Page 36 of Legally Ours

"Tha's right," Brandon said, rearing back up on his knees to look at Cory. "She said, NO SIR!" Then he pivoted back to me with a face like a sad, drunk puppy. "Why don't you wanna marry me, Red? Don't I make you happy?"

He leaned back and started yowling more tone-deaf lyrics up to the ceiling. If I hadn't already known the lyrics to Springsteen's "Brilliant Disguise," there was no way I would have recognized the song.

"LOOK AT ME BABY!" he sang-shouted in a way that made me want to cover my ears.

Cory actually did. I cringed at the unusual high note that practically cracked the windows just before Brandon collapsed again into my lap. Cory looked at him, completely repulsed. Then his sharp gaze snapped back to me.

"This is the second fight this week," he informed me.

He yanked his tie off of his neck and shoved it violently into his pocket. Vaguely, I wondered if Cory had ever had his blood pressure checked; half the time, the guy looked two seconds from a heart attack.

"He's lucky the other guys were just as drunk and no one got any video. Just like he's lucky I'm so fuckin' good at my job." Cory glared at me again, pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time, then shoved it back in. "Listen, Orphan Annie."

I blanched at the name. "You know my name, Cory. Can you please just use it?" Why couldn't this guy ever just acknowledge me as a person?

Cory continued as if I hadn't said anything. "If he's going off the deep end, I can't help him. He's not listening to me, so maybe you can get his ass to straighten out, since you're the one who fucked it up in the first place. But this kind of shit cannot continue. I can only pay off so many people to keep it out of the press, and he's been lucky so far. But seriously, he gets into one more fight––one more, you hear? I'm gone. When he's sober again, can you manage to tell him that?"

The condescension in Cory's voice made me want to start throwing some punches myself, but right now I had a snoring giant pinned to my lap. Besides, this was genuinely alarming. Two fights? Nightmares? Coming home fall-down drunk? What was happening to Brandon?

Was it really all my fault?

"I'll tell him," I said quietly, pressing a hand gently to Brandon's shoulder.

"You better," Cory said, and turned to leave. But when the elevator arrived, he held the door, tapping his lips for a moment. Then he turned to me with one more thing to say.

"If you care about him," he said, more slowly than I had ever heard Cory speak before, "you might want to think about what's best for him. Whether you are really what's best for him."

I opened my mouth with a sharp retort, but was interrupted by a long, loud snore from the man passed out in my lap. As the elevator doors opened, I stroked the thick mane of blond, giving tenderness that he wouldn't accept from me earlier. Brandon hummed and smiled, and melted further into me.

"I love you," he muttered in between another throaty exhale. "So fuckin' much."

"I love you too," I whispered. My heart squeezed in my chest. "So much."

~

We stayed there the rest of the night. Eventually Brandon found his way onto the sofa so that we were stretched out on it together, with me leaning against the arm and a folded blanket, him a heavy weight between my legs while he used my stomach as a pillow. It wasn't the most comfortable night of sleep I'd ever had, but I wouldn't have traded it to be anywhere else.

At one point, he woke us both with an unintelligible shout, but when his sleep-glazed expression found me, his arms wrapped around my midsection like a vise, and he burrowed back into my body. I wove my fingers through his hair, and he fell back asleep quickly.

But in the morning, I woke up alone. Without the benefit of the blackout curtains that outfitted the bedrooms, I rose practically with the sun that shone through the massive picture windows like a bullet to my brain.

Brandon was up, and I had been draped with the blanket. Pushing myself up, I looked around the apartment. His keys, wallet, and briefcase were still sitting in on the foyer table. So, he hadn't gone yet.

I pulled myself up, massaging out a kink in my neck. Testing my weight on my bad ankle, I limped to Brandon's room. The door was shut. I knocked, but there was no answer.

"Brandon?"

No answer.

Tentatively, I opened the door and pushed it open. I walked into the room and nearly ran into a giant, dripping wet, completely naked Brandon.

"Whoa!"

"Christ!"

We both cried out together as our bodies came into contact, the wet of the shower water seeping through my flimsy nightgown. The electricity was instantaneous, and we jumped apart in shock.

"Jesus, did you forget how to knock?" Brandon gasped after he sprinted to the bathroom and grabbed a towel to wrap around his waist.

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