Page 28 of For Pleasure Or Worse

Don’t get testy, Cap, it's very thoughtful and not at all homoerotic to send your friends presents. Also am I the only one who got a vibrating cock ring?

Me

Tally put a lot of time into those and I’m gonna tell her you fucks are making fun of them

Pike

We love Tally

Echo

Tally is the best

Wink

An angel

Angelo

What they said

I tossed my phone in the passenger seat and stared out the windshield. A sprinkle of rain began dotting the glass and leaving lazy rivulets of water behind despite blue skies.

Tally and I got engaged over Christmas and it was like it set a ticking time bomb for the inevitable conversation with my brother. The one where I told him that my best man was actually Pike. To be fair it wasn’t only him I was being a pussy about relaying that information to. I was more terrified of my mother’s reaction.

Angelo’s response was a toss-up. He could either care too much or not at all, and I wasn’t proud to say I had no clue which side of that coin was going to hit the pavement.

I came back home from deployment after four years on and off in the Middle East and the punky kid who was always snooping around my bedroom and sneaking into parties on my coattails had gone from a well-intentioned nuisance to a full-on public disturbance. Drinking, smoking, stealing my parents’ car and totaling it when he forgot to put the parking brake on and it rolled into the fucking Hudson. His actions were inconsequential, because like he always said, he wasn’t going to college anyway, and Dad couldn’t fire his own kid.

Nobody ever expected him to be better. There was a part of me that thought my decision to go into the military cemented my brother’s fate. Mom and Dad were forced to let me go, so they were holding on to Angelo for dear life. Anything he did was naught compared to me leaving and starting a life in a new place where they weren’t a part of it twenty-four-seven. I was the one who got the guilt trips and the sad phone calls, thewhen are you coming to visit’sand theyou wouldn’t even recognize us anymore’s.

He and I had grown apart, and I was worried that choosing him as a best man out of obligation to my parents was a recipe for disaster. The Angelo I knew wasn’t responsible enough for the task, and his inability to step up to the plate didn’t only affect me, it affected Tally and our entire wedding, too.

There was no use putting it off. I picked my phone back up off the seat and called my brother. The line rang twice before he answered.

"Ayo."

"Hey brother, get you at a bad time?" I could hear the click of a lighter and a drag of breath, almost see the bright red burn at the end of a Marlboro. A terrible habit that he couldn’t seem tokick even twelve years later and after my mother begged him to. Eventually she gave up trying.

"Almost done for the day on a jobsite.”

"Are you ever gonna quit those?"

"It's this or drinking myself to death." There was a smile in his voice.

"You're sober?"

“No.” He coughed out a laugh. “Fuck no.”

“How's business?"

Angelo was quiet for long enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear to make sure the call was still connected.

“Something wrong, Matty?” he eventually asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you're calling me. You don't ever call me. And it's the middle of a work day. Let me guess, Mom and Dad finally got to you. How far are you from the ledge right now? Do I need to call someone?"

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