Chapter 32
ALEX
The Night We Met | Lord Huron
After the girls arrived at the jazz lounge, Alex had opted to give her space, avoiding so much as looking at her, even if her mere presence felt like a gravitational force all its own. But after an hour of forcing his body to resist its natural inclinations, he caved. After the way they’d left things that morning, he needed to talk to her. A real conversation, not late-night texting that would inevitably lead to something physical, ignoring the real connection he knew they had. So he grabbed a drink for her and made his way towards her sofa, where she was talking to the friend he’d met while addressing and stuffing invitations.
Where he’d heard her say she was moving to fucking Barcelona .
Sarah whipped around, eyes stricken when they landed on his face, which he entirely lost control over for the span of five seconds, as he felt devastation flood his features.
By the time she said his name, voice choked, he’d regained control. ‘Alex. I—’
‘You’re moving?’ he asked again, face now settled into a stony expression.
She stood, lip pulled between her teeth, and it brought back flashes of the night before. Of her sharing his bed. Feeling—really feeling, for the first time—like they had a shot at being something. ‘Maybe. I, um, I have an interview this week.
‘For what?’ he bit out. Behind Sarah, he vaguely noticed her friend slink away in the direction of the dancefloor.
‘Assistant curator of a gallery.’ Her voice was quiet, but measured, as if she’d put thought into this. Decided it was best for her. Decided leaving him was best for her.
‘Why? You’re painting full time. I thought that was what you wanted.’ He couldn’t think that he’d ever spoken to her so harshly. Even when they were barely more than strangers, and she’d been determined to dislike him, he’d been playful. Affectionate, even.
‘I’m painting animals, Alex.’ Some of the snap returned to her voice, and it was a shame, really, that he couldn’t enjoy one of his favourite things about her. ‘I’m not exactly Georgia O’Keeffe.’
‘And you’re not going to become her by not painting anything at all,’ he said flatly.
‘This is a good opportunity for me. I’ll make industry connections. I’ll get to travel.’
There was so much he could have said. Let me keep helping you. Let me take you travelling.
Instead, he was a dick.
‘That is such bullshit, Sarah, and you know it. You act like there’s this secret club you can’t get an invite to, but you already have the access code. Who do you think is commissioning you? Anyone spending that much money on a painting of their fucking hamster is investing in real art too. You don’t need galleries. You already have a network of potential customers. Have you ever shown them your other work? Or are you so scared of being rejected that you won’t even try for something real?’
It was possible he’d stopped talking about art.
Sarah’s mouth flattened into a thin line.
‘Were you even going to tell me?’ Alex continued. ‘Or was I going to get a you up? text with a pin dropped somewhere in the Barri Gotic ?’
‘Well obviously I’d only be leaving after the wedding.’
Alex wanted to claw through his chest at the unspoken end of that sentence. So we’d be done.
‘And it’s not like we’re—’
Cold, sour laughter strangled Alex’s throat, one hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose. ‘Sarah, I swear to god, if you say we’re not friends, I am going to lose my shit.’
All the whispered conversations after sex, the bonding over his tattoos, that night in the bar… All of it for nothing, it seemed.
‘Can we talk about this another time? This is supposed to be a party.’
‘No.’ Alex stared her down. ‘Because apparently I can’t get you to talk to me unless I’ve just fucked you. And I’m done doing that.’
As soon as he said it, he felt like an asshole. For her part, Sarah looked like he’d slapped her. But rather than apologise, he dumped the drinks he was still holding onto a nearby table and stormed towards the exit.
When Erik found him five minutes later, Alex’s head was thrown back against the brick exterior as he gulped down breaths of the cool night air. In his periphery, he could see his brother mimicking his posture, down to the hands thrust into his pockets.
‘I guess it’s pointless asking if you’re okay,’ Erik finally said. ‘What happened?’
‘We—’ Was it a break up if you hadn’t been dating? Alex shook his head, then turned it to face Erik. ‘How much did you see?’
Erik shrugged. ‘Just you storming out. Sarah looking upset.’
‘Right. So how pissed are you and Abby that I hurt her friend?’
‘I don’t think Abby saw anything. And I can not tell her if you want.’ His brother’s face, so like his own, twisted. ‘Looks to me like you’re pretty hurt too.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Alex muttered. ‘I just… I feel like a fucking idiot.’ Even more so when he considered that the grand romantic gesture he’d imagined would now be a permanent reminder of his failure.
Erik nodded. ‘Want to talk about it?’
‘No.’
‘Want to go home and get shitfaced?’
Alex huffed a frustrated laugh, scrubbing a hand over his face—a crack in the mask he’d never let Erik see before. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’
‘Okay.’ Erik straightened. ‘Call an Uber. I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Erik, wait—’
Ten seconds after that messy blonde head vanished through the door, Alex pulled his phone out with a sigh. He had to get home, even if he wasn’t about to let Erik skip out on what was left of his party. But when his brother came back, jacket in hand, he refused to listen to Alex’s protests.
‘How did you explain to your fiancée that you’re leaving?’ Alex asked.
Erik smiled. ‘I told her my brother needs me.’
‘Been a while since we were here.’ Erik leaned back in his armchair, swirling the whiskey in his glass.
Alex rubbed his tired eyes, recalling when the two of them had sat in the same spots months before, as Erik bemoaned his own girl troubles. Now he was getting married in less than a week.
That night had been a turning point in their relationship. When Erik had returned to his volunteer project in the Philippines after a brief stint in London for New Year’s, they’d stayed in touch better than before, even if it was mostly surface level. And after he’d moved home permanently and into Alex’s house, they’d made sure to see each other regularly, when Alex’s schedule allowed.
‘Sorry for making you leave your party early,’ Alex muttered.
Erik rolled his eyes, a small smile gracing his lips. ‘What kind of bachelor party would it be without my best man, anyway?’
‘I think your bachelor party ended when you were reunited with your fiancée, and your fingers started venturing down the back of her dress. Is she going to be mad you bailed?’
Erik grinned at Alex’s first statement, adding a shrug in response to his question. ‘I’ll make it up to her. To confirm,’ Erik continued, ‘you don’t want to talk about Sarah?’
Alex shook his head before taking a long swallow of his drink.
‘Okay. Then I have something to say.’ His brother shifted in his seat. ‘I’m about to take a really big step in my life, and I guess it’s caused some self-reflection or whatever, and…I’ve realised that I’ve possibly not always been the best brother.’
Surprise lifted Alex’s eyebrows.
‘We were never that close, and I told myself it was because you were too old and too cool to hang out with your little brother and his friend, but’—Erik paused, scraping his knuckles against his jaw—‘but maybe that was exactly the problem. I was never available to you, because I spent all my time with Abby. And with you and I being closer now…I regret that we could have had this for longer, if I hadn’t been so consumed by her. I guess I’m trying to say that I’m sorry if we made you feel like we didn’t want you. We were kids who didn’t entirely understand what we were to each other, and I think—I know —it made us selfish. And maybe we didn’t know how to say it back then, but you’re always welcome.’
A tight feeling in Alex’s chest had his voice coming out wry. ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever heard you speak for that long.’
He’d wanted it, craved it, when they were kids. An invite into their little club. At two years old when he’d heard the news, he didn’t remember finding out he was going to have a little brother. But he’d seen the grainy old footage of the moment. A small face lit up with excitement. Gleeful in pictures from the hospital as a tiny hand wrapped around his finger. A built- in best friend to go on adventures with. That was what he’d imagined.
Instead, he’d watched his brother and their parents’ best friends’ kid have game nights and movie nights and sneak off to cause mischief at family functions. Everything he’d wanted, but warped and twisted and viewed from afar. Alex knew they hadn’t actively tried to exclude him. Their Christmas Eve double feature of The Princess Bride and Jurassic Park in particular always garnered an invite. But despite their words deeming him welcome, their strange, insular intimacy meant he’d never really felt part of it. And as cycles went, the more often he withdrew, the less often the invites came.
‘Abby feels like shit about it too, you know. Like she stole your brother away or something. That’s why she’s not always around, even if we’re going to spend the night here. She’s seen how good it’s been for me to hang out with you more. How happy it’s made me that we’re closer now. And she wants to make sure she’s not repeating what happened back then. I think she’d like to have you in her life more though.
‘After the wedding, I want to make sure we’re still getting brother time—maybe more than we have now, if you can swing it with work—but it’d mean a lot to me if the three of us could do things occasionally too. I’m aware you two have this thing where you act like you’re annoyed with each other all the time, but you know she cares about you, right?’ Despite Erik’s gently imploring tone and that dopey smile he got whenever he spoke about his fiancée, he rolled his eyes. ‘I love her an ungodly amount, but fuck if she’s not stubborn. And she’ll never tell you this, so I will.’
Alex would likewise never admit that Erik was offering him something he’d spent a lifetime wanting. But he’d happily take it.
Fighting the temptation to rub at the warmth brewing in his chest, Alex lifted the left side of his shirt instead, letting the fabric uncover the lines of Roman numerals tattooed at the top of his ribs. ‘You know this is the first tattoo I got? I was eighteen, and it was my first month of uni, and I— I hadn’t figured out who I needed to be there yet’—in twenty-six years, that was as close as he’d come to admitting to his brother the truth about how he moved through the world—‘and I was lonely as hell. I missed home like crazy, but I’d told myself I wasn’t going to cave and visit until Christmas. I was walking down the high street by myself, and I saw a tattoo place, and…’ The hand not holding his shirt up gestured to the inked skin.
Curiosity lit Erik’s normally tired—it was one trait they shared—eyes. ‘Are those…’
‘Dates. I’d never thought about getting a tattoo before. I had no fucking idea what I wanted. I just wanted to feel tethered to something. So the guy asked if there were any important dates in my life, and…’ Alex gestured back at the string of letters. ‘It’s Grandad’s birthday’—he didn’t need to specify which side; Erik would know from the tightening of his voice—‘Mum’s and Dad’s, yours…and Abby’s. Because when I thought of home, when I thought of family, she was always there, even if you took your sweet time making it official.’ The emotion that had filled Erik’s face at his reveal gave way to amusement. ‘I’m happy you found someone who makes you so happy, Erik. And honestly?’ Alex took a breath. Let his shirt drop back into place. Looked away. ‘Yeah. It sucked when we were kids. But I’m glad I get to be in your lives now. And you’re going to have to live with the bickering, unfortunately. The day Abby stops ribbing me is the day I worry she doesn’t care.’
A quiet chuckle floated across the room in response.
There was still so much Alex wasn’t saying. And for the first time, he half wanted to spill his guts. Explain exactly why he transformed himself to perfectly match most social expectations. Explain the part their childhood had played. Explain why, even now, there were parts of him he’d never shown his brother.
Then he considered how much he had lowered his guard around Sarah. How close he’d let her get. And how that had blown up in his face.
No. He could keep playing the perfect brother part. And maybe then they’d stay.
Alex quickly neutralised his expression before meeting Erik’s eyes again, but not quickly enough. He frowned at whatever he’d found on Alex’s face. ‘Is there something else?’
Even if his brother’s childhood ignorance was part of the twisted root that Alex’s persona had grown around, he suddenly found himself missing when Erik had been less perceptive.
‘No. We’re good. Thanks, man.’