college, I fought fires and sent every penny to Mom to pay for what the scholarships didn’t.
And it wasn’t just money. I’d agreed to order cheese pizza for my entire young adulthood because Donny didn’t like toppings on his pizza and we couldn’t afford to buy more than one pie. I always put my family ahead of me, because I loved them and I wanted the best for them. It’s what family did.
But I couldn’t do this.
“No. Not a good idea,” I said.
“I knew it. You’re still mad at me about being with Blair.”
His words struck a chord, and I immediately felt defensive. “It’s not that. You know I’m happy for you.”
“Then what is it? Why is it such a bad idea for Blair and me to stay with you and your girlfriend? You don’t still have feelings for my girl, do you? It’s been years .”
“ Hell no.”
“What do you mean, ‘ hell no?’ You don’t think Blair’s a catch?”
I rolled my eyes. “I mean you’re being ridiculous. And I know I’m usually one to save you from your own mistakes, but you can’t just invite yourself to stay with—with my girlfriend.”
“Rex,” Donny said. “Blair’s going to kill me. You know what she’s like.”
A little too well. I chewed the inside of my lip. “You need to sort your own shit out, Donny.”
“It’s my wedding.”
“Yeah, which is the perfect opportunity to grow up.”
Donny let out a long sigh. “Come on, Rex. With all the physical therapy I’ve had to do on my knee, and the news that I might never play football again, and then all the wedding planning…”
I rubbed my forehead, groaning. He knew exactly which strings to tug with me, and I felt my resolve weakening. When we were kids, I’d had to step up and fix his mistakes on a regular basis, like the time he almost got kicked off the football team for smoking weed behind the bleachers. Or the time he flunked out of twelfth grade math and I had to beg Miss Hannah to let him do a make-up test so he could graduate.
Dad had just died, and Mom was a mess, and I was dealing with grief and the weird guilt that came with the relief that we wouldn’t need to deal with our father’s sulkiness and resentment and hair-trigger temper anymore.
Then, like now, Donny needed me. And no matter how much I wanted to tell him to fix his own fuckups, he was still my little brother—and it was his wedding.
Donny paused. “Rex. I need your help. Blair doesn’t know we don’t have a room, and when she finds out we have nowhere to stay, she’s going to kill me. But if I told her I arranged to stay with you, and so close to the venue, she’d think I was a genius.”
“You could be honest with her,” I suggested, and yes, I realized the irony of my giving him that particular piece of advice.
He ignored me. “Think of it like a wedding present. Plus, we can spend more time together. It’s been a long time since we’ve done that.”
“It’s not my house, Donny.”
“Yeah, but it’s your girlfriend’s. And it’s Abigail Stone. She’s been in love with you since she was ten. She’d never say no.”
A childhood crush wasn’t the same as a real relationship. I was pretty sure Abigail didn’t harbor any secret feelings for me now. She was pretty clear about that every time we saw each other. I was just Gabe’s friend to her.
Besides, Abigail would take great pleasure in saying no to an unreasonable request. She wouldn’t let anyone steamroll her into anything.
Which made me wonder why she’d agreed to this scheme in the first place.
Then Donny said the magic words: “Please, Rex?”
I let out a long sigh. It was hard to argue with him. And I was the one who opened my big mouth with a big fat lie. Donny was a lot of things, but he would always be my little brother, so I said, “I’ll talk to Abigail.”