Page 64 of What Happened Last Night

Jay made a distressed gagging sound. “Stop.”

“In fact,” I continued, “Will does that to me regularly, and he does a lot of other things, which I will describe to you in detail until you agree to leave my boyfriend alone. First, he puts his hands on my—”

“Stop!” Jay quit defending his nipples and tried to put a hand over my mouth. Our conversation stalled as we wrestled for a minute.

“Okay, fine,” Jay said. “We won’t beat him up. For now.”

“Or ever,” I insisted.

“Fine,” he gritted out. “Or ever. Okay? Are my nipples safe?”

“For now.”

I opened the bathroom door just in time to hear Will say to Mack in the living room, “A guys’ trip? Sure, that sounds fun, I guess.”

“Oh, good!” Mom said, sounding delighted. “You boys can get to know each other. You’ll have such a good time.”

TWENTY-NINE

Will

I often forgot that my half brother was a guitar god. Especially when he was sprawled on my sofa, wearing basketball shorts and a ratty tee, brushing cracker crumbs from his beard as he played Skyrim.

“Okay,” he grumbled, “I thought that video games were only for pasty nerds with punchable faces. I might have been wrong.”

“You’ve been playing for three hours,” I pointed out.

He scowled at me. “I have not.”

“You have.” I sipped my beer. “Also, you’re already better at it than I am.”

Stone’s scowl got deeper. This was the scowl that made many a person afraid to talk to him. I gave him a blank-faced look in return.

“I am not better at this than you are, nerd,” he said. “It’s just easy, that’s all.”

Stone was better at Skyrim than me, but only because I hadn’t played Skyrim in a while. Still, it was impressive how quickly he’d picked it up without ever playing before. Stone let people think he was a dumb guitar player, but in truth he was intelligent as hell. He just preferred that no one knew it.

“Whatever you say, nerd,” I shot back at him.

Stone grunted and turned back to the game. “Are you gonna tell me the real reason you invited me over tonight?”

“To bond with my brother?”

“Try again. You’ve been giving me crazy eyes all night. It feels like you have something to tell me. Probably something I’ll find excruciating.”

I sighed and sunk lower in my chair. Outside the windows of my penthouse, a light rain was coming down. As usual when I spent time with Stone, I simultaneously felt like we were total opposites and that he was one of the only people who understood me. We didn’t have to have deep conversations to get each other—which was good, because we both hated deep conversations. We could go see a local band or spend the evening in my living room, talking about nothing, and somehow it felt better than therapy.

Maybe it was because of all the people I knew, Stone was the one to best understand why I’d left my New York life and come here. He never questioned it. Only Luna understood it as well as Stone did.

“I’m dating Luna,” I said.

“Your assistant?” Stone didn’t look away from the game. “I figured.”

“No comment?” I asked. “Do you think it’s a bad idea for me to date my employee?”

“I think it’s a bad idea for you to ask me for dating advice,” he shot back. “Have you met me?”

He had a point. Stone could score whenever he wanted, but that was because of the rock god thing, not because he had seduction skills. And he definitely didn’t have relationship skills. He’d lucked out with Sienna, a fact that he was well aware of.

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