6. Malcolm #2
“She’s my girlfriend’s.” Should I still be calling Kaylin that? Fuck it, I don’t know anything right now. “This is Stephanie.”
Bailey snorts, which is the appropriate reaction to meeting Stephanie and learning her name.
“Come on in.”
“Can I hold her?”
“I’m kind of her person, so it usually doesn’t work out when I hand her over to someone and she can still see me.”
“ Okay …” Bailey says like I’m a complete weirdo. She comes into my apartment and spots Kaylin. “Hi.”
“Hi,” my ex? girlfriend says, with a smile and a wave. “I’m Kaylin.”
“Bailey,” my fellow intern says as she takes in the surroundings.
My apartment is a one bedroom, one bathroom box with an open floor plan.
It’s literally nothing special down to the boring windows and wood laminate flooring.
It’s one of those places that was slapped together fast to make a quick buck on people with mid incomes wanting to live in the city.
It verges on depressing. “How long have you lived here?” Bailey asks.
“About a year,” I say, closing the door and switching Stephanie to my other arm.
“Seriously? It looks like you just moved in.”
“How’s that?”
“For one thing, you don’t have anything on the walls.”
“I can’t ever decide what to put up.”
“You know, if you don’t like it you can take it down.”
All that makes me think about is putting holes in the wall for no reason if I change my mind. Reason number a million why I could never get a tattoo. I check my watch, and it’s seven on the dot. I’m less surprised when the next knock and yip come.
Opening the door for my stepbrother, it’s like coming face to face with yet another stranger.
Yes, in terms of how he’s dressed, he looks more like how I remember him, but also like if that version were airbrushed, run through AI and perfected.
Or one of those what would I look like as a Disney hero filters.
He’s in a black t-shirt that hugs his ridiculously sculpted chest and dark-washed jeans with a slit of a hole in one knee.
Both his sleeves of tats are on nearly full display.
His hair isn’t slicked back. It’s falling around his forehead in thick, dark waves—longer than it looks at work.
He’s got his messenger bag strapped across his body in a way that makes me notice his shoulders, collarbones and pecs.
My fingers twitch, an urge to trace the lines of him as compelling as the desire to stroke velvet.
And what the fuck ? This is Ryan . We’re not friends.
I’m not— attracted to him. It’s probably more like jealousy.
Like I wish my body looked like that. If my muscles were that defined, then I could feel all those ridges and dips when I touched myself.
Okay. Fuck. No. Jesus, I’m an hour into my break with Kaylin and I’m already all over the damn place. I don’t want to touch Ryan—or—I mean—touch myself thinking of Ryan—or wait. No. Jesus, he’s a guy . I don’t do that. That’s not—it can’t be—this is nothing.
Still, I can’t look at his body. I can’t look at his face, either, so I look at the dog as I step aside and let him in.
One of the many, many problems I have with what he said to me so many years ago was it put me in an impossible position because he’d been my stepbrother since we were eight.
On top of that, he was my best friend in the universe.
The pressure his confession put on me felt like he was shitting all over everything.
Granted, I didn’t immediately recoil. I knew he was out of it, but I also knew he was telling the truth, and I wrestled with it.
I didn’t want our friendship to be over.
I was fourteen, we were in high school. Everything was changing—he was going one way, and I was going another, so I actually did think about it.
I thought about whether how close we were meant I had feelings like that for him, too.
But very quickly, I realized what it would mean if I did, and how it would change not only everything at home but also at school, and I couldn’t let myself go there. In short, I freaked the fuck out.
Literally overnight everything that attracted me to him—his wit, his patience with me, the way it felt to hold him or be close to him—morphed solidly into a deep revulsion that only picked up steam over the years as we completed puberty, and he started getting stoned all the time.
But he’s all respectable man now. Angry respectable man.
His gaze is flinty and hard, guarded as he looks between me and the dog. His dark hazel eyes are mostly a pale brown with bold flecks of emerald green. It makes him look a little unreal, to be honest, in a way that’s hard not to stare at.
“Hi, Ryan,” Kaylin calls out .
Those eyes widen slightly at the sound of her voice. He gives me a look like what the fuck ? About three feet into the dining area, he stops and stares at Kaylin approaching. “Hi,” he says flatly.
She’s going to hug him. Of course she is.
She’s always felt bad for him and guilty and whatever else her big heart can hold.
Because she was an asshole to him, too. She’s just allowed to feel bad about it, while I’ve had to convince her that she and I didn’t do anything wrong. Apparently, it worked.
She slings both arms around him, and I want to put my hands between them and push her off. If I don’t get a goddamn hug, then she shouldn’t either.
He keeps it brief as she gushes. “Mal said you looked different, but damn, you look amazing .” When she pulls away, she doesn’t stop touching him, running her hands up and down his arms like she did with me, both the parts covered with his shirt and his bare skin.
I have an insane urge to slap her hands away.
He’s my—I mean, she’s my girlfriend. Or… fuck .
I don’t know what any of us are anymore.
“It’s great to see you,” she says giving his biceps a squeeze before catching the look I’m giving her and stepping back.
“Yeah,” he says.
I blow out a breath. We need to get this over with, and I say as much.
“I’ll order pizza,” Kaylin says, heading toward the kitchen.
Bailey and Ryan nod their greetings at each other, and I ask if anyone needs a drink.
Bailey holds up her refillable water jug, and Ryan shakes his head. He looks disconcerted, the line between his eyes more prominent. As he glances around the room like he’s not sure where to put himself, I use my free hand to gesture to the table.
Bailey takes her phone out of the front pocket of her overalls and Ryan sets down his bag to pull out his laptop. I grab mine from the coffee table and put Stephanie on the couch. She protests, immediately racing after me, but I try to ignore her as she scratches at my leg to get on my lap.
“Anybody have a great idea since we last talked?” I ask in an attempt to both break the ice and get my wayward thoughts on track.
“Does anybody have a book they wrote lying around that we can self-publish? Put the money toward a nice cover and a few well-placed ads?” Bailey asks.
Ryan shifts in his seat, eyes on his laptop. He glances up at her with his brows raised. “I had the same idea.”
“How long would it take to write a book?” I ask.
Bailey shrugs. “I figure it doesn’t have to be good. Just really hyped.”
I don’t get it. “How do you hype a book that sucks?”
“What makes you think it would suck?” Ryan asks, like he’s already written one, and I’ve offended him.
I didn’t mean anything like that, though. “I’m just saying if we don’t have one, maybe we can find a book that doesn’t suck and offer to hype it for a cut of the royalties.”
“Like—start a small PR business?” Bailey asks.
“You’re just pulling this out of your ass, aren’t you?” Ryan says. “Did you come up with an actual idea?”
Stephanie nips at my pants leg. “What about a dog walking business?”
I feel Ryan’s gaze creeping on me.
“For night shifters,” I add. “Midnight dog walking. We recruit some college kids or whatever, run some online ads, then scale up.”
“Dog walking, huh? Where’d you come up with that?” he asks, his voice low and suspicious.
I give him a flat stare. “Why?”
“Sounds like something I’ve heard before. Let me ask you this: what would you say to turning over some vintage t-shirts and scaling up into limited edition sneakers?”
I’d say I don’t usually blush, but I might now. Fucking ChatGPT.
Bailey speaks up, “How much could we make doing that? And how fast?”
“We’re not doing that,” Ryan says. “It was a joke.”
Haha.
“It doesn’t suck,” she says.
“No, but unless you have a ton of time to go thrifting and manage online sales, it’s not viable for our timetable.”
I’ve gotta say, I remember Ryan being smart and good at math, but I don’t remember him being this quick. It’s…impressive. Cynical, but still impressive.
“Well, what’s your best idea?” Bailey asks, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms over her chest to look at him.
“I’m not sure it’s the best I’ve had, and I haven’t put much thought into it, but at the gym tonight, I thought about maybe like a financial advice YouTube channel? We do a small ad buy and once we have a following we start a subscription tier?”
“Is that how YouTube works?” she asks.
“I think so,” he says. “I’m not sure. I didn’t say it was a good idea.”
“I’m not doing videos,” she says.
Ryan sighs. “We’ve got three hundred dollars?—”
“Two fifty,” I interrupt him.
He glares at me. “Great. Perfect. Two hundred and fifty dollars. We need something scaleable at a rapid rate, and I think the cheapest, easiest way to do that is by utilizing social media. It would take some luck, though.”
“I’m not sure about that,” Bailey says. “Influencing is a business—it can’t be all luck.”
A moment of silence passes while we digest this. Neither of them are wrong, but I’m running a little short on luck these days. Bailey asks, “How would we stand out? There’s literally millions of people trying and failing at going viral daily. What do we have that they don’t?”