Chapter 1
Noah
It’s nearly two in the morning when my cell phone rings. I pick it up without looking at the caller, sticking it between my ear and shoulder so I can talk hands-free. “Hello?”
“Hey, Brother.”
My fingers pause against my laptop keyboard. I blink my burning eyes a few times, and my small apartment living room comes back into focus, my single desk lamp illuminating the small area where I sit and casting the remainder of the room in darkness. Kellan never calls me. Ever. He’s a texter through and through. “What do you want, Kellan?” The question snaps out of me as, hunched over my laptop, I try to concentrate long enough to finish this particularly difficult string of code. Miaku is the best video game that no one’s ever heard of. That’s because it’s not a finished product yet. I’ve been working diligently on its creation for over two years now, and I’m nearing the end of its completion.
“Can’t a brother call to see how his twin is doing?”
The words sound far away. I take a sip of my tea, burning my tongue in the process and spilling it all over my shirt as my hand jerks the mug away. Shit. “Some other brother in another family, maybe. Not you.”
A pause. “I need a favor. A big one.”
I brush off the comment with a mild, “Sure you do.” I’ve been stuck on this line of code for almost ten minutes. Somewhere in the characters is a mistake that’s causing the game to glitch. After scanning it twice, I spot the break. A quick fix, and it’s good as new.
Although Kellan and I are identical twins, we’re nothing alike. He’s like an insufferable peacock, and I’m the hissing cat hiding under the living room couch. I wear black. He wears tacky Hawaiian shirts. He’s an athlete. I’m more comfortable sitting at a computer with headphones in my ears. He thrives on human interaction. I’m deeply introverted and need time to decompress.
“I mean it,” he says, voice insistent and, dare I say, desperate. “It’s important.”
My fingers slow their typing.
Tap, tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
Tap.
Silence.
Kellan’s breathing on the other end of the line is the only sound.
Let’s see. The last time Kellan asked me for a favor was a few years ago when our family still lived in London. He and I were freshmen at Oxford, and Kellan was desperately in love with this guy.
Nope. Not love. Lust. He was willing to do whatever it took to get into this guy’s pants. But he wasn’t sure if the guy was into men. So Kellan begged me to pretend to be him and hit on the guy, to see if he was receptive to the idea. He was not, in fact, receptive to the idea, considering I ended up with a black eye. I didn’t talk to my brother for a month after that.
That’s the problem with Kellan. His ideas are shit. They have no legs to stand on. He’s not a person of logic. He decides he wants something, and he does whatever it takes to get it, consequences be damned.
And yet I’m curious. Call me a masochist, but the way Kellan’s mind works, you can’t help but get sucked into the next dumb plan. Most of the time it blows up in his face.
Grudgingly, I hear myself say, “I’ve already told you, I’m not making you a character in my video game.”
“That’s not what the favor is,” he scoffs. “But thanks for the reminder.”
“Then what is it?”
I manage to add two more lines of code before he says, “You know how I’m on the soccer team?”
A sigh escapes me. That happens a lot where Kellan is concerned. Most days I don’t have the patience for him. “Yes.” Kellan has been playing soccer for fifteen years. He and Sebastian are both going pro in the fall, and they share the annoying trait of making it known every chance they get. Sebastian and Kellan, top-of-the-line athletes. Unlike myself.
I used to think Sebastian had the biggest head between the two of them, but Kellan is starting to catch up.
“Here’s the thing. I’m required to attend every practice and game as a part of the contract I signed. Only, something’s come up, and I won’t be able to make practice the next two weeks.”
I finally accept I’m not going to get any work done while on the phone with my brother, so I push away my laptop and wait for the last shoe to fall. Miaku isn’t a school assignment, but I want to finish it by the end of March. That gives me six weeks to work out the kinks. I’ve been through what feels like a million edits of the software, but it’s still not done—
Right. Kellan.
