River smiled and fished out his smokes. “We’re from the backwoods of Virginia. Small no-name place near Roanoke.”
“Then we moved to Nashville when we were four,” Reese said.
River lit up two cigarettes. “To Charlotte when we were nine.” He handed me one of the smokes, and I snuck a sheepish grin at Daddy, who narrowed his eyes playfully.
I’d been good all day, though!
“And to Virginia Beach before high school,” Daddy finished.
Damn. “That’s a lot of moving around.”
Suddenly, a bunch of questions piled up. I wanted to know about their childhood.
“What’s the improper South, then?” River asked Colt.
Colt grinned. “Anythin’ north of Richmond. And Florida, of course.”
I snickered and took a drag from my smoke.
“Of course,” Daddy agreed with a laugh. “That settles the next song.” He played the first notes of a new song, and Colt recognized it right away.
I couldn’t help but laugh at the lyrics. It was a funny song about being rednecker than others. About Slim Jims, dirt roads, hauling hay, and loud trucks.
Daddy looked happy. I couldn’t stop smiling at him, like I was some idiot. He was just so beautiful and sexy and everything.
Keeping my voice down, I spoke without disturbing our entertainment.
“What made you move around so much growing up?” I asked River.
“Our mother, for the most part,” he replied quietly. “She was a teacher, and she had to go where the jobs were.”
Made sense. “She was a teacher?”
He nodded with a dip of his chin. “She died of cancer when we were sixteen.”
Fuck. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago, and we weren’t always on good terms.” He leaned over and kissed my shoulder. “Similar story with Pop. He’s a long-hauler, still alive, but we don’t talk.” His smile turned rueful. “We all loved one another—we just didn’t like each other very much. It was all right when we were still kids, but as we grew up and didn’t wanna separate our beds, Pop got angry.”
He might say it with a dose of humor, but I saw through it. It wasn’t funny at all.
Having gotten to know the Tenley twins more, I saw their bond as something to cherish. It was beautiful and messy and incomprehensible, at the same time as it was the simplest form of the purest love I’d ever witnessed.
I’d met twins who wore the same clothes, twins who wanted to be as independent and unique as possible, and then these two. They didn’t compare. They were two halves of a whole, and it wasn’t even about sex. They needed each other like air. Just like I didn’t leave the house without my lungs, they didn’t stray far from each other either, because they couldn’t.
“I’m sorry they didn’t understand you,” I murmured.
He hummed and watched me as he inhaled from his smoke. “Things got better when we moved in with our grandmother in Virginia Beach. She didn’t understand either, but she accepted easily. Judgment is for the Lord, she used to say.”
I smiled. “Is she still around?”
“Afraid not, but she was almost ninety when she passed a couple years ago,” he answered. “Good woman. Every night before she went to bed, she had a couple fingers of whiskey as she read from the Bible.” He paused and grinned slightly. “She caught us smoking weed once. Said, ‘Least you coulda shared it with me, ya idjits.’”
I chuckled under my breath.
“Your turn, pup.” He nudged his elbow to my shoulder. “Any extended family to visit on holidays?”
I shook my head. “Not really—except for a couple cousins on Dad’s side that we see very rarely.” I took a final drag from the cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Significantly more family members alive on my mom’s side, but they’re all shitheads. Except for Aunt Mel. She and Mom kind of divorced the whole family after they took my biological dad’s side when Mom wanted to leave him.” This was mostly crap I’d heard years later. I’d been too young to understand much at the time. “Never mind that he was a gambling alcoholic who stole from her. She was in the wrong for walking out, apparently.”
“Definitely shitheads.” River nodded in agreement and stubbed out his smoke too. “World’s full of ’em.”
Yeah. To the point where, when you met two people who were the opposite, one might get so excited that he accidentally blurted it out to his aunt.
I’d managed to keep my mouth shut last weekend, but this morning, I’d caved. She’d witnessed one too many of my stupid grins that I’d ended up awkwardly confessing I was “sort of seeing two men,” and then I’d tried to downplay it as “but it’s just a kink thing,” and she hadn’t bought it.
I didn’t buy it either.
In a short period of time, River and Reese had opened up a new world for me, one I wanted to live in forever. With them. Two coveted Sadists who typically didn’t do the whole relationship thing.