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“Happy Chanukah, asshole.”
Ben blinked across his cluttered desk at his brother’s obnoxious smile. When Aaron dropped a very familiar, white, cracked iPhone on top of the essay he was grading, Ben’s eyes widened, and he immediately patted his pockets before realizing that yep.
That was his.
“How the hell…”
“Magic,” Aaron said, wiggling his fingers in the air. He glanced around before walking to the office door and grabbing the ugly folding chair with the wobbly leg. He flicked it out and spread his legs as he sat, reaching for the table with a look of panic on his face as the chair tipped sideways.
Ben said nothing, hiding his grin behind his fingers. There was little more satisfying than seeing his brother knocked sideways a little. Aaron was always so much more put together than him, and it always made Ben feel inadequate. Even when Aaron wasn’t doing it on purpose.
But he was the good brother. The golden brother. The one who defined family pride. He was the doctor—married to a beautiful and kind woman and probably on the verge of having babies and putting their mother out of her baby-fever misery.
Ben was none of those things. He was awkward, gay, wasn’t sure he even liked children, let alone wanted to father any, and he was a professor barely making ends meet on the shitty public university salary they’d offered him with his contract.
“What the hell is wrong with your office?” Aaron demanded.
Ben snorted and shrugged, sitting back in his chair. “State budget?”
“I don’t agree with Mom on much, but—” Aaron started, but Ben hit him with a balled-up piece of paper, and he stopped, glaring. “What? I’m just saying you could do better than this.”
“Yeah. The two of you have been just saying I can do better for as long as I can remember.” Ben dragged a hand through his hair. “Andyou’ve done such an amazing job trying to convince me that my career is pointless,” he added, waving his hand at his overstuffed bookshelves.
Aaron, to his credit, looked a little apologetic. “I wasn’t trying to be an ass.”
“Yes you were,” Ben fired back. “But I’m used to it. Anyway, why are you giving me my own phone for Chanukah? Also, you’re like four days early.”
Aaron’s contrite expression moved back into smug. “I’m not giving you your phone. The gift is on it.”
He was vaguely terrified that his brother had changed his phone background to something like Ben’s naked toddler ass during seder. Or the time he decided to go to temple on Purim as Spider-Man but had stripped from the waist down—which, in his defense, he was four.
He swiped his finger across the glass and waited.
Nothing happened except that it loaded to his home screen, and nothing seemed amiss.
“Did you download spyware?”
Aaron scoffed and leaned forward, his long finger tapping on an icon that took Ben a second to realize hadn’t always been there. It was unobtrusive—a sort of forest green with a white logo in the center he couldn’t quite make sense of.
The app started loading, then opened to what looked like some kind of email dashboard.
“Uh?”
“You really are out of the loop,” Aaron said with a small sigh. “You know how Mom’s been up your ass about finally settling down?”
Everything hit him all at once, and a deep, irritated groan escaped Ben’s chest before he could stop it. Aaron was right, of course. His momhadbeen up his ass for the last ten years about settling down. It had taken her some time—almost to his senior year of his undergrads—to accept that he was gay with no intention of marrying her best friend’s daughter.
But once she did, she’d been on him about meeting a nice man and adopting a dozen babies she could feed and kiss.
She was only slightly a stereotypical Jewish mom—mostly in that regard. She didn’t nag often, and she didn’t actually care that he’d gone into teaching instead of medicine like his brother. She didn’t even care that he only ever showed up for the High Holidays and only to avoid her insistent phone calls.
He had a feeling Aaron was feeling the brunt of her constant nagging about relationships since they had brunch together every third Sunday of the month while Ben used the excuse of grading papers to never show up.
So, he supposed this wasn’t a surprise.
“What the hell even is this?” Ben asked. He tapped the menu icon, then hit calendar, and his eyes settled on eight red marks, one each day near the middle of December.
