5. Black sheep of the family #2
He glanced into the pool house behind the buffet table. The door was wide open, but there was no simulator inside. “Brodie refuses to get it. I can’t believe I ever wanted to stick my tongue in his mouth.”
Colby read his back. “You did?”
She smiled sheepishly and reached for another toothpick with cheese on it. “Yeah. For like all of junior year and part of senior. Until you told me what happened. Your brothers are almost as hot as you, and they don’t feel like my brothers, you know?”
“You need a sister I can pine over. Pay back,” Colby mutters.
“Sorry, I do have a hot male cousin but… You wouldn’t be interested in that. Right?” Briar said and stared at him.
He stared back. “And prove them, right? Fuck no. I’ll be back. You good?”
“Yeah. Good. Gina Hollanov is here. Do you remember her? She was my cheerleading coach. I’ll go say hi.” Briar pointed toward a woman with long blonde hair in a champagne-colored dress that Colby vaguely recognized.
He headed into the house and went out to the garage, passing the kitchen that was bustling with catering staff.
The golf thingy wasn’t in the garage. Like a lot of California homes, they didn’t have a basement, so he headed upstairs.
There were four bedrooms and an office up there.
He figured maybe his dad set up the simulator in the office, which was just a museum to his brief career and never really used for much.
The walls and shelves were covered with pictures.
His old uniform top, baseballs, and awards from the juniors.
But then he heard noise coming from the other end of the hall. Men talking and laughing.
That end of the hall, past a massive window, had the bedroom he grew up in—across the hall from Atlas’s room and next to Brodie’s.
And that’s where the noise was coming from because that’s where the golf simulator had been set up.
He stopped abruptly at the open door. There wasn’t a lick of anything that had been left in his room when he moved out.
He glanced behind him, through the open door to Atlas’s room.
He could see the familiar blue paint and the striped duvet Atlas had always had.
The oak base of his bed was also visible.
He’d bet Brodie’s room was untouched too.
But this room, which had been his sanctuary and the only place in this McMansion where he felt he belonged, had nothing left that proved he’d ever existed in it.
The walls, which had been a deep green, were beige now.
His artwork, his posters of the Eagles and Joni Mitchell, were gone from the walls.
His vintage stereo, which he’d saved up for and hunted down after visiting endless flea markets and antique stores, was nowhere to be found.
There was a plain white couch and a teak side table against the far wall and nothing else.
Atlas stood in the middle of the room with a golf club in his hand. Two other men stood behind him, holding glasses of beer and talking about his last swing.
“You really have a hell of a form. You’ve never taken lessons?” one guy asked approvingly.
“Nope. Maybe I’ll quit baseball and go into golf,” Atlas said with an easy smile.
He looked relaxed, tanned, and confident.
He also looked older. Colby hadn’t seen him in over a year, but he looked like it had been three or four.
It was hard to explain, but he looked more like a stranger than Colby had anticipated.
“Don’t even kid,” the other guy said. “You’re on the brink of getting your shot. Of course, knowing you, if you switch, you’ll win the Masters next year.”
“Shut up,” Atlas chuckled, but his chest puffed out at the compliment.
He handed the club to the taller of the two guys, who took it and said, “You don’t get two sports and a hot wife, dude. Leave something for the rest of us.”
He turned, and that’s when Atlas noticed his younger brother. The smile on his face fell, and his shoulders tensed. “Oh. Hey Colb.”
“Hey.” Colby stared at him, and then his eyes pinballed around the room again. “Where’s all my shit?”
He sounded like a defensive child, and he knew it, but…
what the actual fuck? When he left, he asked his mother if he could come back for his stuff one day, and she’d said yes.
Atlas shook his head. “I think Brodie said they boxed it up and put it in the garage. Or the pool house. I don’t remember. But they didn’t toss it.”
“Why?” Colby swallowed down the rest of that question, which would have been “why my room?” But they both knew the answer to that, and neither had the balls to say it aloud. “Why are you getting married?”
It was a bad pivot. Atlas’s friends stopped talking and looked at him. Atlas frowned. “Because I met a woman I want to marry.”
Colby gave him a look that screamed bullshit. Atlas let out a loud breath and turned to his friends. “Guys, this is my youngest brother, Colby. Colb, these are my boys. Wyatt is the catcher on my team, and Domingo’s the first baseman.”
They both tipped their heads toward Colby hesitantly.
Yeah, because I’m the problem, Colby thought angrily.
But he bit back the urge to ask which one of them knew Atlas was gay.
He wasn’t about to out his brother. As angry as he was at Atlas for what he’d done to Colby, two wrongs didn’t make a right.
Atlas turned to his buddies. “Can you guys give us a second. I haven’t seen Colb in… forever.”
Domingo blinked, and his expression changed. He pointed at Colby. “You’re the brother who lives in Los Angeles and sings.”
Colby nodded, kind of stunned that they knew anything about him. And now Wyatt looked interested too. “Right! Yeah. Atlas played one of your songs for us. You’re fucking good.”
“Th… thanks. Thank you.” Colby turned a confused gaze on Atlas.
“I had an old CD that you burned. Like your senior year or something.” Colby tried not to look as astonished as he felt.
“It would have been junior year. You definitely don’t have anything I did during my senior year. Unless you stole it,” Colby muttered and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I might have found it lying around the house when I came to visit. Before they packed up your stuff,” Atlas replied as his friends shuffled past him and down the hall.
Colby leaned on the door frame, refusing to enter the space that was no longer his.
He felt a tightness in his chest he hadn’t felt for a long time.
Atlas sighed and ran a hand through his shaggy dark hair.
He took after their mom’s side of the family with thick, curly chestnut colored hair and dark hazel eyes that were easily mistaken for brown.
His skin was a shade darker than Colby’s, more like how Colby’s looked if it were tanned.
They didn’t look alike, but until the incident, they’d been as close as brothers could be.
“You’ll like Gina. She’s great,” Atlas offered. Colby stared blankly at him. “My fiancée. Gina. She went to Kennedy with us, but she graduated two years before me.”
Colby’s brain flashed on the woman Briar was going to talk to downstairs. “Gina, the old cheerleading coach?”
Atlas nodded excitedly. “Yeah! We connected at a season-ticket holder event for the team. Turns out she worked in marketing for the team. She loves baseball in general, and she’d been following my career since college.
She was so proud I was a local boy and requested to work on the event because I was there. ”
“So, you decided to…” Colby’s eyes darted down the hall, and his voice dropped an octave before he continued. “You decided, wow, I should pretend to be straight for this woman because she’s a big fan. That’s a level of narcissism I don’t even think Dad has reached.”
Atlas’s face went stony. “I didn’t decide anything for her. I’m not… not straight. And don’t fucking label me, Colby. It’s not your place.”
“Right. Well, I’m just connecting the dots, Atlas,” Colby hissed at him, working as hard as he could to keep his voice low so no one would hear. “Let’s see… at fourteen you told me you thought guys were hot.”
“I said hot too,” Atlas shot back. “Too.”
Colby rolled his eyes. “Do I need to remind you about Thanksgiving? Your freshman year of college, when you came home, and I found you and your bestie—”
“I was young, horny, and Foster was obsessed with me,” Atlas spat out. He tried to mask the pained expression on his face with a scowl. “And bisexual people exist, Colby. I thought you would get that. Don’t you pretend to be bisexual?”
“I don’t fucking pretend anything. And does your future wife know they exist?”
“I’m sure she knows they exist. She’s liberal as fuck. Dad would actually shit if he talked politics with her,” Atlas replied.
Colby stared at Atlas. His chest tightened further. “But Gina doesn’t know she’s marrying one?”
“I’m not bisexual. I thought I was then. But I was… confused. I’m not now. I don’t need to tell her about every fucking stupid mistake I made as a child,” Atlas scoffed and moved to sit on the couch that was pushed up against the wall where Colby’s bed used to be.
“Oh, okay then.” Colby felt warm, like he had a fever.
It was rage, and he knew it. “Then let’s go downstairs, and you can tell Dad that you borrowed my iPad when you were eighteen and it was you who was watching the gay porn he found in my browser history, not me.
But it’s okay because you were just confused then and now you’re not. ”
Atlas’s whole body tensed. His jaw flexed as he gritted his teeth. His eyes lost any light they’d been holding. “Why can’t you just let that whole fucking thing go? We’ve all moved on except you.”
Colby stared and fought to keep his mouth from dropping open.
He really should have been expecting the denial and the gaslighting.
Atlas seemed to understand he was making this worse.
He stood up and walked closer to Colby. “I was young and stupid, and I panicked. I admit it. Colby, you were already…”