Bewitched by Bella's Brother (5 page)

against the window. “I’m sure you’ll hear it before the end of the summer, and then it will seem like I’m making a big deal out of nothing, but not now.”

They got to the construction site not long after that, and as Sebastian set the parking brake with a loud
scritch
, he caught sight of Asa and made a similar sound in his throat.

Gods.

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The man was wearing the khakis he’d left the house in,

but had taken off the polo shirt to reveal his inner wife-beater—or, at least the white tank top with the same name.

He was helping someone lift a stack of beams, carrying

them easily on his shoulder, his white-brown braid hanging from under a yellow hat. His wide shoulders and muscular arms were tanned and perfect, and everything, including the six-pack under the tightly ribbed tank, was flexing with motion.

Sebastian made another “gurk” sound and thumped his

head back against the seat of his car, and Bella turned and grinned at him.

“Got it bad, hah?”

Sebastian banged his head against the headrest some

more in denial. “No, Bella—no. Not at all. Why would I have it bad for a guy who cooks for me, builds three-dimensional art, and cleans the kitchen floor half-naked? I mean… I’d have to be… you know,
gay
, or something to fall for that sort of loser!”

“Cleans the floor naked?” Bella raised her eyebrows.

“You know, heifer, you need to learn to sleep lighter.

You’d catch more.”

Bella blew a raspberry at him and opened the door,

letting the baking air of the foothills start an oven-cleaning cycle in the car. “If you don’t tell me that story, I’m gonna take your hard drive out of your computer and hide it until we leave.”

“You bitch!” Sebastian shrieked, and he jumped out of

the car after her. “You know that’s off limits!”

She did, too—and the threat was baseless—but it gave

them a good reason to enter the on-site trailer shrieking Bewitched by Bella’s Brother |
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laughter at each other, and Jordan looked up at them and smiled.

Then held his fingers to his lips and shushed them.

“Shhh…,” he murmured. “There’s bugs in here. They’re shy.”

Sebastian met Bella’s eyes, and the two of them

gathered very respectfully over the severed bottom of a

plastic drinking bottle. Curled up in the middle were two pill bugs, and Jordan was gazing at them reverently.

“Those are, uhm”—Bella was making “ewie” faces and

Sebastian worked hard not to laugh—“those are
great
bugs, buddy. Did you want to, uhm, take them with us in my car?

We can go home and swim.”

Jordan looked happy for a minute, and then his face

fell. “My dad says I have to let them out before we go. He says they have bug families, and we don’t want their families to miss them. They’re just visiting.”

Sebastian gave a sigh of relief, and Bella nodded

vigorously. “Your dad is a wise man,” Sebastian said. “How about I….”

“How about I take you to go set them free,” Bella

interrupted brightly, “and Sebastian can talk to your dad. Hi, Asa! Sebastian, meet us outside!”

Sebastian watched her leave through the back door of

the trailer with outrage in his eyes, but the little shooshing motions she was making with her hand were surprisingly

sober.

“Talk to him!” she mouthed, and he narrowed his eyes

at her and then turned brightly to Asa, who had entered the front door.

“Hi,” he said, feeling foolish. “We were, you know, just here to get Jordan. And to tell you we’re having kids over to Bewitched by Bella’s Brother |
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the house on Wednesday after summer school. We can pick

him up, you know, if that’s okay. A friend at work has kids and no pool. We figure you’ve got a kid with a pool and no kids. You know. It would work, right? We’ll clean up. She’s nice, really nice. But married.”
Oh Jesus, Sebastian, stop
talking.
“So, you know, its not a fix-up or anything. We just want to play. Like a pool party. With the kids.”
This can only
get worse!
“But not in an icky way. We just like kids.”
See!

Got worse! Why won’t he respond!

Asa was just looking at him with raised eyebrows and a

faint smile on his lean mouth, and Sebastian wanted to

smack his own head against the trailer wall on general

principle.

“So, we were, you know, hoping that would be okay.

That’s okay, isn’t it? Oh yeah, and I brought him a book—

one with origami lions, and some paisley paper. I’m hoping he likes the paisley, because I thought it was cool. Did you know that the paisley design came from India but it got its name from Scotland?”
Are you fucking kidding me?
“And I have no idea why I can’t stop talking. Could you please for the love of God respond to me?”

Asa blinked sleepy blue eyes and looked bemused. “The

party sounds like a good idea. I hope Jordan enjoys himself.

I’m grateful.” He smiled slowly, and it was genuine, and Sebastian felt his adrenaline dump ease off a little. “And I had no idea paisley designs crossed continental lines.”

Sebastian let out a helpless laugh. “It was a surprise to me too.”

Asa nodded, the movement itself seeming to make the

air still and calm the moment down. “So everything else

works, we’re good.”

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“Good,” Sebastian responded on a deep breath. “I’ll go

now. I swear—Bella’s known me for years. I’m really not an escaped mental patient, it’s just that….”

“You’re embarrassed about last night, and now I make

you nervous,” Asa said reasonably, and Sebastian let out a horrible tension he didn’t know he had.

“Yeah,” Sebastian said, happy with that one syllable,

just this once.

“Me too,” Asa told him, that bemused expression still

there. “I usually make a better impression than that one.”

“Yeah,” Sebastian said, feeling his face relax into a real smile. “Well, I was the one who was staring at your crotch.”

Asa surprised him then with a gasp of breath and a full

flush—and with his fair skin, it was easily visible from the base of his throat to the tops of his cheekbones. He made the same sound the parking brake made in the Volkswagen, and shook his head in exasperation.

“You had to go there!” he accused after they stood there for what felt to be a full minute of embarrassed silence, and Sebastian closed his eyes tightly and nodded.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’ll go now. Bella’s waiting.”

Asa kept his eyes closed and nodded, and Sebastian

slipped out of the trailer, wondering when he’d become a socially disabled savant.

The ride home was tempered by Jordan. Jordan didn’t

talk much, but he sure did like bugs, and they were able to get him to talk with them about the differences between

arachnids and insects, something he had apparently learned in school right before he’d left to come out to California.

“Arachnids have eight legs and insects only have six,” he Bewitched by Bella’s Brother |
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said with emphasis, and Bella nodded her head vigorously from the driver’s seat. “Say it!” Jordan insisted, and Bella met Sebastian’s eyes in surprise.

“Arachnids have eight legs and insects only have six,”

she repeated dutifully, and they both gave sighs of relief when that seemed to satisfy the little boy.

“Good,” he said, nodding his head. “I’m going to read

now. I don’t get sick when I read in the car.” And then they were left in silence.

“What happened?” Bella asked in a furious whisper

when it became apparent that Jordan’s attention was laser focused on his book about bugs.

Sebastian slanted an irritated look. “Why would you

want to know? I thought the fun of bailing was not having to know what happened in the first place!”

“No, the fun of bailing is not having to live through the awkwardness but getting the funny parts replayed for you in vivid color!”

“Says the woman who made me sit with her through her

last two breakups! I don’t want to talk about it!” he snapped, and there was something very like triumph in her face when Bella said, “HA! I knew it! You’re totally crushing on him, aren’t you?”

“Now why would I do that?” Sebastian asked. He

checked the rearview to make sure the bitterness in his voice hadn’t alerted Jordan to something important and adult in the front seat. “I’ve fallen for straight guys before. You’ve been there—it hurts.”

“That wasn’t a straight guy,” Bella said seriously. “That was a married douchebag who would sooner bang a grad

student than come out of the closet. That wasn’t your fault.”

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“I wasn’t a vir….” He looked in the rearview again and

revised what he was going to say. “I was a consenting adult,”

he finished, and Bella rolled her eyes.

“You were twenty-four,” she told him.

“Which is how old you are now!” he told her back, and

she waved her hand to make that little factoid go away.

“I’m mean. I’m a steel-plated bitch and I’m not afraid to use it. You
like
people, Sebastian. You wanted to believe in forever, and you got the same thing women have been getting for years.”

“Which still doesn’t explain why you just threw me at

your brother!”

Bella glanced in the rearview too—harder, since she was

driving this time—and shrugged when Jordan’s attention

seemed focused on the bugs. She took a hard turn, and then another, and then answered him.

“I don’t think Asa’s hung up on gender,” she said softly, seriously. “I know he was married—but he….” She looked

sideways at Sebastian and shrugged. “You didn’t see the way he was looking at you this morning. I’ve seen that look in guys’ eyes—I’ve seen it aimed at me and I’ve seen it aimed at you. Trust me. I know what I’m looking at.”

Sebastian flushed then, and wondered if it was as

obvious on him as it had been on Asa. “I won’t do that

again,” he said, but his voice lacked conviction.

“Odds are good you won’t have to,” Bella said. She

risked her hand off the stick shift and patted his knee. “Asa never starts anything he doesn’t mean to follow through.”

“Well, I don’t think he’s going to start with me!”

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a sound like seagulls hitting an outstretched tarp.

Sebastian whirled and looked at Jordan, who was

looking at the seat in front of him with horrified eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he whimpered, and Sebastian said, “Oh,

honey,” and Bella wrinkled her nose as the odor hit the front seat.

“Oh Christ!” she exclaimed, wincing. “Let me guess….”

“Yeah,” Sebastian told her, cringing. “That whole bit

about being able to read and not get sick? That was a total lie.”

Jordan burst into tears then, but they were two minutes

from home, and Sebastian managed to calm him down and

salvage the book. His upholstery, on the other hand—that was going to be a trick.

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TURNED out, Asa had a cleaner for that too.

They did their best when they got to the house. First

they took Jordan in and got him cleaned up, and then they put him in front of the television with a glass of water and his beloved book. Then Sebastian and Bella spent half an hour trying to clean up the car. They scrubbed their

shoulders sore, but the stain—and the stench—remained.

They’d pretty much resigned themselves to rattling around in Bella’s beat-to-shit Honda for the rest of the summer, until Asa got home and heard the whole story.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, and since they were out at the pool by this time (where they forced Jordan to drink lots of water and wear a plastic hat so he wouldn’t get sick in the sun), they took him at his word.

And his word was good, Sebastian concluded later on in

the evening.

Asa had come back in half an hour, and they’d gotten

out of the pool long enough to cook dinner. This time, the quiet didn’t seem quite so oppressive to Sebastian; he

started to enjoy the way Bella and Asa worked together in the kitchen without speaking. Jordan would occasionally

offer a random comment as they did, but mostly, there was sort of a happy hum of peace there. Since Sebastian usually ran his mouth at a thousand miles a second, the peace was soothing.

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After dinner, Asa sat down in the living room to read his son a book and Sebastian went outside to check on his car.

His joy at discovering it did
not
smell like what it had been covered in that afternoon could hardly be contained. He rushed back into the house, thanks tumbling off of his

tongue, when he was brought up short by the sight of Asa with his son in his lap. Jordan had fallen fast asleep, and Asa was resting his cheek on his son’s hair.

Sebastian skidded to a halt and took a deep breath.

“Would you like me to take him?” he asked, thinking

that he could probably lift that little body pretty easily.

Jordan’s wrists and ankles were slender with growth, and while he was tall for his age, he looked like he’d weigh less than a full-grown tabby cat.

Asa shook his head, then shifted his body to move. “I’ll get him,” he murmured. “But I’m coming back, so don’t take my chair.” He flashed a small grin there, to indicate the absurdity of Sebastian needing that one overstuffed