HUNTER
Every Friday night, I got dinner with my brothers. Well, I got dinner with three of them. Andrew was in San Diego and lord knew how many other half-Covingtons were buried in the woodwork. I hoped they stayed there. Andrew had been hard enough on Smith, and even though Finn had put on his usual, sarcastic front, he wasn’t pleased about it either.
I made it to Cunningham’s the same time as Smith, catching up to him in the parking lot. He was leaning against the closed door of his car, brow furrowed at whatever he was looking at on his phone.
“Hey, baby brother,” I greeted. “You good?”
He pursed his lips and shoved his phone into his pocket.
“My friend’s new fish died,” he said.
I grimaced, thinking about how much Finn had wanted a fish when we were kids and how emphatically his requests had been denied. Eventually, Finn had just stopped asking for what he wanted, and so had I.
“That sucks.”
Smith shrugged, glancing up at me from the corner of his eye. “Have you talked to Andrew lately?”
Sometimes I forgot Smith was twenty-five. It was so easy to see him as the same long-limbed, angry, preteen he’d been when he came to live with us. It had been well over ten years, and sometimes it felt like it, but more often than not…it didn’t. It was hard for me to believe he was in his twenties now, and Marshall nearly forty, while Finn and I were on the wrong side of mid-thirties.
How had my life gone by without me even noticing?
“Yeah, I talk to him a bit,” I said, not wanting to be completely honest because I’d always put Smith’s feelings above all else.
“Has he asked about us at all?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” he said, frown deepening.
Puffing out a breath, I looped my arm around his shoulder and pulled him away from his car. I had no idea what was going on in his brain, but I knew he wasn’t going to tell me about it. Marshall was his confidant.
“Let’s eat, alright?” I suggested, pulling him toward the restaurant.
“Yeah.”
We walked into the restaurant and found Finn and Marshall already there, thankfully back in our normal booth and not at the five-person table we’d used for the last two weeks. Smith sank into the booth to Marshall’s left, and I took my place at Finn’s right. The two of them had drinks already, but the waiter was quick to arrive with a Manhattan for Finn and a vodka and soda for me.
“So glad you could join us,” Finn drawled, clinking the edge of his glass against mine. “I was just talking to Marshall about his recent domestication.”
“I’m not a raccoon.”
“What’s it like?” Finn asked next, scrunching up one side of his mouth. “Having someone to come home to at night?”
Something flashed across Marshall’s face, and the look he answered Finn back with was scathing. But as soon as it was there, it was gone, and he said, “I enjoy Silas’ company.”
“Of course you do.”
“You should try settling down, Finn,” Marshall said. “Might do wonders for your personality.”
Finn cocked his head at Marshall, another curious look passing between them. “I like myself just fine, thank you, Marsh. I sleep well at night.”
Marshall hummed, and I could tell there was something happening between the two of them, though what was anyone’s guess. The line of questioning brought me back to my earlier thoughts from the parking lot, though, and the absolute last thing I wanted to do was lose myself in a spiral in front of my brothers.
The way things had been going for me lately…it was all wrong.
I’d been on that app Finn set me up on for almost a year, and sex was fine. A lot of the time it was better than fine, but I wanted more. I’d watched Marshall fall in love with Silas. I’d seen firsthand the subtle ways my oldest brother had been changed, and I was man enough to admit I was jealous about it. I wanted that connection, that intimacy.
The only way I’d find it was to delete that app or at least take the stupid dollar sign out of my bio. But I’d taken all the money and dumped it into a high-yield savings account and the resulting balance wasn’t a small one. I could make a good donation to a charity or something, and that felt like it balanced out the dubious way I’d earned it.
