Jet
When I wasin high school, I dreaded family dinners with Noah and our parents.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend time with him. I did. He was just starting to show more of his personality in junior high, and I was fascinated by the person he was becoming. Noah, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way about me. Staring at his plate across the table, it was more like he was scared, probably buying all the horrible things our parents told him about me, how unholy and bad I was.
Drowning in my own problems, it was easy for me to swallow those lies, too.
Back then, Mom’s Midwestern casseroles between us, Noah would never look me in the eye. He’d just sit, polite and quiet like our parents wanted us to be, focusing on his cheesy potatoes and green beans.
Sitting at his table years later, though, in his tastefully decorated condo and a whole different city, it finally felt easier. We were warming to each other, able to relax and even joke around a little. The wine helped, and we’d both clearly grown over the years. That was part of it.
But I couldn’t deny how much it helped to have Peyton there, too.
I felt like myself with Peyton. It was hard to explain, but he seemed to accept me in a way not many people did, and I was pretty sure I was coming to understand him. I got how he ticked, and he seemed to get how I was built, and we both apparently liked what we saw.
There were some awkward moments with Noah, but they were eased by Peyton’s presence, and his smiles bolstered my confidence. If he liked me, then maybe Noah could come to like me, too.
I just prayed that their conversation would go okay once I left. Peyton planned to bite the bullet and share the truth with my brother, his sexuality and the fact that we’d hooked up. After it was all out in the open, I hoped we’d be able to move on. It would almost fucking certainly mean an end to hooking up with Peyton, and that sucked, but there wasn’t any other choice.
He caught my eye from across the table. For most of my life, I ran from the trouble that I caused. But Peyton made me want to stay and face things, same as he was doing.
It was something about his sincerity, that good heart of his. I already knew we should talk to Noah, but it was only when Peyton texted me to say the same that I decided to actually do it.
“What about Thailand?” Noah asked, pulling me from my thoughts. “Did you get to travel much outside of Bangkok?”
We’d been having this conversation on and off all night, while our plates slowly emptied in front of us. Noah hadn’t travelled outside of the United States, but he was fascinated by different styles of architecture. As we warmed to each other more, he’d started tossing out places that he was curious about, and I offered up what I remembered from walking the streets.
“I went there three times, but never got outside of Bangkok. Just the architecture I saw around the nightlife, though, that was something else.” I shook my head, searching for ways to describe it. “It was futuristic.”
Noah leaned back in his chair. He was slim, dressed in a casual blue T-shirt that somehow still looked expensive. His neatly trimmed hair and the immaculate, understated decorations of the condo reminded me how much he’d lived up to our parents’ expectations.
“Futuristic,” he said with a smile. “I like that.”
“How’s the club design coming along, by the way?” I asked.
“Really good,” Noah answered quickly. “Thank you again.”
Peyton chuckled. He was the only one of us in a collared shirt, which he wore with the top buttons undone.
Distracting.
“What?” Noah asked, tilting his eyes to his friend.
“Well, really good might be an exaggeration,” Peyton added. “We’re at an impasse with the client.”
Noah waved his hand in the air, a gesture that I remembered from when he was a kid. “Oh, she’ll get over it. It’s just too ridiculous not to get over.”
“She wants the bar on a rotating platform,” Peyton explained.
I thought about it, then started laughing. “Seriously?”
Peyton rubbed his beard as he chuckled. “Those poor bartenders.”
“I take it you two aren’t going in that direction?”
Noah and Peyton exchanged a glance. “God, I hope not,” Noah chuckled. “It’s such a bad idea. I’d hate to lose the business after all we’ve invested—”
“But we don’t want our new brand to be the guys who made the vomit-inducing bar,” Peyton finished for his friend.
