Page 131 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“Mason will have a smart joke or thirty, and Jace will probably tell him to stop being an asshole. Arlo is going to shrug it off because he always deals with new or weird stuff that way, but Dom is probably going to laugh his ass off. Moira will wonder what that will do to the hotel, and someone will remind her it’s about us too, not just the hotel. Marty and Dad...I don’t know. I could flip a coin and end up with the same mental back and forth.”
“Nothing about this is making me feel better.”
“It was never about feeling better, it’s about...anticipating.”
Milo wrinkled his nose, and I watched him gulp his drink. “I don’t know how you can do that. If it doesn’t make you feel better, why bother?”
“I just told you,” I said with a sigh, taking the empty glass from him and putting it on a housekeeping cart as we passed. “To anticipate.”
“Anticipating is making it worse for me.”
“So stop asking and trying to figure it out on your own.”
“I can’t!”
“Yeah, I know.”
We stopped a little way down from the event room, and I turned to him. “Just how bad are you going to freak out? I’d like to know so I can figure out if I should stop you drinking.”
He gave me a dirty look. “I don’t need a babysitter.”
“You kind of do when you’re freaking out and there’s alcohol at hand,” I told him, raising a brow.
“I’m not...look, I know I deserve this right now, I really do, but I do not need you doubting me. Can that wait till later?”
I stared at him in confusion before shaking my head. “I’m not trying to accuse you or insinuate that you’ll take off the minute shit gets stressful. Because we both know it will get stressful, even if there isn’t a lot of drama when we start talking. I was just saying that you do tend to overindulge with booze when you’re stressed.”
“Oh,” he said, his tight expression sheepish, then a moment later, turning indignant again. “Hey, I’m not that bad.”
“Milo, you kind of are. I’m not saying grabbing a drink or two under stress isn’t normal, but it’s like you don’t think the first drink is kicking in fast enough for your nerves, so you start drinking too much too quickly. The next thing you know, I’m having to escort you like an overgrown toddler back to safety before you jump naked into a pond.”
“I’m never living that down, am I?”
“Probably not. But if it makes you feel better, I’m doing everything I can to make sure you get to live down what happened this week.”
His smile flickered, both hopeful and pained. “Yeah?”
Making sure there was no one else around, we didn’t need to put ourselves on display—again—for the world before we were ready to talk about it with the family, and then took hold of his hand, squeezing it. “I told you, I’m still upset about it, I’m still hurt. But I love you, and I know it was and is a really unique thing we’re going through right now, and people react in all sortsof ways when things hit the fan. That means I’m in the process of forgiving you already, it’s just going to take a little time, is all.”
“I know,” he said, again sounding miserable but trying to be happy. “I deserve it.”
“You deserve it to the point of understanding that you fucked up, but you don’t deserve to be endlessly punished over what was not exactly an overblown reaction.”
“Bro, it was dramatic as hell.”
“I said overblown, not dramatic. And maybe we can cut out the ‘bro’ stuff, we’ve got enough of an uphill battle waiting without reminding people of a few...details.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Right. Yeah. Good point. Did you know Raf thinks you’re hot?”
I was as used to the conversational pivots Milo could pull as much as anyone, but that made me jerk back in surprise. “What?”
“Yeah. Even told me that if we were ever in the mood for a threesome,” Milo said with a shake of his head. “The worst part was that I know he’s joking, but I know damn well if we offered, he’d be on board in a heartbeat.”
“Okay, well, if I ever decide to have a go with a third person, your ex will not even make the list.”
“What is your deal with him anyway?”
“I have less of a deal with him now, it’s obvious you were both just using each other for a good time, but also because he helped the living hell out of us when he would have been completely justified to tell us both to take a long walk off a short pier. He’s not the arrogant jackass I thought he was, turns out he’s an arrogant jackass with a heart of gold and an untamable boner.”
