Page 6 of It's Just You

2

Kane

I stood outside the bar,waiting for my brother to pick me up. I’d had a few too many drinks to want to drive home, and even though it would be a pain in the ass to get my bike back the next morning, it was better than driving while buzzing like this. Buzzing, and a little mortified, and absolutely not sure how I should’ve handled the situation in the bar.

It wasn’t like I’d never been hit on before, but usually, it came from women. I’d never been all that interested before, but I wasn’t interested in men either. What did that make me?

I had plenty of time to mull it over before Sam pulled up to the curb, but I was none the wiser by the time I pulled the door open. Collapsing into the passenger’s seat, I sighed and closed the door behind me.

“You smell like you went for a dip in a barrel of beer,” Sam said, wrinkling his nose. He went out to bars on occasion, but he’d never been one to drink much. He liked getting on his high horse, though, since I’d called him instead of going through the trouble of getting an Uber.

Should’ve gone with the Uber.

“If you’re going to lecture me, leave my ass here and I’ll get an Uber,” I warned him as I buckled up — not that it was much of a threat. He wouldn’t care if he left me there or not.

“I don’t have to lecture you. You’ll be punishing yourself when you wake up hungover,” he said primly. And he was the one to be in college. Jesus.

“I’m not going to wake up hungover,” I told him, sighing. “I’m not even that drunk. I don’t need to get wasted to have fun. I just didn’t feel comfortable driving.”

“Did you?” He turned at the stop sign.

“Did I what?” I asked blankly, closing my eyes.

“Have fun?”

I winced. I had no intentions of telling him what had happened. I’d never hear the end of it. “Yeah, it was okay. Would’ve been better if Jared hadn’t canceled on me. No one really looked interesting enough to talk to past a few rounds of pool.”

Thankfully, we didn’t live too far from the bar, so I didn’t have to bother with mundane small talk for long. It wasn’t that I didn’t talk to my brother, but ever since I’d graduated from high school, we’d grown apart.

I’d gone to college for only a year before having to drop out, but by then, he was ready to leave as well. He was only two years younger, but when he moved out, he’d seemed so much more immature than me.

I’d been the one to carry the weight on my shoulders of what was happening.

I had to admit that I was jealous of him for getting to live it up at a college several hours away while I barely got to go out, but I had too many responsibilities hanging over my head to even go to the local community college.

Keeping Sam from finding out just how sick our father was was only one of them.

No matter how many times I tried to persuade my parents to tell Sam the truth, they refused to. They wanted him to have a normal, guilt-free life at a normal college.

In other words, they wanted to give Sam what I hadn’t been able to have.

I didn’t want to resent them for that because I knew they meant well. But I stayed home to be the good son, the best son, in our dead-end town where everything stayed the same day in and day out.

“Kane?”

I jerked my head up. “Yeah, what? Sorry.”

“We’re home,” Sam said, coming to a stop in the driveway.

I blinked. Maybe I’d had more to drink than I’d thought, or maybe my thoughts were just too heavy of a burden to bear. “Right.” I got out of the car, closing the door behind me.

Our parents had already been asleep when I’d left, and they could sleep through a bomb going off. Sam hung up his keys then headed for the sofa, where a movie had been paused in the living room. “Night, Kane.”

“Yeah, ‘night. Thanks for picking me up.”

“Don’t get used to it. What the hell do you do when I’m not here, anyway?”

Not drink so much, mostly, because I didn’t have the constant reminder of everything I couldn’t have right in front of me. I wasn’t going to tell him that, though. I shrugged. “Uber. Will you take me back to get my bike in the morning?”

---