Page 97 of Love Thy Brother
Rubi had weed stashed in a jam jar behind the speakers. I stole it, stuffed some in his boho metal pipe, and smoked it like a fiend, muffling my wheezy cough with my fist.
Yuck. This was why, despite my appetite for escaping reality, I didn’t fucking smoke.Maybe he has edibles here too.
But I didn’t feel like rifling through more of his things. I wanted to be wherever he was.
“Where else would we be but right here with each other?”
He’d said that to me once, the day before his dad died, at a biker festival in Swindon. Before he fell asleep with his head on my feet. Dozing in the sun. His mane of hair spread out on the grass like spun gold.
The memory turned me around. Rubi was still sleeping, the blanket kicked to his legs, head resting on a marine patterned cushion. As the weed kicked in, I fell into staring at him, but it hurt, so I closed my eyes instead, drifting along to Amyl and the Sniffers.
Being stoned was fucking weird. My body became part of the thick rug I lay on, the warmth from the fire too much and not enough at the same time. Like bad sex. Or maybe it was the weed. I didn’t want it. I wanted something harder. A hit more disruptive than this gentle, ruminating buzz.
More than anything, though, I wanted Rubi, and I missed him while he was asleep.
“Oi, don’t hog all my good skunk.”
A heavy weight bore down on me. The weed pipe was plucked from my slack fingers, and I opened my eyes to all my dreams come true.
Rubi lay over me, big body covering mine. He lit the weed pipe, sucked in a lungful of herbal smoke, and let it go from the side of his kissable mouth. “Having fun?”
“Passing the time.”
“With Aussie punk and green?”
“It’s all you had.”
“Not true. You could’ve had Gordon Lightfoot and a fucking Horlicks.”
“Still could.”
“You want that?”
“Do you?”
Rubi ditched the pipe and scanned the nearest record shelf. He thumbed a seven-inch sleeve free of the pack and the discordant punk keeping me company cut off, replaced by gentle ’70s guitars.
If You Could Read My Mind.
I shook my head. “You’re not a ghost I can’t see, boo.”
Rubi’s only reply was a soft hum. He eased his weight off me and stretched out on the rug, close enough that he wasn’t really gone.
Our legs entwined themselves, bodies shifting closer. I propped my head on my elbow and watched him, and he watched me right back, the heat of his potent gaze eclipsing the fire.
The old song finished.
He swapped it for Deep Purple and something—everything—changed. The gentle companionship we’d so nearly perfected became a slow slide into the inevitable. The place of no return I was so certain was a bad fucking idea.
And yet I did nothing to stop it.
Nothing to stopmyselfas we collided on his living room floor, as messy as we’d ever been.
Chaotic.
Naked, as clothes disappeared.
Rubi’s bare skin smelled like the wind. The winter rain. The weed smoke from my lungs, and the wood on the fire.
