I had a few choice words to say to the universe, or karma, or whatever was ultimately responsible for my present state of awkward embarrassment and thrusting me into this situation with Phoenix before I’d come up with a game plan:Fuck you, too.
3
Phoenix
Iwanted to see how many more parts of Jonas’s body I could get to turn beet red—his sweet awkwardness just added to his sexiness—but my mother came rushing down the hallway and interrupted with her chastising shout.
“Hey, Ma.” She smothered me in a hug and then tipped her cheek up for me to kiss, which I obediently obliged after removing my hat.
“I’m overjoyed that you’re here, dear,” Mom said. She bit her lip and frowned. “But why didn’t you let me know? If I’d known, I’d have prepared more for dinner. I don’t want anyone to walk away still hungry.”
“Ma, please.” I took her hand and walked down the hallway. “You always make enough food to feed an army and then some. None of us will starve, trust me.” She just hummed and peeled off into the kitchen as we walked past it, looking like a woman on a mission.
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure Jonas was following, but he was still hovering near the front door, looking like he was about to bolt. Nope. Uh-uh. Not happening.
Turning to face him, I cocked my head toward the family room. “Let’s go, Pickles.”
“Oh.” He gazed longingly at the staircase. “I was just going to…you know…” He held up one hand and made a climbing motion with his first two fingers.
I strode over to him, stopping once I was well into his personal space. “Am I really so awful to be around?” I asked in a low voice.
“No!” he replied, eyes wide as he shook his head. “I just thought that maybe you’d like some time alone with your family.”
The trace scent of his peaches-and-cream body wash teased my senses. God, he smelled sweet and tempting, like a walking dessert. I hoped I’d get a chance to taste him.
“You’re my family too, Jonas. Or, you were.” I couldn’t help the hurt that crept into my voice. He’d decided for the both of us to essentially cut ties for the last six months. For a while, I’d been angry and confused. Sad. But now I was determined to reverse it.
Jonas wrung his hands together, glancing toward the stairs one last time. Then he nodded. “Okay, let’s go,” he said. He stepped around me and tripped over a non-existent crack in the wooden floor, but caught himself before he fell. He pulled his shoulders back, straightened his shirt, and marched toward the family room. I chuckled quietly to myself and followed after him, thinking about what had brought us to this moment in the first place and my next steps.
I hadn’t initially relished the thought of being attracted to my sister’s best friend, a guy I had watched grow up and had treated as a brother for many of those years. I’d first recognized my feelings at their college graduation. I’d given both him and Brooklynn hugs after the ceremony and was fascinated by how he fit right into the crook of my arm, and by the way his head had tucked perfectly under my chin. For a while, I’d felt weird about my growing attraction to him, and was sure it was one-sided—both reasons why I had not acted on it. I’d tried to bang him outof my system by replacing thoughts of him with the bodies of several guys back in New York City. Surely there was someone out there who would be able to fill the Jonas area of my brain, and I would move on from my inconvenient infatuation, right?
Wrong.
I’d struck out with all of them, and it had finally hit me why. Sure, there’d been some great sex. But sex was just sex when there wasn’t a real connection. They’d all been too perfect. Too put together. Too corporate culture for me. Too tall, too bulky, too not Jonas. My thoughts always wandered back to the boy I’d told scary stories to around the backyard campfire, and then had to sit up with into the wee hours of the morning, cracking jokes or playing “I spy” while Brooklynn was sound asleep in her sleeping bag, because he was too spooked to sleep. To the boy whose knees and elbows I’d bandaged more times than my own sisters’ because sidewalk cracks and tree roots were always out to get him. And to the young man whose loose hair I’d held back as he puked his guts out into a bush his second summer home from college. It had been the first time he’d ever gotten drunk.
He’d been like a younger brother to me, until he wasn’t. I’d somehow fallen for him without even realizing it was happening.
Then last Christmas, we’d had the most bizarre conversation that had given me a spark of hope that he might be into me too. He and Brooklynn had been out for a night of fun and ended up several drinks past tipsy. After picking them up at the bar and driving them to their apartment, I’d stayed a while to make sure they’d be okay. With Brooklynn snoring away on their couch, Jonas and I had sat on the floor, propped up against it. I remembered our conversation vividly, playing through it in my head for the thousandth time…
“Thanks for picking us up,” Jonas said, hiccupping again. He wrapped his three layers of blankets tightly around himself,and I had to sit on my hands to keep from leaning over and unwrapping him like the gift he surely was.
“You’re welcome. That’s what brothers are for. That, and petty revenge against the enemies of my siblings.” I grinned in his direction, but found him frowning down at the floor.
I was about to ask him what was wrong when he blurted out, “We’re not actually brothers.”
My brows raised at his words. “Yeahhhhh, I’m aware of that. I was referring to Brooklynn and Amberly. But I like helping you out too, Jonas.” I reached over and brushed his chin with my thumb. “You know that.”
He gave me a goofy grin as I withdrew my hand. “Glad we’re on the same page. Because it skeeves me out to think of you as a brother. Because, you know, sometimes I think about your dick. And that would be incest-y if we were brothers.”
I blinked silently. “Ehh, what was that second-to-last part?”
“Oh, don’t worry.” Jonas held up his palms and shook his head. “Not, like, in a creepy way. My cousin, Hazel, who had a baby recently? She was over for dinner at my grandparents’ last week while Morgan, my parents, and I were there. The topic of circumcision came up”—because that was apparently a totally natural subject for the dinner table??—“and whether it was ethically okay to have it done on a baby. The conversation took a strange turn”—thisconversation had taken a strange, albeit comical turn—“and anyway, long story longer, since then I’ve been thinking about the few dicks I’ve seen up close and personal. And then I was trying to decide if you’re circumcised, since sadly I’ve never seen your dick.”
He was staring intently at my sweatpants with his brows drawn together, cheeks all rosy, and biting on his lip in what had to be the sweetest, goofiest look of drunken concentration ever.
Not many things left me speechless, but all…that…did. I was trying to decide if he was yanking my chain or being serious, and decided that he was too drunk to make shit like that up on the fly. He seemed to mistake my amused silence as annoyance, or maybe disgust, and began blabbering again.
“I mean, no, that’s not what I mean. Pickles! I was thinking about pickles. Definitely not your dick. Are you hungry? I’m starving. Wow. Yeah. Pickles. Nice and…briny. I could go for one right now.” Jonas cringed and slid down into his mound of blankets, looking a little green as if realizing the thought of eating actual pickles while drunk was, in reality, pretty nasty.
