One Last Time (Loveless Brothers 5)

It might be the first time he’s brought up the before intentionally since we agreed it doesn’t exist.

I wrack my brain, slowly shake my head.

“He’s get out the camp stove and the canned milk and we’d all go on the front porch and drink cocoa and watch the storm,” he says, and finally takes a sip. “In the summer, anyway. If the power went out in the winter we’d all pile onto the couches and have a fire, and if it stayed out overnight Caleb and I would push the beds together in Levi’s room and sleep with him.”

Seth laughs then, leans back into the sofa.

“He always seemed like the one who’d manage the best in primitive circumstances,” he says.

Levi, the eldest Loveless brother, is now the Chief Arborist for the Cumberland National Forest and lives with his fiancee in a cabin that he built himself. I’d say he can manage.

I sit up straighter on the sofa, legs crossed, and pull Seth’s head into my shoulder until he’s leaning on me.

“What else?” I ask.

“When it would storm in the summer, Daniel and Caleb and I would go out on the front porch to watch it, and every time there was a lightning strike we’d all look over at the porch light to see if it was still on,” he says. “I think Daniel would’ve run out and tried to catch the lightning if we’d let him. Caleb was always a little spooked by it, but liked being brave with us.”

“And you?”

“I was always counting the seconds between the strikes and the thunder so I could know how far away the storm was and which way it was moving,” he says, lifting his mug to his lips. “Someone’s gotta compile the data.”

“Want to turn out the lights and pretend the power’s out now?” I ask. I run my fingers through his hair, tousling it, and I can feel him relaxing into me.

I don’t touch Seth as much I’d like. I find myself shying away from these sweet, simple things because I know exactly where it can lead, and we made an agreement.

“Nah, it’s bound to happen soon enough on its own,” he says.

There’s a long, silent moment where nothing moves, and there’s no sound but the occasional creak of the building, settling into the cold, or his neighbors making the smallest of muffled thumps against their shared wall.

“Sorry about the drive,” I finally say.

“Don’t apologize. It wasn’t your fault,” he says, voice slow and lazy, his twang coming through.

“I can still be sorry.”

He drinks the last of his cocoa, puts the mug on the table, then turns and arranges himself so his head’s on my lap, his feet over the armrest of his couch.

“You sure you’re okay?” I ask, settling one hand on his chest. He puts one of his own over it.

“I am now,” he says.

I don’t ask anything else because I know the story of how his father died: dark night, icy mountain road, single-car collision. Seth was eleven, almost twelve. It’s no wonder that we bonded three and a half years later when I suddenly moved to Sprucevale.

I finish my cocoa and we talk, my hand on his chest. If I pay close attention I can feel his heartbeat even through his ribcage, steady and true, and for once I don’t wonder. I don’t wonder who else has sat like this, talking about his family. Who else has made him drinks and worn his pajamas, who else has driven him home in a storm and stayed the night.

We talk about raccoons and squirrels and chipmunks and all the havoc they’ve wreaked. We talk about which grocery store in town — there are two — has better tomatoes, which has a better beer selection. I ask about the bookshelves lining the wall opposite us, his television in the middle, and he laughs and tells me how Caleb came and built them in a fit of heartbreak over his twenty-two-year-old student.

“Can you sow some more discord between them and get some side tables?” I ask, slumped on the couch, feet on his coffee table, his head still in my lap.

“This is why he thinks you’re a witch,” Seth points out.

“I thought it was because I have magical dick-raising powers.”

“Decline to comment.”

My hand is still on his chest, my thumb slowly stroking back and forth. Despite my comment, I don’t look down at the dick in question. No good can come of that.

Well, no agreed-upon good.

“I still can’t believe he banged his student,” I say, looking at the bookshelves. They’re very nice bookshelves.

“Is banging,” Seth points out. “Present tense. It seems like a terrible idea, but they’re happy.”

“There’s no accounting for taste.”

“Says the woman with the octopus tattoo.”

I glance down at where Seth is tracing along the bottom of my ocean tattoo: a sailing ship, pulled under the waves by tentacles. Above it’s there’s another, birds in its rigging, flying it away.