Chapter 13
FINN
Ileft Sophie and Daniel’s before lunch with a fuzzy head and gooseflesh that showed no signs of going away.
Sophie had cleaned Daniel and me both up, her grip barely on the unfair side of teasing the whole time.
We’d eaten, we’d finished our coffee, and I forced myself to leave.
I could have stayed all day with them. I wanted to stay all day with them, but I knew myself well enough to not.
It would take no work at all for me to be consumed entirely by them, and that was a road I didn’t want to walk down a second time.
So instead, I picked up sandwiches from Hunter’s favorite deli and showed up at his front door.
I had the lobby code, but I gave him a courtesy call to let him know I was there.
My presence was unexpected, and I didn’t want to walk in on him and Lincoln doing something positively indecent.
I hadn’t forgotten the conversation me and my brothers had before about Rapture.
I knew more about all of their sex lives than I’d ever wanted, but that didn’t mean I had any interest in seeing it play out firsthand.
When I got to Hunter’s floor, his front door was cracked open, his fingers curled around the edge of the door to stop it from closing.
“You better have food,” he said from inside.
I gave the plastic bag a rustle and he stuck his head out, dark hair mussed like someone’s fingers had recently been tangled into it. I imagined I didn’t look much better, and the onceover he gave me ended with a raised brow and him stepping out of the way to let me inside.
“Yesterday’s clothes,” he said instead of hello.
I kicked my shoes off and shoved them toward the wall, ignoring hm entirely. Lincoln was on the couch, and unfortunately for me, so was Silas. The two of them were tangled around each other like plant roots, the TV remote held loosely in both of their hands.
“I didn’t plan for an extra,” I said to Hunter, setting the bag down on the kitchen counter.
“They’ll share.”
“I bet they do,” I murmured.
Hunter smacked me—hard—against the back of my head. “Not like that and you know it.”
“I don’t, but now I do.”
Hunter’s boyfriend and Marshall’s boyfriend were exceedingly close friends. They maintained, as I’d heard through the grapevine, that while they were almost always in physical contact with each other and they certainly made out for fun, they’d never actually slept together.
“Just friends,” Hunter murmured.
A reminder.
“Doesn’t it make you jealous?”
I looked at my brother in time to see his eyes go soft. He shook his head and started to unwrap the sandwiches. He knew which was meant for him and which was meant for me, and he cut the third in half and split it for his boyfriend and Silas to share.
“I’m secure in my relationship with Lincoln,” he said. “And so is Marshall with Silas.”
I scratched the side of my neck, watching the two friends whisper to each other and then Lincoln laughed, stare drifting casually toward the kitchen.
When he locked on to my brother, his eyes did the same gooey thing Hunter’s had done, and I found myself feeling stupid for implying there was anything to worry about between them.
“Right.”
Hunter gave me a wary look, then picked up the plates meant for me and him. “Come talk in the other room.”
It wasn’t a question, and I followed him into the bedroom. The window on the far wall was open, curtains waving in the breeze. The bed was a disaster, a bottle of lube and one of Hunter’s ties on the nightstand.
“I’d rather have this conversation in front of God and every Covington known to man than to sit on that bed right now, Hunter.”
My brother ignored me and sat on the floor, leaning his back against the footboard and stretching out his legs. I joined him, arranging the plate on my lap and staring at the wall.
“This is why I like the window seat,” I reminded him.
“I can’t stand the color you chose.”
A laugh aborted itself in the back of my throat, and I stabbed my finger into the center of a chip that was particularly large. It cracked and shattered into much more manageable pieces, and I shoved one into my mouth.
“I painted over it,” I told him after I swallowed.
“When?”
“Last week,” I said carefully. “Smith and Riggs helped me.”
Hunter rubbed his chin and then lifted his sandwich to take a bite. He chewed and swallowed, then said, “I would have helped.”
“I know.”
I would have called him, if not for the catalyst that had sent me to Smith in the first place. I never wanted to tell Hunter about that. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it. If I could erase last weekend from my memory, I’d empty my 401k to do it, no questions asked.
“What color?”
“It’s called Pelt.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything,” he said.
“It’s purple.”
“A vast improvement from pink.”
I kicked Hunter in the ankle.
He didn’t miss a beat. “Why are you in yesterday’s clothes?”
“Because I haven’t been home. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” Hunter picked at the crust of his bread, peeling it off and flicking it onto the edge of his plate. “Are you going to make me ask where you were?”
“No one is making you ask.”
“You weren’t with them?” he blurted, grimacing as the words left him mouth. “Were you?”
“No.”
“Someone else then?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Someone better?”
Another nod and an unwelcome tightness in the back of my throat when I thought about just how much better Sophie and Daniel were. Not just for me, but as people.
“Are you going to tell me his name?” Hunter glanced at me from the corner of his eye. “Her name? Their names?”
Was I so fucking easy to read?
So transparent.
“Not yet.”
Hunter took another bite of his sandwich, chewing slowly and swallowing hard. “But soon?”
“Maybe.”
He nudged his leg against the outside of mine. “You need to eat.”
“Oh, do I?”
“Please.”
I took a bite, smaller than the ones my brother had been doing for himself. When I swallowed, he stared at me expectantly so I did it two more times.
“I’m older than you, you know.”
“Not by much,” I said. “And if I wanted to be parented, I would have shown up at Marshall’s.”
Hunter sighed and ate the rest of his sandwich. I still had most of mine and didn’t want to be bullied again, so I ate some more of it while he finished up.
“Whatever it is, you don’t have to do it yourself,” Hunter told me, taking my mostly empty plate and stacking it in top of his.
I started to regret my choice to come over. Hunter had seemed like the safest option for me, but that had been poor planning on my part. There wasn’t a person in the world who knew me better than Hunter, and that was for better or worse.
“I promise you I’m not, and I promise you I’m fine.”
Hunter lifted his hand between us, fingers curled and pinky outstretched. With a petulant groan, I hooked my little finger around his and we shook on it.
“Seal it,” he said next.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
Hunter yanked our joined fingers, smashing his mouth against the pad of his thumb.
“Seal it,” he said again.
“I’m fine,” I repeated, mirroring the pose and kissing my thumb.
The move brought us close together, and I had no choice but to let Hunter give me the kind of scrutiny that confirmed I was a lying liar.
He raised a brow and I corrected myself, “I’ll be fine.”
“You aren’t alone.”
“I know.”
“Call Andrew if you need to.”
The suggestion was so preposterous, I broke the pinky promise and reeled back. “Excuse me?”
“Call Andrew,” he said. “Or text, I don’t care.”
I rolled away from Hunter, moving onto all fours to push myself to my feet. I was too old to get up from the seated position, and Hunter laughed when my hip cracked.
“I don’t even want to talk to my favorite brother. Why would I want to talk to one I don’t even know?”
“Because you don’t know him.” Hunter stood and brushed some crumbs off his lap, the plates in hand. “Have you even seen him since I got promoted?”
Hunter’s promotion had been easily nine months prior, and of course I hadn’t seen Andrew since then.
Hunter was the one who acted as the talking head of the family.
He was the one who tried to maintain contact with Andrew.
I knew Smith talked to him, and I imagined Marshall probably did as well.
There was a group chat between the five of us that I did my best to ignore.
“No.”
“No, you won’t talk to him or no, you haven’t seen him?”
“Both probably,” I grumbled, turning and heading for the door of Hunter’s bedroom. “Definitely the latter.”
“Maybe you should. San Diego is a short trip and maybe a change of scenery would do you good.”
He wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t going to tell him that.
And besides, the last thing I wanted to do was burden a brother who was a practical stranger with whatever emotional hardships I’d gotten myself into. Andrew already had a bad first impression of me. I didn’t need him seeing me at my worst as a follow up.
“Appreciate the feedback,” I told Hunter sharply, making the turn out of his hallway and back into the living room.
Silas and Lincoln were still on the couch, but at some point one of them had gotten up to get the sandwich. Both plates were empty, save for the crumbs and some leftover chips.
“Are you staying awhile?” Lincoln asked, stretching his legs out and propping his heels on the coffee table.
“I don’t think so.”
“You can.”
Lincoln dropped his head against the back of the couch, undoubtedly to get a better look at me.
There was something about the invitation coming from him that rubbed me wrong.
Maybe not wrong, but…it was my brother’s apartment and Lincoln was the one inviting me to stay.
I mean, he lived there. The two of them were in love. I was just being unfair.
It made perfect sense for Lincoln to be the one to invite me to stay because he’d want me to know even though things had changed in Hunter’s life, my relationship with Hunter wasn’t meant to be one of them. I appreciated the sentiment of it, even if I didn’t know what to do with it.
“Thank you, Lincoln. But I’m fine.”
I walked around to the front of the couch and took their empty plates into the kitchen. Hunter was already there with ours, and I faced a flashback of earlier in the morning. Sophie at the sink with me and Daniel on either side of her, three used plates between us.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive, Lincoln.” My voice cracked, and I put their plates into the sink beside mine and Hunter’s.
“Andrew, at least,” he said to me under his breath.
I leveled a sharp glare at him, and he rolled his eyes. “Thank you for lunch. Thank you for coming over.”
“I’m not sure I brought a real value add today.”
“You always bring a value add.” Hunter turned off the water and used my shoulder to dry his hands. “But please go home and change your clothes before you force anyone else to be around you for longer than thirty seconds.”
I lifted my arm and sniffed my armpit. “I don’t smell.”
“Not like BO,” Lincoln called out from the couch.
Groaning, I bracketed my hands around my hips and stared up at the ceiling. I probably smelled like sex and liquor, but if that was true, Hunter ignored it and wrapped his arms around me anyway in a hug I didn’t ask for.
“She smells pretty,” he said, clapping me on the back and shoving me toward the door.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “She is.”
Hunter walked me to the door and we said our goodbyes. On the walk back to the car, I texted Andrew.
He was quick to reply and two hours later, I was in San Diego.