CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(12)
“You ever get the feeling she’s counting the days until we’re history?” Stone asked.
“That’s nothing new. But what the hell was up with that last line?”
Stone was rolling the twenty into a tight tube. “What?”
“You got some bad news you want to share?”
His blue eyes found mine. People often commented how much we looked alike. We did, but no more than any other brothers. Just about every girl in town and a fair number of the women blushed and licked their lips when we walked by so I didn’t have any doubts that they all liked what they saw.
Stone snorted. “I was just messing with her.”
“Good. You better be careful.”
“Come on,” he scoffed. “You think I don’t know any better than to cover my head when it’s pouring?”
“Every time?”
“Every time.” Stone’s face broke into a mischievous smile. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
Stone looked pointedly out the window toward Erin’s house. Then he looked back at me.
“None of your business,” I growled.
“Still? Seriously? You guys have been together forever. I could string together every non-relationship I’ve ever been involved in and it wouldn’t come close to the time you’ve sunk into Erin.”
“Let’s go eat,” I said, a little grumpy.
“Wait a minute.”
“No. Not discussing this with you.”
“Okay. But can I ask you one more thing?”
“As long as it has nothing to do with where I put my dick.”
Stone looked thoughtfully out the window. His voice grew quiet, almost wistful. “What’s it like?”
I knew what he meant. But it took me a minute to think of an answer. Over the years, Stone had a long string of girls, but never a girlfriend. Some of them he’d liked more than others but even the best of them could only hope for being kept at arm’s length for a short while until he moved on. Erin told me what the girls all said about Stone, as if I didn’t already know. They said he was a shark, a pimp, a player, not that it stopped any of them from chasing. Yet despite his chronic sarcasm, somewhere inside of Stone, in a place that was nearly unreachable, lived a tender heart. I was probably the only one on earth who ever saw that side of him. Earlier, when he chimed in and interfered with my mother’s tirade it hadn’t been done solely to irritate her, although he probably considered that a convenient benefit. These last few years she’d made it a habit to swoop in on me out of nowhere and when she did he always did his best to take the heat off. Stone would go to the mat for me. Of that I never had a doubt. He was a good brother. Even if he could be a f*cking jackass sometimes.
“It’s nice,” I told him and he seemed satisfied with the answer, inadequate as it was. It was nice, being wrapped up in someone and knowing she was every bit as much into you, maybe more. I would wish the same thing for him too, that he’d learn how to open his heart to people other than me.
Stone stopped me when I started to head next door to Erin’s. He said he was hungry enough to eat a Gila monster and didn’t want to get stuck in a tornado of girl activity that would mean another two hours would go by before we got to eat. Usually I would have balked and dragged him over there anyway but I was starving. Plus I felt a touch of guilt because Stone didn’t ask me for favors very often. So I texted Erin that I’d be back in an hour and then we could all figure out how to pass the summer night in this great metropolis.
It was only a little over a mile to Main Street but the heat slowed the journey down. I was wishing I’d brought some water along when Stone seemed to read my mind and took a sharp right into a quiet yard with a garden hose hanging from the rusty bib on the side of the house. He switched the water on without a pause and watched the stream flow for a good minute before bending his head to take a drink. Every kid who ever grew up in a hot climate knows that you never touch the first gallon of water to spill out of the hose. A few years ago some boy who’d just moved from the crisp Rocky Mountain air of Colorado took a dare and burned his lips to blistering. That’s what happened if you weren’t careful.
Stone handed the hose to me silently. The water was warm and tasted somewhat like metal but it felt good going down my throat. Some boyish remnant inside of me felt ridiculously happy, sharing a stolen drink with my brother in a yard that didn’t belong to us and wiping my mouth on the back of my wrist. It was the dance of a thousand childhood days that had come before.
We took a shortcut through an alley that ran along the backside of one of the town’s most prosperous streets with its courtyards and swimming pools and small orchards full of well-tended citrus trees. The occasional gecko or ground squirrel darted in front of us before disappearing into unseen holes beneath the block fence. As we reached the end of the alley, a decent-sized chuckwalla turned around and stared at us boldly rather than scurry into the shadows. I stared back. Stone, a few steps ahead, let out a low whistle.
“What are you doing?” I asked uneasily as I left the lizard behind and noted the way my brother was staring with interest through the open window of an expensive car.
Stone made a tsk-tsk sound. “Left the keys in the ignition. Dipshit.”
It was parked discreetly around the corner beside a sprawling Santa Fe home that occupied on acre on what passed for prime real estate around here. I knew who the house belonged to. I knew who the car belonged to. I knew what that gleam in my brother’s eye meant. I didn’t like any these things.