Chapter 1
“So really, you have to tell me how it is, playing with your bro,” the girl asked, tucking a strand of long brown hair behind her ear.
It was New Year’s Eve and they were at Vault, at Ramsey’s invite.
“Uh, it’s great,” Trevor said. “Really great.” Thinking that he meant it and he didn’t, all at the same time, but not sure if he really wanted to get into it or that he wanted to get into it here, with a girl he didn’t know at all.
Trevor hadn’t really wanted to come out at all, but Lane had insisted.
Talked up a big game about meeting someone—about Trevor meeting someone—but Trevor was beginning to wonder if all the rumors he’d heard about Lane’s many hookups had been fabrications, because he’d never seen Lane pick a guy up before.
Well, maybe tonight was the night.
The bar was crowded, and he’d headed to grab another drink when he’d run into Viola—Violet? Vienna?—he wasn’t sure he’d heard her name properly or had remembered it, if Trevor was being honest.
She was very pretty, but he just couldn’t dredge up the interest he knew he should feel.
“Was this your plan all along? To play together?”
Trevor hesitated. He and Lane had never once talked about that.
They still hadn’t talked about it. Trevor had brought it up once, on that first plane ride to Toronto the day after the draft, when Lane had seemed more prickly than he’d ever been, vacillating between echoing Trevor’s excitement and being prickly and odd about the whole thing.
But Lane had shut down Trevor’s question on if he’d known the Thunder were interested in drafting him.
He hadn’t wanted to talk about it, not at all.
Though he’d wanted to, Trevor hadn’t pushed. Pushing usually meant getting iced out or pissing Lane off, and he never wanted to do that. He liked Lane, despite his moodiness, especially the glimpses of Lane he’d seen behind the prickliness.
“Uh, well, no, you know we didn’t really grow up together,” Trevor hedged.
“No?” Viola-Violet-Vienna’s eyes were dark and lively, interested in what Trevor was saying, and he felt bad because the opposite was not true.
“Our parents didn’t get married until I was sixteen and Lane was older, about to head to college.
And then he was in college, and then I was in college.
” Trevor shrugged. It was a rote recitation he’d probably given in a hundred interviews and conversations at this point, whenever anyone asked them how close they were.
Because they hadn’t been close. How could they be, when Lane was so rarely around?
“But now you’re together all the time,” Viola-Violet-Vienna pointed out.
They were. Trevor had gotten the impression that Lane hadn’t really wanted to invite him to live in his two-bedroom condo downtown, even though there was plenty of space, and he had considered declining and saying he’d get his own place.
But then his dad had sat down with him and laid out all the reasons why it was a good idea. Most importantly, that Lane had already been in the NFL for three seasons and knew intimately what Trevor should be doing. But also that he’d never gotten the chance to get close to Lane, and now he could.
Trevor hadn’t mentioned that he wasn’t always entirely sure Lane wanted them to be close, but he did think it, sometimes.
“Yeah, we live together,” Trevor said.
“And how is that?” she asked.
He was so painfully aware of all the heavy lifting she was doing in the conversation.
How she was trying to make something of nothing, and he admired that, really he did, but he was not feeling it.
Rarely felt it, if he was being honest. He’d always had trouble getting close to girls, and what happened with Sophie in college had made it even tougher, after.
“Um, it’s a process,” Trevor said, trying to be diplomatic.
Trevor hadn’t known Lane all that well before he’d been drafted to Toronto—familial relationship notwithstanding—because they’d really had no chance and no time to form any kind of bond.
Living together was like living with a stranger, basically.
But it still surprised him at how prickly Lane could be, sometimes.
Not always.
But occasionally, Trevor would seemingly hit a nerve and Lane would bark at him.
Lane never failed to apologize after, looking guilty and sounding even worse, and it always made Trevor more determined to make things work.
“Hard, huh?” she asked.
“It hasn’t always been easy.” He didn’t think Viola-Violet-Vienna would go running off to the closest media outlet to proclaim that the two bros on the Thunder weren’t as close as the team tried to claim they were, but caution was too ingrained in Trevor’s personality at this point.
He didn’t want to make a wave. Or make anything worse.
It kind of killed him that the team called them the demon twins. They weren’t that bad.
They bickered, sure, but what siblings didn’t?
But, that voice in the back of Trevor’s head reminded him, you’re not really siblings, are you? You’re just your father’s kid, and Lane’s his mom’s son.
“But you’re so good on the field together,” she said, eyes sparkling at him.
And sure, he’d known that she knew who he was.
It had come up almost immediately. This was a private party, and the crowd was full of pro athletes—not just Thunder players, but hockey players too, from both Toronto and Buffalo, and then also a handful of Raptors basketball players.
But the way it kept coming up made him want to grab his drink and make some very transparent excuse to get away.
“That’s totally different,” Trevor said, even though it really wasn’t. Not the way she was meaning it. Because they still were figuring out their dynamic there, too.
It was good, sure, but Trevor wasn’t stupid enough to think they didn’t have a lot of improvement to make still.
“Oh? Is it? How?”
Trevor knew he had to extricate himself. She was putting so much effort in, really trying with her questions, and it wasn’t fair when he wasn’t actually interested.
“Uh, well—” But he wasn’t willing to be rude, either, not to her face, and he really didn’t know how to extricate himself.
But before he could make a further mess of things, a hand landed on his shoulder. Maybe before he’d moved to Toronto, he wasn’t that familiar with Lane, but since then, there’d been a hundred casual touches between them, a thousand.
Enough that Trevor could’ve recognized the weight and shape of that hand anywhere.
“Hey,” Lane said, leaning in. “What’s up here? Who’s this?”
“Hi, I’m Victoria,” the girl said brightly, “and you must be Trevor’s brother.”
“Stepbro,” Lane corrected casually, but he swore he felt Lane’s grip on his shoulder tighten and then relax.
Trevor had only called Lane his bro or his brother, once.
He’d learned the hard way Lane didn’t like it.
He didn’t know why, but it was enough that Lane didn’t like it.
Did he sometimes wonder why? Did he wonder if he hadn’t ever done enough, been enough, to be considered Lane’s brother?
Yeah, ’cause it was impossible not to. But he tried not to, just tried to respect the boundary that Lane had set, all those years ago.
“Right,” Victoria said, still smiling but it seemed slightly more strained.
“You were telling me about that thing,” Trevor said, turning to Lane. Maybe he should feel some type of way about using Lane to get him out of this conversation. “That thing you wanted me to do.”
Lane’s eyebrows skidded up. “I was?”
“Yes,” Trevor said. He turned to Victoria. “Sorry, but we’ve got this thing going.”
Her smile went brittle. And the thing was Trevor didn’t think she’d actually liked him, even. She’d probably only liked that he was a football player. Rich and famous. And now she didn’t like that he was leaving before she’d ever gotten a chance to reel him in.
“Right. Well, nice to meet you.” She turned away with a little hair flip, and that made him feel a little guilty, sure, but honestly the biggest feeling surging through him was relief.
“Hey, what was that?” Lane asked when they turned back to the bar. Lane tapped his glass and the bartender headed over to pour him another tequila on the rocks.
Trevor shrugged, sipping at his own drink. “Just wasn’t feeling it, I guess.”
“A hot girl? Why not?” Lane grinned, but there was a brittleness to it that Trevor had come to associate with a subject they needed to avoid.
He hadn’t quite put together what commonality every occurrence had, but he knew he’d figure it out someday.
Maybe then he’d get down to the bottom of why Lane felt the way he did.
But until then, he was going to respect that boundary, even if he didn’t understand it.
“Just not,” Trevor said. “Do you like every hot guy you see?”
Lane’s grin morphed into a smirk. “I mean, sure.”
But Trevor didn’t buy it. He’d heard stories about Lane’s exploits before coming to Toronto, both referenced by Lane himself and other players he’d known—even several Thunder players had mentioned it—but Trevor hadn’t seen anything like that since showing up.
And he lived with Lane, so he’d have noticed if Lane wasn’t in his bed, or if there was someone else in it with him. But he was always there, and Trevor had never even seen anyone else in their apartment.
“No way,” Trevor pushed back. He finished his drink and set the glass on the wood bar with a decisive click. “No way. You never pick up, dude. If you think I care—”
“No, no,” Lane interrupted.
“I’m just saying, it’s your place, you can. I’m not gonna be weird about it.”
Lane made a face. “I know you wouldn’t be. You’re . . .” Trevor watched his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed. “You’re a really sweet, accepting guy. You wouldn’t get weird about it.”
“Okay, good,” Trevor said, with a nod. He’d needed to say that. Hadn’t really thought that was why Lane had been sticking closer to home or not bringing guys home, but he’d still needed to make that point clear.
“But that doesn’t explain you,” Lane countered.