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“What was it you had to get? Clothes? Are you down to the last set? Because I swear that’s what you were wearing at Quentin’s last night. And yet there’s no bag. Or is that in your car?” He peers around me dramatically.
“Okay, Easton. Cut the shit. Point taken.”
“I hope it was worth it.”
“It was.”
“Worth losing A.J. over?”
“A.J. and I aren’t actually together. It’s a ruse for Dad’s sake.”
He shakes his head, his mouth flatlining like it’s all making sense and pissing him off at the same time.
“Which is why Wren told me I should talk to you when I told her I was concerned about the way you were with Quentin last night. How long has she known?”
“A minute. She’s my sister you know. I have to have someone I can confide in.”
“You have Bea. Don’t make my wife keep secrets.”
“She’s only known since I got here. I had to tell someone.”
“You could have told me.”
“And then you would have been lying to Dad and complaining about being in the middle. Not that you should be taking his side.”
“I’m not taking his side. I just think one of us has to have a détente with him. Know what the fuck he’s up to. I don’t want any surprises from him or Mom. And I don’t want Mom to feel like we’ve given up on her. I still love her.”
“I don’t care what he’s up to. It’s never anything good these days. He’s leaning all the way into his narcissism. I don’t want any part of it.”
“You still talk with Mom.”
“Trying to talk her out of her Stockholm syndrome. Telling her to get a divorce and find a younger guy. She’s been due one for what… nearly thirty years now?”
Easton gives me a look. His parentage isn’t a secret between any of us, but the outside world doesn’t know that he has a different mother. Our parents did a good job of keeping the Vegas showgirl a secret, and East was raised as if he was my mother’s child. I’m thankful to my mom for bringing East in like her own. I love him to death and have no idea what I’d do without him, but I never could understand her forgiving our father.
At the very least I’d hoped when we were all eighteen and grown that she’d find herself again, start over somewhere new with someone who could treat her right. Instead, she stubbornly continued to stand by my father, telling me I had no idea what it was like to be married. That much, at least, is true. And if that was what marriage looked like, I didn’t want it. At least not anymore.
“I agree she’s due a better life than the one he’s given her. But after all these years, I have to assume she has her reasons.”
I sigh and collapse in the chair next to him on the deck. “Is this for me?”
“Yes. Or at least it was until you decided to turn traitor.”
“Traitor?”
“Crossing lines with the enemy. You remember how that turns out historically, right? Romeo and Juliet? Hatfields and McCoys?”
“Romeo and Juliet is fiction.”
“Probably based on facts.”
I roll my eyes at my baby brother and shake my head. “I’m not a traitor.”
“So you didn’t sleep with him?”
“You really want details of my sex life?”
“No, but I need to know if you’re fucking my quarterback. The one who’s been trying to get me kicked off the team. Remember?”
