15. Merrick
Merrick
Merrick scrubbed his kitchen sink Monday morning thinking about Wilder.
He thought about how Wilder ordered for him without asking, how Wilder brought him back home and sat on the couch while Merrick painted until dinner time.
He had asked questions at first about color names or technique, but eventually he’d quieted down and Merrick had filled the space.
He didn’t normally want to talk when he did art, but he enjoyed explaining things to Wilder and he enjoyed the way Wilder smiled after he did it.
Everything after that passed in a blur of sweat and cum and bruises, Merrick’s secret toy stash untouched.
Wilder had tucked it into his own closet when they’d gotten back after lunch and hadn’t said a word about it since.
Merrick didn’t say anything either, even though the dildo hung over his head like a ghost.
He flipped on the water and rinsed the cleaner out of the sink, finding a residual pasta stain in the corner of the basin his sponge hadn’t been able to scour clean.
Merrick scratched at it with the edge of his fingernail, cursing under his breath when the faded red refused to budge.
An insistent knock on his door drew his attention from the task at hand, and he dried his hands off on a towel.
“Hold on!” he shouted from the kitchen, checking his phone for text messages from Wilder and finding none. He had no idea who would be coming to visit him in the middle of the day on a Monday, but when he opened the door and found his brother on the welcome mat, he had his answer.
“Hey,” Bryce said awkwardly, shoving a hand through his hair only for all the strands to fall right back into place on his forehead and the tops of his ears.
“Hey.” He stepped out of the way to let his brother in. “I didn’t expect you.”
“Are you busy?”
“Just cleaning.”
Bryce closed the door behind him and made a beeline for the couch, collapsing onto the corner that had quickly become his, even though he hadn’t lived with Merrick for very long at all.
“Everything okay?” Merrick joined his brother on the couch, frowning at the rings on the coffee table left behind from one too many ignored water glasses and beer cans.
“Yeah, we just haven’t really talked at all since I started dating Holden.”
Merrick inhaled deeply.
“And I know you told him you don’t care, but I’m not sure I believe you,” Bryce said.
“I really don’t care.”
Bryce made a sound in the back of his throat.
“I care that you kept it from me,” Merrick said. “I don’t care who you fuck.”
“You used to care.”
Merrick groaned, rolling his neck until it cracked. “I didn’t want you to get hurt by sucking off the wrong jock on the wrong team, alright?”
“So you slut-shamed me?”
“Are we here to talk about high school or the fact you think I’m avoiding you because you’re dating my coworker?” he pressed.
“Maybe both.”
“I need a beer for this.” He pushed up from the couch and went to his very clean and sparkling kitchen. Merrick pulled two beers from the fridge and shoved the second one into his brother’s waiting hand upon his return to the living room. “What do you want to say, Bryce?”
“Will you be quiet long enough for me to get it out?”
It was a fair question, even though the accusation was biting. Bryce would never know what it was like being the only child, the firstborn, with parents like theirs. Bryce wouldn’t understand how hard Merrick had to fight for attention, how much he needed it then and craved it now.
In answer, he cracked the top on his beer and waited for his brother to speak.
Bryce waited him out, like if he held on to the silence for long enough, Merrick would give in and fill it. And he wanted to. This was definitely some sort of test because it took all his willpower to not overwrite the quiet with the sound of his own voice.
“Who are you seeing?” Bryce asked, eyes narrowed.
“What?”
“You’re seeing someone.”
“How do you know that?” Merrick asked.
“You’re different.”
“I’m not.”
“You are,” Bryce countered, stare locked on Merrick as he took a slurping sip of his beer.
“Are you the only one allowed secrets?”
“If you’re mad at me for keeping one, then yeah, Merrick, you can’t keep your own. I’m tired of the double standard of you.”
That was…aggressively fair, even if he hated the way the comment made him feel. Merrick frowned, licking up a drop of beer from the side of the can before taking a swallow to cleanse the wrong answer out of his mouth.
“His name is Wilder,” Merrick said. “Though I don’t see why that matters.”
“Your house is clean and you’re quiet,” Bryce said. “It’s curious, is all.”
“I thought we were here to talk about what a horrible brother I am.”
Bryce’s eyes widened and his upper body reeled back into the corner of the couch. “Is that what you think?”
“That I’m a bad brother?”
Bryce nodded, and Merrick shrugged.
He wasn’t one of those people who intentionally sucked all of the air out of the room.
He never meant to commandeer conversations or hold all the space, but he struggled to find another way.
Merrick knew all of this about himself, so of course it was hard to believe that he’d created a tolerable living situation for his brother to grow up in.
He’d hoped Bryce moving to LA would have been a chance for them to start over as adults, but Bryce had gotten involved with Holden so quickly, they never had a chance.
“You’re not a bad brother,” Bryce told him, brow knit together in a way that made him look a lot like their mother. “You are a lot, though.”
“I know.”
“But I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for you.”
Merrick was desperate for the gag, anything to stop himself from vomiting words into his brother’s lap.
Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek until the pain sucked him back into the present.
He focused instead on his bruised ass and how it hurt when he sat wrong on the couch, his overused cock and how heavy it lay against his thigh.
“I like that you have a lot to say,” Bryce told him. “Because it meant that I also needed to have a lot to say. It made me smarter, quicker, and I’m grateful for all of that.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he muttered.
“I don’t know how to start fresh with you,” Bryce said. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to be brothers who are adults.”
He snorted, a noise in the back of his throat that choked him until he coughed and sputtered. Bryce watched him warily from the other end of the couch, and Merrick chased the emotion down with a swig of beer.
“Is that what you want to do?”
“I think it might be easiest.” Bryce’s mouth quirked up in the corner. “You can start by telling me about Wilder.”
“Or you can start by telling me about Holden.”
Bryce’s cheeks flushed the slightest pink at the mention of his boyfriend’s name, and Merrick wondered if he had the same tell about Wilder.
“You work with him.”
“That doesn’t mean I know him.”
Bryce arched a brow. “Maybe shut up sometime then and let him get a word in.”
“He’s quiet!” Merrick protested, and Bryce leveled him with a sharp look that served as a reminder everyone around Merrick was quiet by default because he rarely gave them another choice. “Okay, that’s fair.”
His brother rolled his eyes and glanced at the coffee table, clearly used to the wood being a mess, covered with Merrick’s various drawings and paintings.
Merrick had spent the morning cleaning, though, and the only piece out was one he’d started working on at Wilder’s over the weekend.
It was a little interpretive, but he’d wanted to capture the colors he’d seen on the backs of his eyelids when he had an orgasm during that spanking.
He wasn’t doing a good job of capturing their depth, but Wilder liked it anyway.
Bryce leaned over the table and tapped the corner of it. “Dry?”
“Enough.”
His brother picked the paper up and studied it, eyes darting from color burst to color burst. “I’ve never seen you do one with such a dark background.”
“Trying something new,” he said, which was true in more ways than one.
“I like it a lot.” Bryce returned the art to the table and flexed his knuckles, Merrick’s work spread across them.
Stardust.
That was the tattoo Bryce had wanted on his knuckles, and Merrick had been happy to put it there. It was a gift whenever he got to tattoo his brother, but he noticed something fresh and bright that wrapped around his brother’s wrist bone.
“Who did this one?” Merrick asked.
“Holden, obviously.”
It was a good tattoo, small. A dragonfly.
“Any meaning behind it?”
“Yes,” Bryce said.
He wanted to ask for the meaning, but he knew if it was meant for him, his brother would have offered. Old Merrick, high school Merrick, would have pressed the matter. He imagined the dismissal was a test, and he didn’t intend to fail it.
“He does good work,” Merrick said instead.
“Better than you?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
Bryce laughed, rolling his eyes and smiling down at the tattoo his boyfriend had given him.
“Tell me about Wilder,” Bryce said. “If you want.”
“He’s handsome, obviously. He’s curious, like…he wants to hear when I talk about art and stuff.”
“Lock him down.”
They both laughed at that, and Merrick lifted one shoulder toward his ear in a lopsided shrug. “I know, right?”
“How old is he?”
“My age.”
“And he…makes you happy?”
“Yes.”
Bryce nodded.
“I’d like to meet him sometime.”
Merrick opened his mouth and closed it, not sure how much information he wanted to divulge.
“He…goes to your work sometimes,” Merrick said, testing the waters.
“To…oh.” Bryce let out a breath. “Is that…”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never—”
“I know,” he said.
His brother let out a breath, shoulders dropping. “I didn’t know you—”
“That’s fine,” he interrupted.
This was the worst conversation they’d ever had. A dozen things that needed to be said, but neither of them able to get a complete sentence out without interruption.
“That’s deliberate,” Merrick said to clarify.
“How do you—”
“Rafe is a friend,” he said.
“He knows we’re—”
“Yes.”
Bryce grimaced, scrubbing a hand down his face.
“It’s fine,” they both said at the same time.
Was there anything worse than finding out your brother had a membership at the sex club you bartended at? Probably not, but Merrick wasn’t sure.
“Holden, too,” Bryce blurted, tilting his head back and glaring up at the ceiling.
“Are you—”
“Please don’t.”
“Okay.”
That was one more person to avoid, one more piece of information about his brother he didn’t really want to know.
But the two of them were trying to have a relationship as adults and these were conversations adults had.
It wasn’t like they were going into detail or anything like that and, honestly, it was good to know his brother was safe and cared for.
Merrick didn’t know a lot about kink and he didn’t know how much his brother knew about it either, but he understood the ground rules and he knew with Wilder he was safe. He found it hard to believe that whatever roles his brother and Holden played to each other were any different.
“Anyway,” he said, clearing his throat. “I like him. He’s…he’s a good man.”
“So are you.”
There was something about the straightforward sincerity in Bryce’s voice that had tears prickling the backs of his eyelids. Merrick blinked past them and clinked his half-drunk beer can against his brother’s.
“So are you,” he told him.
“So.” Bryce grinned at him after they drank. “When do I get to meet him?”