Chapter 5 Birthright #3
“A million years later,” he reminds me.
I laugh. “Six. But it was a good six years.”
“I won’t be gone that long,” he says.
I hope not. Taking a break from the mugs, I lean on the counter, folding my arms over my chest. “What are you worried about?”
“The usual. That everyone will hate me. I won’t make any friends.”
“Hate you?” The notion is literally ludicrous, and I don’t even think I’m being biased. “How could anybody hate you?”
“You sound like my mom.”
“I’m just saying you’re likable.”
“You think?” he asks, his eyes brightening, and it’s so fucking beautiful, it hurts.
“I mean—I’m not very hard to impress.”
He manages a half-hearted laugh, and it makes me want to hear the whole-hearted one again.
“You’ll make plenty of friends,” I tell him. “People will love you. I had a great time in college, and I don’t have nearly as good of a personality as you. You’ll be fine.”
“I hope so. Thanks. For liking my personality and all. I like yours, too.”
“Thanks,” I say. “You’re now the member of a very, very small club.”
He glances up at me, and his lips press together.
His chest rises and falls with a quiet but deep breath like he’s about to say something major or do something that terrifies him.
It’s a breath before a big dive. It’s making me hold my own.
Heat rises inside me, some flame igniting.
Some burst of light in the distance that says this. This is the path.
He blinks rapidly and turns away, back to the newly distressed granite countertop and the newspapers and bowls. His fingers shake as he reaches for another and suddenly stops. My heart’s in my throat. “You don’t need me in here.” He backs away. “I’ll do Connor’s room.”
When he leaves the kitchen, I can breathe again.
I can’t blame him for needing space. I imagine I got kind of overwhelming there for a second with the weight of my fantasy destiny crashing down.
I halfway think I would have kissed him had he not turned away.
Ridiculous, I tell myself. Back the fuck off, Archer.
If anyone in the world is off-limits, it’s Tristan. I need to get a grip.
I reach for the top shelf, thinking I’m grabbing the last coffee mug, but it isn’t.
I pull the porcelain mortar and pestle from the highest shelf and set it on the counter in front of me.
It clanks to the countertop as it leaves my own shaking hand.
For a moment, my vision blurs, and my heart rate spikes.
The thick layer of dust is reassuring, allowing me to come back to the present.
Maybe she stopped using it when it stopped working on me.
One of the more upsetting thoughts I’ve actively avoided since coming home and learning I had another little brother is that he died exactly as sick as I was when I was his age.
Around ten o’clock, I’m at the point where I want to dump everything into trash bags and toss it.
I’m done sorting. It’s the hall bathroom that pushes me over the edge.
There are about five-hundred sample-sized shampoo bottles in one of the cabinets.
The others are filled with mismatched linens and half-empty cans of hairspray.
It’s all crap. Fortunately, I have yet to find anything as disturbing as the mortar and pestle. Tristan isn’t quite so lucky.
I’m heading to the kitchen to get more trash bags when I hear him gasp and then shout, “I’m saving you a lot of future trauma, Archer Brennan.”
He’s in my parents’ bedroom. Literally a room I have never set foot in. His tone doesn’t suggest anything particularly dark, so I can only imagine what he’s found in there. Likely something sexual.
I decide to go in. Not because I want to see for myself, but for closure. Approaching the door, I get a primal, fear-based adrenaline rush. As suspected, Tristan is crouching down near a nightstand. He glances my way and half-grins with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.
“Are you traumatized?” I ask.
“I’m getting there.”
“I’m fine with letting the movers do this room,” I tell him.
“Yeah?” He stands, one wary glance at the nightstand later. “Maybe that’s for the best. This was definitely your mother’s side of the bed, by the way.”
“Didn’t dear old dad move out?”
“She didn’t really accept that, from what I’ve gathered.”
Once again, I have to wonder how much Tristan knows. “Weird,” I say. But it’s not surprising. My mother was actually insane.
I look around the room. There’s an opulence to it that verges on tacky.
Too many prints on the wall, too many pillows on the bed, a plush rug that doesn’t match anything but looks like it cost a fortune.
A framed picture on what would have been my father’s nightstand catches my eye.
I step into the room, approaching the familiar image in the dusty frame.
The scent of the room itself is so much worse than the eucalypts in the foyer. It’s my mother’s scent—unchanged after all this time. It’s powdery and peppery and triggers my gag reflex. I swallow hard as a wave of nausea grips me. Determined, though, I keep moving toward the frame and pick it up.
No fucking way.
I turn it over, remove the backing, and on the other side of the small painting, written in my handwriting, is my name. Archer B. 7th grade. Cardigan.
I take out the small watercolor and turn it over again.
It’s Connor’s face from when he was little.
Maybe Bryan’s age. I block that thought out and stare at the subtle, careful brush strokes.
I painted it from memory. I painted it when I was twelve years old and two thousand miles away. It was the first face I ever attempted.
“Has this always been here?” I ask, in complete disbelief.
“I don’t know,” Tristan says. “I’ve never been in here before.”
He’s beside me now. So close I can feel his warmth at my side.
“Is that Connor?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I show him the back. “It’s one of mine.”
“You did that in seventh grade?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wow. I’d love to see what you can do now.”
When I don’t say anything, he asks, “You okay?” His hand is on my shoulder blade.
I turn to find him looking at me. He’s only a couple of inches shorter.
Not much at all. Up close, I feel his presence viscerally.
Deeply. Want is too small a word for how I feel.
Desire barely scratches the surface. Need is such a cliché.
It’s more than all those things, and it aches.
Am I okay? These feelings aren’t. But maybe they’re only a distraction from what I’m holding in my hand. Something else that hurts and stabs and tries to penetrate the armor I wear like skin.
“This is the only thing I’ve seen of mine in this house.” I say it because it’s the first piece of proof I’ve found that I was ever here before. That this is really where I came from.
Tristan is quiet, but his hand moves smoothly across my back to my other shoulder. I love when he touches me, which I can say about very few people. I prefer to initiate physical contact, but it’s always Tristan who moves first, and I want to touch him back.
I want more than to touch him. I want to lose my hands in his hair.
Drown my tongue in his mouth. Myself in his body.
He’s letting me stare at him while he scatters glances at the watercolor, my face, my shoulder, his own hand.
The silence and stare don’t last long, but in my head, it stretches into this unending moment where I could tell him all the things I never told anyone, or I could kiss him until words stop mattering at all.
His presence comes over me like rain. Every time I’m near him, I leave drenched.
I don’t know if it’s the task at hand, the ongoing emotional upheaval, or if it’s just him, making me feel things I have no right to feel.
His roaming gaze moves to my mouth, then to the charm on my necklace, then the floor between us as he takes a small step away. The place where his hand was grows colder.
“I feel like I’ve known you longer than I have,” I say, which is an okay line. Not the smoothest or the coolest, but in this case, it’s true.
“Technically, you have, but I get what you mean. It probably just seems like that because I knew your family. Connor.”
“Maybe.”
“Should we keep going? There’s a lot left to do.”
We should, but it’s almost like he’s giving me an option. An opening. A chance to confess. I don’t take it, though. “Yeah,” I say. “If you don’t think there’s anything Connor would want in here.”
He shakes his head, gaze still averted. “Definitely not.”
I leave the picture frame on the nightstand but take the small painting with me.
Ultimately, Tristan and I go our separate ways again, getting back to work.
We pack up the house in different rooms. He stays for hours like he understands how much I want to get this done.
I want this to be the last time I’m ever here.
He takes care of the bedrooms. I deal with the rest, sealing things up, sorting them for storage, charity, and Connor. The movers are scheduled for tomorrow, and I’m prepared to stay up all night if I have to.
Tristan emerges from Bryan’s bedroom a little after one in the morning as I’m charging down the hall with two more trash bags. “I have to go,” he says apologetically.
I nod, understanding. “Thanks for staying so long.”
He gestures toward the bedrooms. “Everything back here that can be packed is packed. There’s a contents list on all the boxes.”
“Thank you. I’ll sort it all out.”
“Um…I know you aren’t getting rid of Connor’s stuff, but can you not give away anything of Bryan’s either?” For the first time tonight, his voice sounds unsteady.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Okay. He was…” He shakes his head and looks down, like he can’t finish telling me what or who the brother I never met was. And I’m not ready to know, either.
I resist the urge to move toward him. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He looks back up at me. “If I haven’t said it already, I’m really glad you’re here, Archer.”
I notice he doesn’t say home, and that means something to me. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. He was listening. He heard me. “Me too,” I say quietly.
“Yeah?’” he asks like he hopes I’m telling the truth.
I nod. It’s half true anyway. I feel useful here—at least for now.
“You have my address, right? Because Connor’s staying with me,” he adds, like I might derive some other meaning from it.
I nod. He texted it to me at some point, once the living arrangements were finalized. “How’s his rehab going?” I hope it’s not too obvious that I’m stalling for more time.
“He’s walking without crutches. It takes a lot out of him, and he’s still got a limp, but he’s getting there.”
“Do you think there’s any chance he’ll wanna come live with me when you leave for school?” I ask.
“Do you want me to talk to him about it?”
“I can.”
He hesitates for a second, then says, “Maybe you should let me do it. Oh, and hey. Listen—he doesn’t know that you and I… He doesn’t know I’ve talked to you. So, if you see me with him, can we…?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to hide anything from him—”
“You don’t have to explain,” I say.
He exhales. “Thank you. Text him in a couple days, okay?”
“Okay.” I drag the word out, not ready for him to go. I can already imagine the silence of the house without him in it, and it’s no good. Not something I’m interested in. He’s starting to pass me in the hall, so I ask, “Any thoughts on what I should do with the rest of the stuff in here?”
He glances at me, less than a foot away. “I’d just burn the shit,” he says, heavy on the bitterness.
It surprises me. It’s the first time he’s expressed anything remotely negative about my family. Now I’m positive he knows more than he’s told me. Without thinking, I drop the trash bags and grab his arm to stop him. “Hey.”
Our gazes meet and lock together.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Sorry,” he says quietly. “That just slipped out.”
I give a small shake of my head. “Don’t be.”
Trusting a wild instinct, I pull him toward me, and we wind up with our arms around each other again, each of us gripping tight. I can practically feel his fingerprints branding me, and I’m just shy of digging my nails into him. “Thank you,” I whisper.
“You’re welcome.”
My pulse blasts like machine gun fire. Letting him leave was an unpleasant thought before, but now it feels like I’m about to lose something vital. Something I might really need.
His body shifts in my grip, not away, but closer, and it has my mind changing direction, too. I think about letting down his hair. I think about what his mouth tastes like. Arousal surges. Intense desire floods my core. I don’t think it’s subtle, but he doesn’t move away.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I think so.” There’s no possible way he doesn’t feel my dick hardening against his lower abdomen. I’m powerless to stop it, too. He smells too damn good. He feels perfect.
“What’s Perfume Genius?” he asks, referring to the t-shirt I’m wearing that his chest is pressed against.
“It’s a Seattle band.”
“Pretty much every time I see you, you’re wearing this shirt.”
“It’s my favorite.”
“Mine too.” He pulls away an instant before I do something incredibly stupid, and I swear it feels like he takes a piece of me I didn’t know I was using.
He gives me the smallest of smiles, and I feel a heavy pressure settle in my chest. It’s the way a hopeless crush feels. It hurts, but the pain feels necessary. Important. “I should go,” he says.
“I know.”
“Goodnight, Archer.”
I nod, watching him walk away.
I take it back. Coming home might be the worst idea I’ve ever had.