Page 15 of Messing With My Brother's Best Friends

Gage’s head snapped around as if he just noticed my friend was there.

“I don’t really drink that shit.”

“Shit?” My tone rose abruptly. “Tequila’s amazing.”

“I guess I got put off by the smell of it that time you and your friends decided to neck a bottle of it doing shots.” His lips curved into the smallest of smiles. “Remember that?”

Oh fuck, yes I did. It was a long time after before I dared to drink tequila again.

“Kendall chucked up?” Barbie cackled when Gage confirmed this with a nod. “Did you hold her hair back when she spewed?” Another nod, sealing my fate.

My face flamed bright red, what memories I had of that night coming back. My friends and I were having a sleepover when we were about sixteen, and one of them had snuck a bottle in. We’d dared each other to take shots, the first burning its way down, but the next and the next… It got easier and easier to drink them until it didn’t. Mum had been pissed to find a gaggle of vomiting girls in her garden, her voice carrying across the yard as she called out my name. But I couldn’t be summoned.

Because I was in the corner of the garden vomiting my guts out as Gage held me.

I didn’t know how he found me or why he knew I needed help, just that he was there. His hands were firm as one supported my chest, my whole body convulsing as he held back my hair. I remembered snippets of his voice because it was soft rather than hard and mocking me when I was down. Then there was his hand when I was finally done, rubbing circles on my back to soothe me as Mum called out again.

“Kendall?”

Barbie stared at me, a mischievous smile on her face.

“I vomited up every damn thing I’d eaten in the last day or two,” I said with a sheepish shrug. “That was probably enough to turn anyone off tequila.” I held up my glass. “I guess I was too drunk to remember enough to know better.”

“Well, let me know when you want another one,” he told me. “Or if you need your hair held back.”

“Right. Thanks.” I smiled tightly.

“Hang on, where are you going?” Barbie asked him, never knowing when to leave something alone.

“To help put the bed together,” he told her.

“Where’s your phone?”

“Barbie…” I growled, watching her hands set the glass on the edge of the pool and then reach up.

“Inside, charging—”

Those words were enough to seal his fate. She rose up like a siren of old, grabbing his hands before he could say anything, and then used her momentum to pull him down into the water.

My hand shot upwards, trying to protect the precious margarita from getting contaminated by chlorine, but there was no saving it from the epic splash. I was left spluttering, and so were Barbie and Gage, but a mouthful of water wasn’t what drove the air from my lungs.

Gage was always a big guy; much was made of that in school. The local footy coach nearly wet his pants when he started playing because he was so much bigger than other kids his age. Some girls I knew speculated just how ‘big’ he was when we got a whole lot older, but teenage Gage had nothing on this. He’d been wearing a loose, old cotton t-shirt, but now I understood why he’d been staring. The fabric clung to shoulders that were so damn broad I didn’t know how he got through the door, his deltoids looking as big as basketballs as he tossed his hair and then dashed water out of his eyes, only for him to turn around and catch me staring.

Look away, a little voice shrieked inside my head. It was a familiar one that I hadn’t heard for a long time. Staring at my brother’s best friends would’ve just got my ponytail pulled or someone saying something snarky at my expense, so I knew better than to do a quick comparison, the teenage bare chest I’d seen displayed all summer overlaid on top of the man’s right now.

And the man won.

“Pool party!”

Barbie’s shout jerked me out of my head, making me all too aware of the water and the way the currents caressed my skin, my glass going to my lips, my hands needing something to do. The margarita had a chemical aftertaste to it that was not an improvement, but I drank it down while she scrambled out of the pool anyway. “If you don’t drink tequila, and shame on you by the way, then what do you drink?” She cocked her head to one side. “A beer, right?”

“There’s some in the fridge,” he said then moved to the pool ladder. “But I’ll get one.”

“Yeah, better than leaving him here with me.” Where the fuck had that come from? My mouth snapped shut as Barbie’s eyebrow jerked up in a way that I knew meant trouble. “I mean, he’ll probably start dunking me like they used to when we were kids.”

“You used to hold my bestie’s head under the water?” Barbie asked Gage in an accusatory tone.

“Sometimes.” He shrugged. “And sometimes we’d play Marco Polo, or she’d do backflips off my shoulders.”

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