2
Seb laughed as he went up the stairs to his apartment. That had been a bit mean, but also sort of fun. Seb considered it his sacred duty to test out the new employees, and he’d seen his fair share at Dog Ears over the years. He was surprised Cassidy hadn’t mentioned him.
Martin was kind of cute though, if you got past his trembling scarecrow persona. His plaid shirt had been at least a size too big, and his belt had been pulled to the last hole. Even then, his pants had hung off his frame, but his face had been nice to look at, with high cheekbones and soft brown hair that had fallen unironically into his eyes.
You had to admire his fumbling attempts at courage. The cowardly lion daring Seb to put his dukes up was adorable. The urge to flirt had been impossible to ignore, and watching Martin stammer his way through the role of tough guy had been fun.
That last bit, with the change, had possibly been a step too far, even for Seb, but then again, he never had been able to resist the opportunity to make a dramatic exit.
The new guy really was cute.
Seb set the book on his working table. The book was useless. The weight of the paper was wrong, and the gloss wouldn’t fit with anything else he was using at the moment. He’d pulled it out of the pile at random, but when the pages tore, he knew he’d have to keep it.
His newest acquisition appeared to be a compendium of European mid-1960s fashion, and not in a good retro kind of way. Men in orange crocheted vests and too-tight plaid pants smoldered at him from behind sideburns and pencil-thin moustaches.
Seb turned the page. Girls rode scooters down quaint cobblestone streets, but the clothes didn’t get any better.
Maybe he could laminate them into placemats and sell them online. Hipsters loved that kind of thing.
The next page showed a woman in a flowing bathing suit and a hat that looked like a traffic cone, and he pushed the book away in disgust. No wonder it had been top-shelved. And now it was his. All this so he could make a dramatic exit.
Behind him, the laptop on the coffee table squawked, and the screen flashed.
Incoming call from
Oliver.Stevenson85
Oliver?
Seb swallowed hard. He’d expected it to be Kenneth, his agent, doing one of his pop check-ins to make sure Seb was actually working. He’d been excited to chat and pleased to report he was running ahead of schedule.
But Oliver?
Why on earth would he be calling? Seb hadn’t talked to his older brother in months, and always on the phone.
Still feeling the adrenaline from his unexpected run-in, Seb took a deep breath and accepted the call.
The screen blinked, and the speakers crackled. For a second, everything was pixelated, and Seb had the idea that maybe this was a wrong number, someone with his brother’s name but not, in fact, his Oliver. But then the image righted itself, and his older brother smiled at him from another room in another city.
“Hey Seb. I wasn’t sure if you’d be there.”
It was Oliver’s voice. Oliver’s face. Something behind Seb’s right eye flickered, a split second of panic that, if he let it, would have him running from the apartment and probably out of town.
“Well, here I am!” He forced himself to smile and sit up straighter. The top of his head disappeared from the frame, but he didn’t bother to adjust the laptop. Whatever Ollie wanted wouldn’t take long.
“I—I don’t think I have the right phone number for you anymore.”
He did. Seb had seen Oliver’s number in his list of missed calls from time to time, but he almost never left a voicemail and, when he did, it was never specific enough to prompt Seb to call back.
“Dunno,” he said. “What number do you have?”
Oliver frowned, and in that moment, he looked so much like their father it made Seb’s blood go cold.
“I—” Oliver looked around him, like he was trying to find something. “My phone is in the other room. I’d have to go get it so...”
The connection went quiet. Seb waited.
“How have you been?” Oliver asked finally. He smiled, but whether it was lack of sincerity or something lost in translation over an internet connection, it didn’t reach his eyes.
