I met his eyes as I took a drink of my own.
“Steal her thunder,” we both said at the same time, bursting into laughter.
God, I was glad he was home.
* * *
“I was wondering why the fuck Henry was staying with Ani instead of me,” I blurted, shaking my head a couple hours later and seven beers in.
“Aw, did it hurt your feelings?” Alex asked with a grin, lying back on my couch with his bare feet propped on the coffee table. That was almost exactly the same thing Ani had said. God, sometimes they were so alike it was uncanny. Like they shared a brain.
Though most of the time I thought Alex was funny and Ani was a bitch.
“It didn’t hurt my feelings, asshole,” I replied, making Alex laugh. “It was just weird.”
“Eh, they’re buds. I’m not surprised,” Alex said with a wave of his hand. “I am surprised she had room for him—how far is she on the house?”
I shook my head and relaxed farther into my recliner, grabbing a new beer off the floor. “Not far. I helped her get the floors finished in the living room so she could buy a couch for him to sleep on.”
“I have no fucking idea how she’s lived there for so long with only bedroom furniture,” Alex said with a small laugh.
“She’s got her TV and shit in her room so she just hangs out in there,” I replied without thinking.
“Oh yeah? You’ve been hanging out in Ani’s room?” Alex joked, watching me closely.
“Yeah,” I deadpanned, my palms going clammy. “I go over there to watch TV while she sucks me off.”
Alex froze for a minute, then broke out in gut-busting laughter. “The only way Ani would put your balls in her mouth is if she’d already cut them off and was planning on eating them,” he choked out, his face turning red from laughing so hard.
I snorted like I knew he expected me to, but couldn’t stop the memory of Ani during a seriously good blow job the day before. My balls had definitely been in her mouth at one point. My dick hardened in the sweatpants I’d grabbed earlier when we came into the living room.
“Shit, I’m beat. I’m gonna head up,” Alex said as he finished laughing. “Wake me up in the morning?”
“Yeah, no problem.”
I locked up the house and cleaned up the beer bottles before following Alex upstairs. He was already snoring through the closed doorway to the spare room, and I couldn’t help but smile.
I loved it when Alex was home. He was literally my other half. The better half. When our mom died, he was the only thing I’d had to hold on to in a drastically changing world. I may have been the tougher twin, but he’d always been the strongest. Where I jumped to conclusions and went off half-cocked, Alex was slower to react. He watched and waited, covering up his feelings with humor until he was ready to let loose.
Few saw the serious side of Alex. He rarely showed anyone the guy who worried over his sister and parents almost maniacally. They didn’t see him angry. They rarely saw him quiet.
Alex was the life of the party—always—and he planned it that way. Sure, his personality was a pretty cheerful one, but no one was in that great of a mood all the time. Other people didn’t notice but I always knew.
I could read him as well as he read me.
I stripped naked and climbed into bed, bracing my hands behind my head as I stared up at the ceiling.
I loved that Alex was home, but it freaked me the fuck out, too. He’d see shit that the rest of my family didn’t. My fingers itched to pick up the phone and text Ani not to come over, but I knew that was ridiculous.
She wasn’t going to show up at my house after she’d already left for the night. It wouldn’t happen. But still, my stomach churned with anxiety as I lay there in bed. I didn’t want to ruin the surprise for her, but I sure as fuck didn’t want her accidentally telling the entire family that we were fucking like bunnies.
My heart thumped hard as I thought about what Alex’s reaction would be to the fact that Ani and I were sleeping together. I’d told Ani that he would high-five me, but I knew even while I was saying it that it was far from the truth.
Alex would be livid.
He knew me.
He’d know what it was.
And he’d be pissed as fuck that I was screwing Ani with absolutely no intention of being in any type of relationship with her.
Chapter 8
Anita
Holy shit, she’s huge!” I called, running toward the front of Dan and Liz’s house and the woman standing there with a toddler in her arms.