Page 117 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“I...holy shit,” she said in a whisper that went to my core and froze it. “You don’t know?”
“Don’t know what?” Milo blurted out, panic etched into his features, and I let out a soft sound that was just shy of a whimper.
“It’s...” She set the bottle down again, this time with a hard thunk, and fumbled for her pocket. “Fucking...I’d ask if you have your phones off, but I know that’s not the case because Eli messaged me back earlier.”
“What do you mean?” Milo asked, twisting and trying to locate what I was sure was his phone. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been blowing up all day,” she continued, looking lost and upset. She stopped reaching into her pocket when Milo grabbed his phone. “Like...allover. All day.”
“We had our social media account notifications turned off,” I told her faintly, because where the hell did anything other than explosives blow up? “We didn’t want to deal with...the world for a bit and turned it off. I never turned mine back on today because I wasn’t feeling it, and I guess Milo didn’t either.”
“Oh god,” Milo moaned as he fumbled to unlock his phone and find the app buttons. “I thought everything would be quiet after not seeing a post from us since Friday, people move on, and I wasn’t feeling in the mood to...holy shit.”
If I thought the color had drained out of his face before, it was nothing compared to the paleness bleeding through his face now. The kind of pale that would make anyone look at him and ask if he needed to sit down and drink some water. Right now, I thought he needed a drink of something, alright, but I had a nasty feeling that even the hardest liquor wouldn’t help either of us.
“So many messages,” Milo groaned, and despite wanting to walk right past him, enter my room, close and lock the door, and refuse to come out until I’d made sense of the shit, I walked up behind him and looked over his shoulder.
Messages was...one way of putting it.
“You’re so fucking nasty,” Milo read one, skipping to another. “That’s your brother, you sick fuck. Oh...wishing death and...dismemberment on us, and death threats and?—”
He kept scrolling, and my stomach rolled at the things we could see at a glimpse. Milo didn’t open any of the messages, not that it was necessary; just scanning the preview of the first line was more than enough. We didn’t need to read the whole message to know that people were spewing their disgust and hate into our private messages, and I could also see that we were being tagged in several different videos.
“God,” I said, closing my eyes and swallowing hard. “We’ve been stitched and tagged up one side, down the other, and back again. I don’t even want to know what those look like right now.”
“Holy fuck, I thought you knew,” Eva said with a horror that I couldn’t help but believe. “I would have...I would have never come at you so hot. I thought you knew and were just?—”
“How did this happen?” I wondered, and for a moment, the wretched part of my brain suspected Eva, but the rest of me balked at the idea and threw it in the trash where it belonged. I agreed with Eva’s assessment of herself down to the letter; she really could be a royal bitch sometimes, but I had never known her to be cruel or spiteful, not maliciously anyway. And even if she did have a moment of malicious pique, outing us wasn’t her style. No, her style had been precisely what she’d done today, an aggressive, in-your-face confrontation where she made sure you knew exactly where you stood, but it was still ultimately between you and her.
No, Eva had not done this.
Eva hesitated. “I...Jesus, you know I’m bad at giving bad news.”
“We already have the bad news,” I said, taking Milo’s phone out of his hand. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or worried that he’d let me take the phone without so much as a whisper of protest despite his desperate scrolling. Either he was dealing with things well enough to know that continuing to read the messages was a faster path to hurting himself, or he was so dazed and lost in his own panic that he didn’t know what to do with himself and was letting me take control of the situation. “You might as well just...give us the rest. Or at least where it started.”
A pained look crossed her face, but she reluctantly reached into her pocket and drew out her phone. There was no analog clock in the apartment, but I could still feel the ticking of the seconds as she unlocked her screen and scrolled for less than a minute, but each second felt like eternity. She stopped messing with her phone, gave another soft noise and handed the phone to me with a look of apology.
The video had music playing, but there were no voices, just the written message at the bottom of the screen, ‘Cresson Points’Pretty Boy Brother Duo should probably take themselves down to Alabama.’ It was a crude comment that would undoubtedly make the user very few friends from the south, but the video the words were stamped onto really had my attention.
“Fuck,” was all I could manage because there we were, the video looping a few times to show the two of us sneaking out of the showers at the gym. A filter covered our groins, but the filter might as well have been a glaring sign that said we were naked...naked with our hands on each other in very much not a brotherly fashion. The camera was good enough to make out the fact that there were fresh marks on Milo’s neck, show the flush in our cheeks, and fuck me, you could even see the swelling of our lips from how hard we had been kissing one another.
After it had looped a few times, it began to show pictures from our accounts, which were just...normal videos and photos of the two of us. There were the ‘thirst traps’ we’d done, which were mild compared to other people, but with the context of the looping video, even the respectful distance we put between each other as we posed to show off at Milo’s insistence looked suggestive. As did the video of Milo going skinny dipping, the ones where we were showing off the food we got together for a perfectly normal night, us together at the beach, huddled up close to both be in the frame, but now made to look like two lovers enjoying a day out.
“I don’t know who this is,” Milo said as he gripped Eva’s phone so tightly that I didn’t blame her for carefully extracting it from his grip before he broke the screen. “Who is this user?”
“He’s...a small-time anti-influencer influencer,” Eva said with a wince as she checked her phone before tucking it away. “At least most people think it’s a he. His whole thing is hunting down influencers in real life and finding them doing shit that makes them look bad to their audience. He’s had a few hits that were drowned out quickly, but this one...well, his follower counthas shot through the roof, and you guys are pretty much his rise to fame right now.”
“That was at the gym,” Milo said faintly, his eyes wide but seeing nothing as he stared at the wall. “I bet...I bet it was that guy. The one we flipped off.”
I thought about that for a moment, trying to think who he was talking about, until a spark flashed in the storm of confusion and a face bubbled up from the depths. Right, the jackass that hadn’t known how to take no for an answer. There had been only one time where Milo and I had done something like that in public, and yeah, it had been the day that jackass and his friend had been there.
“We can’t know for sure,” I said, even though someone else had obviously been in that locker room without us being any the wiser. I had been so confident that we would hear someone coming and have plenty of warning. Clearly, that was not the case, and now everything was out in the open...to everyone and their grandmother.
“Does it matter?” Milo demanded in a slightly hysterical tone, turning to start pacing. “Anyone with an internet connection will be able to see this. Christ, did you see the views? How many comments there were? People have probably been stitching it left and right. We’re so fucked right now.”
“Now wait,” I began desperately because I could see Milo working himself up into one of his freak-outs, and it would probably be the freak-out to define all freak-outs. If I didn’t get ahead of him...I didn’t actually know what he’d do. “There’s nothing that’s promised right now.”
“Are you shitting me?” he practically wheezed, gesturing to the phone in Eva’s hand, the poor woman looking how I imagined Pandora must have looked when she opened that box for the first time and realized what shit she had accidentally unleashed on the world. “Anyone who wants to know about thiseither knows or will know, and anyone who doesn’t even care to know can find out by accident because it’s blowing up! We’re the circus freaks of the modern age right now. Everything, our jobs and income, our friendships, ourfamily, all of it, dead in the goddamn water, and I just?—”
