The Apartment: The Complete Affair (25 page)

“Sweet kid,” Eric said, watching her walk away. “But way too young. She’s gonna be trouble for her old man, acting like that.”

“Oh, don’t act like waitresses of all ages don’t fall all over you, Mr. Football,” Ethan teased.

“Hey, I haven’t played in years,” he blushed. “But sometimes, Maggie does get a little jealous. I keep telling her that fair is fair, because anywhere we go every man’s eyes are glued on her.”

“The trials of a gorgeous couple. My heart goes out to you.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk, Mr. Tortured Artist! I used to think you spent hours in the mirror trying to perfect that brooding pout of yours. Something must have worked, though, because Rachel certainly wasn’t hard on the eyes.” He looked up suddenly, realizing what he had just said. “Hey man, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Really, don’t worry about it,” Ethan waved him off.

“No, that was a shit thing to bring up right now. How are you managing these days? It’s only been a couple weeks since you broke up.”

“I’m… coping,” Ethan replied quietly. “Besides, we’re not here to talk about me. We’re here to get you out of that damn hospital for a while and pig out on the best pancakes in town.”

“We’re doing that already,” Eric smiled, nodding toward the young waitress as she delivered two heaping stacks of buttermilk pancakes to their table. Sighing wistfully, she looked back and forth between each of them and the warm maple syrup on the table before walking away. “Man, I don’t even want to know what she’s thinking.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Ethan laughed, pouring the syrup in question over his breakfast.

“Anyway, as I was saying, you’ve done your job. I’m out and eating something. We’re having a nice talk and you are distracting me.”

“Are you sure being distracted is what you really want right now?” Ethan asked quietly. “You can talk to me about anything, you know.”

“If memory serves, I said the very same thing to you a few weeks ago. I think if anyone should be more ready to talk, it should be you.” He looked pointedly at Ethan, calling him out for never confiding in him. “I’ll come around soon—I always do—but you’re the one who needs to realize that the world isn’t going to end if you admit that you aren’t always perfect.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ethan snapped defensively.

“It means that I’ve never known anyone so worried about making a good show of things, setting the scene just right. It’s okay to admit that you’re upset about something, or pissed off even. Nobody should seem so level-headed after breaking up with their girlfriend of ten years.”

“I don’t like people to know my business.” He especially didn’t like it if it meant that they might hate him when they did.

“Know your business? Ethan, I don’t even know
you
. Not anymore.” Eric sighed and took another sip of his coffee. “I’m trying to get to know my brother again. I think if anyone has a right to ask you about some of your business, it’s me.”

Ethan finished chewing his bite and put down his fork. “Alright, what do you want to know? And before you start, just know that I’m not sure how much I’m ready to talk about yet, so don’t be offended if I pass on something.”

“I understand. I won’t dig too deep today, don’t worry.” Eric cracked his knuckles and sat up straighter, his enthusiasm coming off of him in waves. “You say that you are coping right now, but how? I couldn’t even imagine being able to function if Maggie left me. I mean, I know you and Rachel must not have been in the best place there at the end, but still—how on earth are you handling it?”

“Believe me, Eric, ‘not in the best place’ is a fucking understatement. If I seem cold about it, I don’t mean to, but I can’t help it.” He took a big drink from his coffee before continuing, forcing himself to divulge at least a few things to his brother. “In all honesty, I’m torn up about the way she left. The way it went down was really bad. But the whole relationship…it felt like a lie. And it would be a lie now to say that I miss her in my life.”

He waited for Eric to process what he had just told him. “But I thought you two were, like… totally in love?”

“No. Not at all.”

“What? I thought you guys were so far up each other’s asses that nobody else mattered to you.”

“Then you believed the lie,” Ethan frowned. “What we had was sort of… an understanding. And it worked out for both of us at first, but things got very bad between us at the end.”

“Dude, don’t get pissed at me for asking this, but are you gay?”

“What? No!” Ethan’s head snapped up and looked around, embarrassed at his loud outburst.

“You can tell me if you are. I swear I don’t give a shit.”

“No, Eric! What the hell made you think that?”

“Well, an ‘understanding’? It sounded like you were describing some weird-ass beard arrangement.”

“No, no,” Ethan laughed, forking another bite of food into his mouth. “There just wasn’t any love between us. It was purely physical to begin with, for me at least, and that sort of morphed into a warped friendship. I had problems that I’m not proud of at all, and then she had even worse problems after that. We were just toxic together and not doing each other any good.”

“Why didn’t you guys split up when you first realized it was that bad?”

“It wasn’t part of the plan,” Ethan whispered. “She told me how much talent I had, how successful I could be with her resources, and I believed her. I tried to stick it out for a while after I got out of rehab, but she started to get annoyed that I wasn’t putting out the same amount of work that I had been when I was high. She started making thinly veiled threats about finding someone younger and more talented. I finally got fed up with the whole thing.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Eric said quickly. “What the fuck do you mean,
rehab
?”

Ethan blinked for a moment, a wave of panic washing over him. He hadn’t meant to let that slip, but it had felt so good to talk to his brother that he hadn’t been guarding his words.

“Uh…” He had no idea how to recover from his blunder. What would Eric think of him now?

“Ethan, don’t bail on me now, man. Talk to me.” The look Eric gave him let him know that he wasn’t going to be able to weasel out of this. Ethan decided that even if it made Eric hate him, at least he would be able to say that he successfully distracted his brother from what was happening at the hospital.

“Well,” Ethan sighed. “I guess you could say that I had a small cocaine habit.”

“I didn’t realize there was such a thing as a
small
coke habit.”

Ethan flinched. This was going about as well as he had expected. “That came out wrong.” He fidgeted with his napkin as he tried to think of how to explain it so that Eric would understand. “I didn’t mean that the habit was small. That shit did a fucking number on me. I just meant that it’s not like I was strung out all this time, only for about a year.”

“How the hell did you get wrapped up in that shit?”

“Rachel. She kept talking it up and suggesting that it would help me paint faster.”

“Are you fucking
serious
?” Eric snapped, barely containing a yell. “That fucking bitch.”

“Not that I feel like defending anything she’s done right now, but I’ve come to accept my own role in it, too. I never should have started. I’d give anything to be able to go back and tell her to fuck off.”

“Yeah, I’d like to go with you,” Eric grumbled. “But you’re all clean now, right?”

Ethan sighed and looked down at his hands. “Trust me, I have no desire to go through that bullshit again.” He knew it didn’t matter what he said, and that now he’d always be an addict in his brother’s eyes.

“Thanks for telling me about it, man. That sounds really hard, and I think you’re really strong to come out on the other side. I won’t bring it up again, but just know that you can talk to me about it anytime.”

Ethan’s head snapped up and he stared at his brother. That was it? Eric didn’t seem mad anymore, and he didn’t seem ashamed to have an ex-druggie brother. He almost seemed…proud of him? Was that even possible? It was such a revelation that Ethan was stunned speechless until Eric spoke again.

“So after rehab you left?”

“I planned to, but she must have seen it coming because she beat me to it. We were in New York for a gallery opening. I was hoping that since we were back in the country it would be easier and more civil. We could go our separate ways and neither of us would be stuck in Europe alone, you know?” Ethan looked up from his coffee into his brother’s caring blue eyes. “I underestimated how much she didn’t want to be left. Not because she loved me, but because she had to have the upper hand.

Eric shook his head, trying to make sense of everything he was learning. “So rather than let you leave amicably, she dumped you first?”

“Well, I don’t think ‘dumping me first’ is adequate enough to describe what she did. When I came home that night she had completely cleaned me out. Everything was gone from our room, even my luggage. She left me a note that said I had no more to give her. She went on to describe her new protégé and thanked me for providing her the startup money she would need to launch his career.”

“She didn’t!”

“You betcha. I checked and she had taken everything I transferred to my American account to get us by for months.”

“That’s really fucked up.”

“I know.”

“But—Rachel? I never would have pegged her as capable of something like that.”

“I don’t think any of you ever really knew her.”

After a few moments of silence, Eric pushed further. “Do Mom and Dad know how bad it was?”

“Absolutely not. I’m not sure I want them to know.”
But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad
.

“Ethan.” He wouldn’t say anything else until Ethan met his gaze. “They’ll understand. I know they’ll be sad that you had to suffer through that, and Mom will cry and wonder why you never came home to us, but in the end they’ll be supportive.”

“I don’t want to embarrass them,” he whispered.

“What?” Eric’s eyes bugged out. “Are we talking about the same people?”

“Think about it. The son who they think is a wonderful success in life is nothing but a cokehead who shut them out of his life for nearly ten years while he ran off with someone he didn’t even like very much, who later stole all of his shit. How does that make me look?”

Eric thought for a second. “Okay, on paper, it’s not great, I’ll grant you that. But I’m not stupid enough to believe that’s the whole story. I won’t make you tell me anymore now if you aren’t ready, but it’s pretty obvious to me that she was seriously messed up from the beginning. I always felt like there was something funny about you guys, but Maggie just said you were probably snobs.”

They both laughed at that, and their deep, husky voices pulled the waitress to them like a magnet, coffee pot in hand for refills. Once she’d left again, Ethan leaned forward and smiled, feeling lighter in his brother’s company than he had felt in years. “Maggie wasn’t exactly wrong, you know. I was a pompous ass for a long time. I thought I was above it all.”

“Above what, though? Being in love?”

“Well… yeah. I’ve never really thought about it, but I guess that’s right.”

“Nobody is above it, man. It either happens or it doesn’t. You just haven’t met the right one yet. Don’t think that because I was a goner at eighteen that everyone is supposed to be.”

“I don’t think I’d know it if it hit me over the head, to tell you the truth. I have no reference to go by. All I know is sex, and even that was fairly rusty until recently.” Beautiful hazel eyes and soft pink lips flashed through his mind, and he ignored the warm feeling that it caused.

“Well, just don’t fuck it up and mistake one for the other. If you find something worth keeping, you owe it to yourself to see it through.” Eric stopped his fork halfway to his mouth when he realized what Ethan had let slip. “Wait a minute. Did you say until
recently
?”

“Uh, pardon?” Ethan swallowed so hard that his brother could see it across the table.

“Dude, are you already fucking someone?
Here
?”

“Keep your voice down, asshole!” Ethan shot glances across the room, making sure nobody was paying attention to their conversation.

“Oh my God, you totally are! Who is it? Come on, tell me! Is it someone from high school? Some old crush wishing she’d never let you go?” He started batting his lashes and making kissy faces.

“Eric, shut the fuck up. I’m not going to talk to you about it.”

“No way, that’s so unfair. Do you remember how much you whined and begged until I told you about my first time? Payback is a bitch, isn’t it? Besides, you’re rebounding in a very small pond, brother dear. You might as well tell me, because I’m sure I can find out by other means if I have to.”

Ethan put his head in his hands and groaned, cursing himself for not thinking when he spoke. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he mumbled, his hands muffling his voice.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Ethan’s eyes darted around the room again before meeting Eric’s expectant look. “It means that I don’t know her name.”

“Was it a one-nighter? Didn’t bother to ask it?”

“No,” Ethan felt his cheeks heating. “There have been numerous… encounters.”

Eric stared at him for a minute in total silence. “Okay, forgive me if I’m coming off as thick here, but how the hell is that even possible? Do you just never speak?”

“No, we speak a lot, actually. She’s really very lovely.”

“Then why don’t you know her name?”

“Because I demanded that she not tell it to me.” At Eric’s puzzled look, he explained in more detail. “I was upset about Rachel, I felt like everything was closing in around me, and then she just appeared, like some sort of angel or goddess. It was perfect, and I didn’t want to sully it with names and facts about each other. I wanted to keep her as my own private treasure that only existed for me while I was here.” He looked to see if Eric was following him. “When I’m with her, it’s like nothing else matters.”

“So why don’t you swap names and start dating? It sounds like a little bit more than a fuck to me.”