Chapter 6
Bryce
When Bryce woke up the next morning, Merrick was already awake. He found his brother in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and frowning down at his sketchbook.
“Morning,” Bryce mumbled, still half asleep.
Merrick pulled a coffee mug down from a cabinet and set it in front of the coffee pot before stepping out of the way for Bryce to fill it himself.
“Did you have a good night last night?” Merrick asked.
Good would have been an understatement. The time he spent with Holden had been off the charts and their phone call had been something else entirely.
After they’d gotten off the phone, Bryce had actually showered.
He’d avoided Merrick, managed to get himself into bed, and fell asleep before his head hit the pillow.
He woke in the morning with a pleasurable ache between his legs and a pounding urgency to find a clinic offering same-day test results.
He shivered and wiped some sleep from the corner of his eye. “I did.”
“What’s his name?” Merrick asked.
“Does it matter?”
“I don’t know. Are you going to see him again?”
Obviously.
“At least once,” he said, because it was the truth. He and Holden had plans for another round and he would see Holden whenever he went to Ink and Ember, but he didn’t think any of that meant anything. Whatever was happening between them was just sex, or if it wasn’t, it needed to be.
“When?”
“Tonight.” Bryce rested his elbows on the counter and looked down at the dragon his brother had been sketching. “What about you? Are you seeing anyone?”
Merrick sniffed and flipped the cover on his sketchbook closed. “No.”
It was the shortest answer his brother had ever given him about anything.
Bryce turned and leaned against the counter, sipping his coffee without looking directly at Merrick. “Tell me more about that.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“You always have something to say.”
Merrick cleared his throat and turned around, leaning against the edge of the counter and mirroring Bryce’s pose. The two of them held their coffee the same way and stared out the window over the sink. Bryce thought about Holden, and he had no idea what—or who—Merrick was thinking about.
“How was your flight?” Merrick asked instead.
A deflection.
“Short, but it was fine. Had some ginger ale and some of that over-dry trail mix. Flirted with a flight attendant.”
“Was she pretty?”
Bryce smiled, thinking about the slender twink.
“He was.”
“Have you ever met a person you didn’t want to take to bed?”
The question was more an accusation, and Merrick’s tone was biting.
“You,” he answered. “And please don’t pretend like you care about what I do behind closed doors.”
“You don’t even always close the doors.”
“You weren’t supposed to be home until eight!”
His brother snorted a laugh in the back of his throat, shaking his head.
Bryce had struggled trying to get the right kind of attention growing up.
Merrick had always been such a personality, in and out of their house, it was as if Bryce was born with shoes to fill.
There was no corner of his life where he wasn’t compared to his older brother.
And he loved Merrick, he really did, but he didn’t want to be like him and that was a hard pill for everyone around them to swallow.
Merrick was good at art, better than good, obviously.
Bryce still drew oval-shaped suns in the corners of the page.
Merrick had always been a good student, straight A’s in everything, where Bryce had to work for C’s.
Merrick’s gift for conversation had made him the center of attention while Bryce’s struggle to be heard over the chatter of his brother made him a troublemaker…
a distraction. But when the two of them were alone together, Bryce saw a mirror of himself and he didn’t understand why everything that came so readily to Merrick had been so difficult for him.
It was one of the big reasons he’d wanted to leave home.
Bryce was desperate to be somewhere people could know him as himself, not as Merrick’s brother.
So, of course, the first thing he did was go find himself a man who knew him as the latter.
Even if he did have plans to see Holden again, the next time needed to be the last time.
Bryce hadn’t moved to LA to stay in his brother’s shadow, and he certainly didn’t want to start out there.
“So, what’s your plan then?” Merrick asked. “You can stay here as long as you need. Until you can get a job and get some money saved.”
“I have money saved.”
“Things are different here.”
“I’m not a child,” he snapped. “I know LA is expensive. I know it’s a hard city.”
Merrick exhaled, blowing the breath into his coffee before taking a drink. “What do you think you want to do?”
“I was going to see if I could find a bartending gig or something,” he said. “I really don’t want to start serving again—”
“Too many actors already waiting tables anyway,” Merrick interrupted.
Bryce snorted. “And I’ll start looking for apartments tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
He wanted to. He loved his brother, he did. But he was using Merrick as a steppingstone. A helping hand to get out of St. Jack’s Bay and settled somewhere new.
“Do you work today?” Bryce asked.
Merrick nodded and turned his attention back to his sketchbook, focusing again on the unfinished dragon he’d been stabbing his pencil at when Bryce had woken up.
“Tell me about it,” Bryce said, knowing how to use his brother’s chatter as a tool to change the mood when he wanted to.
“This dragon at two,” he said, sliding the drawing toward Bryce.
It was a beautiful Japanese-style thing, clearly designed for a forearm.
Bryce might not be an artist himself, but because of Merrick he’d grown up around enough of them to know the basics of how tattoos wrapped around the body.
He had a few of his own, most done by his brother and some done by his brother’s friends.
He was nowhere near as inked as Merrick, and both of them had much more open skin than Holden, who was covered pretty much from his throat to his ankles.
Bryce wanted to see him naked.
Shit.
“I meant tell me about the shop. About your life here.”
“Riggs is a good boss,” Merrick explained. “An amazing artist. He has a boyfriend who comes around a lot named Smith. He’s young, but still older than you.”
Bryce rolled his eyes.
“He opened the shop after his husband died. He just hired me and Holden not too long ago.”
“I remember,” Bryce said.
“It’s small and it’s quiet—”
“You’ve never been quiet a day in your life.”
Merrick grinned. “Holden tells me that at least once a day.”
Bryce should have known asking about work would derail the conversation into dangerous territory.
He focused himself on Merrick’s sketchbook, flipping through the pages to see what else his brother had been working on.
It was easy to tell which drawings were for clients and which had been for himself.
Merrick had always been fascinated with nature, drawing flowers and birds and trees since he learned to pick up a pencil.
At least that was the story their parents always told.
Merrick had been drawing since before Bryce had even been born.
Deciding it would invoke more attention if he ignored the topic of Holden completely, Bryce took a drink of coffee and asked, “What’s his deal, anyway?”
The question was twofold. He did want to know about the other man, but he wanted to keep his brother off his tail too.
“He’s cranky,” Merrick said. “Quiet. He keeps to himself.”
“Everyone is quiet when you’re around.”
“Not you.”
Bryce didn’t tell his brother that was from necessity. Instead he took another drink of his coffee.
“How was your little lunch adventure yesterday?” Merrick asked. “He didn’t say anything about it when he got back to the shop.”
Enlightening, Bryce thought to himself.
“Uneventful,” he answered. “He doesn’t have much to say.”
Unless he’s horny, Bryce though, in which case it’s nearly impossible to shut him up.
“I don’t know what his deal is.”
“What do you mean?”
“His deal,” Merrick repeated, like saying the same thing again would somehow clarify it.
“Merrick.”
“I don’t know. He just comes to work, does his job, and leaves. I don’t know a single thing about him.”
“Have you ever asked?”
“What?” Merrick scoffed at him. “Of course.”
Bryce raised a brow, decidedly in disbelief. His brother was kind, but he rarely thought to engage others in the talking parts of his day.
“Is that why you made him take me to eat?” he asked.
“I asked him to take you to eat because you were hungry and directions to the corner store are confusing.”
“It was three blocks,” Bryce said.
He closed Merrick’s sketchbook and looked at his brother, who was staring at him with an uncomfortable kind of intensity.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Merrick answered quickly. He clutched his coffee to his chest and walked out of the kitchen toward the living room.
Bryce topped his mug off before following after his brother and finding him on the couch. He sat down next to Merrick and stretched his legs out, propping his socked heels on the coffee table. This time, Merrick was the one to match his pose, crossing his legs at the ankle.
“What?” he asked again.
“I think he’s lonely,” Merrick blurted, and Bryce could have laughed at the absurdity of it.
“Why do you think that?”
“He’s just so quiet! I don’t think he has any friends. I don’t think he has a girlfriend, and I don’t think he has any family here. I just…”
“You didn’t have any family here until yesterday,” Bryce countered. “And if you have a girlfriend, you haven’t told me.”
“I have friends,” his brother argued.
“I’m not saying you don’t. I’m just saying it sounds like you don’t really know a single thing about him so I’m not sure what your goal is.”
“I don’t think he has friends and you don’t know anyone here,” Merrick explained. “I thought the two of you could maybe be friends.”
“I’m sure he has friends.”
“You don’t.”
Bryce sighed. When his brother got like this, there was no stopping him. Merrick would get these ideas in his head and convince himself they were real, even if they had no basis in reality. Bryce figured it had to do with Merrick’s overactive imagination or something. He’d never been sure.
“I’m fine, Mer. And I’m sure he is too.”
“Well, if you wanted to be friends with him—”
“I don’t,” Bryce said sharply. Maybe too sharply. He forced a smile and shrugged his shoulders. “He probably doesn’t want to be friends with me.”
“Who wouldn’t want to be friends with you?”
Plenty of people, Bryce thought to himself.
Everyone who compared him to Merrick and found him lacking, for one.
Everyone who compared him to Merrick and found him worse, for two.
He’d never tell his brother that, though.
For as much as Merrick stressed him out and hurt his feelings with his talent and his general ability to be perfect at everything, Bryce never wanted Merrick to know how that had impacted the people around them.
Nothing bad that had happened to Bryce had ever been Merrick’s fault directly.
And for as much as his brother annoyed him, he really didn’t want Merrick to change.
He just wanted to exist, and he wanted that to be enough.
He wanted to be quiet sometimes and he wanted to breathe, and he didn’t want to be compared to someone he’d never wanted to be in the first place.
“I want a new tattoo,” he said, stretching his leg out and kicking Merrick in the ankle.
The change of direction in conversation was exactly what the both of them needed. Merrick angled his body toward Bryce and tucked one leg beneath himself, cradling his coffee mug with both hands.
“Oh?” Merrick raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Tell me more. Actually wait, let me get my sketchbook first.”