Page 89 of Stepbrothers with Benefits
“He kinda seems like the sort of person who has to make things difficult, or he’s not happy.”
“I remember hearing Mason bitch to Jace that he can never accept being happy unless he makes himself miserable first.”
“Sounds exactly the kind of bitchy thing Mason would say when pissed off.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think he’s wrong either. I don’t think he’s right, but not wrong. But they figured out how to make Jace stop fighting himself and enjoy being happy once in a while. For me? I’m perfectly okay with the idea that I’m into guys...or maybe just one guy. Personally? I don’t see the point of figuring out which one.”
“You don’t want to know?”
“I’ll figure it out eventually, but it’s not a priority. Because right now all that matters is that I’m into one specific guy,” he said, eyeing me with a softness that went straight to my core.“And maybe one day I might need to figure out if I’m into guys in general since apparently the one guy I’m into has at least a passing interest in being with other guys.”
My eyes widened. “Whoa, whoa, don’t like...mistake me or anything! I’m not saying I need to have something like that.”
Eli laughed. “Quit panicking. I’m not against the idea...though I’m not open to...being open.”
I shrugged. “That was just...well, like you said before, a part of the shallowness between Raf and me, or at least it feels that way. God, I need to talk to him.”
“You do.”
“After this weekend...is that cowardly? Or wrong?”
“I don’t think it’s cowardly to want to enjoy something for a while before dealing with the potential consequences.”
“Right,” I said, not sure if I should take comfort from that when comfort was what I was trying to find. I might not know as much as others, but I knew it was easy to find a reason to feel better when that was what you wanted, especially when you were afraid the alternative was the shit you didn’t want to deal with in the first place. “And I’m serious, sharing guys is not a requirement. And the open thing? You can throw that out the window, no problem. It was funny to try, but in a relationship that matters? Nah.”
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with bringing in a third if both people are okay with it,” he said with a smirk. “And like I said, I don’t know how I feel about that. Maybe we might have to bring in a third for me to figure out if I could be into another guy enough to sleep with them, or maybe I’ll know beforehand. I’m not against the idea...in the future. Right now, though, I’m more focused on seeing how this weekend feels for us, how it feels to test out a potential future, long-term sort of thing.”
“Fair enough,” I said, willing to let the idea go for two reasons. The biggest reason was that I trusted Eli more than Ihad ever trusted anyone, including myself and the rest of my family. If he said my interest in that sort of thing didn’t bother him and he was willing to play with the idea later, he genuinely meant that. Eli was a careful thinker, but I had never known him to lie to me. The other reason was that I felt that floaty, pleasant feeling again. “Testing out the long term, huh?”
“Well, we already have plenty going for us in that regard. We know how to live with each other. I know how to navigate the pile of shoes you leave by the front door, even when I’m drunk as hell and could break my neck, and you know wood and leather furniture is a good idea for us, considering I keep forgetting to throw my wet clothes and towels into the hamper. I enjoy cleaning, and you enjoy cooking. I know how to dress myself and others, and you know how to chat people up and get them comfortable. You’re starting to snore like a freight train, and you know that I steal the blankets. You know that I take too long sometimes, and you sometimes don’t take long enough. We know how to be with each other in all sorts of ways, and have dealt with each other in ways that have broken relationships, both romantic and friendship, and it’s only made us closer.”
“True,” I said. “But...romance changes things.”
“It does,” he admitted. “It changes things you can’t predict. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t at least get a better taste of what we already have. Maybe this was just an excuse for me to make things feel more official without figuring anything out. Maybe it was just seeing how we’d feel going out together in public. Or maybe I just wanted to have a real date.”
“I guess it doesn’t matter what the reason was,” I said with a shrug. “So long as we’re both on board.”
“Which I think we have sorted out.”
“Yeah.”
“What are you worrying about now?”
“I don’t know, everything?”
“Well, quit worrying,” he said with a wink. “That’s my job. Anytime you take over worrying, things fall apart, and you start losing your mind. You’re terrible at worrying.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Nothing like being told I’m one step away from melting down.”
“You never stay melted for long,” he said with a shrug.
I thought about that, flashing a genuine smile when the final cocktail for the night was brought to our table and the desserts were taken away. It was a martini, and I fingered the stem while considering what we’d discussed. It all boiled down to two things: did we want to take things further, to make things official? And were we prepared to face whatever came from coming out and telling the world we were a couple?
Telling Raf was made a lot easier by his suspiciously timed comment to me the other day. I could at least be confident he wouldn’t cause too much fuss. Not that I wasn’t going to feel guilty that I hadn’t considered him beyond the perfunctory in the past few weeks. Even if the end result was him not being upset and I wasn’t a shitty person, I still owed him an apology. Even if the relationship was shallow, and he agreed it was all for fun, he deserved more consideration than I had given him.
Then there were the rest of the people in our lives...and our family. Okay, sure, they had joked over the years about the two of us, and damn, even if they were genuinely jokes, our whole family was going to beinsufferableif Eli and I actually committed to...being committed. But there was still the possibility that even though they acted as though they wouldn’t have a problem, even I knew there was a difference between the theoretical and the literal. The idea of Eli and me being together might have been fine in their heads as a joke, but the reality might...God, how could we tolerate it if we disgusted or offended them?
That was our family.
