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“Hey,” he said quietly.
“Hey,” I whispered back. I reached my hand into the pocket of my jacket slowly so I didn’t wake Tria. I grabbed my smokes and shook two of them out of the pack. “Give me a hand?”
Brandon picked up the cigarettes, and I found the lighter in the other pocket. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You, uh…been here long?” he asked as he took a drag.
“Long enough.” I smirked.
“Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” I told him as I shook my head. “I’m just glad I didn’t have to watch.”
He took a few steps forward and looked out at the brilliant, star-filled sky. As his eyes gazed upwards, he smiled.
“So what changed your mind?” I asked.
“What you said,” Brandon replied without hesitation. “When Keith was here, and I hit you. I couldn’t get what you said out of my mind. I watched this, um…”
His cheeks darkened in embarrassment.
“I watched this porno once with a couple guys from Beals High.” He stopped for a moment before going on. “There was this girl in it, and there was just a line of guys doing her one after the other. After you said that to Keith, well, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”
“No way!” I snickered, trying not to laugh too hard and wake Tria up. “I was thinking about one just like that!”
“It was gross,” he said.
“It was,” I agreed. “I mean, I like a threesome or whatever in a porn sometimes, but that was just too much.”
“I didn’t want Nikki looking like that,” he said in a soft voice.
There was no argument from me there, so I nodded and continued to smoke.
“She’s your niece or something, right?” I said. “Doesn’t that shit bother you?”
“No,” Brandon said quietly. “I’m only her half uncle. My mother had Nikki’s mother twenty years before me. Her first husband died, and she didn’t want to marry anyone else, but she wanted another kid. That’s why she went through all of that in order to have me. We’re not any closer than cousins genetically, which is still far enough removed that there is no real likelihood of genetic problems.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Even if there was, I grew up knowing she was going to be my wife. I loved her as a kid, and I just fell more in love with her every year as we grew up. We were friends first, always knowing we’d be together later.”
When he put it like that, it didn’t seem totally sick. Not healthy, either, but not totally sick. I nodded, wondering what it was like to have your life mapped out for you like that. In some ways, I could see the appeal in the simplicity.
“How long have you been with Tria?” he asked after a minute.
I chuckled quietly.
“Well,” I said, “this would be day four.”
Brandon eyed us both.
“We’ve been living together for a while,” I clarified, “but we weren’t…you know…together.”
“You just using her?” he asked as he narrowed his eyes at me. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business or anything, but she’s Nikki’s friend, and I don’t want her hurt. I know Nikki had a lot to do with getting Tria out of here, and I don’t let on about her lying to me, but I want to know Tria’s safe and happy, that this was all worth my wife’s efforts.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Though if I had known how good a cook she was, I might have tried to get her to move in with me earlier on.”
