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“I don’t know. We never talked about it until a few days ago.”
This caught me by surprise, and I felt myself gape at him. “Seriously?”
“I guess Win can read us both.”
A sour tang coated my tongue at the thought of Win being able to read Max better than me. I hated the idea, knowing that someone else could see things about him that I could not.
I wanted to be the one to know him the most. The deepest. And then suddenly, an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.What the fuck for?
I fought against myself, tortured myself, trying to keep my feelings on lockdown. All the nights I’d tried to stop loving him the way I do, aching so deep because it didn’t matter how hard I tried. I wished for him still. The constant whisper in my head of how disgusted they would all be to know about my less-than-appropriate feelings for my own brother.
At times, loneliness swallowed me up because I bore it all on my own, afraid to even confide in Win because I was so terrified our family of three would be altered and the only people I had left would abandon me too.
Mom and Dad had no choice… but Win and Max? If they walked, it was because they chose to. Because they wouldn’t be able to look at me.
A broken groan rumbled in my chest, echoing up my throat. Max’s eyes deepened, and he took a small step forward. The glass doors of the shower shuddered under my weight when I practically fell back into them.
“Stay where you are.” I warned him, my insides shredded.
“Wes.”
“Neither of you said a word,” I rasped. “Did you two just laugh at how stupid I was, how transparent? Did you feel sorry for me, maybe think I was fucked up in the head from that beating I took?”
Growling, Max flew across the room, grabbing me by the shoulders and spinning to plow me into the nearby wall. My body hit, but the collision was buffered by the way his hands spread out across my upper back and shoulders.
“Don’t ever fucking say that again,” he demanded. “You are not stupid.”
“Yeah?” I asked, staring over his shoulder, seeing nothing at all. “Then what am I?”
His fingers spasmed against my back, but I didn’t need the reminder he was touching me. That was a reminder I would never ever need.
So long I’d spent aching for his touch, and even when I knew I shouldn’t want it, I was loath to turn it down.
“You’re perfect.”
A piece of me shattered, a piece I’d been trying to protect. “Don’t say shit like that to me.”
“Why?” he asked, hips shifting toward mine.
I lifted my eyes, letting him see. Knowing he would be able to because, apparently, my poker face didn’t even exist. “Because it will hurt too much when you take it back.”
He sucked in a breath, hands pulling from beneath my shoulders to cup my face, and lowered his head. Before he could make contact, I laid my hands on him and shoved, forcing him back.
“And stop kissing me,” I said, chest heaving. My lips tingled, heart weeping for what I’d just denied.
A frustrated sound echoed up to the ceiling as Max plowed his hand through his raven hair, the strands flopping over his forehead and creating a frame for his flashing eyes.
I started for the door, needing out of this space. I needed to lick my wounds in private, wait until they became scars.
It won’t matter. Everything is changed.
“And what would you have had me do?” Max yelled at my retreating back. Anger was something he always simmered with, but this was something else. Desperation.
I paused.
“Was I supposed to call you out on what I saw in your eyes? Was I supposed to ask you if you loved me as more than a brother? And what then?” He went on as if the floodgates to a part of him I’d never been privy to burst wide.
And even though it hurt like hell, even though I was standing here bleeding out… the very blood leaving me trailed toward him.
