I let my anger show, then. “Do not bring Dad into this, you bastard.”
The door opened, and both of us turned to see who it was.
Baxter was standing in the doorway with Brock behind him. Both were damp from the rain and looking a little shocked. Zane and I quarrelled almost as much as Canaan and Corin did, but for us to show true anger at each other was very rare. Mostly we just bickered, since Zane was every bit as alpha male as I was and thought he was the more mature and responsible one most of the time, as if he was the oldest rather than me, which caused us to butt heads over pretty much everything.
The problem was Zane usually was the more mature and responsible of the two of us. He was by far the most serious of all of us, which was to be expected given his calling in life. He’d seen and done shit I didn’t really want to know too much about, stuff that had scarred him deeply, left permanent marks on his soul. It left him with little tact and no tolerance for bullshit, which meant he’d call me out and not spare my feelings in the process.
Like now.
Thus my anger: I knew he was right, and it pissed me off. And I was pissing myself off by being a stupid pussy, and Dru was pissing me off by being her amazing too-good-for-me self and making me feel like a fucking pussy, and the looks Brock and Baxter were giving me were pissing me off, just because they were my little brothers.
Needless to say, I was a lot of different kinds of pissed off.
“The fuck are you two knuckleheads looking at?” I snarled.
At six-two, Baxter was between Zane and me in height but closer to Zane in terms of raw bulk. Whereas Zane’s body was that of a warrior—lean, hard, and conditioned to handle the most gruelling of circumstances—Baxter, being a semi-pro football player, was overall thicker. He carried a little more body fat over his muscles, was conditioned for raw power and to absorb the brutal impacts of tackles. His hair was, like most of us Badd brothers, a deep, rich brown, thick and wavy, clipped close on the sides and left long and messy on top. Same dark brown eyes as all of us, but his reflected an easy-going, lackadaisical, party-boy personality.
He took his football career intensely seriously, though, and on the field Bax was an absolute monster, faster than his size belied and yet strong enough to break the hardest tackles with ease. I’d seen him shrug off hits from guys that stood six-eight and weighed four hundred pounds. He’d just brush their worst damage off like an irritation, and then take off like a rocket to nail the QB with the crushing force of a runaway semi.
Off the field, though, he took just about nothing seriously. He was a natural ladies man, every bit the player I was. He had an easy way of picking up chicks—and an easier way of ditching them. He drank like a fish, trained like a beast, and generally gave off an air of not giving a shit about much of anything except football, women, and booze. Which was true…mostly. He had his demons, like all of us, he just kept his buried deep and didn’t bother trying to sort ’em out, preferring instead to drink and fuck and bench press them away.
Baxter sidled over to me, a weird look on his face. He lifted both hands and curled his fingers into claws, pressed them to my chest, and slid them down a few inches.
Shit, shit, shit. Forgot about that—should’ve put a shirt on.
He moved around behind me then, and let out a chuckle. “Holy hell, brother,” he said, laughing outright, now, “either you tangled with a mountain lion, or you’ve got a prime piece of tail stashed around here somewhere.”
Another laugh, and his fingers were tracing what I assumed were Dru’s fingernail marks on my back. From the extent of his touch and the disbelieving laughter from him and the rest of my brothers—all crowded behind me, now—I realized the marks she’d left had to be pretty extensive.
“I mean…damn, dude,” Baxter said, awe in his voice. “She tore you the fuck up.”
Zane, of course, had to get his two cents in. “Yeah, and he let her leave, too.”
Bax spun me around, gaping at me like the bull-neck moron he was. “You what?”
“Like any of you assholes know shit about it,” I snapped. “You haven’t met her, and none of you fuckers have ever kicked it with a chick more than once, no more than I have. So I don’t wanna hear dick about it from any of you.”
Brock eyed me. “Was she good?”
I sighed and rubbed my face with both hands. “Most fucking incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.”
“Which, of course, means you should bail on her pronto, right?” Brock quirked an eyebrow, a gesture I hated; it was a Dad gesture, that lifted eyebrow.
Brock looked the most like Dad. Just slightly shorter than Bax at six-one, he was leaner, rangier, more inclined to spend his time in the cockpit of his stunt plane than in the gym. Same brown hair and eyes, but Brock kept his hair neatly cut and swept off to one side like a GQ model, a few strands left to dangle near his left eye. Being my own brother, I had no problem admitting he was a pretty sonofabitch. It was annoying, honestly. He had a dry sense of humor, a sharp insight, and a tendency to ask the hard questions, usually at the worst times, too. Like now.