Page 96 of Love Thy Brother
He didn’t deserve the sadness in his eyes now either. “Maybe we tried? Got brewer’s droop or some shit?”
“We weren’t drunk.”
A boyish scowl scrunched Rubi’s lovely face. “Might as well have been, cos I ain’t having it. There’s no way we fucked, and that’s a hill I’d goddamn die on.”
Dying for something didn’t make it fact, but if that was how he wanted to spin our sordid mess from here on out, I was down. Maybe one day we’d test his theory. We’d fuck and it would be so earth-shifting we’d know for sure we’d never done it before.
Not today, though.
Definitely not today.
I pushed the sandwiches and Doritos on him.
He took them and pulled me down on the couch. “You wanna watch something?”
“Like what?”
He shrugged and pointed the remote at the TV. The room was dark from the closed blinds. Netflix gave it some ambient light and I let his big couch and comforting bulk suck me in.
The sandwiches were fucking amazing.
I ate two.
Rubi ate three and all the Doritos and passed the fuck out in front ofYellowstone.
If we weren’t getting naked, it was probably the safest place for him. His house was a nest of cosy things. I found a blanket and covered him, then built a fire in the burner to keep him warm while I became the world’s biggest hypocrite and investigated his boiler.
It was way fancier than mine. Lots of buttons and a mobile thermostat. I poked at it until it made the right noises, then took my nosy self upstairs.
Rubi’s house was narrow and deep. Two smaller bedrooms at the front, a master at the back. Couldn’t tell which one he claimed as his own. Logic said the big one, but Rubi wasn’t a size queen kind of dude. Also, he never fucking slept here.
That you know of. Maybe he brings Tinder dates here to bang them.
As if he needed an app to get laid.
I glared into the darkened room, flipping the lights for no discernible reason other than I was a fucking idiot. An enormous bed greeted me, made up with grey sheets, a faded Rebel Kings sport bag dumped in the middle.
The same bag he’d lugged around his whole fucking life.
Huh. Maybe this was his room, after all.
Don’t look in the bag.
I looked in the bag. Three pairs of pink boxers. A couple of T-shirts. A hairbrush I probably needed more than him.
At the bottom I found an unopened box of co-codomol, and it called to me in ways that made me fucking hate myself. Only the fact that I’d have to explain where they’d gone stopped me swiping them.
Really? You’d steal his pain meds?
No.
I took the random pack of Rice Krispy Squares instead and returned to the living room.
Rubi was still napping and too gorgeous to look at for long. Like all old school Kings, his house was crammed with vinyl records. Every shelf. Coffee table. Cupboards. Cam had most of the metal music our fathers had collected at the clubhouse.
Rubi had kept the kooky shit and made it kookier. The only thing that made sense about his collection was the genre sequence he’d stacked them in.
He had a media unit built from the kind of oak Saint liked to work with. It smelled of wood stain and the forest. I sat in front of it and pulled records out of the punk stacks, some old, some new, and had myself a quiet party for one in front of the fire.
