Finn scoffed. “What do you think?”
I smiled, stepping closer to my brother and resting my head against the outside of his arm. “Did you have…did you love them?”
“Right for the jugular, eh, brother?” Finn laughed, but the sound quickly died in the back of his throat. “I don’t think so. I mean…no. But I did really love the idea of them. Of being together that way.”
“A throuple.”
“That’s such a stupid word.” He knocked his shoulder into mine, and I pressed myself closer to him. It was important Finn knew he wasn’t alone, even if he felt it.
For a while, he didn’t say anything. We stood together and watched the timer on the oven countdown. When it reached one minute left, he said to me, “I don’t feel like I’ll ever go back to normal. Like, I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.”
It would have been a Marshall thing to ask him,“What way?”so I didn’t. Instead I stood with him, and watched the timer with him, and when it went off, I took our pizzas out of the oven with him. Finn was in a rare state. It was so uncommon to see him so serious, I wasn’t quite sure how to handle him, but I wasn’t goingto make it weird and I wasn’t going to walk away. I might have invited myself over, but Finn clearly needed the company more.
We sliced our pizzas and ate over the counter, standing up and still touching. The crust was crunchy, the sauce sweet, and the anchovies delivered the perfect amount of saltiness.
“I’ve had breakups before, and they sucked, but I felt like myself again. I got back out and I dated again.” Finn wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then reached into a drawer and handed me a napkin. “After being with them…with Neil and Annette…I don’t see how I can just date again.”
“Maybe you did love them,” I suggested gently.
“Maybe,” he agreed.
We finished two more slices of pizza before I was too full to eat. After that, I helped Finn clean up. We took two beers from his fridge—and I didn’t ask when he started drinking beer not bourbon—and carried them into his library. It was one of the homiest rooms in the house, recently painted a soft pink color, and it had arguably the best seat in the house—a window seat tucked into a bay window that overlooked the back yard. There was just enough room on the cushion for two, and we sat there together, backs against the wall and knees bent.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it.” I knocked the side of my foot into Finn’s ankle. “But it won’t be like this forever.”
He arched a disbelieving brow in my direction, sniffing in amusement at me.
“Are you the father figure of the family now?”
“No,” I answered quickly. “I’m just your brother.”
Finn blinked hard and turned his attention toward the paned window. “That’s more than enough, Smith. Don’t let anyone else ever tell you otherwise.”
CHAPTER 32
RIGGS
Saturdays at the shop had always been busy, and that hadn’t changed after hiring Merrick and Holden. More people in the shop meant more noise, but it also meant more money, and I couldn’t be mad at that. But it was the bustle of bodies and conversation surrounding me that threw me off the bells on the door jingling, announcing someone’s arrival. It was just after dinner time, and I was in the middle of a decent-sized piece on someone’s thigh. The other guys were both buried too, so it wasn’t an appointment. I’d been expecting—or hoping—Smith would come by, but last I heard, he ‘was holed up with one of his brothers.
“Hey, man,” I greeted, without really looking up. “No time for walk-ins today, but if you want to leave your info, we’ll give you a call.”
“Will you?”
The voice was almost familiar, but more like a memory than anything else.
My spine straightened, and I set my machine down without looking away from the tattoo. I sprayed a towel, wiped the ink away, then snapped off my gloves and tossed the towel into the trash.
“Gimme a minute,” I said to Greg, my client.
“Sure thing.”
He was on his phone, anyway, not paying attention. Even if he had been, he wouldn’t have known that when I reached the counter of the shop, I was about to come face to face with a ghost.
“Hey, Toren,” I said, still not brave enough to look up.
“Come on, Riggs.”
Clearing my throat, I raised my chin and met the eyes of my dead husband’s twin brother. Fraternal, thankfully, but sometimes I felt like that had been a fluke. The two of them had always been extremely similar in not just appearance but also personality. Seeing Evander and Toren Ember together was like seeing both sides of a mirror right in front of you come to life.
