11. Alex
Alex
Long after Leo finally shuffled off to his room, I sat awake in mine, wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
It quickly became obvious that sleep wasn’t an option.
And when the early gray of dawn began to pour through my window, I finally gave up and headed downstairs, through the kitchen, and out into the back garden.
There, I sat on an old wooden bench under an olive tree and tried to figure out what the hell was wrong with me.
Jealous? Of someone touching my stepbrother? Since fucking when?
The morning was doing nothing to help me think. It was too beautiful. That was the problem with this place. It didn’t give you the decency of bad weather when you needed it.
I turned it over and over in my head the way I’d been turning it over for the past four hours. The facts, laid out plainly, the way I preferred things. Leo had gone out with a man. Leo had come home at two in the morning. I had been sitting in the kitchen waiting for him like some kind of—
I stopped that thought before it finished itself.
The garden smelled like rosemary and the particular sweetness of the lemon trees along the far wall, which I was beginning to find slightly oppressive.
It was too much. Everything here was too much.
Too warm, too bright, too fragrant, too honest. Back home I could go days without noticing anything.
My apartment had smelled like takeout containers and industrial carpet cleaner and I’d been completely fine with that.
It had required nothing from me, not even my attention.
This place forced me to pay attention. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
I rested my elbows on my knees and looked at the cracked stone path between my feet. A small ant was navigating the canyon between two paving stones with tremendous purpose. I watched it for a while because it was easier than thinking.
It didn’t work.
I don’t want some greasy plumber putting his hands all over you.
I closed my eyes. The words sat there in the back of my skull, exactly where they’d been for the past several hours, perfectly preserved and absolutely damning. I’d said them out loud. To Leo. In a lit kitchen. While stone cold sober.
The worst part wasn’t that I’d said them. The worst part was that I’d meant them.
I’d been sitting in that kitchen replaying the image of Matteo’s hand on Leo’s arm at the bar, that easy, natural gesture, like Leo was already something that belonged to him.
And something inside me had reacted to that image with a heat that had nothing whatsoever to do with brotherly concern.
I’d told myself it was protectiveness. I’d told myself it was the leftover anxiety of a man who’d just had his entire life collapse and was now clinging to the one stable thing left in his orbit.
I’d told myself a lot of things over the course of four hours, and none of them had held up under examination.
The ant disappeared into a crack in the stone.
I sat back against the bench and looked up through the silver-green leaves of the olive tree at the sky, which was going from gray to pale gold at the edges. A bird was singing somewhere in the fig tree at the far end of the garden. It sounded obscenely cheerful.
I thought about Leo’s face when I’d said it.
The way the words had landed. The way he’d gone very still and then very careful, the way he always did when he was processing something he hadn’t expected.
He hadn’t laughed at me. He hadn’t recoiled.
He’d just looked at me with those amber eyes and asked me why it mattered.
Why does it matter to you?
And I hadn’t answered. Because the answer was the problem. The answer was the thing I’d been sitting out here in the cold morning air trying to outrun, and it kept lapping me.
I thought about myself standing at that bedroom window with the sun warm on my chest, genuinely content for the first time in months, and then coming downstairs to find Leo making coffee on a saucer.
A goddamn saucer. For a plumber he’d known for forty minutes.
And the feeling that had moved through me when I understood what that meant.
I’d told myself it was the loneliness. That I’d been isolated for so long that any kind of abandonment, even imagined abandonment, was going to feel like a betrayal.
I’d told myself I was projecting. That I was transferring my anger about Amanda onto a completely innocent situation.
I’d told myself every rational, reasonable thing I could think of.
And then Leo had come home at two in the morning and I’d heard the door and something in my chest had cracked so quickly it almost hurt, and I’d understood, with a clarity I deeply resented, that none of those explanations had ever been the right one.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.
Leo was my stepbrother. We’d grown up in the same house from the time I was fifteen and he was thirteen. Our parents were married. He’d borrowed my chargers and stolen my hoodies and driven me absolutely insane for the better part of a decade and I had never, not once, not for a single second—
I stopped.
The bird in the fig tree kept singing.
Had I?
I sat with that for a moment, which was a deeply uncomfortable thing to do.
I wasn’t given to this kind of introspection.
I was a man who made decisions and executed them and dealt with the consequences afterward.
Sitting under an olive tree at dawn picking through the archaeology of my own emotional history was not something I was built for.
But I didn’t know what else to try.
I thought about being fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
I thought about Leo at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
Skinny and bright-eyed and always talking, always moving, always finding something to be enthusiastic about.
He’d annoyed me. I’d been a difficult teenager, and he’d been the relentlessly cheerful kid that had come packaged with Michael when he married my mother.
I’d resented the whole arrangement on principle.
That wasn’t attraction. That was just being a sullen adolescent.
I thought about later. College, my early twenties.
Leo had been around on holidays and the occasional weekend and I’d been polite because it made things easier.
I hadn’t thought much beyond that, though.
I’d been with women. I’d been building my career, trying to create a life for myself that was something worth having.
Amanda had come later, and she’d been beautiful and ambitious, and she’d wanted the same things I thought I wanted.
I’d told myself that was enough. I’d told myself that was what love looked like when you were practical about it.
I hadn’t thought about Leo. Not like that. Not consciously.
But there were things, now that I was sitting here turning them over in the gray morning light, that didn’t fit the story I’d been telling myself.
The way I’d always noticed when he walked into a room.
The particular irritation I’d felt whenever he brought someone home during the holidays, some friend from college or a guy he was casually seeing.
I’d written that feeling off as not wanting drama at family dinners.
And the fact that I could still, with complete accuracy, describe the exact shade of his eyes.
Amber, with a darker ring at the outside.
The way the morning light turned them almost gold.
I knew that because I’d paid attention. More than a stepbrother needed to.
I stood up from the bench abruptly, because sitting still with that realization felt like I was being crushed to death.
I walked to the far end of the garden and stood with my back to the house, my hands braced on the low stone wall, looking out at the valley below.
The morning was coming in properly now, the sky going from pale gold to a clean, clear blue at the edges.
The valley stretched below me in long terraced rows, still soft with shadow, the distant suggestion of the sea at the horizon catching the first light like hammered silver.
Were there other men I’d noticed without realizing it? As far as I knew, I wasn’t gay. But then again, I didn’t recall ever thinking being anything other than straight was an option. Boys liked girls, that was just how the world worked.
But clearly, with Leo as the prime example, that wasn’t true. And somehow, while accepting him without question, I’d never bothered to question myself.
I stood at that wall for a long time. Long enough for the shadow to pull back from the garden behind me and for the first real warmth of the morning to find the back of my neck.
Long enough for the birds to get genuinely loud about it.
I was aware of the house at my back, its old stone walls still holding the cool of the night, and somewhere inside it, Leo sleeping.
I thought about the men I’d known. Colleagues, clients, old friends from before everything fell apart.
I ran through them like a catalog, looking for something I might have missed.
There were men I’d respected, men I’d liked well enough, men whose company I’d valued in a functional, uncomplicated way.
I’d never looked at any of them and felt what I’d felt last night watching Matteo’s hand rest on Leo’s arm.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
That was the honest truth. I was a man who’d spent his entire adult life making decisions based on clear criteria and measurable outcomes, and none of that machinery was remotely useful here.
There was no framework for this. There was no spreadsheet that helped you organize the information that you might, potentially, have feelings for your stepbrother that had nothing to do with being his stepbrother.
Feelings. Christ.
I pushed off the wall and walked back along the stone path toward the house. The rosemary bush caught at my elbow as I passed and left the smell on my sleeve, sharp and clean, but not enough to stop my spiral.
The kitchen was empty and cool. I filled the coffee pot and set it on the warmer with the focus of someone trying to stay inside a very small and manageable task.
Measure the coffee. Flip the switch. Find two mugs.
I did it all very deliberately, as if precision might compensate for the fact that everything else in my skull was in absolute disorder.
I was attracted to Leo.
I stood at the counter and let the sentence exist without immediately trying to dismantle it.
It was, objectively, a terrible sentence.
It was a sentence with consequences and complications that I didn’t even know how to begin to map.
It was a sentence that my father would have something to say about, and Diane, and probably anyone else who’d ever met either of us.
But it was also, undeniably, true.
The coffee pot started to gurgle.
I thought about last night in the kitchen.
Leo standing at the counter with that careful expression, working through what I’d said with the same patience he showed everything.
He hadn’t made me feel like I was a bad person.
He hadn’t flinched. He’d just looked at me and asked his quiet questions and let the silence do the work.
For one brief moment, I thought I was in the clear, that I’d avoided disaster.
And then when I’d touched him, when I’d put my hand on his shoulder and felt the warmth of him beneath my palm, felt the slight sharp intake of his breath—
The coffee pot whistled.
I took it off the heat and poured two cups. Set them on the table. Sat down in my chair and wrapped both hands around mine and stared at the tabletop.
There was really only one solution that I could come up with. Only one that made any sort of sense.
Ignore any feelings I had for Leo. He was my stepbrother, and I wasn’t gay. Those were two very good reasons why nothing could come of this and why these feelings were foolish and stupid.
Above me I heard the old floor creak and my heart did a little flip in my chest. Leo was awake. I had maybe five minutes before he appeared in that doorway where I had to look him in the eyes and pretend that I hadn’t just had the most terrifying realization of my life.
I never should’ve agreed to this vacation.