Zach shook his head, smiling.
“What’d you tell her?”
“That I was going to breakfast with you, then off to Gramms, and that I would text her when I got home.”
“Bet she wasn’t too happy about that.”
“Probably not. I’ll be paying for that one later.”
Cael snorted, shifting back into his seat and pulling the keys from the ignition. “Something tells me I will too.”
“Oh, man. Yeah, you will.”
Zach couldn’t help but laugh. His little sister could be relentless. He could imagine exactly what Cael had been putting up with lately, but there’d be even more hell to pay today when he got home, especially after two months of avoiding her.
“Alright, so, I’m starving,” Cael said. He hopped out of the truck. Zach followed a few steps behind him.
After opening the door to the restaurant, Cael held it for Zach, then followed him inside. The usual simultaneous and perky “good morning” from the four-person wait staff hit them as they walked in, as did the delectable smell of sizzling bacon and fresh coffee. Fucking heaven.
As Zach made a beeline for the corner table by the window with Cael trailing right behind him, one of the waitresses looked up and made eye contact with him. In an instant, her auburn eyebrows shot up and a huge grin sprawled across her round, subtly-freckled face.
“Hey, stranger,” she beamed, winking at Zach, then glanced behind him at her brother. Zach guessed he should have expected Chloe would have been working today, but his brain had been a little out of it all morning. “I’ll be right with you guys,” she added.
Zach slid into the molded-Formica bench seat facing the window, letting Cael have his usual spot opposite him with a direct view of the kitchen and the door in order to appease his OCD, as Zach liked to joke. Zach had never minded though. Cael had always been the protective sort, particularly with family, which had included Zach and his for more than a decade now.
They’d already been best friends for about nine years when two seniors decided to corner Zach in the high school locker room one day, warning him not to spend so much time with Cael because he was gay and that others were starting to suspect he was too, since no one had ever seen him with a girlfriend.
Zach couldn’t help that he was geeky, scrawny, and short. Most girls avoided him like the plague back in those days, but even when they threatened to spread rumors that he was gay around the school, Zach’s gut reaction hadn’t been to defend himself or lies about his own sexuality. Instead, he’d defended Cael. To this day, he remembered what he’d told them.
“Cael isn’t gay. But even if he is, I don’t care. Spread all the fucking lies you want, but it doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t make me gay either.”
One of them taunted him further. “Sounds like an admission to me.”
“Yep, total denial,” another one joked.
“Careful, or he’ll go running to his boyfriend.”
Zach just rolled his eyes. He might have been shy, but when it came to his friends and family, he wasn’t afraid to stand up for them when the need arose.
“You guys are assholes,” Zach said, trying to push past them, but they were bigger and stronger and stopped him.
“Where you going, fag?”
“Leave him alone.”
Cael’s firm voice echoed from around the corner just before he stepped into view. Zach hadn’t even known Cael had come looking for him. He’d come up alongside a row of lockers behind him and apparently had heard every word Zach had said to those guys.
The other two guys backed off a bit.
“Hey, Manning. Here to save your boyfriend?”
“Fuck off, dick-for-brains. I might be gay, but Zach isn’t, so lay off or I’ll tell Coach you were bullying him and you’ll get thrown off the team.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Care to test that theory?”
Zach had known they wouldn’t, and after a brief exchange of glares and silence, they’d waved them off and left.
