Page 75 of By All Accounts
“They knew to not settle for less than the best because that’s what you taught them…taught us.” My brother’s face turned blurry, and I blinked hard, annoyed that I was on the brink of crying. That wasn’t how I’d wanted this whole thing to go. “What I’m trying to say is… I want to thank you.”
“We want to thank you,” Smith seconded, and Hunter nodded his quiet consensus.
“For what?” Marshall rasped, staring down into his wine.
“For being the way you are,” Hunter said.
“For being a—” I stopped myself, choked down a wave of spit. “For being a better father than you had.”
Marshall finally looked up from his drink, eyes bright and glassy. “A better father thanyouhad.”
“No. You had him, yeah. But we had you.”
It was rare for Marshall to be speechless, but with those words in the air between us, he didn’t have anything to say. His jaw worked and I watched his cheek hollow as he bit into the soft flesh, probably to stop himself from crying. I guessed the move because it was something I did too.
Something Hunter did.
Smith.
Maybe even Andrew, I didn’t know. I should ask.
“Finn, I?—”
“You don’t have to say anything,” I told him quickly, taking a drink of my Manhattan and shivering from the burn. “I just wanted you to know.”
“But may I?”
“I don’t think we could stop you,” Hunter muttered, which earned him a glare packed with far more affection than I’d ever noticed before.
“You talked about your brothers being happy. What about you?”
“Respectfully, Marsh, the point of this wasn’t to talk about me.”
“Well.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Too bad.”
Smith chuckled and swirled his wine around, his lack of defense proof the emotional admission part of the night was over. I’d said what I had to say, and Marshall had moved on to being Marshall again. But even though I wasn’t ready to talk about Sophie and Daniel with him, the redirect hurt less than it would have before.
“I am happy,” I said.
And I thought about Daniel and Sophie and how good she looked in yellow. I thought about Daniel’s late-night sheet pan nachos, and I thought about the way he worshipped the ground his fiancé walked on. I tried very hard to not think about the way he looked at me with the same heavy intent because I didn’t want to get a boner at dinner with my brothers.
“Can I have a little more than that?” Marshall pressed.
There was no point, I wagered, in keeping the secret anymore. Hunter knew about my relationship with Sophie and Daniel. Smith knew I’d ended up in jail over Neil and Annette. Marshall was blessedly in the dark about the worst of it because the thought of disappointing him was enough to make me want to crawl out of my skin.
“I’m…I’m seeing a couple people.”
“Nothing serious, then?”
I managed a weak laugh. “It’s actually very serious.”
“But you’re not exclusive?”
“We are,” I said. “The, uh, the three of us.”
I could see the conflict flash across Marshall’s face, the need to tell me I was making a bad decision, the domineering worry that always followed his lack of understanding around a choice one of us had made. But I also watched him open his mouth and close it, eyes a little wide before he asked, “And you’re happy like that? With the two of them?”
My mind wandered to the way water pebbled on Sophie’s shoulders in the shower, to the way she knew how I liked my coffee without being told. I remembered how soft Daniel’s hair felt in my hands, his hot mouth stretched around my cock as I came in the back of his throat. I wondered if Marshall would think differently about it if he knew one of the people was a woman he’d met.
