“How young?”
“Smith’s age,” I said, realizing Andrew probably hadn’t committed my brothers’ ages and birthdays to memory yet. “He’s twenty-five.”
Andrew let out a low whistle, and I chuckled.
It had been a two weeks since we’d all met Andrew, one week since we’d met Marshall’s boyfriend, Silas, and I prayed we made it through the rest of the month with as little fanfare as possible.
“And Smith was okay with that but not me?”
I laughed. “Smith is…he’ll be fine.”
Whereas it had always been the four of us, it was also always me and Finn, Marshall and Smith. Whatever feelings Smith hadabout his idol dating someone fourteen years younger than him was between the two of them to work out and explicitly not my problem.
“Do your brothers know you and I have been talking?” he asked just as I flipped the blinker to turn onto Finn’s street.
“They know we talked before you met them. I can’t imagine they’d assume that would stop.”
“So, no,” he said.
“I’m close with my brothers, but I don’t tell them everything.” Andrew didn’t know what to say to that, and I was thankful. “Speaking of, though, I just got to Finn’s house, so I’ve got to go. Do you want to get together soon? If not everyone, maybe the two of us can grab lunch.”
“Yeah. Yes. That would be nice.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye.”
“Bye, Andrew.” I disconnected the call by turning off the car.
Dropping my head against the headrest, I let out a breath. The adrenaline from my hookup with John still raced through me, and I needed something to take the edge off. I just needed a minute to get myself together, but bright light washed over the porch and Finn’s tall silhouette filled the open doorway. He gestured for me to come inside and didn’t wait for me to follow before heading back in himself.
“You got this,” I told myself, grabbing my things and following my brother into his house.
I kicked off my shoes at the door and dropped my phone and keys on the side table. He had an overgrown monstera that made it impossible to leverage any open space on the table, but he had made no moves to trim her back so I didn’t say anything about it.
“Going to piss!” I shouted out to Finn, heading for his guest bathroom before finding wherever he’d gone off to on his own.
The fluorescent was damning, so I turned the light back off and locked the door, undoing my pants and pulling out my still sticky and half-hard cock. Using warm water from the sink and a washcloth I would make sure to bury at the bottom of his hamper, I cleaned myself up from the earlier rendezvous, then pissed because I wasn’t a liar.
“It’s fine,” I said to my reflection in the mirror. My hair wasn’t even out of place from work. The whole go with John had been so low impact I hadn’t even broken a sweat. “You’re fine.”
“Everything coming out okay?” Finn shouted from somewhere in the house.
Even though he couldn’t see it, I rolled my eyes, then dropped the washcloth on the top of his hamper on my way to find him because fuck him.
I found my brother in his office, which we’d recently painted some odd shade of pink that he assured me was meant to make the place feel calm and cool like a museum. It reminded me of the nipples of Annaleigh Watson, a girl I’d dated in college for a few months, but I didn’t think Finn would appreciate the comparison.
“Do you really like this color?” I asked.
I couldn’t imagine spending all my work from home time in a room the color of my ex-girlfriend’s areolas.
“It’s classy,” he said.
Ignoring him, I went for the liquor Finn kept on his built-in bookshelves, pouring some bourbon for him and a vodka for myself. He wasn’t behind his desk, instead on the cushioned window seat that overlooked his back yard. Finn was still dressed for work in navy slacks and a black button-up. He’d undone the top buttons and rolled up the sleeves, stretching a slender arm toward me when I got close. I passed him his drink and climbed onto the seat myself.
With our backs against opposite walls, and knees bent, we didn’t fit as well as we had when we were younger. The window seat in one of the guest rooms at our father’s house had been our favorite place to escape to as children, then as pre-teens. At some point, we’d evacuated to the roof, seeking more privacy, but some of our most intense conversations had been with our feet aligned, his, mine, his, mine, and our faces tipped toward the ceiling.
“I never asked you,” I started, raising my glass over our bent knees. He knocked his into mine, brow raised in question. “Did you buy this house just for the window seat?”
