He rolls my spare mountain bike to a stop in front of the big white house and stares up. “Daddy’s rich, eh?”
“In all the things that don’t matter.” I’m not a bitter dude, but Joss hears the sour note and tilts his head at me. “Shitty divorce,” I clarify. “He got this life, and my mom got a trailer in Morristown.”
“How old were you?”
“Fourteen. We didn’t know he had so much money until he bought this place a year later. Nice, huh?”
“Sounds like a cunt.”
Like I do so often with Joss, Ilaugh, my chest expanding as I double over. “I’ve never said it out loud, but you’re not wrong.”
Joss shrugs. “Say what I see. It’s a non-word where I come from. Sometimes I forget it’s more abrasive in the rest of the world.”
“Don’t ever change.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.” Joss treats me to his widest smile, and I wasn’t lying when I called him sunshine earlier. He’s drier than Jax, his humor more biting, especially when he turns it on himself, but damn, he makes me feel some kind of fuckin’ way.
I dig my brother’s keys from my pocket and head up the steps to the door. Joss follows me, his boots clumping on the concrete.
The alarm system goes haywire. I tap in the code—my birthday of all things,still—and precede him inside, the empty house a metaphorical slap in the face I don’t give a shit about because he’s with me.
Joss ignores the wealth around us and gives me his full attention. “This place isn’t you.”
“Glad you think so. My dad offered me the pool house a while back. I deleted the fuckin’ email.”
“You still talk, then?”
“Sometimes. I’m not good at hating people, but he makes it easier than I can forgive him for.”
“Why?”
He always asks me that. Never pushing me, but somehow leaving me nowhere to hide. “He’s selfish, and he hurt my mom and my sister. I was an outdoors kid. Never home, so I didn’t care where we lived. They cared, and it affected them a lot when we lost our house in Winooski.”
“That’s where you live now, right?”
“It’s where my place is. I don’t live there.”
“At the moment.”
“You’re a semantics dude?”
“Semantic. Pedantic. Pick one.”
I pick you. The sentiment makes me shiver. I turn away to conceal it and head for the stairs and the bedroom my twenty-eight-year-old brother still calls his own, despite the fact that he lives on another damn continent. “Give me a sec?”
“Whatever you need, Kai.”
I don’t know what I need. Just that my name on his tongue sounds good. That despite being in a place that makes me want to Hulk smash everything inside it, I’m laughing as I slip into Rowan’s room.
The laptop he wants is in the drawer of a desk bigger than my bed. I open it, tap in the code, and find the document he needs. I email it to him then back the fuck up and book it out of there. My dad is in NYC on business. Not due back till next week. But the idea of running into him still bugs me enough to send me jogging back down the stairs.
Joss isn’t where I left him. He’s migrated to a shelf of crystal photo frames. With his battered boots and wild hair, he’s so out of place in the stuffy glamour of my father’s house that I have to laugh. Again. My mom traded our trailer park home a decade ago, but I’d take him there a thousand times before we came back here.
I reach his side. He’s peering at the photos of my paternal family, a deep frown creasing his handsome face. “This is your brother?”
“Yup.”
“You don’t look alike. I mean, apart from him being beastly fucking tall. Is your mum that blond?”
