Bewitched by Bella's Brother (16 page)

She’d given them both meaningful looks when she and

Jordan had come back from the zoo the week before. Asa

had arched an eyebrow and Sebastian had blushed, and

Sebastian had prepared himself for the grilling of his life the next morning.

It never arrived. Bella had looked at him and patted his knee and said, “I think you’re both gonna bleed all over me before this is done.”

Sebastian hadn’t had an answer to that.

He still didn’t.

“Yeah,” he told her now with a faintly ironic smile.

“We’re using lots of lube.”

Bella wrinkled her nose. “Jesus, Sebastian, that’s my

brother… eeeeeewwwww….”

Sebastian laughed, and Bella followed, but it had the

sound of a faked orgasm, and they both knew it. Sebastian couldn’t keep anything from Bella; he never could.

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“I think leaving in August is going to make that pity

party we had after Professor Douchebag look like backstage at a Placebo concert.”

Bella grunted affirmatively and kept her eyes out over

the solid blue horizon, where big clouds grazed like sheep on a hill. “I’m gonna miss the shit out of Jordan.”

It was true. Jordan would have been devastated by his

mother’s defection if Bella hadn’t been there. She and

Sebastian picked him up from summer school as often as

possible, took him to the zoo (the closer one, the Sacramento Zoo), played with him at the pool, and read him books.

Jordan asked Sebastian to play Nintendo with him and came to Bella when he skinned his knee, and while Sebastian had always loved playing with the Bryne children, Bella’s reaction to Jordan surprised him.

They seemed to be kindred souls. Sebastian had been

the one person Bella opened up to, and he enjoyed that.

Jordan seemed to be the one person she could be quiet with.

They could sit together for half an hour, not saying anything, just moving plastic bugs about on a table. Bella would

sketch her amazing, absurd caricatures, and Jordan would color carefully and artistically in the finely detailed coloring books that Sebastian brought him almost daily from the

bookstore. Whereas before, Sebastian would have said that Bella was no more maternal than he himself had a uterus, he began to see the true mother in her.

Bella had just been waiting for the right time—perhaps

even the right soul. Sebastian had been her first try, and he hadn’t ended up badly, but Jordan… Jordan was the child of her heart.

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Sebastian had to swallow twice to say it. “You could

always stay.”

“I wouldn’t leave you, Sebastian. Jordan has Asa—you

need me.”

He closed his eyes at her answer, and she wrapped her

arm around his waist. “Yeah, well, no one makes ice cream and vodka like you do.”

“Very true.”

The ferry ride was over shortly after that, and the

baseball game was lovely. They had decent seats, but Asa had brought his iPhone with little video games for Jordan to play with when he got bored. The adults talked desultorily, cheered their team on to a crushing loss (one run in the tenth inning), and took turns taking Jordan to the bathroom.

When it was Bella’s turn, Asa moved seats to right next

to Sebastian and casually brushed his hand.

“Having a good time?”

“Having a
great
time. You forget how much more fun sports are close up, you know? It’s just cooler when

thousands of people are rooting for the same thing you are.

It, like, taps into some sort of primal, cave man urge to be with the crowd. It’s like, ‘Hey! There’s a zillion of us! We can beat off the big hairy mammoths!’”

Asa smirked. “Sebastian, don’t you think ‘beating off’ a big, hairy mammoth is a one, or, at most, two-man job?”

Sebastian’s eyes bulged, and he sprayed the beer in his

mouth over his lap in a fine mist. By the time Bella and Jordan had returned, he was clinging to Asa, giggling, “Great hairy mammoth balls…” and not much else.

“Ohmigod, Asa. What did you
say
?”

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Asa’s mouth quirked up. “I’m not sure, Bella, but I think Sebastian finally has something to top the monkey story.”

Sebastian rode in the back with Jordan (at the little

boy’s request) for the ride home. The car purred quietly along, and Sebastian was lost in his own thoughts until he realized that Asa and Bella had actually initiated a

conversation. They had completely forgotten about him in the back, which was nice, because he got to eavesdrop with impunity.

“Are you done?” Asa asked, that deep voice resonating

quietly through the car.

“With my soda? No—I may make you stop for another

one.”

Sebastian recognized Asa’s grunt then; it was the tiniest bit of impatience that he used when Sebastian was being

deliberately obtuse.

“I meant with the torturing yourself for being young and imperfect.”

Bella made a little whine. “Asa… it was such a lovely

day….”

“Yes. Yes it was.” Asa stopped there, as though he’d said something meaningful, and Bella’s frustrated sigh indicated he had.

“It was a lovely day, and I should let myself have them

and not dwell on the stupid shit I did when I was a kid,” she recited, like a little kid repeating her father’s instructions.

“You
do
understand how to make sense,” Asa told her mildly. “I couldn’t believe you were still… I don’t know, what do you call it?
Celebrating
the most painful moment of your life? Why would you want to do that?”

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“I don’t know, Asa. Are you going to take a moment and

remember your wedding anniversary?”

Ouch!

Asa laughed, though, a little bitterly. “Not even when I was still married.”

Bella sighed. “Damn—Asa, I’m sorry. You just hit my

bitch-switch. That was a horrible thing for me to say.”

“I was getting too close. Isn’t being on the offense a rule of emotional warfare?”

Now it was Bella’s turn to laugh. “Yeah. At least the way we’ve always waged it.” Her voice grew darker. “You and me, Asa—we’ve always been… I don’t know. Self-contained. We

don’t let a whole lot out. I… I really admired how you did that and still made me feel like you loved me when I was a kid. I had to remember, that’s all. I had to remember that I was stupid, and you were awesome. I had to remember how

not to be stupid again, and how to live my life so I didn’t hurt anyone, or….” Or let them get too close. Sebastian

remembered the look on her last boyfriend’s face when she’d broken up. He’d known—he’d known he had gotten too close.

He’d known why she dropped the ax. “Anyway,” she

continued, “I… I felt like I really let you down.”

Asa let out a whole different sort of grunt. Sebastian

thought he should start a list of them: Asa’s understanding grunt, Asa’s hurt grunt, Asa’s negative grunt, Asa’s I-liked-the-way-you-just-touched-me-do-it-again grunt. It would be like a communication manual for a man who claimed to be

simple.

This one was a “Don’t be stupid” grunt, and Bella

grunted back. “I guess that was just me,” she murmured.

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Thank heaven
someone
in the car had the extra chromosome to facilitate communication.

“Just you,” Asa affirmed. “Baby, if you think I hadn’t

had my share of indiscretions by the end of high school…

well, then I was just as good as I wanted to be at hiding them.”

There was an awkward pause as Bella tried to put

something into words. “Were, uhm, any of them male?”

Sebastian could feel the wave of heat that washed off of Asa all the way from the front seat. “Not until now.”

Bella telegraphed her move, or Sebastian would have

been caught eavesdropping. As it was, he had just enough time to close his eyes before she looked. Satisfied that he was asleep, she said, “Be careful with him, Asa. He’s kind of… vulnerable.”

“I know that,” Asa said softly, and in the ensuing

silence, Sebastian really
did
fall asleep, and he missed the rest of the quiet conversation. When he woke up, though, as the SUV was pulling up the driveway, Bella’s voice was

husky, as though she’d been crying.

They made it into the house and put an unconscious

Jordan in his bed after prying his puppet and his foam finger and new baseball hat out of his sleeping death grip. After that, Sebastian raced Bella to the shower—and lost.

When he
finally
came out, a towel around his waist and still drying his hair, Asa was stretched out across his bed, wearing sleep shorts and a T-shirt, leaning his head on his hand as though he owned the place.

Sebastian widened his eyes. “Tonight?” he asked.

“Damn, Asa—aren’t you tired?”

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Asa nodded. “Yes. I’m tired. So is Jordan. I thought….”

He flushed under his tan, the high cheekbones going darker in the shadow of that straight, Roman nose. “I thought

maybe we could, you know, spend a night.”

Sebastian smiled in spite of himself. “If you think he’ll sleep through it….”

“I locked my door, so he’ll call out if he doesn’t.”

“Then yes.” Sebastian heard himself say it with faint

surprise. He sounded needy and hungry for the touch of

Asa’s skin. They’d managed to make love nearly every night that week, but this was the first night since the first one that Asa would be spending in Sebastian’s bed.

Sebastian put on his sleep shorts unselfconsciously;

their first two days together had burned much of the shame out of him. As he slid into bed, Asa buried his nose in the still-damp curls at his neck and breathed in.

“You smell so good… even when you use Bella’s

shampoo, you still smell like a man.”

Sebastian snuggled backward; he enjoyed being the

bottom, and, given his height, really enjoyed being the small spoon. “Lucky you,” he mumbled. “I am one.”

Asa’s arm wrapped over his waist, and Sebastian closed

his eyes, knowing the cold truth. There was not enough

vodka and ice cream in the world.

“You know,” Asa said quietly, “if you decided to stay, we could do this in my bed every night.”

“I know,” Sebastian muttered, suddenly wide-awake.

“Believe me, Asa, I know.”

Asa’s body was so wonderful behind him, so solid, so

real, that Sebastian actually dreamed that they were in Asa’s Bewitched by Bella’s Brother |
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bed—nothing else in the dream, just the security in being in that vast bed, with this kind, steady, funny man at his back.

Bella woke them early in the morning because Jordan

had crawled in bed with her. “You may want to sneak into your room like a debauched prom queen, Asa,” she said

dryly, and Asa rolled his eyes.

“I was always a perfect gentleman,” he grumbled. “I may

have debauched them, but I always walked them to the front door.”

Bella watched him go in the thin light of what would

have been the crotch of dawn if they weren’t so close to solstice. “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “when I was a kid, I never would have thought he’d be so good as a gay man.”

“Was that just weird for you?” Sebastian asked, feeling

insecure. “I mean… are you sure that wasn’t weird for you?”

Bella shrugged. They’d both had liaisons in their old

apartment—one of them would retreat to the couch and the other would get busy in the bedroom—it was a fact of college life sometimes. Privacy wasn’t a given. That hadn’t been weird; they’d managed just fine, although they’d both

learned to be
really
quiet lest the other person give them a full-on ration of shit, with quotes from the heat of the moment, complete with expression.

But that had been as college students. Sebastian had

just spent the night with Bella’s brother; that put it on footing as family.

“Here,” she said, yawning, “scoot over.” She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and it was chilly in the morning.

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“Bind up your hair, heifer… I don’t want to choke.” She

always had an elastic band on her wrist to get it out of the way.

He scooted backward into Asa’s warmth (ahhh!) and she

scooted into his. For a moment they heard Jordan’s

protesting voice as Asa got him out of Bella’s room, and then it was quiet again.

“Was it weird?” she repeated. “A little—I mean, you

know, because he’s my brother. It would probably be weird if I saw him with his ex-wife—and I certainly don’t want him to see me in bed with
anybody
.” She shuddered. They hadn’t spoken about her disclosure or her reasons for “Bella’s day off,” and she and Asa seemed to have made peace, especially after the baseball game, but still… sometimes, Sebastian reflected, you probably really didn’t want your family to know too much about you.

“Was it weird because he’s with you?” She shrugged

again, even though she was back spooning into him. “I’m

just glad you’ve got an excuse to stay family.”

Sebastian swallowed, oddly touched. “You and me aren’t

an excuse to stay family?”

She sighed. “You can be a diva, baby—don’t think I

don’t know that. Don’t think I don’t know how you’ve been feeling your way with my family these last years. You love being the fun uncle, but you don’t know if you’ve got what it takes to stay. It’s been like every day we’ve been friends, you get another little filament of connection holding you with me… and I’m not sure if all the little threads are enough to make a rope. I just….”