Page 33 of Messing With My Brother's Best Friends

“Add the vegetables to the sauce and stir them through. Add water if the sauce starts to dry out and keep an eye on it.” She smiled then, so why did that feel like she was stabbing a knife into my chest? “It’s not something you can just set and forget and expect it to be ready to be served when you’re hungry.” A sharp nod. “Good Bolognese requires a bit of patience.”

Before I could explain, before I could tell her just how few women had been in this kitchen, she was gone, walking out the door again, and it took every damn thing in me to stop myself from running after her.

Chapter 18

Kendall

“I dunno if many girls have talked about softening carrots in this kitchen before.”

Gage’s gruff voice spoke those words continuously inside my head, until I was forced to dig through my boxes and find my portable speaker and turn some music on just to drown it out. When my head was bopping along to the beat rather than listening to my brother’s best friend talk about his past conquests, I was able to tackle the boxes.

Essentials only.

Toiletries were produced and placed in the adjoining bathroom, something that made me feel a little uneasy. It was all gleaming chrome and subtle tile, and my ratty makeup palettes looked too dusty to fit in here, so I shoved them into the drawers and closed them up. Clothes were unpacked and placed in the wardrobe, as well as a bag of dirty clothes re-discovered. I needed to work out what they had in the way of laundry facilities here. I’d bought some laundry powder, but… I glanced at the door and shook my head. Nope, I wasn’t going out there, not yet. So instead, I went on a little wander down memory lane.

I didn’t need to pull my photo albums out and stack them on the shelves provided. I definitely didn’t need to flick through them. Finding the rest of my shoes and my other work uniforms was far more pressing, but instead I looked at this. Sun bleached snapshots of my family, each one of us kids grinning fiercely because Mum had told us to say cheese for the tenth time. Over and over the photos were shot to her satisfaction, but I couldn’t help but smile at them now.

Skinny little Finn, all arms and legs, though I was unfortunately the complete opposite. I’d ‘taken after your mother’ Dad always said, but the way he hugged Mum close made it clear he didn’t mind her curves at all. Finn and I had been forced together for the photo, the subtle way we leaned away from each other making that clear, but as I stared, I saw them too.

Gage, Connor, and Van were close friends with my brother because we all grew up on the same street. Connor in the big, fancy place up the end, the rest of us in typical three bedroom, one bathroom places with a yard and a Hills hoist clothes line at the back. Staring at the photo, I could almost hear the hum of lawnmowers going on a Sunday afternoon, the bees hovering drowsily over flower beds as we played in the sprinklers. It’d killed me every day of my childhood that the families up our street had no daughters my own age, but Finn… He’d had a built-in friendship group from the moment he was born.

Fritz and sauce sandwiches on white bread, full of salt and preservatives, but we’d thought it the greatest of culinary delights. Plastic tubes of sweet frozen treats. Zooper Doopers were always brought out on particularly hot days, when we panted under fans that spun far too slowly. Mum thrust them into our sticky hands and told us to eat them outside. Then, hyped up on sugar, we’d climb up the big tree at the back of the house, getting higher and higher so the sluggish breeze would finally start blowing on our sweating skin. I’d looked over the roofs of all the houses down the street and felt like queen of all I surveyed.

Right before the boys started jumping up and down on the branches, threatening to send me falling down to the ground.

But it wasn’t always bad. As I flicked through the images, seeing birthday parties and footy games, my bakery displays at the local show, and awards I’d won at school proudly displayed, I was surprised to realise that. The guys were annoying, so fucking annoying, but Finn had come through in the end. I didn’t need a photo to remind me of that, staring at the empty page at the end of the album, creating photographs in my mind.

“You…!” I screamed, launching myself at him when he dared to step foot in the kitchen. He surveyed the mess, the cakes I’d sent smashing to the floor along with the plates, then my reddened face. “You did this. You fucking couldn’t let me have this one thing?”

Mum had given up trying to console me, going to find the dustpan and broom to clean up the mess I’d made.

“What thing?” It was his wide-eyed stare that convinced me. If he’d meant to prank me, he would’ve been wearing a triumphant smirk by now. “What thing, Ken?” His hands landed on my arms, but I shook them off. “What the hell happened?”

I’d stared at him far too closely, needing something more than his words to convince me he wasn’t guilty of switching the sugar for salt. He lied and he lied and he lied, often barefaced to Mum and Dad, making me look bad for even accusing him, but when I saw the pulse jumping in his neck, I started to wonder.

“The sugar in the container was swapped for salt,” I ground out.

“Salt…?” He frowned, then dropped down, inspecting the smashed cakes like a detective might a crime scene. I winced when he grabbed a piece of cake and tasted a few crumbs, his look of disgust close enough to my prospective employers that I started crying again. “Ken… fuck, Ken…”

In that moment, he was for the first time, finally, my brother. His arms went around me, and I was treated to a nose full of teenage-boy stink and this. Him holding me close, rubbing my back in awkward circles, right before Mum appeared.

“Finn…”

Dad would’ve just laughed and then yelled at me for making a fuss, but Mum… She could be relied on to take my side. Her grave tone made clear he was about to cop it, and a vicious part of my heart rejoiced in that. Let him hurt. Let him bleed, it murmured, vowing revenge.

“You couldn’t stop those stupid bloody pranks, not even when Kendall was trying to impress those people?”

“Mum, I didn’t—”

“So how did the sugar turn to salt then? The jar is clearly labelled, so there’s no way it was accidentally mixed up. Finn—”

But before Mum could deliver her judgement, her phone rang.

“Hello? Look, love, things didn’t go well. No. No, and we’ll talk about it when you get home…”

She walked out of the kitchen, leaving the broom behind. Part of me felt impelled to reach for it, to clean up everything before Dad got home, but I shoved that impulse to one side. Fuck that, and fuck them.

Fuck him.

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