Page 6 of My Brother’s Best Friend

“Seriously, this tousled, hayseed bachelor-naturalist thing is cute up to a point, but what happens when your cabin gets struck by lightning, or encircled by howling coyotes, slavering for your blood? I don’t want you to die alone out here. You want another beer?”

That last sentence was directed at Deacon, Levi’s friend who’d arrived a few minutes ago. He was sitting in a chair made out of old shipping pallets, padded with throw pillows I’d rescued from my grandparents’ house before they moved into a retirement community. A metal deck chair with flaking green paint completed the living room furniture, and I sank into it.

I supposed Deacon was my friend now, too. It was hard to get used to that idea, though. Hard to get used to the idea that I had friends at all. So much of my life had been solitary that it still startled me when people wanted to hang out with me.

Growing up, Levi had been my only friend. I was awkward and quiet, and my parents were aloof and stand-offish, considering themselves better than most of the people on the island. It hadn’t made it easy to get to know people.

By the time my dad moved away and my mom got sick, it was like I’d missed a critical period for social development. I couldn’t figure out how to make small talk. Couldn’t figure out how you went from strangers to friends without scaring people away with your weirdness.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Levi—it was Levi liking me that threw me for a loop. He was warm and outgoing. I was shy and silent and spent way too much time in my head. I wasn’t a talker like Levi, or open like Deacon, or any of the other qualities I was pretty sure made a person likable.

I was just…me. Six foot seven inches of hesitant, anxious-and-failing-to-hide-it introversion. I never knew what to say, always felt like people were judging me, and had made my peace with my quiet little life.

But Levi didn’t seem able to accept that.

“We don’t have coyotes on Summersea,” I told him. “We have gray foxes, but they’re solitary hunters and unlikely to encircle a cabin. There were scattered reports of a couple of red wolves here in the 1870s, but those are of dubious veracity, and in any case, red wolves have been officially extinct in the wild since 1980. And while Canis latrans has moved into the void left by Canis rufus across most of Georgia, rising sea levels, real estate development, and the lack of any bridges to Summersea have combined to keep the island free of large mammalian predators. In fact, there was a proposal to bring coyotes to the island in the 1990s to help control the deer and rodent population, but residents voted it down three times before the advocacy group dropped it in 2001.”

Levi took one look at me and burst out laughing. Even Deacon couldn’t help smiling.

“Dude, I say this with so much love, but this is exactly why you need to get laid.” Levi stood and walked back to the refrigerator.

I flushed. This was my problem. I either didn’t talk enough, or I talked too much about the wrong things.

“Sorry. I know I kind of go off on tangents sometimes. But I don’t think hooking up with someone is going to stop that.”

“I’m not trying to stop it, I’m saying you need to find someone who’ll find your tangents as charming and thrilling as we do—” Levi paused to point between himself and Deacon “—but who has, you know. Breasts.”

This time, it was Deacon who rolled his eyes. “Ignore him,” he told me. “He just fixates on other people’s love lives so he can ignore the trainwreck that is his own.”

“Excuse me, I don’t fixate, I care.” Levi lifted a finger. “I lovingly express my care for my friends, and support their desires for full, meaningful lives, and science shows that a life well-lived is one full of deep connections and intimacy. Unlike some men, I’m not afraid of opening up.”

“Clearly.” Deacon cracked open the beer Levi handed him. “You talk as much as Cam, and make even less sense. No offense,” he added with a nod in my direction.

“None taken.” I looked down at my bottle.

“I feel like a better way of supporting your friends might be asking them what they want. I haven’t exactly heard Cam moaning about how alone he feels,” Deacon continued.

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Levi barked a laugh. “Cam could be bleeding out from a coyote attack—”

“We don’t have coyotes.”

“—Fine, bleeding out from a wild, venomous rodent attack,” he amended, “and he’d still refuse to ask for help because he wouldn’t want to bother anyone. Which is precisely why you need someone out here with you,” he said, looking over at me.

“To watch while carnivorous rabbits attack me?” I raised an eyebrow.

“And to insist on taking you to the hospital afterwards, because you know you’d talk yourself out of it, left to your own devices. A girlfriend would make you see sense.”

I couldn’t decide which annoyed me more—that he wouldn’t let this go, or that he was probably right.

At least, partially right.

Because I did avoid going places that forced me to interact with lots of strangers, if I could help it. And I wasn’t a big fan of people focusing on my body, which would probably be necessary in a hypothetical death-by-rabbit scenario.

But the other part…

“Isn’t your brother in town these days?” Deacon asked Levi. “Why can’t you meddle in his life instead?”

“Oh, believe me, I plan to. But not his love life. He’s just getting over a breakup, so I don’t think he’s ready to jump into something else.”