I managed to focus on the road long enough to get where I was going. Without even realizing, I’d headed for the one place I’d always found comfort – my parents’ home.
I pulled into the driveway, but I didn’t see any cars. Both moms would be at work this time of day, but I’d been hoping maybe Kaine would be here.Shit.
After I parked the car, I noticed I’d received a notification from Uber. I'd received a drive request and hadn’t even noticed. I pulled up the app automatically, only to be staggered by the address for the pickup. It was my house. With a drop off at the airport, twenty minutes ago.
Of course. It figured he wouldn’t want to stay with me any longer. Not after… everything.Fuck. I stared at the screen, frozen, unsure what to do.
A loud knock on the car window made me jump.“Fuck!” I barked, about jumping out of my skin. I looked up to see my brother, Bishop looking at me curiously through the window. His head was cocked sideways, like a bird eyeing a tasty worm.
“You staying in there all day?” he asked, one eyebrow raised at me. Bishop was about as different as you could get in the looks department from most of the family. He was a little shorter than me, his hair was a long shaggy dark brown, pulled back from his face in a messy tail. I might have called it black once, but after seeing Mason’s true black curls, I didn’t think it could compare. He was standing in the mid-morning sun in a pair of track pants and a white t-shirt.
I opened the car door and stepped out. “It’s bad manners to sneak up on someone like that,” I groused and sniffed. Maybe he’d think it was just allergies… Yep, becausethatparticular deceptionalwaysworked.
“Um, dude, you’ve been sitting in your car staring at your phone for like, ten minutes,” he said, looking at me strangely. “I walked up and stood here for a couple of minutes waiting for you to realize I was here. You didn’t, so I knocked,” he shrugged, looking around the car as if he was expecting someone else. Of course. He was looking for Mason.
“I… I was just…” Bishop’s eyes locked back on mine, no doubt taking in my red and teary eyes, rumpled clothes, and shattered look.
Finally, he spoke.
“You, my brother, are in desperate need of caffeine. Come with me.”
I followed him into the house, mind too numb to do much of anything else. I sat at the table without direction and watched Bishop walk into the kitchen and start making coffee.
Bishop took his coffee seriously. No instant or Keurig coffee for him. He bought his coffee from some specialty store downtown, ground the beans himself, and only added flavorings to it if he was in a major mood. I watched him move around the kitchen with grace and remembered with a pang how well he and Mason had gotten along at the house the other night. They both had artistic souls.
Bishop was an artist masquerading as a computer programmer. He loved doing pen and ink drawings, which were pretty amazing, but he was going to be starting a new job in a few weeks as a computer program developer with a firm in Cleveland. The moms had really hoped that Bishop would decide to do something with his art. He had a real talent for conveying mood with just black and white, but he had insisted to everyone that he wanted a stable career, a job he could rely on and income to support himself, and art wasn’t stable.
Stability had always been important to Bishop. Ever since his parents had disappeared on him, he’d experienced an almost pathological need to plan for the worst. For months after he came to live with us, he had hoarded food in his room, hidden stacks of warm clothes in hidey holes around the house and yard and squirreled money away anyplace he could find to hide it. I guessed having your parents vanish overnight would do that to you.
He had insisted on keeping his belongings in a trash bag for the first few weeks he was here, saying almost every day that he didn’t want to unpack, because his parents would be back for him any time now. Even after he’d finally unpacked, he’d driven the moms to distraction with his panic attacks whenever there was an unexpected change to someone’s schedule. Reliability and predictability were of paramount importance in Bishop’s life. When the courts finally terminated his parents’ rights in absentia, he was devastated, but his nightmares had finally eased.
Lots of counseling later and Bishop had become an integral member of our family, his quiet good humor hiding an anxious soul, fearful of loss.
Bishop had come out to the family when he was sixteen, almost as an afterthought. He brought a boy home from school one night to study, introduced him to everyone as his boyfriend, then proceeded to kiss the dickens out of him in front of the family. The moms had to have a talk with him about public displays of affection and what was and was not allowed at the dinner table.
I chuckled when I remembered the look on his boyfriend’s face when Bishop had kissed him in front of both moms. Bishop looked up at me from the coffee maker where he was pouring freshly brewed hot coffee into a mug. He put the creamer away, and I couldn’t help but stop him before he went any further.
“Bishop, I’m sorry, buddy, I know it smells wonderful, but I kinda hate coffee…” I began as he set the coffee mug down on the table.
“No shit,” he said wryly, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and filling it with ice. “That must be why I was getting you this,” he said, setting a cold soda on the table in front of me. “The coffee is mine.”
I sighed, cracked the soda can open and poured it over the ice. Bishop sat down across from me, blowing gently on his coffee to cool it. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and a look of utter bliss flashed over his face as the coffee hit his system.
“So, what happened?” He asked as I took a sip of the soda. He pushed a box toward me, which I couldn’t resist opening, only to find cream sticks from Jubilee Donuts inside. Nowthiswas heaven.
I took a bite of one of the pastries, pausing to let the sugary goodness seep into me. Bishop grabbed the other one, making short work of it.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Moms are at the dojo. Twins had to go in early to get their order in for next month’s pulls and Kaine stayed over with someone,” he answered.
“Who?” I asked, concern creeping in as I thought of my younger brother.
“You know who,” he said, rolling his eyes at me as if I was simpleminded. “Nicki. If his parents hadn’t moved, I swear to god he and Kaine would have been married already.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea…” I said, my hand reaching for my phone.
Bishop’s hand came down on mine as I started to swipe my phone.
