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“I hate you,” he tells me, poking at his fish. “So much.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I hate you, is Avery for, I must like you because I’m using words instead of pounding your face in.
We’ve all tried to teach him manners, but since we basically pulled him out of a gutter, it’s been a slow, painful process.
I’ve been trying to remove his head from his ass for the better part of three years, and sometimes it seems like I’ve accomplished nothing. Until he drops his ghostly blue eyes to the plate and mutters, “Thanks, I guess.”
Carrying my dinner to my usual place at the long island, I pause to swat the back of his close-cropped head. “Any time.”
He spears another piece of asparagus like he’s a gladiator and the fork is a javelin. “You got practice tomorrow?”
Now, it’s my turn to try not to cringe. “Yeah. First one back for the season. Looking forward to it.”
Avery doesn’t buy my shit any more than I buy his. The corner of his mouth twitches up. “Sucks to be a living legend.”
I’m starting to hate that term. Living legend. Implying, what, exactly? That I should be dead?
Because I’m thirty-five and I still play football? Or does it mean that most people who play longer than I have dropped dead? Either way, I can’t figure out how to not be insulted. And Avery knows it.
I talk around a mouthful of sea bass. “Sucks to be a fighter without a belt.”
He glares. Back to Outright Murderous.
Eh, just as well. Keeps me on my toes.
As I chuckle, two sets of footsteps approach from either side of our townhome. I could probably pick them out of a lineup at this point. After fifteen years as a pack, there isn’t much I don’t know about the Thorne brothers.
The slow, distracted shuffle from the left will be Spencer. Holding a book, I’d bet. Or a stack of papers. He probably has a red pen behind his ear, too. And muttering—he’ll be muttering about something.
That shit always makes me laugh. It reminds me of the day we met, two freshmen assigned to be college roommates. I walked into the room and found the guy muttering about his socks, pissed as all hell that the tiny dorm didn’t have “a proper armoire.”
The horrified look on his face when I suggested he stash his socks in a shoebox next to his bed still makes me snicker.
Most people who met us didn’t understand how the hell we lived together. Sometimes, I still wonder. There probably haven’t been many sets of best friends who are more opposite than us.
But it just… happened. Spencer helped me with classes. I helped him not get his shit kicked in over his know-it-all tendencies. I made food, and he cleaned the room.
It worked.
When our first year of courses came to an end and we decided to get a place off campus, I knew he and I would be a pack. Meeting his older brother, Tristan—who seamlessly stepped in and rearranged our lives until they were exactly what we wanted them to be—only sealed the deal.
Tristan has always been powerful. I was second-string on the university football squad until he took a few meetings, made some calls. Three years later, I got drafted to the exact team I hoped for. When I asked how he pulled that off, he pretended not to understand the question.
I assume it’s the same way Spencer got into every doctoral program he applied to. And how he landed a prestigious position as a researcher and professor, despite not having a single people skill to speak of.
If the permanent scowl on his face isn’t enough of a clue, his students usually figure that out within two or three clipped sentences.
His intensity scares the shit out of people. It’s for the best that he’s usually too engrossed in his work to notice or care. Although, I do hope his TAs get some sort of therapy disbursement.
Opposite Spencer’s shuffles, I hear quick, focused paces. That would be Tris, our pack alpha. Likely coming from his study, where he holes up and does whatever a senator does.
Years later, it’s still not clear to me. But it must be important because he never seems to relax.
The second he appears on the threshold, his ever-present phone in one hand, I can tell he’s looking at it but isn’t even seeing it. With his free fingers, he clutches what appears to be a dead fern.
Who knew we had a plant in this house?
