“And I’ll definitely want you sucking my cock for breakfast. Let’s see who wins.”
“Such a caveman,” I groaned.
“You’re bossy. You leave me no choice.”
*
Matthew’s mischievous grincaught my eye as we walked toward the tiny bistro on Park Street. Almost an hour late to meet his siblings, my skirt was on sideways and there were very distinct teeth marks on my collarbone. We could safely add sex hair to the list, too.
He had been waiting at my door, zeroing in on the Forty Winks bag the moment I rounded the corner, and we barely made it to the bed.
“Good thing you have so many scarves,” he chuckled.
“Yeah, so you can be a little vampire.”
He smirked, and I was tempted to drag him back to my place and beg for his teeth all over again.
“Your brothers and Shannon are going to take one look at us and know,” I murmured.
“No, they’re not. They’re busy getting drunk and talking about how many times I fucked up this build. Far bigger issues than whether I spent the past hour owning your pussy.”
He grabbed my hand, kissing my palm then lacing our fingers together as we joined the group inside the restaurant.
I’d seen plenty of Shannon since returning from my conference travel. We went so far as to calendar drinks and pedicures, and spent the weeks before our appointments harassing each other to get shit done and not cancel at the last minute. So far, it was working.
Riley often accompanied Matthew to Trench Mills, and he occasionally led the progress-monitoring walk-throughs. He was charming and sarcastic, and if my parents had ever given me the younger sibling I requested on multiple Christmas lists, I would have wanted him to be exactly like Riley.
Sam and Patrick were still question marks for me, and Matthew didn’t share much about either. He jogged with Patrick, which was to say Matthew jogged and Patrick—allegedly—complained about it for the duration.
We sat, and after a round of greetings and brotherly ball-busting, the table fell quiet and all eyes were on me. It was painfully obvious I was the only outsider, the non-architect, the plus-one, and it felt oddly similar to sneaking into my brothers’ tree house when I was four.
“Why the fuck did you kick me?” Sam yelled, his glare leveled on Matthew.
“Consider it a warning shot,” he mouthed.
“If I may,” Riley said from beside me, his hand raised for silence. “You shouldn’t be staring at Miss Honey’s tits, Sam. She’s a nice lady, not one of your party girls, and I would’ve kicked you, too.”
“Is that a thing now?” Shannon asked. She passed the white wine to me, the red to Matthew. “‘Miss Honey?’”
Nicknames were a rite of passage for this group. Initially I found them rude and rather cruel—how else can you explain referring to Sam as ‘the runt’?—but I came to see them as part of the Walsh DNA. They were tough on each other, yelling and criticizing and insulting each other easily, and swearing with impunity, but it was how they showed their love. I figured their name-calling was roughly equivalent to the elaborate training operations Wes and Will staged with the Commodore.
“Yeah, I’m taking credit for this one,” Riley said. “I think we should adopt her.”
I felt Matthew’s gaze on me but I couldn’t interpret his preoccupied stare, his slow, measured sips, or the way his eyes lingered on my face.
“Do you adopt many people?” I asked.
“So far? Just Nick,” Patrick said.
Nick was the one person apt to show up at Matthew’s door at six on a Sunday morning and drag him out for a bike ride, or invite himself in for breakfast. The pediatric neurosurgeon and I got to talking several weeks ago, and discovered a shared nostalgia for the West. We missed In-N-Out Burger and street grids that made sense, and admitted to love-hate relationships with New England winters. My Commodore Halsted stories could go toe-to-toe with stories from his superstitious grandmother. We were both the babies—he had two older sisters—and to the dismay of our families, we both ended up staying on the east coast after college.
“What’s his nickname?” I asked.
“Doctor,” Patrick said. “And we aren’t entirely sure he’s earned that one.”
“And what’s yours?” I asked Matthew. Still watching me with his wine glass in hand, a curious expression moved across his face, as if he was trying to understand something complex.
He shook his head. “Never found one that stuck.”
