I rarely trusted anyone to guide me around my brother’s hot-as-fuck altar to Hephaestus, and I refused to look too deep into why I willingly put myself into Vanya’s arms, like somehow I knew it would be impossible for him to lead me into danger.
That was a terrible way of thinking.
That sort of thing got people flayed alive.
But it was Vanya, and deep down in my bones, I knew he could never hurt me. That if I were safe anywhere at all, it was beside him, just like this.
I flexed my fingers on his arm and realized I didn’t have my cane. “Wait. I?—”
“Is here. I pick it up for you,” Vanya said.
I hadn’t even realized I’d dropped it. I’d been too fixated on touching him again. Jesus, this man was going to ruin me, and he wasn’t even trying.
Gripping my cane like it was a literal lifeline, I made my way over the stone path Caleb had put in himself. It was very tactile and allowed him to movearound without using his own cane, but I didn’t know it well enough to go without mine.
It was a sad moment of realization that there were pieces of my brother I’d let slip away, and I hated that a big part of the rift was all my fault. My secrets, my anger. Not all of it, of course. We all had our shit. But I knew the part I played.
Once Jonah and I had been picked up by our teams, and once Caleb had moved out on his own, we drifted. We wanted to stay a united front. We said it all the time.
But in reality, we had each become our own island.
Even when Jonah and I were living together, it was lonely. It felt like an overcompensation for a childhood that taught us we were no more and no less than what the world thought of us.
Our mother had us believing for so damn long that the more people who loved us online, the more we were worth something.
And it didn’t take someone with a psych degree to tell me that I’d taken some of that with me into adulthood once I’d broken free of my mother’s grasp. I knew damn well that was the reason I was afraid to change what people thought of me.
They thought I was slutty and funny and whimsical and whatever else they saw in me. An easygoing, cool guy who didn’t let the world bother him.
If they knew the truth—if they knew I was a high-strung jackass with low self-esteem who was rarelyattracted to anyone and most of the time couldn’t get hard, even for porn—would they like me then?
Would I still be worth something?
Deep down, I knew the people who really loved me wouldn’t care, but mounting that risk felt like climbing Everest, and I was not in that kind of shape.
“Caleb,” Vanya called as his steps slowed.
He started hammering louder.
“Okay, you can be pissy, but your brother is here, and if you don’t take him, he will fall into fire and melt. Like wicked witch.”
“That was water,” Caleb snarled. The hammer clanged as he dropped it. “Vanya!” he shouted as Vanya took his arm away from me. “Don’t you fucking…do not walk away! God damn it!”
“He can be such an asshole sometimes,” I said quietly.
“Takes one to know one.”
“And another one to draw the picture,” I shot back.
He huffed, then snorted, and his hand touched my elbow. “Come on, dipshit.”
I trusted Caleb even more than Vanya. He led the way past his tables and eventually to cooler air. We were around the back of his smithing shed, where he’d set up a few tables under his shady trees.
It was getting cold fast, but it felt good after being under the blazing hot awning of his work. I sat down with a small sigh, stretching my legs out in front of me as I folded my cane and set it next to my feet.
“So. Are you here to apologize, or?—”
“No.” I took a calming breath. “Look, Dad wasn’t even awake when I was there, okay? And if he was, he wouldn’t have recognized me. He doesn’t know anything anymore. I did this to quiet that ugly little voice in my head that sounds like Mom.”
