Page 138 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“Said what?” I asked.
“What you said doesn’t matter because you were being a whiny little defensive bitch,” Mason said, and ignored me when I shot him the bird. “Which is where my problem comes in. What the hell are you being defensive about? What about any of our reactions says that we’re pissed off or upset or...judging you two?”
I looked around to read the expressions on everyone’s faces and felt Milo stir beside me to do the same. Looking at Moira, who twirled a finger in the air while rolling her eyes. Jace simplyshrugged when I looked at him, nodding at Mason and making a face. I suppose, if he could fall in love with the man he’d shared a mutual hatred with for years, then what could he say about Milo and me?
Mason had clearly already pushed the idea that he wasn’t bothered by asking in the first place. Beside him, Arlo smiled and raised his glass. Next to me, Dom was humming a song that I distantly recognized as a little old for my age group, sighing when I realized it was “I Kissed a Girl”, and I would bet good money he was replacing ‘girl’ with ‘boy’ in his head. So he didn’t have a problem...except for being almost as bad as Mason sometimes.
Only my dad and Marty didn’t look unbothered by the news. My dad was frowning at the table, and I recognized the expression as one of mine; he was thinking hard and wasn’t thrilled with his thoughts. Marty looked like she didn’t know what to think and was busy trying to wrap her head around everything while ignoring the chaos around her.
“Mom?” Milo asked in a soft, timid voice I’d never heard before. I didn’t think, reaching out to take his hand under the table and squeeze it. Even if Dad and Marty were the only ones with a problem, eventually they would come around if only because the rest of the family outnumbered them. But I knew what he was thinking, the same thing I was: having them upset or disappointed or worse, disgusted by what we were doing might eventually go away, but the pain of seeing it would take far longer.
Matilda looked at Dad, and he looked at her, a silent conversation between them. He took her hand like I had just taken Milo’s, murmuring something I couldn’t make out. Whatever it was cleared the cloudiness in Marty’s expression, even making her laugh softly and shake her head. She gave hima look of such fondness that I felt myself squeezing Milo’s hand again.
“I need...to ask some questions and hear fromboth of you,do you understand?” she asked, glancing between us. “I’ll get the one with the most land mines out of the way first...is this just sexual? I know sex is a part! I’m not stupid and I heard...Milo.”
“And it occurs to me that there’s another thing I’m never going to live down,” Milo muttered, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.
“At least Micah wasn’t here for it,” I said. Twelve might be old enough to know that couples had sex, but he didn’t need to hear that two of his uncles were having sex with each other in such...a blunt way.
“Why do you think I asked him if he’d stay with his friend this weekend?” Moira muttered, and I knew then that the shithead had known about Milo and me, expected we’d bring it up at the dinner, and thought it best to get Micah out of the blast radius in case something ridiculous happened; it involved our family, so something ridiculous was bound to happen.
“Boys,” Dad piped up, nodding his head toward Marty.
Milo squeezed my hand back and cleared his throat. “It’s about way more than just sex. If it was just sex, I would have found a way to get over how I felt?—”
“You can just say jerking off,” Mason muttered and then grunted when Jace’s body gave a hard jolt and glared at him.
“But it was and always has been more than just sex or a crush,” Milo continued, and I could feel the twitch in his hand that probably ached to smack Mason. “It’s never been a mystery to anyone that I’ve loved Eli the whole time I’ve known him. And deep down I knew that love wasn’t just...a deep friendship…shut up, Dom, but something else. But I kept that buried and hidden, even from myself, because I knew how much it would hurt to beinlove with someone who couldn’t love me back. But I…” heglanced at me, his eyes searching my face, and when I hoped that he would find it, he took a deep breath and smiled, “I have the chance to love him like I always have, but now I get to beinlove with him. I get to bewithhim in the way I always wanted. People can spend years and years and years trying to find the person theycouldspend the rest of their life with, but I’ve always had Eli for that, and he has me. It’s just now...now we get to do it, not just as best friends, but as two people who are in love and don’t have to search anymore. We have it. And that’s what I want, to be with Eli, and him to be with me. I always used to joke with Eli that we were made for each other, but somewhere in the production line, someone hit the wrong switch and made him straight or made me a guy. He’d tell me it was probably a few more switches for getting the wrong gender over the wrong sexuality, and then we’d get into this whole debate about what kind of switches it would take for either?—”
“The point,” I muttered to him with a soft laugh. “Get to the point.”
“But that is the point,” he said with a huff. “Because only you would go along with the stupid shit I say and do and provoke me to be even more ridiculous. Because I was right, we’ve always felt made for each other. And I had no choice but to let our sexualities get in the way of that, but I’m not going to do the same thing just because there’s a ‘stepbrother’ title attached to us. It’snot wrong. Maybe it’s weird to some people, but it’s everything I’ve ever dreamed of, and now I want to prove that I’ve been right for years, thatwe’reright. I’m in love with this man and want us to be happy together.”
It was rambling, veered off course at one point, made a weird sort of sense, and was said with complete and absolute sincerity. In short, it was precisely the sort of thing I would expect out of Milo, but even expecting something didn’t take away the swell of warmth that came to life in my chest as I stared at him withwonder. I had always known he was a gift waiting to be fully appreciated by the right person, but now I was the one being presented with the gift.
NowIwas the one who had to see what I was being truly offered; now he had chosen me to be his partner. I was the one he chose to bathe his attention with, the one who would always get me into some shenanigans, but would also be confident that I would always have his loyalty and devotion. I was the one who got to wake up to him every morning if I chose to, or rather, be woken up by him, his hair sticking out in every direction, a bright light in his eyes that shouldn’t be there after only being awake a couple of minutes, and the sun making his eyes twinkle.
Then again, I suppose I’d always had that, but now it wasn’t just more but all. It was all mine if I chose to have it.
“Damn,” Mason said into the silence. “That was...alright, call me convinced, holy shit, Milo! You’ve got Jace all choked up, look at him!”
Milo frowned. “He doesn’t look any different, but he...okay, now he looks murderous.”
“Well, yeah, he doesn’t like people knowing he has big squishy feelings, but congrats! Other than Micah and me, people don’t usually make him sentimental. Your inspiring speech of love and loyalty managed to get through all his thorny armor and pierce his big gay heart with love! It’s a day for…AGH!”
We all watched but didn’t flinch when Mason’s chair ‘accidentally’ tipped backward and sent him crashing to the floor with a dramatic clatter of wood and a flailing of limbs. And if we saw Jace pull his arm back and resettle himself in his chair... no, we didn’t. Sometimes life was full of mysteries, and sometimes those mysteries involved the karmic retribution that some people drew upon themselves by being jackasses. There was a point where you had to understand that some stuff was above your pay grade and just soak in the beauty of the moment.
Moments like Mason being given a mild concussion.
Marty glanced at Dad and gave a little shrug. “And you, Eli?”
Oh God. “Please do not make me try to follow his amazing speech with something of my own. I am begging you, it will never compare.”
She smiled. “I was just asking the same question of you that I asked of him. I don’t think anyone is expecting another speech.”
“You should probably avoid one,” Moira said, peering over the table toward her twin, who was trying to get free of the legs of his chair. “Mason might not be able to help saying something else, and the next person he pisses off might put him in the hospital.”
“I was just…ow! Arlo...Arlo, help me, my leg’s stuck,” Mason complained from out of sight, save for his hand reaching up desperately toward Arlo.
