Chapter 3 #3
"How do you know?"
"I know." His foot presses harder against mine. "Couldn't sleep last night anyway, so I had time to do my research."
"You couldn't sleep," I say.
"Mm." He bites a grape in half. "You were upstairs. Knotted. Probably still slick when the sun came up. I lay on the couch downstairs and thought about it for about six hours."
I swallow the lump forming in my throat.
"Zero—"
"Got up at five. Margot was already up because Margot's always up. Made coffee with her. Richard came down and read me half the Times. I ate eggs with them like a normal son and then I went for the longest fucking run of my life."
"How long."
"Far enough that I almost didn't make it back. Specifically so I'd be too tired to do anything stupid before noon."
"Did it work?"
"Demonstrably no." He grins. Bites the other half of the grape and winks at me.
The shower. "But here's the gift, Carter.
Margot's been up since five. Richard's been up since five-thirty.
They will be on a boat in the sun for the majority of the day.
Margot's gonna eat dinner and pour herself one glass of wine and be asleep on Richard's shoulder by eight-thirty. I'd put money on it."
"...okay."
"So. Here's the situation. I told Margot at breakfast this morning that the midnight swim is a Graves family tradition. Has been since we were teenagers. She thought it was sweet. She actually said it was sweet, Atlas, can you imagine, Margot thinking I have a sweet bone in my body."
Atlas rolls his eyes.
"Smooth, right? I needed an explanation for why we were going to slip out tonight, and that is the explanation I came up with. So congratulations, brothers. We officially have a tradition."
"Zero, oh my god—"
"We have a tradition, Atlas."
"We have not done it every year since we were teenagers."
"We have now. Margot thinks we have. That's the point. We slip out after they go to bed, we go down to the beach, we get drunk on the wine I am about to drive into town and buy in absurd quantities—"
"You're not–"
Zero cuts Atlas off.
"I am going to drive into town and I am going to buy four bottles of red, two of white, a corkscrew that isn't whatever ancient piece of crap is in the kitchen drawer, and a bag of those salt-and-vinegar chips Bane likes that he won't admit he likes."
Bane, blank-faced: "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Mhm."
"I do not like those chips."
"I'll buy two bags."
"...fine."
I am laughing. I can’t help it. My ribs hurt from it. I take a bite of my sandwich to hide my smile.
Atlas looks at me. The amusement is still there at the corner of his mouth but his eyes have softened into something else.
"Yes?" he says. To me. Just to me.
"Yes what?"
"Tonight. You in?"
I am in.
The bonds are too strong to deny and all I want to do is revel in them. Three distinct currents running through my veins like a second, third, fourth pulse in my system. If these three are down at the beach tonight, that’s the only place I want to be.
I nod.
"Yeah," I say. "I'm in."
Bane reaches under the table. Finds my hand. Squeezes. Lets go.
Atlas tips his sunglasses back up and goes back to looking at the sea. It’s nice seeing him like this–away from work. Shoulders relaxed like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
"Bring bug spray," Bane mutters.
"Riviera energy from this one," Zero says.
"It's the beach, you idiot, not the goddamn—"
"Riviera energy."
Bane throws a grape at him. Zero catches it in his mouth.
I bite the inside of my cheek as Zero winks at me and Bane puts his arm around the back of my chair.
∞∞∞
The lights go off downstairs at nine-fifteen.
I hear Margot in the hallway saying something low to Richard. The lock turning on the master bedroom door. Then nothing.
I am standing at the window of my bedroom in a hoodie and shorts, watching the moon come up over the water.
A floorboard creaks behind me. Bane.
"You ready?"
"Yeah."
He threads our fingers together and pulls me down the hallway after him.
The path to the beach is dark and cool. Moon high.
Atlas is ahead with the blanket folded over one arm.
Bane has the bug spray and a bottle of water and is carrying a tote bag bulging with the chips he allegedly does not eat.
Zero, predictably, is carrying nothing but two bottles of red wine (the ones that didn’t fit into the tote bag), the new corkscrew, and the smug expression of a man whose midnight-swim lie is finally about to earn its keep.
"Margot bought it whole, by the way."
"Of course she did."
"She made me promise we'd do it again next year."
"Zero."
"I told her we would."
The sand is cold under my bare feet. The tide is far out. The whole stretch of beach is empty—not a light, not a soul, just dunes and dark water and a moon that's almost full laying a silver path across it.
Atlas snaps the blanket out flat. Drops onto it. Leans back on his elbows.
"Gentlemen."
Zero doesn't sit. He walks two steps onto the sand, peels his t-shirt off in one motion, gets out of his shorts and his boxer briefs in one practiced movement, and is naked and running for the water before any of us have processed it.
"ZERO!"
He doesn't turn. He hits the water at a dead sprint, dives, comes up shouting something obscene about the temperature.
Bane sighs. Long-suffering.
"If I drown out there," he says, peeling his shirt over his head, "I want you both to know it's specifically because of him."
He's down to skin in three seconds. Sprints after his brother. I watch Bane's pale back disappear into the dark surf and Zero's whoop carries back up the beach and—
Atlas's hand finds my wrist.
"Come here."
He pulls me down between his legs. My back to his chest. His arm settles across my collarbone, his other hand spreads warm and flat on my stomach over the hoodie, and I lean back into him and let my head drop onto his shoulder.
"Better."
"Yeah."
We watch them.
Zero is doing some kind of dunking maneuver on Bane that involves a lot of splashing and a lot of swearing. The moon is on the water. Their voices carry. Bane laughs—a real laugh, the kind I almost never hear out of him—and Atlas's chest rumbles against my back with his own quiet laugh.
He kisses my temple.
We sit like that for a long time.
After a while, Atlas's hand slides under my hoodie. Just his palm. Flat on my stomach. Skin to skin. Possessive in the quietest way he's ever been possessive of me.
"I almost didn't go."
"...what?"
"To the wedding." He says it into my hair. Quiet. Like he's giving me something he hasn't given anyone. "I had a meeting in Singapore that day. I was planning to send my regrets and a card."
"You're kidding."
"I rebooked the flight at four in the morning.
I don't even know why. I don't make decisions that way.
I called my secretary at four in the morning and said move it, and she didn't ask why, and I sat in that pew next to Zero and watched a kid in a too-big suit walk his mother down the aisle, and I—"
He stops.
His thumb traces my ribs.
"And there you were."
I don't know what to say. My throat has closed. I press my face into his shoulder.
"I almost missed you," he says. Soft. "By a phone call. By a Singapore meeting."
"Atlas—"
"I'm telling you because I want you to know I think about that day. A lot. I would have met you eventually, of course I would. When you moved in. Across the table where you would already be my father's wife's son and the rules would have already been in place."
His thumb traces my ribs.
"But I got to meet you before. Before you were my stepbrother.
And I hold onto that. That I felt something back then, before all of this.
" He huffs a quiet breath into my hair. "So however fucked up it is that all I want to do is worship my little stepbrother, it doesn’t seem so bad if I think about you from that night. "
I turn in his arms and kiss him. He holds me there. Kisses me back.
Atlas is strong like a rock, like a place I could fall apart and never miss a piece when I decided to put myself back together. His hand raises higher up to my chest, my hoodie raising up until chills pebble along my skin from the ocean breeze.
"Get a room," Zero shouts from the water.
We don't break apart.
Bane jogs up the sand first, dripping, hair pushed back. Zero is fifteen feet behind him, walking instead of running, taking his time. Both of them pale in the moonlight and absolutely unembarrassed.
Bane scrubs a wet hand through his hair and shakes the water off his fingers. "Hand me a towel."
"You forgot the towels," Atlas says. Calmly. Into my hair.
Bane stops at the edge of the blanket.
"...what."
"You forgot the towels, Bane."
"Atlas, you are killing me—"
"I told you to grab them on the way out the door. You said you had it."
"I had the bug spray, the water, the chips Zero made me come back for—"
"You forgot the towels."
"...I forgot the towels."
He stands there at the corner of the blanket, dripping onto the wool, naked and pissed off and extremely Bane about it. Then his eyes drop to me—pulled between Atlas's knees, wrapped in Atlas's arms, dry and warm and very much not wet—and his mouth flattens.
"Maxie."
"...don't."
"C'mere, baby."
"Bane. Bane—"
His hand is on my wrist. He pulls. Atlas, traitorously, opens his arms. I am hauled forward onto the blanket and into Bane's lap in one motion, bare skin and seawater all over the front of my hoodie, his arms locking around me, his face pressed wet and cold into the side of my neck.
"Bane."
"Mm."
"You are freezing—"
"Mm-hm."
"You did this on purpose—"
"Fuck, you're warm." Mumbled into my throat. Almost a curse. "Fuck. Don't move."
Behind me, Zero has finally arrived at the blanket. He drops onto his knees next to us with the corkscrew already out, working it into the first bottle of red without bothering to put on a stitch.
"Glasses?" Zero asks.
"In the tote."