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Johnny narrowed his eyes at me. “How long has this been happening?”
“A little while now.”
“Do you realize that you just fucking cost me five hundred bucks?” He looked at Charlie and scowled. “I’m so sick of losing money to you.”
I frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“The whole family has had a running bet on which one of you idiots would wise up and snatch Poppy up first. Over the years, it’s gotten bigger and bigger. And thanks to you, I just lost the money I was going to spend on edibles to take with me to the music festival next weekend.”
Charlie punched his brother in the arm. “I’m a cop, asshole. Don’t talk to me about buying a shitload of drugs to carry across state lines.”
“I didn’t tell you to become a cop, Charlie.” Johnny turned back to me. “I don’t like what just happened. My baby sister doesn’t have sex. I’ve lived with that idea my whole life and I’m going to keep on living with it. Poppy is a fucking nun. You treat her like that. You don’t take her into a public bathroom, dickhead.”
I motioned for him to hurry it up. “Take me back to this bet.”
“I bet that Jude would make the move first. Of course, I thought he would’ve done it ten years ago, but I still bet on him every year.” Johnny grinned. “Ma always bets on Sam because she wants grandbabies with curly hair. And because she thinks Sammy’s in love with Poppy. Not that she has any faith in any of you after all this time. She openly tells Poppy to hang out with men who she can actually reproduce with now.”
“She does what?” Irritation flared and I considered calling Poppy’s mom to tell her to stop telling her daughter to look anywhere else.
Paulie nudged his brothers. “Someone doesn’t like that.”
Jude had gathered himself enough to join the conversation. “What did the bet entail? Hooking up? Or something more serious?”
Charlie looked between the two of us and shook his head. “No. Whatever the two of you are doing right now, stop it.”
Johnny looked between all of us and held up his hands. “I’m going home to my wife. She’s going to be pissed about the edibles too. Happy about you winning, though, Cyrus. She’s always pulled for you.”
Paulie said his goodbyes and left with Johnny, leaving Charlie alone with us. After Sam moved over to join us, Charlie stared the three of us down. “I have a thought in my head that no brother should ever have to consider about his baby sister. No matter what I do, it’s still there, though.”
I wondered how far Poppy had gotten and how mad she’d be if I spanked her and didn’t let her come. I did not want to have any conversation with her brother in regards to things I wasn’t sure she’d want shared. I didn’t want to speak for her and then find out I’d spoken wrong.
“If I asked a question like which one of you slept with my sister first, would you have an answer?” Charlie’s hard stare moved over each of us. For some reason, when he landed on Jude, he hesitated. “Were you first, Jude?”
None of us opened our mouths to say a word but that was just as telling as all of us answering with the order we’d claimed her in. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but Charlie looked like he was seconds from a mental breakdown.
“If one of you doesn’t make an honest woman out of my sister, I’ll murder each of you and hide the bodies so well that no one will ever find a trace of you. Do you understand me?” He backed away. “You better treat her with respect. Jesus.”
Sam lost all traces of humor. “I understand that you’re upset but don’t pretend to not know us just because you don’t like something about our relationship with your sister. There is no one who would treat your sister better or with more respect.”
“I’m not sure passing my sister around like a bag of chips at a barbeque is all that respectful, Sam.”
There was something that most people never knew about Sam. Out of the three of us, he’d always been the most laid-back. He never got angry or caused a scene. If someone managed to find that one thing that Sam cared about, though, he could be savage. That one thing that he cared about? Poppy.
“Careful how you phrase that, Charlie.” He lowered his voice. “You know us. You’ve known us our whole lives and you’ve seen us take care of your sister that whole time. Nothing changes how much we care about Poppy. I’m trying to be understanding because I’m sure finding out something like this is shocking, but I’m not going to let you run with the narrative that because we’ve seen Poppy as a woman, she’s somehow less to us now.”
The two men stared each other down until finally Charlie looked away. “She’s not as tough as she pretends to be. I worry about her.”
I could tell he was working through something and when he looked back up at us, he seemed haunted.
“I had to go and get her one time.” He pulled his hands down his face and shook his head like he was trying to clear whatever image he was seeing. “She’d followed Andrew to some event in Dallas and when she got there, he panicked because there was a designer he wanted to impress. A designer who was an older single woman. He saw the woman as a meal ticket to the next phase of his career and instead of letting Poppy hide in his room like normal, he told her she had to go.”
Dread crawled up my spine.
“She tried to tell him that she didn’t have money to get her own room or pay for the gas to get back home, but he went off on her about her being so immature and young. He said something about her behavior being the reason he couldn’t be seen with her, because she was just a dumb kid.” Charlie spit the words out. “She was too ashamed to try again with him. She was so fucking embarrassed that she accepted that level of neglect from him. She slept in her car for two nights before she called me sobbing because there had been men knocking on her car window the night before.”
My blood ran cold and I found myself looking for her then, needing to be sure she was safe.
“Andrew was gone. He’d left with the designer and hadn’t thought twice about Poppy until he got back home a week later and wanted his bed warmed. When I got to her, she was curled up in her car, scared and freezing. She cried for two whole days before she managed to lock everything down again. Then she came out of the bathroom like nothing had ever happened, told me if I ever told a soul about her crying she’d give me something to cry about, and told me she had to get back home to finish a project. It was like nothing had even happened. But I can still hear her crying. And I can still see how broken she looked when she finally cracked.”
