Page 6 of Knock Knock

“I’m tired, boys.” Dad’s sigh was sad. Tired. Worn out and beaten down.

“Fine. We have a couch.” Maddox pushed Dad towards his truck. “Get in. She’s fine.”

I knew he’d never leave her for good, and I didn’t know how I felt about that, but for one day, he could come spend the afternoon with us instead of worrying about her or getting mad at her. He’d earned that. He’d go back later and all would be fine.

* * *

Maddox rolledhis asshole eyes at me.

He wasn’t a huge talker, but I’d been expecting a little more than that. A grunt, even. “That’s it? An eye roll?” I threw my arms wide, waiting for him to talk me off the ledge and stop treating me like I was a loser.

“What do you want me to say, Xav? Want me to call you a lame piece of shit? You are. Want me to beat some sense into you? Give me ten to finish this step and I will.” He tossed a rotten board at me, damn near taking out my kneecaps. “Who fucking cares, man?”

“Me! I care!”

“Because you think Nate blames you for shit going wrong with Kaylee? Or is this the hypothetical kid thing again?” He held out his hand, so I passed him the new board for the step.

No, but we’d been messing things up for a long time, and I’d started to think our groove was off or something. We had that mind-reading kind of friendship, and I’d been struggling to read him lately. It put me off that our vibe was off, and my whole life felt out of sorts because of it. We barely even made it to the orgasm stage of our hookups anymore, and that shit was on us, right?

“Because I fucked things up with Kaylee. And I bet Andrea would have taken him seriously if I wasn’t there.” Okay, so maybe Nate didn’t blame me, but I felt guilty about it. Apparently.

Maddox glared at me. He told me to say it straight, and then he glared at me for it? My god, I needed a better emotional sounding board. “Well, fucking excuse me for not being cool with the Andrea thing. Can’t even believe you guys tried that.” He cringed. Hard. “And Kaylee was a lost cause right from the get-go.”

“What? Why?”

“You seriously think Nate liked her? Pay attention, Xavi. He was in it foryou.”

“What?” I shouted. “He was—”

He drowned me out by nailing the new board, so I grabbed a stick and threw it for Gnat, his dog. Maddox was in a pissy mood after Dad admitted that Mom had been slipping a lot lately, but she didn’t want us to know because she still wanted us to come for Friday dinners. So, I let him hammer nails to work off that frustration and sank down on a lawn chair to huff and puff my confusion in the hope that it’d leave my body and clarify some things for me.

I should have known better than to come to Maddox for advice. He was fine at giving it before, but that was mostly when he was warning me away from Nate’s dick. Now I didn’t want to listen to that part. I wanted him to tell me the opposite, but he wasn’t taking the bait. He was throwing feelings at me, claiming things that weren’t true, and making it sound like Nate was only being a good friend to help get me laid.

Besides, Maddox didn’t know what he was talking about. He got the shit beaten out of him by his rival, beat him back, they hate fucked each other, and somehow ended up married. Our situations were so different. He had no idea what it felt like to struggle through… whatever the fuck I was struggling through.

Gnat brought the stick back, panting hard, so I threw it into the water and gave him an ice cube to lick when he returned. I’d never felt more dishevelled in my life. Didn’t even know exactly why I was all out of sorts. It had something to do with people insisting I was on some chronological clock that was ticking down time, reminding me I was a thirty-year-old fuck up with no aspirations, none of my shit together, and no goddamn idea what I wanted out of life.

It had always been me and Nate looking out for our brothers. Since they got their shit sorted, it was me and Nate, living life and finding a new balance. Now I resented the societal standard that felt like it was pressuring me to pick something other than him.

Like… how? How the actual fuck could I pick anything over him?

Maddox cracked a can of beer since Devon wasn’t home and Dad was napping inside, then sank down on the chair beside me and rested his heels on Gnat’s ass. I didn’t know how to start a conversation because I couldn’t think clearly, and he’d always been the silent type, so we sat there like idiots for a bit. I got lost in my head, which wasn’t something I was familiar with. I wasn’t the overthinking type. Usually, something just occurred to me, I had a random freakout about it, and that was that.

Now my freakout was in standby mode because it was all jumbled up with insecurities, confusion, and risks. What sort of life did I want to take a risk on? Was I happy with how things were, or did I have to conform to some standard progression chart?

“You know why shit didn’t work with Kaylee?” Maddox asked after a bit. “We aren’t even touching the Andrea thing because that was just… fuck no.”

Maddox and Devon saw Andrea as the person they went to for help. We saw her that way, too. But booze and stress and fear about missing my brother had played a weird role that night, and propositioning her led to all this overthinking.

“Enlighten me. Since you’re all wise and married now.”

Maddox grinned, proud. “Look, you were on the inside of that relationship, and once we knew about it, we saw shit differently from the outside.”

“Like?”

“Nate was so checked out of that whole thing that he barely wanted to spend time with her.” Maddox shrugged.“He told Devon.”

“What?” I shouted for the third time, making Gnat bark his big ol’ bark.

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