I paused and stared at the whiskey a bit longer, turning over the stupidity of this in my mind. There was a real chance I would get into trouble, depending on when the call came to go get tested again. I’d researched online, and the most sensitive tests only seemed to be accurate for four days, but that meant if they called me Monday, I’d be fucked.
The problem was, I didn’t care. I opened the bottle and drank directly from it, the burn of the alcohol soothing in a nearly scary way as it sped down my throat. The whiskey made my body wake up out of the stupor it had been in since I got home from jail.
Nothing felt right anymore. I wasn’t so stupid that I didn’t realize I was depressed, but I also couldn’t bring myself to do anything about it. I should probably go talk to someone, but I didn’t want to. All I needed was something to blur the edges of the pain for a while, so I sat on the floor with my back pressed against the kitchen cabinets and watched the sun slide across the wall while I slowly drank my way through half the bottle. I thought about the day Carter and West picked me and my suitcase up from a street corner in Mom and Dad’s nice neighborhood while I tried not to cry. And then Carter had hugged me, and I did cry, and he’d told me that there was nothing wrong with the way I was born. He said eventually Dad would come around.
I wasn’t so sure any of that was right, then or now, but the memory brought the first flicker of warmth into my chest I’d felt for a long while. West had been there too. He’d wrapped one arm around Carter and the other around me, and while he didn’t speak, he was a solid rock, and that one kind gesture had relieved most of my anxiety. If West hugged me, that meant he was okay with me coming to their house, in theory, anyway.
With a deep sigh, I smacked my head back against the cabinet, but the pain was muted and far away. The front door opened, and I sat upright. I fumbled for the cap of the bottle, but only seemed to push it farther away from my fingers across the floor, like a hockey puck. When did the floor turn into slippery ice? The cap finally skittered over the tiles and out of reach. My heart hammered so hard I could feel it pulsing in my throat and on the back of my tongue. The bottle was far lighter than it should have been, when I picked it up to look at it.
Dress shoes appeared in front of me, shiny and black. I glanced up the long line of suit pants molded to solid thighs and got stuck on the very satisfying bulge at the man’s groin. Hefty. Weighty. I moaned under my breath and licked my lips.
“What are you doing?” The completely baffled question delivered in West’s voice startled me into finishing my visual journey up narrow hips to a broad chest and even wider shoulders. I finally looked into West’s devastating face. He was so fucking hot.
“It’s no wonder,” I mumbled to myself. My brother had wanted West because he was drop-dead fuckable, and there was no denying it. I slouched back against the cabinets, caught out in my bad deed for the day. West went to his knees in front of me, setting aside his briefcase and laptop bag.
“What’s no wonder?” Slowly, a flicker of a smile crawled across his face and actually became the real thing. My heart trembled and my mouth felt slow. I poked at the back of my teeth with the tip of my tongue while I thought about what his question might be referring to. Oh, right.
“Why he wanted you. You’re good-looking. Nice to eye-up. Easy on the old oculus uterque.” I snickered to myself at managing to remember the term from my anatomy class, struck by how hilarious I was. West rolled those weird, pretty, purply-blue eyes that I seemed to be trapped staring at. My chest got light.
“You’re all charm when you’re drunk, Shane. Anyone ever tell you that?” He snatched the bottle from my grasp and lifted it up to stare into it like it was a Magic 8-Ball for a moment before he upended it and took a long swallow. When he was done, he moved over to lean back against the cabinets beside me.
“Actually, I’ve been told I’m at my best this way,” I said, feeling warm and snuggly, and since he was there, I slid over to rest my body against his. I dropped my head to his shoulder, and the fabric under my cheek, warmed by his body heat, felt so good that I turned to nuzzle against it. He let out a low noise that went straight to my stomach where it warmed to a boil in seconds. He handed the bottle back to me and I took another swig of booze. I couldn’t feel the burn or taste the alcohol anymore, which was probably bad.
“That’s a sixty-dollar bottle of whiskey you put a hurt on.” I glanced up at him, all at once afraid that he was angry with me, but he smiled and reached over to ruffle my hair. His fingers were warm and friendly as they scratched over my scalp, and then he gave my hair a very light tug that had me gasping. When I glanced up into his eyes again, they seemed darker, and his jaw had firmed up, serious and sexy.
“You should go sleep this off,” he said quietly.
“I’m not tired. I thought I might go out.” The idea had appeal. I could go somewhere, keep drinking, maybe wind up in a warm bed. My stomach twisted. It wasn’t that I wanted to go find a stranger, but I’d been so stuck in the shit surrounding Carter’s illness, and then his death, that I had no one to go to, not even for fun. I had a vague idea of what happened with Teddy but didn’t want to text him to confirm my theory. I rested my head back against West’s shoulder and somehow found myself curled up against him with my ear pressed against his heart. He eased his arm around me. The slosh of whiskey as he raised the bottle and slugged some more was loud in the room. I listened to the thump-thump, and he drank. I closed my eyes.
The kitchen was all shadows when I opened my eyes again, and like a piece of skipped video, the world had gone from one extreme to another—light to dark. It took me a second or two to organize the facts—that I must have fallen asleep—but I still felt warm and sloshy with all the alcohol I’d managed to guzzle, and the complete lack of food I’d had today. Someone rubbed their hand lightly over my arm and murmured soothing noises in my ear.
“Be a good boy, just go back to sleep.” West’s low tone dragged across my ear with the hot gust of his breath. I shivered at his words—since when am I anyone’s good boy?—and turned in his arms to look up at him. There was light coming into the kitchen from the hallway, we always forgot to turn that one off in the morning, and West’s eyes glittered through the gloom. The whiskey bottle sat next to him on the floor, empty, and the lack of amber liquid was shocking.
“I’m not tired,” I said, surprised by how breathy I sounded. I was warm and comfortable and safe for the first time in I didn’t know how long—probably since before I left home. I shifted closer to the reassurance of his body heat and muscles. Those nice words rang in my ears. West brought his other arm around me in a hug and tilted his forehead against mine when I sat up a little. My arms felt awkward because they were trapped between us, but I loved the way his hold on me was like steel. He clearly wasn’t planning to let go anytime soon.
“Why were you drinking when I got home?” he asked.
“To feel better,” I said without missing a beat. “To make it all go away for a while.”
West pressed his forehead harder against mine. He closed his eyes, and the dark sweep of his eyelashes against his cheek captivated me. I wiggled a finger up to brush it against them, and his serious expression melted into a half smile. “That won’t work, the drinking. You know that, right? You’re just going to make yourself unhealthy trying to lose these bad feelings this way.”