Page 12 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“Mmm, you never mentioned what I said to Elijah, did you?” she asked, and I hated that I winced; guilt written all over my face. Eli had always said my face was more honest than a child seeing someone with a mole on their face. “I thought so. I was going to ask what he thought about it, but I’m guessing you already have a good idea what he would say.”
There was no point in responding because, yeah, we both knew what Eli would say. The man was my partner in crime, but he was also practically my babysitter at times. An enabling babysitter, sure, but a babysitter all the same. Well, that was a little harsh; it wasn’t like he looked after me like I was a child, but he was definitely the voice of reason and sometimes wisdom. If he thought there was something genuinely wrong with the wiring of my brain, he would be all for me finding out and then fixing it.
He was also the one person who could get away with being on my ass about figuring it out. Everyone else would inevitably get on my nerves, but Eli...well, Eli always had a way of slipping past most of my personality's pokier parts. He was accepting of who I was as a person, while somehow managing to weave in the somewhat contradictory belief that I needed a push here and there to improve on things. It made sense if you didn’t think about it too hard, which I knew he had tried to do many times, but me? I was just going to roll with it, take it for what it was, and leave the overthinking to other people.
“You know, Roland,” I began loudly, drawing the older man’s attention. “I know I said I wanted it totastestrong, but just how strong is it? Because for some reason I’m getting the distinctfeeling that while I’m here, I’m going to want a good bit of alcohol flowing through my system.”
“Uh oh,” a familiar rumble piped up from behind me. “That doesn’t sound good. Bad day?”
I turned to smile. “Well, hi there, Marcus. You’re looking awfully handsome today.”
Which, while true, got the expected chuckle out of him as he took a seat on the other side of my mom. “Laying on the charm? Oh boy, are you giving him trouble, Marty?”
Okay, that might have been a little rude on his part. The man was handsome, though strictly in an older man who was my stepdad kind of way. Eli was basically a younger carbon copy of him, so one could look at Marcus to see what Eli would look like when he was older, and look at Eli to know what Marcus had looked like when he was younger. The result for most people was a little confusing when they saw them together because, damned if Marcus hadn’t aged gracefully, so there was the occasional confusion about whether they were siblings. For me, it was trying not to think too hard about the fact that Marcus had once been pretty hot because that meant thinking about his younger clone as hot, and fuck, that had happened enough already with an uncomfortable regularity that was practically routine.
“No,” my mother said as I grunted a “Yes.”
Marcus chuckled. “The usual for me, Roland, please and thank you. Now, do I have to separate you two?”
Mom gave him a swat. “Behave.”
“Mmm, sounds like you’re the one who needs to behave,” he chuckled, catching her hand when she tried to swat him again, preventing her from making another attempt when he twined their fingers together.
“That’s cheating,” she said, sounding irritated, but even I knew she was just putting on a show. The two of them were crazy about one another, and while they weren’t exactly the same,their differences complemented each other. Mom had a huge heart that she struggled to keep from getting hurt or getting her into trouble, and she could be a little wild and energetic. Marcus was a lot more down-to-earth and patient. He didn’t leash my mom, but he knew how to reel her in, and unlike other people, she let him do it.
Come to think of it, that was a really good way to describe the dynamic between Eli and me. The thought sent a jolt through me, several emotions wrapped up in one sensation that made me take a bigger drink than usual. Several of them were emotions I should not have for my straight stepbrother. I knew it wasn’t because I was gay, I’d known plenty of gay people with step siblings of the same sex who didn’t have feelings that were...not familial. No, I just had to be the freak of nature who had an on-again, off-again, almost, sort of crush on their stepbrother.
No big deal.
Marcus chuckled, squeezing my mom’s hand and looking at me. “So, where’s your other half?”
“What?” I asked, flinching guiltily. “Uh, Raf is at work right now, I think.”
“He was talking about his son,” Mom laughed, calmer and less focused on getting on my ass now that Marcus had effectively distracted her.
The timing couldn’t have been worse, and I shoved away my thoughts along with my squirming guilt. “I’m dating Raf.”
“Yes, but Raf is your boyfriend, Elijah is definitely your other half,” she said, a twinkle in her eye that made me roll my own.
My annoyance flared back to life, and I quickly stifled it before I made an ass of myself. That Eli and I were practically dating was a long-running family joke. It had started as a joke that he and I were more like twins than Moira and Mason, considering how often we stuck to each other’s sides and seemed to know what the other was thinking. Sometimes it made acomeback, and I always welcomed the return of the old joke rather than the one that had cropped up in my early teens. Everyone thought it was the funniest thing; even Eli got a chuckle out of it occasionally, but for good reasons, I didn’t find the humor in it.
Maybe because I knew that if we weren’t stepbrothers, I would have been severely tempted a long time ago to poke and prod to see if Eli’s straightness was a little more flexible.
It was better to ignore the joke and answer the question; the more fuel you gave our family, the longer the jokes continued. “Your son is probably at home taking one of his many naps. He had a mid-term this morning.”
“And you’re not in class right now?” Marcus asked. “Thought you had an afternoon class.”
“I do...usually. But like I told Mom, the next week is for finishing up a class project or getting help understanding stuff we’ve gone over. I already finished the project.”
“Oh. You finished early?”
“Yes.”
“Huh,” he said, smiling as he picked up the glass Roland had set down before him, toasting him with it. “Well, good for you. We all know you tend to be last-minute on things; it’s nice to know you’ll be stress-free about one thing during a pretty stressful part of the semester.”
I blinked, my defensiveness, once all welled up to burst, now left to deflate with all the force of a poorly made whoopee cushion, and with all the patheticness. “Oh...yeah, I guess that’s true. Only a couple of exams to go.”
“You studied for those?” he asked casually.
