I just look at him. Across the room, I can see a couple of orderlies getting ready to intervene. I have a reputation. As I see it, I’ve got a few options. We can have this stupid fucking argument where he accuses me of somehow conjuring piss, and there’s a strip search and maybe they take blood, or I can cause enough of a distraction that they forget about the clean test. I go with the latter route.
I punch him.
Clipboard goes down like a sack of excrement, and I am jumped by the orderlies.
“Sedate him!”
I fight them as hard as I can, or at least, I seem to. Until there’s another one of those pricks and the world starts to swim again, and then once more I’m waking up to being a captive in a pastel room.
I sit up on the bed and put my head in my hands. My shoulders shake.
Anybody watching will think that I am crying, but the truth is I am holding back laughter. Being an addict is like being poor, or being badly dressed. It makes people look at you through just one lens. You get reduced to the addiction. And that means nobody knows that I did this to get the hell out from under Aiden’s thumb, because I have some work to do.
Teddy is dead, and I know that girl at the cemetery had something to do with it. I saw her come in while the others were listening to the priest. She was never a casual visitor to the cemetery. She had her eyes locked on us from the beginning. She was watching.
I was also closer with my little brother than either of the others. Teddy told me things he never told Aiden or Leo. They’re older and more sensible and they’d always tried to tell him what to do. I never did.
So when he came to me, and he told me he was dating someone new, I kept his secret. He didn’t want our brothers to know. He said they wouldn’t approve.
A few weeks ago…
“Did you ever meet someone you’d do anything for?”
Teddy grins the question at me. His messy blond hair is growing out of his most recent haircut, so he looks half-homeless. Or he would, if not for the fact we’re in an overly ornate penthouseapartment that used to belong to our mother both before she was married, and before she passed. Teddy has the fewest memories of her, but he’s always gravitated to this place, so this is where he lives.
He has changed absolutely nothing about the decor, and a cleaner comes in three times a week, so the place looks decent. Mom was into opulence and maximalism, which is why my little brother is lying on an ornately upholstered chaise beneath two grand red velvet curtains.
He’s added a couple of things, to be fair. A projector screen and some game consoles. He’s constantly losing the controllers between all the cushions, so those are strewn everywhere. The bold patterns mean they’re easy to lose and hard to see once they’re lost. He’d do better in a modern style minimalist apartment, but he says no and keeps losing the fucking remote. That’s Teddy as I know him, always inconveniencing himself for the vibe.
“No,” I say, answering his question from the embrace of a chair that still smells like my mother’s perfume. Chanel No. 5. He’s got to be misting it on purpose every now and then.
Teddy is tall like us, but he hasn’t developed an interest in lifting heavy things like me, so his build is closer to Aiden’s. His features are broader, bolder, lighter, like mine, and like our mom’s. Aiden is the one who takes strongly after our father.
“You are so unromantic,” Teddy smiles. “I love women.”
“We all like women.”
“I said love,” he says, reorienting himself upright and giving me a fixed stare that an addict knows anywhere. “I love women. So many. They don’t get it, though. They think if I love them, I’dlove only them. But that’s like loving one flower, or one piece of artwork. If you truly appreciate something, you appreciate all of that thing!”
I snort with dry amusement. “I bet that argument does absolutely fucking nothing for you when you get caught cheating.”
“It doesn’t. And I don’t cheat. Because I don’t commit. You can’t break a promise you never made,” he says with the sort of wisdom that some men love, and all women loathe.
They forgive Teddy because he’s lovely, genuinely sweet, generous, and so many other things. And rich. Richer than fucking god. That always helps.
“Lately though,” he says. “I met this one girl and she’s making me feel like I can’t appreciate the others as much, and that’s not a good thing, right?”
It’s always been known in our family that Teddy was going to be the first to marry. Aiden can’t find a woman who matches his intensity on any level. I like sex fine, but substances don’t ask you to do the dishes, and Leo’s tastes scare the hell out of all of us. God knows what kind of women could tolerate the depths of his soul.
“Sounds like you might have fallen in love,” I say.
“No,” he says, grinning. “I mean. I don’t think so. She’s special though. There’s something different about her. I can feel it. Don’t tell Aiden or Leo. I don’t want them doing their weird background check shit and having people going through her trash. Girls always know when it’s happening. They’re not stupid. This one is especially not stupid.”
“What’s different about her?”
“She’s smart. She’s kind of dark, in a way, but like a cute way? She listens to me. And she gets stuff. I don’t know, man. It’s hard to say. It’s like I can’t put words to it, but I feel like she just gets me.”
He’s talking like a mark, but I don’t really know any difference between love and being a mark.
