Page 44 of Flagrant Foul
As always, I smiled when I saw him. To me, being with Nate was like being curled up in a warm, sunny room after I’d been out in the cold for too long. It was likegetting home after a long day, when I knew nothing else needed to be done for the day.
As always, he smiled when he saw me too. His familiar face cracked open, lips splitting wide enough to show teeth. Nate’s eyes are blue like Teddy’s, but darker, and his hair is lighter. Nate’s taller and broader, but people often say he and Teddy have a striking resemblance to each other. I’ve never really seen it. To me, Nate looks like himself, and himself only.
No one on Earth looks like Teddy.
We were sitting in our favorite booth. The one in the front, at the window that faced onto the street. The window box was full of flowers. Red and purple petunias, I think.
“'Sup, bud?” Nate asked, plucking a small, crispy fry from the plate and popping it into his mouth. “What’s with the shirt? You got a job interview I don’t know about?”
I waved him off and waited until he’d washed the fry down with several large glugs of his milkshake before speaking.
“So,” I said, suddenly a little breathless. My words bunched up and came out a lot quicker than usual. “I went by your place last night. I got my wires crossed andforgot you wouldn’t be there, and Teddy…uh, Teddy was there.”
Nate chewed a fry, swallowed, and then raised both brows in a way that triggered a tiny sense of unease in me. A slight chill made the hair on the back of my neck feel funny.
I ignored it.
“He was sober,” I clarified. “Completely sober.”
Nate’s mouth was a straight line and the rest of him was completely immobile. “What happened?”
I was leaning back against a booth I’d sat in many, many times before, but I felt as though I was somewhere strange. Somewhere new. Somewhere out of my element. “Well, um, you know what happened at the club last year, right? He was…like that again. He, he held my hand…a-and he tried to kiss me.”
There was something wrong with Nate’s eyes. They were different. Cold. Bricks of ice with tiny cracks in them. They were nothing like they usually looked. It shocked me so much my rib cage contracted, and I couldn’t take a good breath.
“What did you do?” he asked, tilting his head back and rolling his tongue over his molars when he finished talking.
I didn’t like this version of Nate, and I especially didn’t like that I’d never seen it before. One of the things I love most about Nate is that I always know what to expect from him. Always. He never lets me down, and he never surprises me. That day at Mo’s, he surprised me. “I-I told him no. I stopped him, I swear.”
His shoulders relaxed visibly and his eyes morphed back into their usual expression so quickly that I was left wondering if I’d imagined what had just happened. He had a sip of his milkshake and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.
“The thing is,” he said with a shrug that was part defeated and part accepting, “Teddy thinks he’s in love with you, Sev. It’s a stage. A phase. He’s a kid, and he’s infatuated. He’s not like you and me. He’s different. He feels things differently than we do. He feels them deeply. In his bones and in his soul. If you…and him… If you try, it won’t work out ’cause, well”—the next shrug was fully accepting—“you’re you, and we both know what you’re like. When it goes to shit, he won’t be okay.”
He didn’t say it, but I heard what he was implying as clearly as if he had—andif he’s not okay, we won’t be either. It stopped my heart and made my blood run cold. “He’s my brother. My blood. You know I can’t letanyone hurt him.” Nate looked at me for a beat and then dropped his gaze. “Not even you.”
A hundred things hit me at once. Shock. Horror. Hurt. Humiliation. But mostly, I was struck by the complete and utter common sense of what Nathan had said. It was a cold splash of water straight to the face. An ice bath that my entire head got dunked into.
Obviously, I couldn’t be with Teddy. He and I? It was ridiculous. Preposterous. What in the fucking world had made me think I was good enough for him?
When I came up for air, I was sobered, and Nate was extending his arm across the table to me. I reached out to him, but he didn’t take my hand like he usually did. He gripped my wrist instead, squeezing hard. I did the same.
It was a power grip. A safety hold.
I held on for dear life.
“Course not,” I said quickly, doing my best to recover from what felt like a thin blade piercing my intercostal muscle and working its way up to my heart. “We never letanyonehurt Teddy.” I tried to smile and was grateful Nate was still looking down because I couldn’t work out how to make my bottom lip stop trembling and peel back the way I needed it to. “We sure as shit aren’t goingto start now.”
Nate looked up at last and got up from his seat, leaning across the table until his forehead touched mine. Our hands were still locked in a vise, but the contact where our foreheads met was warm. He took the back of my head in his free hand and whispered into my hair. “We may not be blood, Sev, but you’re my brother too.” His lips pressed lightly against my crown. “You’re the brother I chose.”
I left the restaurant in a daze and did something I hardly ever did. I went home in broad daylight. My dad was sitting on the front porch, a can of beer in his hand and an empty bottle of vodka on its side at his feet. His undershirt had sweat stains on it and his bloated belly rolled over his waistband.
Perhaps it was the fact that it was daytime and the sun was shining, so the lighting was good, or perhaps it was the conversation Nate and I had just had, but either way, I saw things clearly.
I was insane to think someone like me, someone from this family, could be with someone like Teddy.
My dad raised his beer to me and looked down at my shirt. “Whatever you’re selling, kid, we ain’t buying. We can’t afford shit,” he said, laughing uproariously.
I scoffed. “Good one, Dad.”
