Chapter 8
Artemis
The tin of cookies waits, smug and silver. I swear it’s breathing cinnamon. Every time I look up, it’s there—like Xavier left a piece of himself on my desk just to test me.
To be honest, I’m not sure whether it’s a test I want to pass or fail.
Seven days since that stupid teddy bear—Beartemis—arrived. He’s now looking as smug as his sender in my mind’s eye, sitting on his throne of judgment on the corner of my desk.
Seven days since I tore through six cinnamon rolls, the frosting clinging to my lips like guilt.
Seven days of sweating it out, pretending carbs and feelings can be burned off the same way.
Spoiler alert: they can’t.
My self-control is unraveling like when my brother’s black cat, Puck, gets his paws on a roll of toilet paper.
It’s been a week of late nights, early mornings, changing from college wear for school, to business attire for board meetings, and workout gear to sweat out not only the carbs and sugar Xavier enabled me to consume, but my feelings as well.
I’d love to say I’m over it. That I’ve set my hard, solid red-line boundary and my softer, dashed red-line boundary, but I haven’t been able to get his overconfidence out of my mind.
Which has led me here, to my office at 2:30AM on a school night.
I finished next week’s econ paper. Macro? Micro? Honestly couldn’t tell you anymore.
I’ve signed my name to a dozen documents for work, not just for the acquisition of the new company, but for the day-to-day of my portfolio.
Thank the goddesses for my assistant, Claudia.
When she and I decided to date for both of our benefits, she saw the state of my office and locked herself in here for two days until she could make sense of the shit storm that is my business life.
I have an army of VPs to handle the day-to-day, but I needed someone I actually trusted to organize the chaos of my personal executive office.
I’d be lost without her. And she tells me almost daily that she’s grateful for the extra influx of money the job brings her, like I might change my mind and revoke it from her for some reason.
She’s the buffer between me and the department heads in Chicago and London.
She handles the daily operational reports from the floor managers at the manufacturing plants, leaving me to focus on the high-level architecture.
A throat clears, low and familiar. I blink. For a split second, I think I’ve finally cracked—because my reflection just walked in.
Then it smirks, and I realize my twin’s broken into my home office again. Apollo. Of course.
He’s walking toward me, shaking his head and offering a tumbler of golden liquid. He doesn’t disappear when I blink or scrub my palms over my face.
“The fuck, Pollo? Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
He gives me a glass, lifts the tin of cookies Xavier sent, and sits on the chair across from me, kicking his sock-clad feet onto my desk like he owns the place.
“Right.” He sips, not dropping my undoubtedly bloodshot gaze. “Killed by what? You? Newsflash, Hermano, you’re not exactly brimming with cat-like reflexes right now.”
I swirl the liquid around the tumbler. “What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Same question to you.” He squints at the sticky note on the tin of cookies, quirks a brow of inquiry but says nothing as he pops it open and crams one between his lips. The smell hits before the words do. It’s all warm sugar and butter, with underlying notes of danger.
“Hey.” He takes a bite before making yummy noises. “These are fucking good Snickerdoodles.” He pauses, licking sugar from his thumb. “Your favorite. Guess someone knows you too well.” He punctuates his sentence with bites before he liberates another from the tin. “Want one?”
Yes. But I’ve already had more than I should have since I opened the tin this morning when they were delivered by messenger to my door. I shake my head.
“Ready to talk about this yet?” He jiggles the tin crammed full of my favorite cookies in my direction.
Another shake of my head.
Somehow, he leans forward and swipes the paper I’ve been working on out from in front of me and reads aloud while I cringe both inside and out.
Apollo squints. “Number one: No men. Number two: No fighting on the ice. Number three: Regular exercise.”
He glances at me. “So, what—a celibate monk with abs?”
I scowl. “Keep reading.”
“Four: No shitty food—my body is a temple.” He eyes the crumbs on my shirt. “Temple’s under renovation, huh?”
He rattles off the rest—no missed classes, no outsiders, no distractions, graduate with honors, stick to the plan—and taps the empty line. “Ten’s blank.”
I shrug, staring at the page until the words blur. “Couldn’t think of one that wouldn’t make me sound pathetic.”
He hums shaking the page at me. “You already do.”
When he doesn’t say anything else for a really long fucking time, I tip my head back, in serious danger of falling asleep right here in my chair.
After what feels like an age, he drains his glass. “Seems this is breaking a few of your rules here, Arte. No shit food, no men, and no distractions.” He recites them to me like it’s brand-new information for me. “This one tin of cookies smells a lot like trouble wrapped in cinnamon.”
I like cinnamon. Maybe I like trouble even more.
His lips quirk. While Ares is the brother of chaos in our house, Apollo can always be swayed when the conditions are right. From the way his eyes twinkle, he feels like these are the right circumstances for chaos.
I suck in a ragged breath. If I can master my breath, my thoughts will follow. If I can ignore the twitch in my fingers when I check my phone, the craving will fade. Control is the first line of defense.
I’ve deleted Xavier’s texts and contemplated deleting his contact information but that’d be a waste of time since my brain has clung to his cell number like a life jacket out at sea.
Apollo hums as he finishes his third cookie.
“Say what you need to say, Pollo.”
I sip my drink, enjoying the warm burn of the liquor while I wait for whatever my twin needs to say.
My phone lights up on the table with a vibration that feels like it’s syncing itself with my pulse, and I jump.
Every cell in my body leans toward it like gravity itself wants me to lose my vantage point.
It’s instinctive, it’s fucking desperate, it’s a dead giveaway to my now all-out smirking brother.
I tell myself I’m not looking for Xavier. But the moment that screen lights up, my pulse spikes like it’s a fucking alarm.
Control is the first line of defense. I silently repeat it like prayer, even as my hand twitches toward the phone.
Thankfully, I don’t have to see him again for a while.
It’s October. We’ve played our first back-to-back weekend series with them already, but there’s another one on the schedule for mid-January.
It’s a double header weekend in Wisconsin, and I’m already trying to think of ways to get the fuck out of going.
Faking my own death is currently top of the list.
We do have games this week, and part of me wishes one was against Xavier, so I could look him in the eye and remember every reason he’s a bad idea.
“I don’t think I need to say anything, Hermano. I think you’re doing a great job of further strangling your life all by yourself.”
My head snaps up from being too close to resting on the table. “What? I’m doing this to cement my life, Pollo. To get what I want out of life.”
He gives me a small smile. “You’ve got rules for everything you want.” He nudges the tin toward me. “When’s the last time you let yourself need something?”
My chest clenches. The clock ticks like it’s mocking me, each second heavier than the last.
He pats me again. “You’re trying so hard not to live, you’re forgetting you need to breathe.”
The tin gleams in the lamplight, sugar dusted across the desk like symbolic fallout. I tell myself I’ll throw it away in the morning. But I already know I won’t.