by Liz Crowe
He snuck one of the two cigarettes he allowed per day out, lit it, and sucked in smoke, reveling in its forbidden satisfaction. Better two than two packs, he claimed. But he’d once been a two-pack a day smoker, working deep into the night on his novel only to emerge, stiff-necked and starving, his mouth tasting like an ashtray when the morning alarm sounded.
Just as he finished the cig, he caught sight of Antony’s car in the distance. Wondering when—or better yet, how—he’d made the trade back with Rosalee yesterday, Aiden smashed the butt with his heel, then picked it up and ducked inside, sticking a piece of gum in his mouth.
Antony parked and climbed out of the car, stretching up and then down to touch his feet, before heading to the door. Aiden watched him, the full force of family memory hitting him hard. Antony had always been his favorite. The oldest brother had taken on responsibility for Little A (as opposed to Antony’s, Big A) with relish, shielding him from the scary, intense Dominic while they were all more or less ignored by the ginger-haired, family hero, Kieran—the one serious athlete of the group of them, and the acknowledged family peace-keeper, or brown-noser, depending on the situation.
Aiden glanced around the office, reassessing the order he’d spent an hour imposing on the place, where receipts, invoices, and bills had once been lumped into huge, grease-stained piles. He’d brought in some dollar-store plastic bins, labeled them then sorted through the mess of paper on the desk, depositing them in their respective new homes.
He’d wiped down every visible surface, going through mounds of paper towels and degreaser spray to get the worst of the ubiquitous sheen of dusty grime. All this after he’d mopped down the garage floor twice, used the degreaser and rags on all visible lifts, work tables and tools and even cleaned the garage door windows.
He’d kept rap music cranked, distracting him from his gut-deep exhaustion. Then he’d hunted down the coffee maker underneath six inches of disgusting grime, ran down to Publix for coffee and filters, and now the office smelled less like grease monkey, and more like morning.
“What the fucking hell is that noise?” Antony loomed in the doorway, glaring at him then at the newly neat-and-tidy office desk. “And what the hell have you done in here?”
“Cleaned up. I didn’t lose anything or throw away a single piece of paper. I just imposed some order is all.”
“Hmph.” His brother dropped into the large leather chair with a groan.
“Knee?” Aiden passed him a cup of coffee in a cup he’d spent the better part of ten minutes de-grossifying.
Antony let out another grunt and took the cup, squinting through the rising steam from the coffee. “Stop that cat-in-heat noise. Please,” he added.
Aiden reached over and disconnected his phone from the speaker. He had a sort of random, immature thrill of eagerness for approval and resisted the urge to say things like, did you see the garage floor? How about that bathroom?
Antony sipped in silence, ignoring him. Aiden had heard him tossing and turning the night before as well, but had been unsure if asking if the guy wanted to get up and join him for a shot of bourbon would have been the right thing to do.
He’d been curious about AliceLynn, Antony and Crystal’s now-teenaged daughter, but had been informed of the topic’s off-limits nature night before, once Antony had returned home from a date.
“Not really on a date,” he’d claimed, as he downed two glasses of water in quick succession. “Rosie’s house needs as much work as her car, and she can’t afford to hire anybody. So, she feeds me a decent dinner, and I fix leaks, caulk windows, mow grass, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds convenient, almost like marriage,” Aiden had quipped, as a flare of jealousy hit him square in the chest.
Antony hadn’t answered. He’d merely placed the glass in the sink and shuffled past the table still favoring the knee he’d blown out his senior year.
According to their mother, the brothers who remained in the area still gathered every Sunday morning for the weekly round-ball game. Sometimes friends joined them, sometimes not, but they never ever skipped it, no matter the weather. That probably did not help the condition of Antony’s knee.
“Don’t leave any lights on when you go to bed,” he’d said, without looking at him. “I’ve gotta get some sleep.”
He’d lurched down the hallway while cursing under his breath. Before his wife had been killed, Antony had been the most talkative, gregarious, and outgoing of them all, very much a responsible oldest sibling, but in a positive way. Granted, the man had always had a ferocious temper, and suffered no fools. But the morose version of the man who’d championed and protected him from birth now seemed to be the new Antony. Except of course, those few minutes when he’d been around Rosie Norris.
Aiden sighed and dropped his chin into his palm.
“Let Antony have this one,” his mother had insisted. And she’d been right.
After making a mental note to call Renee the next day, he’d retired to the third bedroom, feeling tired enough to sleep for weeks, only to lay awake studying the ceiling hour after hour.
Aiden watched Antony as he sat at his desk, his face impassive. “I, um, cleaned everything, so you’ll just have to point me where you want me to go for the rest of today.”
Antony gave a noncommittal grunt, still not really acknowledging him. Finally, he got up and plugged his own phone into the speakers. Twanging country music exploded into the garage. Aiden rolled his eyes, pondering just how long and crappy this day might be.
By noon, the non-sleep, busy-work adrenaline had fully dissipated. He sat in the office, head dropping back and bouncing forward in the warm room. Weird half-dreams haunted him—memories of Renee’s lips, and tits, and skin, mixed in with images of Rosalee’s compact sexiness, her thick brown hair, those deep-green eyes. He awoke on the floor after tumbling backward in the chair, then scrambled to his feet, wincing at the tightness behind his zipper.
Wet dreams in the middle of the day, Aiden? Nice.
Gazing into the now sparkling bathroom mirror, he grimaced, studying his own familiar features. He’d been blessed with a square jaw, just like all of the Loves, with a straight nose made crooked by a hard blow from Antony in his senior year, and good teeth. Only two of them had required braces as adolescents, well, three counting his sister, he supposed.
His skin tone fell somewhere between fair and lightly tanned. He had thick brown hair and nondescript hazel eyes. Antony’s deep-olive skin mirrored that of their father and uncle. He also had the chocolate-colored Amatore family eyes. Kieran’s pale, freckled, redheaded, visage reflected their mother’s Irish heritage. Her huge pack of older siblings had declared Kieran the “only decent one of the bunch,” based on his old-country looks.
Dom’s skin was bronze, a perfect match to his long, golden-blond hair. He’d “cursed” it, according to their mother, with wild, intricate tattoos, and bizarre piercings. Aiden had even heard the guy had pierced his dick, which he simply could not get his mind around despite having seen the ring in his nipple plenty of times.
Of the four brothers, Aiden had always been the least striking. Just a regular guy, but with a face he figured would always seem a little younger than his actual years. Which worked for him because, thanks to the lovely Renee, he’d been totally hooked on older women from the beginning of his sexual history.
He’d even gotten tangled up with a professor out in Iowa.
“Practice makes perfect,” she liked to say as she propped on her many pillows and Aiden did whatever she asked of him. Her husband had not been amused. That had ended badly for everyone. He’d been celibate since, which grated on him.
He frowned.
Hi, I’m Aiden, a healthy twenty-seven year-old with two Bachelor’s Degrees in Something Useless, and an unfinished Master’s in Fine Arts. I’ve not had sex with anything other than my right hand for going on four years, and I’m back at home, broke, begging my brothers for jobs, and places to sleep, and my mother is dyi
ng of cancer. Oh, and I’m too scared to face my own father, so I haven’t seen or talked to him yet, although I’ve been in town for two days already. Plus, the minute Dom sees me, he’ll probably deck me.
He made a mental note to call Renee.
Chapter Three
The day ended around six-thirty, when the last of the Love Garage employees called a goodbye and roared away on his motorcycle. Antony glanced over at him as he prepared to shut off the lights.
“I need help with the horses.”
“Tonight?” Exhaustion settled deep into Aiden’s bones. He’d give a million dollars for a nap.
“Earning your keep and all that, since I’m letting you eat my food, use my water and electricity, plus paying you to be the maid around here.” Antony put away his tools and headed for the office.
“Yeah. Right. Okay.” Aiden stretched out his lower back and tried hard not to complain. He could knock out the feeding and grooming stuff in a couple of hours.
They shut the place down and rode home in silence, windows cranked open to the suffocating heat. Aiden closed his eyes and let the motion-generated breeze cool the sweat on his face. He jolted awake when Antony braked in the long gravel driveway in front of his house. A strange car, a beater compact of some sort, sat there.
Aiden glanced at his brother, who glared at it, frowning. “AliceLynn’s here,” he said under his breath. “Wonder what she wants.”
Quietly, Aiden opened his door and got out, deciding that heading straight for the barn at the back of the property presented his best plan of action at that moment. As he traversed the expanse of grass, he had another pang of regret for his one-time, upbeat oldest brother. The farm had been a wedding gift from Crystal’s parents, allowing him to hang onto his savings. He had started such a great life here with his wife and baby daughter.
The familiar routine of horse care distracted Aiden for another couple of hours. His mother’s two dressage beauties—Lucy and Daisy—seemed thrilled to see him, prancing around and nuzzling his armpits with equine familiarity. Once he had fresh hay forked into all five stalls, and had brought them and Antony’s three others back inside from the open paddock where they roamed all day, he had to sit on an overturned bucket, lest he fall down in a heap. If he were the type, he’d cry from exhaustion, hunger, and thirst.
Finally, when a bell rang from the vicinity of the house, he got up and stumbled into the waning daylight. Antony had grilled some burgers and set out a salad. But no sign of the beater car, or of Antony’s daughter, AliceLynn, remained anywhere. They ate with the television tuned to a Reds game without exchanging more than two words of meal logistics.
Aiden flopped back on the couch and sighed. He hated baseball almost as much as he hated country music. “I’m gonna go out for a bit,” he declared at the same moment, remembering he had no transportation. “I mean, do you wanna come—”
“No. I’m beat. Keys are on the counter. Don’t drink and drive my truck, punk.”
Everything about this day left Aiden deflated. But he rallied, determined to draw Antony out of his funk. “C’mon, Antony, let’s go out and get a bourbon somewhere.”
“Fuck off.” He propped his feet on the ottoman and kept his eyes pinned on the TV screen. “Some of us have to work in the morning.”
Aiden gripped his phone, thinking he’d call Renee, hoping maybe she’d have a better attitude about a drink with him. He waited for a couple of minutes, but his brother never glanced away from the screen.
Aiden spent five minutes deciding not to go to his father’s brew pub, or to the new wine bar downtown, and ended up at The Cat House, a dive bar on the west side of town that had not changed a lick since he’d last been there. Ostensibly a sports bar, with a ton of televisions, two pool tables, some dart boards, and disgusting food fried in ages-old grease, it provided the perfect venue to get shit-faced in some anonymity.
He greeted a bunch of dudes that he’d swear had been in the exact same position the last Christmas he’d been home. Then he sat, ordered his bourbon, and held onto it, pondering the amazing and rotten new curve fate had tossed him.
After two more bourbons he felt less shitty, and agreed to play pool. He got his ass kicked the first game then picked up a win and a fourth drink. Antony’s warning about drinking and driving his truck gave him some pause as he sipped it, eyeing a couple of women who’d just walked in the door. One of them seemed familiar. He wondered if the bourbon had messed with his eyesight.
She and the other girl sat at the bar and ordered beers then put their heads together like they were on some kind of man-hating girl retreat. Aiden attempted to focus on his pool game. After thirty minutes, he’d had another drink and had forgotten about her. When a soft, spicy-smelling perfume hit his nose and he straightened up from a beautiful corner-pocket shot and found Tricia Shelton, Crystal’s older sister close to him, he stumbled backward and almost fell on his ass.
“Well, my Lordy, if it isn’t the littlest Love,” she called out, her blue eyes twinkly. “What in the world are you doing back in this shithole town, Aiden? I thought you were at an Ivy League college somewhere.”
Tricia had been one of those girls he’d practically grown up with. Her parents were fellow church members, and owned the insurance company his father used. Tricia and Crystal had been close, bonded in the way children of small-business-owning parents would be—very much like Aiden and his siblings. Like most kids at Lucasville High belonging to the original families of the town, they were all tight, and hung out together in the face of the increasing hoards of invading suburbanites.
When the Love family had gotten an in-ground pool installed, things had taken a turn for the distressing, in his opinion. Both Crystal and her sister would hang around, draped over chairs or floating on rafts all summer long, flaunting their cheerleader bodies—compact, perky, and perfect fodder for young Aiden’s vivid fantasy life.
Once Antony and Crystal hooked up and stayed that way as seniors, she and her sister practically lived at the Love pool when they weren’t working at Shug’s, or in their parents’ insurance office.
Aiden watched through a boozy haze as the woman who had fueled his most active, early whack-off sessions loomed closer. She would be in her thirties by now, but looked not a day over twenty, at least thanks to the brown liquor he’d imbibed. Walking right up to him, she gave him a full body hug, hanging on so long the men around the pool table hooted and whistled.
To his surprised dismay, she planted the sort of kiss on him that made him spring a woody like a teenager. She smelled and tasted like heaven at that moment. So he indulged her, even reaching down to grip her firm, jeans-clad ass as the kiss went on beyond anything anyone would consider “friendly.”
“Mmm.” She ended it by sliding her hand around the back of his neck. “Welcome home.”
“I would have shown up sooner if I knew I’d get such a pleasant welcome.” He held onto her, reveling in the press of her breasts, and the sensation of her curves under his hands.
Jesus, but I am horny.
He cleared his throat and stepped away, grateful he’d kept his shirttail hanging over his jeans.
When he saw the tears in her eyes, he stepped forward again. He hated when women cried, went out of his way to avoid anything that would cause it. But she wiped her eyes then shook her long, dark-blonde hair back over her shoulders and cocked one hip. Aiden gulped, confused, drunk from one too many drinks, or perhaps mere lust.
What sort of bizarre fantasy-fulfillment moment this was, he had no idea. But he believed he owed it to his recent streak of bad luck to just go with it.
“Sorry. I just keep thinking about the last time I saw you. At the funeral.”
He frowned and held out an arm. She tucked in next to him, swaying on her wedge sandal heels, her smallish frame fitting nicely into his side, her hand landing with purpose on his upper thigh.
“I’m a little tipsy,” she whispered into his neck. “But I’m so glad to see you!”
He gave her a squeeze, pondering his immediate options. He could hardly take her back to Antony’s. That would be way weird on too many levels. She distracted him from his scheming with a hard squeeze to the thigh she’d been stroking.
“Buy me one of those?” She pointed to his half-empty rocks’ glass. “I’m celebrating.” She pressed close to his side.
“Oh,” he said, finding his voice at last, but still frozen in place, unwilling to let go of her. “Sounds like fun. What’s the occasion?”
“What else, sweet cheeks.” She batted her lashes. “The successful failure of my marriage. Woo-fucking-hoo.” A single tear slid down her face.
Her friend appeared then, clutching two beers, and wearing a not-happy-to-see-you expression at the sight of Aiden. Then her eyes softened. “Well, of all people, Aiden Love. I never thought I’d see you again.”
Aiden gulped, trying to remember her name. But Tricia’s hand kept moving against his leg, and his poor, lonely cock had gone rigid behind his zipper. To keep from cutting off circulation to his entire body, he straightened and let go of Tricia, who was sniffling again.
“Chill out, sister. Good riddance. That husband of yours is a no-good, cheating, dickhead,” the girl insisted, sipping her beer, and giving Aiden a frank top-to-toe checking-out. “Let’s flirt with this handsome young man, play some pool, and celebrate.”
Tricia sighed and gripped her beer bottle. Aiden was hypnotized by the glow of sweat in the scooped-out V of her tank top. He wanted to lick it so badly he had to clench his jaw not to do it right now in front of God and everybody.
Tricia had teased him relentlessly for so many years, with those string bikinis, her sideways looks, and once, memorably, with a quick, stolen kiss in the lowest level of his house one late summer afternoon. He’d been shocked, but had opened his mouth, accepted her tongue, groaned, grabbed her boob, and immediately come in his swim trunks. She’d retreated, giggling and blowing him kisses. He’d despised her then, in a strange sort of lust-tinged, hateful way.
