Badd Motherf*cker(48)
I slugged his shoulder. “Shut up, Brock.”
He just laughed, and glanced at Zane. “He’s got it bad, doesn’t he?”
Zane jerked a thumb at the Jack. “That was his idea of dealing with it.”
Brock clapped me on the back. “Good idea, big brother: drink her away. Makes perfect sense. That’s clearly the most logical way of dealing with those pesky emotions. Works every time!”
“Smartass,” I growled.
I should have known better, because the second the words left my mouth, all three of my brothers spoke in unison:
“Better than being a dumbass!”
That was Dad’s favorite phrase to use, and hearing it from them all at once only pissed me off all the more.
“Fuck all’a you motherfuckers. I don’t need this shit.” I stalked back to my room, shrugged into a shirt, stuffed my bare feet into my boots, and then pushed past my idiot brothers to the stairs.
“Where’re you going, dickwad?” Baxter asked.
“Hell if I know. Wherever you bastards aren’t,” I said, stomping down the stairs.
Brock was the one to follow me; I ignored him for the moment, but of all the present brothers, he was the most level-headed and thus likely to actually get through to me. The only other brother I’d ever really listen to when I was pissed off was Lucian, simply because he was the strong silent type. He rarely spoke more than a handful of syllables at a time, but when he did, he tended to cut to the marrow of things with well-chosen, hard-hitting words.
My raincoat was gone, which I assumed—hoped—meant Dru had borrowed it and was out there somewhere.
Fuck it. Just a little rain, not gonna hurt anything.
I was just going for a walk to cool off, I tried to tell myself. I was not looking for Dru.
“So, where d’you think she went?” Brock asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know where she’d have gone after you pussed out on her?”
“I just met her, Brock. Literally, the night before last. Nothing to puss out on.”
“And yet you’re already this hung up on her?”
“I’m not hung up on her, asshole.” I didn’t have to be looking at him to see the quirked eyebrow. “Put that fuckin’ eyebrow down before I knock it off your pretty boy face.”
“Super hung up, then.”
“Shut up, Brock.”
“What’s her name?”
“Dru.”
“She pretty?”
“Stop you in your tracks hot, man.”
He kept pace with me as I stomped up the docks. “And the sex…you said it was the best ever?”
“I think my heart actually stopped for a second, near the end there.”
“See, you say your heart stopped, but I think you’re just out of touch with your feelings. You’re mistaking your physical heart stopping for your metaphysical heart reaching out for her.”
I stopped in my tracks and stared at Brock. “Where the fuck do you get this shit?”
He shrugged. “Books.” A sly glance at me. “Tell me I’m wrong, though.”
I knew better than to bullshit this particular brother. “Shut up, Brock.”
He just laughed. “See? Super hung up on a girl you just met last night. A girl who also happens to be able to stop you in your tracks just by existing, gave you the best sex of your life and clawed you all to shit it was so good…and then you bailed on her. And now you’re wandering the Ketchikan docks refusing to admit you’re looking for her, and I’m guessing you don’t have the first clue about what to say even if you actually found her.”
“Shut the fuck UP, Brock!”
Goddammit, but he was right. I hated it when my brothers were smarter than me…which was most of the time.
He caught all that, and didn’t even know the circumstances about why she was in Ketchikan in the first place. He’d really rip into me if he knew that.
I shuddered at the thought.
And, of course, Brock saw me chewing on things. “What aren’t you saying?”
I glared at him. “God fuckin’ dammit, Brock, why can’t you just leave it alone?”
“Because you don’t want me to. You’d have tossed me back into the bar if you didn’t actually want to hear what I have to say.”
He was right, as usual, so I just grunted. “Asshole. When’d you get so fuckin’ smart?”
“Problem isn’t your intelligence, Sebastian. It’s that you’ve never had a chance to grow up emotionally.”
I stopped in my tracks and whirled on him. “You’d better explain that shit real fuckin’ fast, Brock.”