Page 11 of All Roads Lead to You

“I’m not ready to go. I have half of a bottle left of… what am I drinking?”

“You’re not finishing that unless you want to die of alcohol poisoning.”

He scoffed, snagged the bottle from me, and took another sip of defiance. “Why do you even care, Not Brother? You’re just worried Mom and Wyatt will get pissed at you for leaving me here trashed.”

True. But I didn’t want to see Nick wreck in his car and die, either. Or have someone killed in the process.

I yanked the bottle from him again and poured it out onto the grass. “We’re done.”

Instead of getting pissed off as I’d expected, he put his head into his hands and sobbed.

Fuck my life.

This was bad, but no doubt the alcohol made it all feel exponentially worse.

“We’re over. She hid shit from me.”

I shifted on my feet, and my skin grew itchy. I was not used to consoling anyone other than Hunter. But I also wanted to sit on that fucking chair, wrap Nick up in my arms, and tell him he wasn’t alone.

I drew on my well of anger to push out the undesirable thoughts about my stepbrother and yanked him to his feet. “Let’s do this at home.”

Nick didn’t fight me as I snuck him around the side of the house and straight to my truck, so no one saw him sobbing.

I sat him in the passenger seat and reached over to buckle him up, inhaling his strong cologne, the alcohol, and his own scent that I would recognize anywhere.

With a deep sigh, I shut his door, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove us home.

“Two and a half years, man… How could she?”

“She cheat on you or something?”

Did I really want to know? Hell no. It was better when Nick wasn’t single, despite loathing it when he kissed her or hearing them go at it in his room between our too-thin walls.

“No,” he wailed, wiping his nose on his jacket sleeve. “That would be better, right? Then I could be angry. Anger is better than… whatever the fuck this is… Tears and snot?”

Fuck, his words hit down to my very soul.

“Well, then, what was it?”

“She got into Columbia University.”

I glanced at him with a raised brow. “So?”

His dark eyes were wet and wide, looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

“So? We had a plan, a plan she changed so I wouldn’t have a place in her life.”

“Ah, so she told you this at the party? Kind of bitchy.”

“No, I overheard her and her best friends. She planned to keep on fucking me, and then ‘Oops, I meant to tell you I’m not going to Stanford after all. Bye!’” he said in a high-pitched voice. “So, I dumped her.”

“Fair.”

He scoffed. “That’s it? ‘Fair?’”

“What do you want me to say?”

Nick rolled down the window and let the breeze wash over his wet face. “I guess nothing, Not Brother.”

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