Page 40 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
He laughed, clearly not taking my tone seriously, which...fair. I wasn’t that mad at him anymore, not when he was so obviouslyin a playful mood; his night with his dad had been a success. Considering the state he was in, though, he was going to need someone to keep an eye on him before he finally passed out. Waking him up like I had, before he could fully drift off, would give him a second wind, but I’d bet that within the next thirty minutes, he would pass out and sleep deeply for about ten hours. That meant I only had a limited time to get food and water into him.
Keeping my ears trained for the sound of trouble from the bathroom, I walked to the kitchen and dug out leftovers, preferably the kind that would be good cold. The key to getting Milo to eat while he was wasted was finding the right window and knowing it wouldn’t last long, so you had to hop on it as soon as it appeared, or it was gone for good. The best way was to have food ready, and cold food was always ready.
It took him long enough in the bathroom for me to wonder if the idiot had fallen asleep. I knew he was generally a smart enough drunk to take a seat rather than risk pissing all over the place after he’d made that mistake before, but to fall asleep sitting there? On second thoughts, that’s exactly something he would do because I’d done it once, and if I was capable of it, he was capable of even worse.
I took a breath to go check on him when I heard the thump of the seat cover slamming down and the roar of water as the toilet flushed. The damn thing was loud enough to wake the dead, and it usually managed to wake me up if Milo took a piss in the middle of the night. It was a sign that he was still alive and conscious, so I busied myself finishing his plate and getting a bottle of water. By the time I got the remainder of the food into the fridge, he was wandering out, calling my name a shade too loudly for four in the morning.
“Right here,” I told him, slapping the plate of food onto the counter. “Come in here and eat.”
“Oh, thank God,” he groaned as he came around the corner. “I’m starving.”
“Good,” I said, then raised a brow as he sauntered in completely shirtless. “Jesus, did you get sick?”
“Huh?” he asked, dropping onto a stool to pull the plate of food to him. “No?”
“Then where is your shirt?”
“Uhh...I don’t know. Bathroom? I don’t know, I got hot.”
“Of course you did.”
There looked to be a new bruise forming on the back of his right shoulder, and I wondered what he’d done. Considering there weren’t any other marks, I assumed it hadn’t been a fight. Actually, from the state of the cast on his arm, I guessed he had taken a spill at some point. Whether that was just from walking or because he had got it in his head that he could manage a trick while completely obliterated was anyone’s guess.
“Please tell me that if I get online, I won’t find a new video,” I told him, eyeing the filthy cast on his arm. “Because you look like you’ve been doing something you shouldn’t have tonight.”
“There’s a video,” he said around a mouthful of food, his eyes wide. “But it’s not illegal...or dirty...or weird, or?—”
I held up my hand. “I...you didn’t get the account suspended, right?”
“Pretty sure,” he said, frowning down at his plate and then nodding. “Yeah, no, it’s okay. Yeah.”
Inspired by his confidence, I went to my room and plucked my phone off the charger to open one of our accounts. It seemed he only remembered the Instagram account, which might be okay since they tended to be more forgiving of missteps with their terms of service. All I could see from the still marked as the cover photo was him cheesing at the camera like he was having the greatest night of his life.
Praying for the best, I sat on the edge of my bed and tapped the video.
“HEYOOOOO,” Milo bellowed loudly into the microphone, the camera bobbing enough to make the sensitive feel a little seasick. For a second, all I could hear was him laughing and the blurred sight of the club he was in, smears of bright colors and flashing lights. Eventually, it righted, and his double was staring back at me. Marshall and Milo were grinning sloppily at the camera. “It’s ya boy!”
“Good lord,” I muttered at the phrase that was cliché as all hell, and one he had only used ironically in the past. It was supposed to be just for the joke, but I had to be honest, it seemed he wasn’t being ironic as he grinned at the camera.
“Well, everybody,” he said, losing some of the consonants in his slur. “Ya know how I told ya I was adopted? Well,this guy right hereis my dad! Yeah, that’s right. My long-lost dad went and showed up, and now he’s out here, partying with me right now!”
“Christ,” I said with a snort as Marshall sagged onto Milo, which was a bad idea since it looked like Milo was also relying on him to stand up.
“So, everybody say hi!” he called into the camera as the lens went wild again, and I heard more laughter and the sound of something hitting something else hard near the microphone. There was giggling as the camera stared up at the ceiling, and Milo’s drunken face appeared in shot once more to grin before flipping the camera off.
Alright, he hadn’t been lying; that wouldn’t get the account flagged, but I decided to unpublish it for the moment anyway, before more people saw it when morning rolled around. I wasn’t worried about him getting into trouble, but something about putting his dad out there while both were wasted felt like a bad idea. For all I knew, Marshall didnotwant his face out there orto be associated with Milo. Maybe that wasn’t the nicest thought, but there were plenty of reasons not to want your face all over social media, and not just because you didn’t want people knowing you were related to someone.
“See?” Milo asked, and I picked my head up to see he was in the doorway, hanging onto it like it was the only thing between him and the floor, which it probably was. “Not bad.”
“Not bad,” I agreed, knowing it was probably better not to mention that I’d taken it down temporarily until he was sober enough to call or text Marshall and ask if he wanted his face on the net. Of course, it was a little late for that, and there were already comments on the video, so there were bound to be questions we’d have to figure out how to answer in the future if Marshall did, in fact, not want the video to go up. “Going to bed?”
“Yeah.”
“Finish your food?”
“Most of it.”
“Okay.”
