“Here. Take this,” Sam said. “On the house.”
“Really?” I asked. “You’re so nice, Sam. You’re a really good cousin. The best cousin, actually.”
“I am nice. And I’m still mad you didn’t party with me like this on our road trip. Fox would have loved to see you like this.”
Fox was Sam’s boyfriend—and his stepbrother. It was a long story, and it sounded more scandalous than it actually was. But I’d gotten to watch the two of them fall for each other this summer during our road trip, and in the end, it had been one of the most heartwarming things I’d ever witnessed.
I still had little pangs of jealousy all the time. If even my crazy cousin could find a guy that was right for him, it gave me a little bit of hope, too.
“I’m going to go put this on,” I declared, holding up the fresh clean shirt. When I got up, I stumbled a little, and when I looked back at Brody I saw his eyes fixed on me, watching me with some mix of worry and affection.
The man was going to kill me. Just making eye contact with him was enough to make my brain go fuzzy.
“And I’m going to go with you,” he said. “It’s time for some water when we get back.”
He walked beside me to the men’s room.
“I’m not going to teeter over to my death on the way to the bathroom,” I said.
“You sure about that?” he joked. “C’mon.”
We got into the men’s room, where luckily, we were alone.
“All right. Off with that beer-soaked shirt,” he said.
I hesitated for a moment. I wasn’t exactly used to stripping in front of hot guys, but the normal insecurities that plagued me were somewhere far off and muted right now.
Fuck it. I pulled off my shirt. I knew he was probably going to judge me. I was a weakling compared to him, and I could never compare to what he looked like with his shirt off. But he was the one who’d followed me in. And I was a little too drunk to care.
After I pulled off my shirt, Brody reached for a paper towel, wetting it down a little and running it over my chest where the beer was.
“There you go,” he said, drying me off with another towel. “Good as new.”
He was touching me like it was the most natural thing in the world. Taking care of me, like we were old friends who would do this without a thought.
I liked him taking care of me. And I really, really liked having his hands on me.
Fuck.
I felt my cock perking up under my pants. I was getting a drunken hard-on from being toweled off, of all things.
I pulled away from him a little bit, taking a deep breath in. His already-big eyes went even wider, watching me.
“I’m sorry. Are you okay?”
“What?” I said. “I’m fine. I mean—”
“You just pulled away like you’d touched a hot stove or something,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get too close.”
“God, no,” I said. “It was good. Of course I want to be close to you.”
His expression softened. My head was spinning a little. I knew I wasn’t in danger of being sick, but I definitely didn’t have my normal mental capacity right now.
“God, I could kiss you right now,” he said, looking at me with some sense of wonder that I really didn’t deserve.
I was frozen again. I swallowed, looking from the floor to him then back down again.
“Shit,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “It’s just an expression, Logan. I mean it. I’m really not trying to make you uncomfortable.”
A giggle escaped me, surprising me as much as it seemed to surprise him. Soon I was in a bit of a laughing fit, leaning over to steady myself against the wood paneling on the wall.
I pulled in a deep breath, finally gaining some amount of composure and looking back up at him. “You are not making me uncomfortable. It’s just funny, because I actually want to kiss you—like, so badly, all of the time, but I just ignore it because otherwise my brain is going to go crazy—not like King George the Third, or anything, but definitely like the shifting of an era, when everything just feels different all of a sudden. You make me feel so different, Brody.”
He was looking at me with that same mixture of amusement and something else. If he were anyone else, I would have thought he was pitying me, but I knew that wasn’t how Brody operated.
Affection. Was it possible he was just looking at me with affection? It would be the first time anybody other than my family or Dani ever really had.
“Roomie, you are being awfully cute right now,” he said, reaching out to gently grab my shoulders, standing me up a little straighter and looking me in the eyes. “And every fiber of my being wants to kiss you right now, too. But you’ve had a lot to drink, and I’m going to go ahead and let you sober up before you make decisions like that.”