Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

“The one where we don’t let Martin win,” I say.

“Right,” she says, and takes a sip of the coffee.

Then she nearly spits it out, her eyes going wide.

“It’s espresso,” I tell her, already folding my origami paper in half diagonally.

“You sure it’s not paint thinner?” she gasps. “You should find out if someone’s got a heart condition before you give them that.”

“Got a heart condition?”

“I think I do now,” she says, but after a moment, she takes another sip, and this one stays down just fine. “Look, Eli, you don’t have to — holy shit, Martin.”

I turn to look at the door, but there’s no one there. I look back at Violet.

“No, this was him,” she says, pointing at the cranes. “He did this. We were supposed to get a thousand cranes folded by monks, but someone changed the order form to five hundred, and it sure wasn’t me.”

“Does he have access to those?” I ask, taking another sip.

“Yeah, of course,” she breathes. “He’s the other coordinator, he can do everything I can do.”

There’s a brief pause.

“This sounds insane,” Violet says, half to herself. “I’m sure I just had a temporary lapse of sanity and I did it myself.”

“The man hid oysters,” I say. “It’s not insane. Insane is offering your employees one twenty-thousand dollar reward for being the best instead of, say, ten two-thousand-dollar rewards for good teamwork. I’m surprised no one’s been hit by a car yet.”

Violet snorts. It turns out that I still remember how to fold cranes, and we fold in silence for a while. Companionable silence, like maybe we’re finally starting to get used to each other. We don’t even race to see who can make the most cranes, we just work together.

“Let me guess,” Violet says after a long time. “You learned crane folding in the harem.”

I finish the head of a crane and launch it into the air, dropping it on a pile of its paper brethren.

“You’re really stuck on this harem thing,” I say. “Is it so unbelievable that some princess would want to put me up in the lap of luxury just so I was available to her every so often?”

Violet turns red, but she tosses her hair back over her shoulder and glances at me before folding more.

“It’s the most salacious rumor,” she teases. “And you haven’t denied it yet.”

Obviously it’s not true. I don’t think harems exist any more, and if they do, no one’s inviting a scruffy, difficult southern boy into one.

Besides, there’s no way in hell I could share a woman I like. I’d lose my damn mind.

“I think the cult’s pretty interesting,” I say, still teasing her. “What did we supposedly worship? A spaceship or something?”

“People join cults all the time,” Violet says, like cults are so passé. “There’s a monastery up in the hills, for Pete’s sake. They’re the ones who didn’t make me enough cranes.”

“I don’t think the monastery would appreciate being called a cult,” I point out.

“They wear robes,” she says.

“So do judges,” I say. “So do I, after a shower.”

“Is it fluffy?”

“I’ll never tell.”

There’s another span of silence. I sneak a glance over at Violet, bent over the cranes, her dark honey hair spilling over one shoulder, unruly at the end of a long day.

She’s barely spoken to me since we kissed. I’ve barely thought about anything else since then. I’ve laid awake many nights, imagining her lips underneath mine, the way she grabbed me, the way she pushed her body against mine. I’ve done a lot of very quiet jerking off in my attic room.

I’m starting to think I imagined all that. All the same, I want her again. Here. Now.

I want to pull her onto the table, her skin against mine, her nails raking down my back. I want her so bad it’s a physical sensation like a weight on my chest.

“Why were the monks making cranes?” I ask, just to get my mind off of what I want to do to her.

“Because we gave them money in exchange for services,” Violet deadpans.

“Doesn’t the bride usually fold them herself?”

Violet shrugs.

“Some do,” she says, finishing a crane and grabbing another piece of aquamarine paper. “Some outsource it.”

“That does run counter to the point,” I say. “Isn’t the whole idea to demonstrate the patience and commitment you need for marriage?”

“You’re asking the wrong person,” Violet says. “I don’t know the reasons, I just put in the orders.”

“It’s supposed to be a labor of love, not something you pay someone else to do.”

I don’t know why this is the thing that’s getting to me, but it is. Sometimes things are about the experience, about putting in the work. Paying someone else to do it just doesn’t get the job done.

“Why do you know so much about origami cranes?” Violet asks.

“I married into the Yakuza while I was in Japan,” I tell her.