Brock sighed, and took a minute to formulate his thoughts. “We should probably have this conversation another time.” He glanced at me. “Not because of you, Dru, it’s just…it’s a tricky subject, for all of us. Dad’s death is still fresh for us all, Sebastian. But none of us have forgotten how you stepped up, and that you’ve been running the bar alone since Dad died. We all took as much time off for the funeral as we could, but…” He shrugged, for once at a loss. “Then we got the call from that lawyer about the terms of the will, and we knew we had to come back. Not much choice. Not for any of us.”
“Wait, wait…did you guys talk about this already?” Sebastian asked.
Brock hesitated. “Yeah, sort of.”
“Of course you did.” Sebastian pushed ahead, his long legs swiftly carrying him away from Brock and me.
“Not like you’re thinking, though.” Brock jogged to catch up. “Bast, you’re not understanding. All of us have our careers. We don’t really need the money. So we talked about doing the year and then giving Dad’s payout back to you.”
Sebastian stopped, anger on his face. “I don’t need the fuckin’ money, asshole.”
“Yes, you do. But it’s not about the money.”
“Then what’s it about?”
Brock grabbed Sebastian’s shoulders. “You.”
Sebastian shook his hold off. “I told you, all that bullshit about the way things were after Mom died…that was what I had to do. No more, no less.”
“How you feel about it isn’t the point,” Brock said.
Sebastian threw up his hands and kept walking. “Then color me fuckin’ confused.” He jerked open the door to the bar and vanished inside.
Brock let him go, and turned to look at me. “He’s a stubborn motherfucker, but he’ll come around. You can’t ever really take Sebastian’s first reaction at face value. He tends to give in to knee-jerk reactions, and then after he has a chance to think things through, he comes around. So…you know, just give him a chance.”
I nodded, but my mind was going a million miles a second. “Sounds like things are getting complicated for you guys.”
Brock quirked an eyebrow up. “You could say that. Our dad passed away three months ago, and his will stipulated that all of his kids—meaning the seven of us who left home—have to return here for a full year to work in the bar with Sebastian before we get any of the money from his estate.” He pulled the door open for me, and we went into the still-darkened bar. Sebastian was nowhere to be seen, which meant he was upstairs, I assumed. “Which, yes, complicates life for pretty much all of us. It’s about time, though, if you ask me. Sebastian has had to deal with way more than his share of the burden around here for too long. So we all decided to come back and do what we had to do, for Sebastian’s sake. Except he’s too damn stubborn to accept that, so he’s gonna be a grunty caveman about it until he decides to come around to our way of thinking.
“And yeah, all eight of us fully grown Badd brothers living and working in this little bar?” He chuckled with dark amusement. “Oooooh boy, it’s gonna get super interesting around here, let me tell you. Between Zane and Sebastian posturing about who’s the most badass, Baxter acting like his usual bull-in-a-china shop self, the cat-and-dog fighting of the twins…holy shit, man. The next year is going to be fun. Especially for me, since I’m the mediator most of the time.”
“There’s eight of you, right?” I counted off the names I knew. “Sebastian, the oldest, then Zane—”
Brock took over. “Then me, then Baxter, the football player, then Canaan and Corin the identical twins, who are currently in Germany on tour with their band, then Lucian, who’s kind of a weird and mysterious guy, but cool if you can get him to open up, then Xavier the baby.”
“And they’re all coming back?” I asked.
He nodded. “I guess Lucian is going to take a while, since he was halfway across the world doing god knows what. Xavier should be here within a few days, and the twins in a couple weeks. They had a series of shows in Europe they were committed to, but they’ve canceled the rest. And that’s the lot, as they say.” He said the last sentence in a passable British accent.
I leaned against the bar. “And there’s me, in the middle of it all, fucking with Sebastian’s head.”
Brock wobbled his head side to side. “I don’t know, actually. I’m not sure I’d say you’re fucking with his head. I mean, I’ve only been here an hour, but he’s obviously hung up on you, and I’ve never known him to ever get hung up on a chick before. He needs a good kick to the status quo. He’s been stuck in a rut, I think, and the only way he’ll ever get out of it is if someone forces him out of it.”