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“Three. Rafe and Beltran are twins. We call him Bel for short. The one in the photo was Rafe. He’s the more reckless of us. And then there’s Winter. The baby of the family.”
Ethan paused as he dug through the silverware drawer and smiled at Marcus. “Are you the oldest?”
Marcus nodded.
“I can’t imagine growing up with three younger brothers.” Ethan grabbed what they needed and turned to Marcus with a little shake of his head. “That had to be utter chaos.”
“Do you have siblings?”
Ethan’s open and warm expression closed up in a heartbeat, his fingers tightening around the pair of forks still clutched in his left hand. “I did. I was the middle child. I had an older and a younger sister. Lucy and Macy.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Marcus said softly. He wanted to ask more questions, to find out why his sisters were stolen from him, but Marcus bit back the words. Ethan’s tense frame and deepening frown did not speak of a person who wanted to talk about that horrible moment of their loss.
The silence stretched, twisted and painful between them. Marcus knew the anguish he felt. He’d already suffered a lifetime of loss. People he’d once counted as family and friends had died one by one over the last century. Some due to horrible accidents and unfortunate events, while others simply grew old while he remained perpetually thirty. He counted himself lucky that he still had his brothers, no matter how annoying and reckless they could be.
His mother, Julianna, was another story.
She had good nights and bad nights, but the bad always seemed to overshadow the good. She was little more than a ghost of her former self. Marcus had lost her the night that Aiden tried to save her from the illness ravaging her thin, weak body.
“What was the music you were singing earlier?” Marcus asked, trying to think of a topic that might return the smile to Ethan’s face.
It worked. The light started to peek out again, and he shook his head slightly. “And there’s where that snowball of embarrassment started,” he murmured. Marcus almost apologized again, but Ethan flashed him such a smile that the words became caught in his throat. “That was Tori Amos.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of her.”
Ethan groaned and released the utensils he was still holding to grab the phone from his back pocket. “Oh God, you’ve got to know Tori. I know people call Beyoncé ‘The Queen,’ but Tori, she’s a fucking goddess.” He sidled closer to Marcus while tapping away on the screen, searching for what he could only guess was the perfect Tori Amos song.
A second later the first notes of a song tiptoed from Ethan’s phone and his entire demeanor changed. His shoulders slumped and his eyes closed. A look of bliss settled over his features, and he started to sway just a little as more notes trickled out. Marcus noticed that he heard only a piano…and then a haunting female voice.
“She’s a pianist,” Marcus said in a surprise.
“Yes. She’s a complete goddess behind the piano. She can make that instrument laugh or weep or rage for her. There’s no one like her.”
Marcus closed his eyes, letting the piano notes reach into his soul followed by the breathy, lilting voice of the songstress as she wove her magic. She was like a siren stroking her fingers along his soul. For more years than he could count, Marcus had been attached to the piano. There were times that he hated it, sure it was a prison, but there were too many moments in his long life that he sat down behind those black and ivory keys to find solace when he could find it nowhere else.
And it felt like there was a little bit of that reflected in this woman’s spiraling words and dancing notes.
“I discovered Tori a few years after my family was stolen.” Ethan’s words started softly, barely over a whisper. He was staring down at the phone resting on the counter between them. “Listening to her, it was like I could breathe again. And then later with the gay thing, she had a way of empowering me. Providing the shield and shoulder I needed.”
Marcus could feel the furrows digging deep in his brow. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand. ‘The gay thing’?”
Ethan smiled up at him. “I’m gay and Tori is a big-time ally.” His eyes narrowed and his smile slipped a little. “I assumed you wouldn’t care since your brother is so very bi.”
The words coming from Ethan required a few extra seconds to decipher. Everything was getting caught up in his brain. Ethan was gay. He liked men. Not women. And everything about his demeanor and words said that he was entirely comfortable with that. He felt no horror or shame or disappointment in himself.
