“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says with a gleam in his startlingly green eyes. “Good for you, brother. Good for you. I mean, if you can get beyond the fact that you’re wasting the best years of your life slogging away at an eighty-hour-a-week job instead of enjoying yourself, you can at least say that you accomplished something,” he says through a chuckle. “Seriously, just thinking about it gives me the shakes, but I’m super fucking happy for you if you’re okay with it.”
My brother doesn’t go with the societal flow. He’s eccentric and impulsive, and when you expect him to take a seat at a table, he flips it instead.
He’s also quite gifted in giving the world’s most backhanded compliments.
“Wow,” I mutter. “Thanks, Brogan. Your way with words is truly a gift.”
“I know, right?” He flashes a grin at me, completely impervious to my sarcasm, before turning his attention toward one of the televisions. He fiddles with the remote until he finds a channel that piques his interest, and I take his distraction as an opportunity to roll up the sleeves of my dress shirt to my elbows and loosen my tie.
“Champagne, Mr. Cruz?” my flight attendant Laura asks with a smile. Her strawberry-blond hair gleams in the cabin lights, and a familiar kindness shines with equal intensity from her grayish-blue eyes.
“No, thank you, Laura. But I wouldn’t mind a coffee.”
She grins. “One coffee coming right up.”
While Laura heads toward the galley for my coffee, I begrudgingly move my focus back to the man I didn’t invite on this work trip. I’d rather ignore him, but the constraints of my personality, while useful in business, don’t leave ignoring another human being for a full ten hours as an option.
My older brother still lounges on the bench like he owns the plane—he doesn’t, by the way—and his demeanor is a la the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air—laid-back, relaxing, all cool.
The last I heard, he was in LA, doing god knows what with some big-titted, Hollywood adult-film actress by the name of Clara O’Day. Her claim to fame is being “able to handle any size.” I know better than to bring her up directly, but I’m unavoidably curious how he made his way onto this plane of mine in the first place.
“So, I thought you were spending time on the West Coast,” I start with a quirk of my brow. “When did you get back in town?”
His eyes skate away from the TV briefly, just long enough to confirm I am indeed the one speaking to him, and then flit back to reruns of The Office as he answers me. “Meh. The West Coast gets boring after a while. Everyone looks the same, talks the same, and all that kale gives me indigestion.” He shrugs. “I decided it was time for a change, so I grabbed my favorite cock ring, had a goodbye orgy with a few of my favorite West Coast women, and flew back East for a while.”
“Goddamn.” I wince. “I really didn’t need all that information.”
He shrugs. “You asked.”
“No, I didn’t. I think I’d know if I asked to hear about your cock ring, for fuck’s sake.”
“That’s interesting,” he hums, tapping an annoying finger against his chin. “I didn’t think I booked a ticket on Prudish Airlines.”
I scoff and laugh at the same time. “You didn’t buy a ticket on any airline. You inserted yourself on to a flight on which you were not invited.” I tilt my head. “How is that, by the way? How did you know I was flying to Italy?”
“You know how it goes, bud.” He winks and picks up the remote to flip through the channels again. “I talked to Merl yesterday, he mentioned you were heading to the Amalfi Coast, and I figured, what the hell? Why not join you?”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Brogan is the complete opposite of me.
An aging thirty-eight to my vital thirty-four, he is a true exception to the birth order rule. He may be four years older than me, but he is neither more mature nor wiser.
Despite every indicator that says I should feel otherwise, I still love him. As my only sibling, he has a special wormhole permanently carved out in my heart.
Still, like any other case of heartworms, I’d love to get rid of him.
“So, what are your plans after your ride on my free plane ends?” I ask as the engines start to whine, the pilots firing them up, and Brogan pours himself another glass of champagne. “Are you going to stay on the Amalfi Coast or—”
“Who knows,” he interrupts with a shrug of one nonchalant shoulder. “Figure I’ll see where the Italian wind takes me.”
No plans. No schedule. Nothing.
Christ. It’s times like these that I wonder if our mother had a secret affair with the fucking pool boy.
“What about you, Theodore?”
What about me? He knows damn well why I’m traveling.
“Oh, wait,” he adds before I can open my mouth with a sarcastic reply. “I bet you have a ten-day itinerary with every hour mapped out. Probably even have a fifteen-minute window in the morning to take a shit on that schedule of yours.”
“Fifteen minutes?” I question on a laugh. “If that’s your average, you might want to consider changing up the ole diet, bud. Straining for that long won’t lead to anything but hemorrhoids.”
“Aw! You’re worrying about my plans and my rectum.” He grins and crosses his arms over his chest in an overly emotional hugging gesture. “You always were a sweetheart, Theo.”
“Sweet Jesus,” I remark, pulling out my phone and opening my email in a blind attempt to find anything—anything—other than my brother to occupy my time.
He laughs. “I guarantee, right now, your mind is fucking racing over the idea that I have no concrete plans when we land. Hell, you’ll probably already have called the resort and had a room all set up for me by the time we get there.”
I navigate away from the draft I had started to the resort manager about seeing if we have any open rooms and scratch my forehead with my middle finger. Fuck if I’m going to give him any indication he was right.
“Damn, Theo. You need to loosen up. Live a little. Not everything in life has to be so fucking serious.” He stands to his feet to rifle through the liquor cabinet and then makes his way to the mini fridge across from me. “Have a drink. Take a fucking chill pill and relax,” he adds, tossing me a beer and grabbing one for himself.
“I’m relaxed,” I counter, setting down the beer on the small table across from me. “Or I would be if you’d just sit over there—” I point to the other end of the plane. “And shut up.”
He shrugs, struts down the aisle, and sinks into the seat farthest from me. Unfortunately, he’s still in my line of sight as he pops the cap off his beer and pours nearly the entire thing right down his throat.
Good God, I might as well be living inside the movie Christmas Vacation, only it’s not Christmas, Chevy Chase is nowhere to be found, and Uncle Eddie is my fucking brother.
It’s not like I don’t expect someone to have an after-work drink, for shit’s sake, but Brogan doesn’t have a job—or know the meaning of taking the edge off.
He’ll jump right over the fucking cliff, guzzling booze until he passes out—which, I guess, may be a blessing in disguise. It’s just all the bullshit I’ll have to deal with before he passes out that’s the problem.