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But then he’d done this.
Then he’d brought Fawn, and what in the literal fuck?
“Fawn?” Dorian had said that, my best friend from high school and my whole life. He was flanked by our other best friends, Thatcher and Wells, and all three of them were clustered in the snow and gazed inside the house. They were studying Fawn, and I was too.
I couldn’t help it.
I hadn’t been within five feet of Red for months. I’d seen her, but I definitely hadn’t let her see me. She was hard to miss on campus, and intentional or not, I did see her.
I was around her.
More often than not, I witnessed her striding across the quad or studying in the library. Too often than not, I was aware of her brushing snow off her shoulders when she came into a building or kicking that same snow off her boots. She didn’t like snow. In fact, it annoyed the fuck out of her. She always appeared increasingly frustrated when she did have to rid herself of it. Like she didn’t live in the Mid-fucking-west and had to deal with it like everyone did in the winter.
But that was just her, Red.
Red…
Her face was full of color, her tan freckles blending into it. She always flushed cherry red when she was frustrated or scared.
When I made her come.
That Red was my favorite, the one where I had her writhing beneath me, calling my name, and taking her to her high. I brought the madness out of her, her freak, and for so long I tried to control it. I did that, and she couldn’t control me.
Yeah, about that…
That wasn’t the Red I’d seen today. She’d been pissed at me in her little puffer coat, the one that did nothing for her curves and hid all her tattoos. I used to like licking her tats. I bit and flicked my tongue across every visible inch of this girl only a matter of months ago.
But that wasn’t now. Now, I was trying to keep her from destroying the last fucking shreds of anything stable I had. Now wasn’t the time for all this. It couldn’t be the time.
“What, uh,” Dorian started, coming inside. I wasn’t surprised. Dude had open access to my window since we were kids and snuck in all the time to game or chill. He was doing that even more so now since he was dating my sister, Sloane, but even before that, he’d always made himself at home in my space.
The same went for Wells and Thatcher, who definitely exchanged a glance before they came inside. All my friends were big fucking dudes, but they definitely had to make room for Thatch, who was the biggest. Thatcher closed the door before wrestling snow out of his dark hair, the cross earring in his ear dangling. He’d flicked it but stopped everything he was doing when Bru came up behind Fawn.
He’d been faster.
The kid didn’t use to be faster than me. Not even when we were on the football field in high school did he outrun me, but I’d let myself slip in the past few months. A lot of stuff had changed, and the kid himself had certainly contributed to that.
Bru hadn’t even looked like himself when he’d come in, and I think I only glossed over that due to the appearance of Fawn. She’d distracted me, but seeing him behind her now, I definitely noticed he’d grown like three sizes. Not in height but mass, and even though he wore a coat, he was stretching the seams of it.
Yeah, a lot had changed.
Those changes were far from the reaches of my mind at the present. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth to address them, as Dorian’s, Thatcher’s, and Wells’s shock at seeing Fawn transferred to surprise at seeing Bru, then shock again.
I appeared then, right then, and they saw me well. I was a part of all this too and came forward.
But that didn’t mean I had anything to say.
I didn’t know what I could say or should. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on or how my little brother knew Red.
“Hey, Prinze,” Bru led in with. He always called Dorian by his last name. “What’s up?”
Dorian obviously didn’t know what to say either.
My buddy D, as eloquent as he was, appeared to be at a loss for words. He was but did hug my brother.
“Hey. You’re home,” D said, patting Bru’s back. Dorian expected my brother home after Bru had been away at school for the semester, but I highly doubted he thought the reunion would be like this.
The same clearly went for Thatcher and Wells because after their hugs, Wells mouthed, “What the fuck,” over to me. He was getting shaggy these days since he’d grown out his hair a bit. It was still electric blond everywhere but the roots. The fucker didn’t bother keeping up on dyeing it.
