10. Leo
Leo
It was nearly two in the morning by the time I shuffled through the door.
I tried to be as silent as I closed the front door behind me, but the rusty hinges weren’t going to allow such a thing to occur.
Instead, they announced my arrival loudly to the entire house with a squeal.
I rolled my eyes and pushed the door shut, getting it over with as quickly as possible.
The kitchen light was on.
I noticed it the second I stepped into the entryway, a warm yellow slice of it falling across the tiled floor. My stomach dropped a little. I’d assumed Alex would be asleep by now, tucked into bed and blissfully unaware of what time it was or where I’d been. That had been the hope, anyway.
I considered just going straight to my room. Pretending I hadn’t seen the light. But the villa floors were old and creaky, and I’d already made enough noise with the door. Besides, I had nothing to be ashamed about.
So I went to the kitchen.
Alex was sitting at the small wooden table in the center of the room with a glass of water in front of him that looked like it hadn’t been touched. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing at dinner. He didn’t look up when I walked in, which somehow felt worse than if he had.
“Hey,” I said.
Nothing.
I moved to the counter and poured myself a glass of water mostly just to have something to do with my hands. The silence in the room was thick and pressurized, like the air before a storm.
“Alex.”
“What time is it?” His voice was flat. Controlled in that particular way that meant it was costing him something to keep it that way.
“Late.” I set my glass down. “I didn’t mean to be out so long.”
He laughed, but there wasn’t anything warm in it. More like a short, sharp exhale through his nose. “Right.”
I furrowed my brows. This was a change in attitude from yesterday when he was telling me to go after Matteo. “I’m serious.”
“I’m sure you are.” He finally looked up, and I wished he hadn’t. His eyes were hard, jaw tight, and there was something underneath all of it that told me he was furious. I just didn’t know why. “Have fun?”
I didn’t answer right away, and that was answer enough.
He pushed back from the table and stood up. “Great. That’s just great, Leo.”
“It wasn’t a big deal—”
“I didn’t say it was.” He moved to the sink and dumped his water out, tossing the glass a little too hard into the sink.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.
Go do whatever you want with whoever you want.
That’s fine. It’s not like you dragged me halfway across the world so you wouldn’t have to go on vacation alone or anything. ”
“Is that why you’re standing in the kitchen at two in the morning?”
He turned around. “No.” He was obviously lying. “It’s because I couldn’t sleep.”
“Why couldn’t you sleep?”
He didn’t answer. He just crossed his arms over his chest and stared at me with that flat, unreadable expression that I’d learned over the course of this trip meant he was working very hard at not saying the thing he actually wanted to say.
“Alex.” I kept my voice even. “Talk to me.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“You’re standing in the kitchen at two in the morning looking like you want to put your fist through the wall. There’s clearly something to talk about.”
Something flared in his eyes, quick and hot, before he banked it back down. “I told you I couldn’t sleep. People can’t sleep sometimes. That’s a thing that happens.”
“Not to you,” I said. “You slept for four and a half hours on our first day here. You sleep like a dead man.”
He made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. His jaw worked slightly, the muscle in his cheek jumping once.
“Are you angry at me?” I asked.
“I’m not angry.”
“You’re visibly angry.”
“I said I’m not angry, Leo.”
“Then what are you?”
The accusation seemed to hit something. He looked away, toward the window above the sink where the dark garden was barely visible, just the suggestion of shapes in the thin light from the kitchen.
His shoulders were rigid. Everything about him was rigid.
He looked like a man bracing for impact. I just couldn’t figure out why.
“I don’t know,” he said finally, and the flatness was gone from his voice when he said it. What replaced it was something raw, and somehow that was worse.
I leaned back against the counter and watched him. The old house ticked and settled around us in the silence. Outside, the last of the night insects were going at it in the rosemary.
“You told me to go,” I said quietly. “Yesterday. You told me to go see him.”
“I know what I said.”
“So what changed between yesterday and tonight?”
He turned back from the window. His expression was complicated in a way I hadn’t seen before on him. It was like several emotions were competing for the same small amount of real estate and none of them were winning. I watched him try to pull it back into something controlled and fall short.
“Nothing changed,” he said.
“Alex—”
“It’s just—” He stopped. Started again. His hand came up and rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture I recognized from when we were teenagers.
He always did that when he was struggling with something he couldn’t quite put words to.
“You were gone for hours, Leo. Hours. I didn’t know where you were, I didn’t know if you were okay, I don’t know this town, I don’t speak the goddamn language—”
“You could’ve texted me.”
The words landed between us and sat there.
He looked at me. Then he looked away again. “Yeah,” he said, after a beat. “I could’ve.”
He hadn’t texted me. I’d had my phone in my pocket all evening. It hadn’t buzzed once.
I let the silence sit for a moment, because I thought it needed to. Because I thought he needed to hear what he’d just said and how it didn’t make much sense.
“So it’s not about how long I was out or not knowing where I was,” I said carefully.
“Drop it.”
“I’m not trying to start something. I just—”
“I said drop it.” His voice came back sharp, the control reasserting itself like a door slamming. He pushed off the counter and moved toward the doorway. “Go to bed, Leo. I’m fine. You had a great time, good for you, everyone’s happy. The end.”
“You’re not happy.”
He stopped in the doorway but didn’t turn around. His hand was on the frame, knuckles pale.
“I came here because you needed me to,” he said.
“That was the whole point. We were both supposed to be here, together, figuring things out. And then the first chance you get, you go off with some guy you barely know and leave me sitting here alone at—” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Two in the morning.”
“You could’ve stayed with us,” I said. “Matteo was fine with you being here. So was I—”
“I don’t want to be your third fucking wheel, Leo,” he barked. “I don’t want to sit by and watch you have your gay little romance while I have to feel like shit.”
My heart did a little flip as the realization sunk in. “You… Are you jealous, Alex?”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m serious,” I retorted, stepping closer. “You’re jealous that I’m out trying to live a little while you’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself about Amanda.”
Alex rounded on my quickly, poking a finger into my chest. “I don’t give a fuck about Amanda!” he shouted. “But I don’t want some greasy plumber putting his hands all over you!”
The color drained from his face almost immediately, his hand falling to his side.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing I’d ever heard.
Alex stood there in the middle of the kitchen, his chest heaving, the color completely gone from his face.
He looked like a man who had just stepped off a curb and found nothing beneath his feet.
His shoulders hung limp. His eyes were wide and very blue and completely unguarded in a way I had never once seen in all the years I’d known him.
Neither of us said anything for what felt like a very long time.
“Alex,” I said finally. My voice came out quieter than I intended.
“Forget it.” He turned away. “Forget I said anything.”
“I can’t forget that.”
“Well try.” He moved toward the doorway again, and something in me snapped into focus. I knew that if I let a moment pass, it would recede into something we’d never be able to dig back out.
“Stop walking away from me,” I said.
He stopped. His back was to me, one hand on the door frame, and I could see the tension in his shoulders from across the room. Every muscle in his back was rigid beneath his shirt.
“You said you don’t want some greasy plumber putting his hands all over me,” I said carefully, letting it sit. “Why does it matter to you?”
“It doesn’t.”
“You just said it did.”
“I misspoke.”
“You don’t misspeak, Alex. You’re the most deliberate person I’ve ever met.” I took a step toward him. “You say exactly what you mean. You told me that yourself.”
He didn’t respond. His hand tightened on the door frame.
“Look at me,” I said.
Nothing.
“Alex.” My voice was very quiet now, barely above a whisper. “Please look at me.”
It took a long moment. But he turned around.
And the expression on his face was something I had absolutely no context for, because I had never seen it on him before.
It wasn’t anger, or not only anger at least. It was something tangled and raw and frightened in a way that I didn’t know Alex Whitlow was capable of.
My heart was doing something very strange and very fast inside my chest that I didn’t quite understand.
“You’re my stepbrother,” he said. His voice was still flat. But I could hear the effort underneath it.
“I know that.”
“So whatever you’re about to say—”
“I’m not about to say anything,” I told him. “I’m just standing here.”
He stared at me. The kitchen light buzzed very faintly above us, and outside the window the garden was dark and still and full of cricket noise.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he said. The words came out with no small amount of effort. Everything about him was unguarded and honest, something Alex never was. “I’ve been sitting in this fucking kitchen for four hours trying to figure it out, and I still don’t know.”
“Maybe you don’t need to figure it out tonight,” I said.
“That’s not how I work.”
“I know. But maybe that’s part of the problem.”
His jaw tightened. But he didn’t argue with me, which was itself a kind of answer. I watched him process it, watched him push back against it internally, watched him fail to find the counterargument and hate that he couldn’t.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said,” he muttered.
“No,” I agreed. “Greasy was a bit much. Matteo’s actually very clean.”
He grimaced at Matteo’s name, like it physically hurt him to hear it. And then it was gone, and he was looking at me with those tired blue eyes and the complicated expression that I still didn’t really know how to interpret.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Flat and direct and completely sincere. “I made you feel like you had to justify yourself. That’s not fair.”
“It’s not,” I agreed. “But I understand why you’re struggling.”
“Do you?”
“I think so.” I leaned back against the counter and crossed my arms, not to be defensive but because I needed something to do with my hands again. “You came here because I asked you to.”
He was very still.
“And then I went off with Matteo,” I continued, “and instead of someone to be miserable with, you were just alone. In a house you don’t own, in a country where you can’t read the street signs, at two in the morning, with nothing to distract you from the inside of your own head.
” I paused. “Did I get that about right?”
The muscle in his jaw jumped once. “More or less,” he said, which from Alex was practically a standing ovation.
I nodded slowly. The night pressed in around the old kitchen walls, warm and close and smelling of dried herbs and old stone. Outside, something moved through the garden with a faint rustle, a cat probably, or the wind in the rosemary.
“For what it’s worth,” I said carefully, “Matteo is lovely. And I had a nice time. But it wasn’t—” I stopped, choosing the words deliberately. “It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.”
Alex’s expression shifted. Something in him went very still, the way he went still when he was actually listening rather than just waiting for his turn to talk.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I looked down at my feet for a moment, then back up at him. “I mean it was nice. He’s a good man. He was kind and funny and he knew everything about this town and he clearly wanted—” I stopped again. “He wanted more than I was able to give him tonight.”
“What stopped you?”
The question was simple and direct, just the way Alex always was. The way he looked at me, waiting for an answer, made my stomach flutter. And that, more than anything, caught me off guard.
“I guess I just wasn’t ready yet. I wanted to be, but I wasn’t,” I said at last. “Not for him, anyway.”
“Good,” Alex replied, almost too quickly. He recalibrated for a moment before adding, “You deserve more than being a one-night stand, Leo.”
“Yeah,” I nodded. “Too bad I’m damaged goods now.”
Alex crossed the room in a flash, his hand high on my shoulder. “You’re not damaged, Leo.”
I looked up into those blue eyes, my heart doing a little flip. A tingle ran down my spine from where his fingers brushed the back of my neck. At the same time I inhaled sharply, surprised by his touch.
Alex, his cheeks going pink, pulled his hand away. “I…” He shook his head. “Goodnight.”
Then he was gone, his footsteps retreating up the stairs until I head his bedroom door close.
I stood there in the kitchen, my heart still racing and my skin burning where he’d touched me.
Images flashed through my head of Alex standing in just his towel the day before.
My cock gave a slight twitch that sent a shot of adrenaline through my system.
I tried to get my breathing under control, tried to force my heart to stop thumping, and definitely tried to stop thinking about my stepbrother nearly naked.
But nothing would make my body or my mind comply.
And I was terrified of what that meant.