Page 82 of The Twins

Charles

LOS ANGELES - NOW

Remoglares at me as I smoke.

I exhale right in his face. “That was the perfect moment.”

“You don’t get to tell me when to come out to my brother,” Remo hisses at me. He rubs his arms like he’s cold, but he isn’t. He’s nervous. It’s hot out in the city tonight like it always is. “That’s on me. You have no control over that.”

“Oh, I do,” I smirk. Fucking rules. I would smoke in the club, but Tara begged me not to embarrass her in front of her friends. For her, I dragged my ass outside of the club. I wouldn’t have minded smoking alone, but Remo followed me.

Two years ago, Remo came out to me while he was drunk. He might have been drunk, but he didn’t forget what he said. The next day, he attempted to hide from me, but I extracted the details I needed to piece together the puzzle.

“Were you lying to Grey?”

I may or may not have smacked him. Fact is that he limped the next day. And… he had a black eye. I did that. I confess. It was difficult to lie to Vegas about his brother’s injuries, but we blamed it on a late-night mugging gone awry.

When he finally confessed, I felt like a piece of shit that I am.

“No… No. I never lied to Grey. I-I like both. I’m bisexual.”

Bisexuality. It’s a concept that terrifies me, and there aren’t many things that provoke that sentiment inside of me.

I’ve had two years to sit on what Remo confessed to me while drunk, and it changed how I viewed him.

How I viewed myself.

Daddy.

“When will you stop holding it over my head?” Remo asks. He exhales in disgust. “And keep the smoke away from me!”

“I thought you weren’t bratty in my presence? Because I’m on your good side,” I tease him, and it fucking works. He’s a predictable boy. Fuck, he’s not a boy. He’s thirty-seven, and I’m forty-five. There isn’t that much that separates us.

Everything in our life unites us.

If there wasn’t that elephant in the room.

Once upon a time, when Remo was a teen, he fantasized about his much older neighbor. They had a tragic love story that ended before it ever even started, but the two things he takes away from it all are his bisexuality and that he enjoys calling other men Daddy.

Not that he’s ever called anyone Daddy ever since he lost the man he loved so much.

“Keep this up, and you won’t be on my good side anymore,” Remo says. Grey took him to a barber friend of hers the other day. She has connections with the coolest people in this city, that woman. They took care of Remo’s hair, cutting it in all the right places. He’s decided to grow it out, and it suits him.

“I doubt it,” I tell him, and he shrugs. I finish my cigarette, and I start another one to annoy him some more. “What can I do to blackmail you into telling your brother and our woman the truth?”

“First of all, that’s not the way to do it. I have to decide!” Remo insists. He scrunches up his red face, making fists out of his hands.

“Rules don’t apply to me,” I say, exhaling smoke through my nose. He fidgets with his fists, and it makes me smile. “You killed my mother, pretty boy. And your brother spied on me for years. You’re both lucky that our woman loves you so much.”

“Or else?” He narrows his eyes.

“I’d have you both brutally murdered by people who give zero fucks about your white boy privilege,” I tell him, and his eyes widen. His gaze sinks to the floor, and he pouts. The pretty fucker pouts. “And by people, I mean me. I’d murder you.”

“I’d deserve it,” Remo murmurs.

“What the fuck did you say?” I shouldn’t throw away my cigarette, but I do. I stomp on it, and then I focus on the troubled twin. “Remo.”

“I shouldn’t be alive,” he blurts out, straining the muscles on his neck. He wants to say much more, but he holds back.

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