Love And The Real Boy - Coming About, Book 2 (18 page)

She had gotten her mother’s flaming red hair, but hers was stick straight instead of riotous curls. The O’Dowd siblings all had various iterations of their parents’ accent; some more watered down versions of others, Rich assumed depending on how much time each of them had spent in Ireland or how often they visited.

Being the youngest, Maran had only a faint accent, but she’d certainly picked up her parents’ and brothers’ speech patterns and dialect. Though she was a tiny pixie of a girl, she was as bawdy as the rest of the O’Dowds—but unlike the brothers, everything about her put Rich at ease.

He relaxed a trifle and let himself smile at her. “Not…totally. Mostly.”

She twisted in her spot on the couch to face him, propping her elbow on her knee and resting her chin on her hand. “So you’re friends with little Rory Donovan?”

Rich buried the stab of pain he felt at the umpteenth mention of his erstwhile roommate. Instead he raised a brow, giving her a sardonic look. “Little?”

Maran blushed prettily and then let out a contradictory guffaw. “I guess he isn’t so little now. Lord, but I used to have the biggest crush on him. Back when we were kids, I’d kick his arse all over the playground, until he grew a foot overnight and became less interested in fighting and more interested in grabbing my tits.”

“Maran Elizabeth!”

Maran winced at her mother’s angry voice ghosting from the kitchen. “Damn,” she whispered. “Sorry, Mam!”

Rich’s attention had started to drift around the room as the boys conversed and argued with one another when Maran turned back to him and said, “Well?”

“Huh?”

“Rory?” she said, miming a ‘go on’ gesture with her hand.

Damn. Thought I dodged that bullet
. Rich really,
really
didn’t want to talk about Rory. He didn’t know how to talk about him without going into the possible loss of their friendship, and why it happened. For some reason, he didn’t want this kind, spritely girl to know what an asshole he truly was.

“Oh. Yeah, I found him on my doorstep one day, and I guess I just kept him.”

“Omigod, you can’t just say something like that and not explain. Spill.”

So Rich told her the story of finding Rich in front of the building after he’d been tossed out on his ass. It was a good story, the one about how they’d come to live together. He found that it made him happy to tell it; it was like reliving the good times. He had Maran and Shawn breathless with laughter when he was finished.

Maran wiped her eyes and stood up. “I’ve got to go check and see if the girls need help real quick. Want another beer?” she asked.

“Love one,” Rich answered, suddenly feeling awkward again without her soothing presence.

His eyes followed her wistfully as she trotted off to the kitchen. He groaned inwardly when Donal slid across the couch until they were seated next to each other. The other O’Dowds were blessedly ignoring Rich, but Donal seemed to be the troublemaker of the brood. The guy didn’t say anything, however. He just looked Rich over like he was dissecting him, trying to figure out what made him tick. It got old after about thirty seconds.

“What?” Rich snapped, tapping into his inner asshole. He cared for Patrick, but he wasn’t about to let this Neanderthal push him around with his frat-house hazing.

Donal didn’t seem to take offense. He just kept looking, an enigmatic smile playing at his lips. “Don’t mind me, bro. I’m just tryin’ to figure out what makes you so special.”

“The fuck are you talking about? Why do you think I’m supposed to be special?”

He snorted and cocked his head at Rich, looking at him like he was just this side of stupid. “Uh, maybe because Patrick has never brought a guy to Sunday dinner before.”

Rich blinked. Twice. He was shocked into silence; he couldn’t form a coherent thought, even inside his own head.
“What?”
he managed to repeat. Patrick had acted like going to his family’s get-together was no big deal. He’d even come up with the stupid idea to practice ‘pretending’ to be boyfriends. That notion didn’t jibe with what Rich was hearing from Donal.

“You didn’t know that? Patrick is ridiculously private about his personal life,
especially
since he came out—some of the brothers didn’t exactly take it well.” Donal coughed, though it sounded suspiciously like the word ‘Aidan.’

“No, I didn’t. Patrick and I haven’t talked a lot about his family.”

“Typical,” Donal grunted. “Actually, he hasn’t brought
anyone
over. Well, except for Emmaline, that is.”

“Who’s Emmaline?” Rich asked, figuring she must have been a girl Patrick dated before he came out.

Donal’s green eyes widened comically and began shifting around the room—almost as if he were looking for an escape route. His expression grew grim, more serious than Rich would have thought the kid was capable of looking. He ran a hand over his face and stood up.

“I, uh…gotta go do a thing,” he mumbled right as Maran returned with fresh beers.

She took a quick look between Rich and Donal, and then glared at Donal. “What the hell did you do? I was gone for five minutes!”

Donal took advantage of the moment when Maran was juggling her own beer and handing one to Rich to make a hasty exit.

“Fucking coward. Don’t listen to whatever that idiot said.”

Rich was still so confused by the whole exchange that he wasn’t sure what to think about what Donal had actually said. “Who’s Emmaline?”

Maran went pale and closed her eyes, her fingers gripping her beer bottle until they turned white. “Christ,” she whispered, casting a guilty look over her shoulder to see if her mother had heard.

She sighed, and when she met Rich’s eyes, hers were suspiciously glassy. “Emmaline was a girl Patrick was with before he came out. A friend of the family. Look,” she started, pausing to blow her bangs out of her eyes—probably to stall. “It’s not a good story, okay? I think Patrick should tell you himself. Understand?”

Rich nodded, but he wasn’t sure he did understand. Things were getting more and more cryptic, and all he wanted was for Patrick to come back inside. That was a disturbing thought in and of itself. When was the last time he looked to another person for protection, for comfort? Had he ever? He had with Rory, possibly, but even then, it was still at arm’s length.

“Just ask him sometime when you two are alone. I’m sure he’ll tell you about it.”

“I guess,” Rich said. He wasn’t sure if they were at a point in this ‘relationship,’ such as it was, where they shared all their painful personal stories. Sure, Rich had shared his own, but John-Michael showing up had pretty much made it impossible not to.

Maran glanced around the room, then leaned toward him conspiratorially. “You know what? I’m just dying to know what’s going on out there between Patrick and Aidan. I’m sure they’re probably just standing around grunting and dick-measuring, but let’s go find out.”

Without giving him a chance to respond, she grabbed his wrist in a surprisingly strong grip and pulled him up. They wove their way through the crowd and out the sliding glass patio door.

The door spilled them out onto a flagstone patio, hemmed in by a solid hedge. There were a couple of sets of chairs and tables, a hot tub off to the side, and the whole thing was covered by an ivy-draped pergola.

The yard was plush and meticulously groomed, dotted with a few mature oaks. Rich could see Patrick and Aidan clearly a few yards away, but from their vantage point on the patio, the men likely couldn’t see him and Maran.

“I don’t know if I’m comfortable spying on them.”

“Oh, shush. Eavesdropping is the only way we find out anything juicy in this family.”

“Uh…”

“Ssh! Come on, let’s get closer.” She pulled Rich behind her, and they sneaked around the side of the hedgerow until they were between it and one of the bigger trees. “Get down—I think we can hear them here.”

Rich groaned softly and sank to his knees next to her on the soft grass. This was such a bad idea.

* * * *

Patrick thought he heard a noise back toward the house, so he clamped his jaw down on what he was going to say. Instead, he studied his brother’s thunderous face. He and Aidan had been like a couple of powder kegs since he came out. The pressure of the tension between them built and built, and it had to have somewhere to go. True to the path of least resistance, it looked like it was going to explode all over his parents’ goddamn lawn.

Taking a deep breath, Patrick considered his approach. Aidan had become slowly more volatile every time they got near one another. He didn’t want to set him off deliberately, but the whole thing had to come to a head eventually. Patrick wasn’t going to stop being gay, so that only left Aidan and his damn attitude.

As it turned out, it wasn’t up to him.

“How the hell could you bring
him
here? Into our family home?” he growled, gesturing blindly toward the house.

Well, hell
. “Look,
brother
, I know you’ve had a hard time accepting my sexuality since I came out, but that’s no reason to take it out on Rich. He’s not the cause of this anymore than I am. It just
is
. You’re going to have to learn to deal with it.”

Aidan bared his teeth in a feral sneer and took a menacing step forward. “It’s not about bloody Rich, is it? Nor is it about your gayness—although that’s a sick cosmic joke if I ever heard one. It’s about
Emmaline
. It’s about who she was to this family, and about how bringing your little trick into our family home is disrespectful to her memory.”

Patrick froze. Every time he heard her name, it was like losing her all over again, along with the thing he loved most in the world—sailing. But what happened with Emmaline was several years ago. He couldn’t imagine why Aidan was harping on it now.

He had to swallow past a lump in his throat to reply. “That’s not fair. I loved her. Even though I couldn’t be what she needed, I loved her. I’d already told her everything before we went out on the boat. We were just friends—we’d already decided to call off the engagement before the accident. Aidan, you
know
this.”

“But she followed you. She’d have followed you anywhere, Paddy. Doesn’t matter in the end whether you were friends or lovers, does it? She chose
you
.”

Patrick noted Aidan’s pale, drawn face. While he was still as handsome as ever, there were lines around his mouth and eyes that made him look older than he should have. Tired. And when Patrick looked—really looked—into his brother’s eyes, so full of anguish and something akin to betrayal…then he knew.

“You loved her, didn’t you?”

Patrick hadn’t meant to say it. The thought just popped out without checking in with his brain-to-mouth filter first. He waited for Aidan to deny it, to shake his head. Anything. But instead, he lowered his eyes and swallowed thickly, a few tears slipping out of the corners of his eyes. Patrick didn’t truly believe he had the right of it until that very moment.

“My God. You
did
.”

Aidan raised his head, and his face morphed into a twisted mask of rage. “Like you didn’t know that! Like you didn’t like to rub it in my bloody face every chance you got.”

“I didn’t,” Patrick said quietly. “I didn’t know. If you thought I was rubbing it in your face…well, it wasn’t intentional.”

Aidan sighed. He lost all of his bluster all at once, and his body seemed to wilt. “Like I said, doesn’t matter. She was with you for the long haul. Right up until you killed her.”

Patrick felt the blow like a bullet ripping through his body. He never meant to hurt Emmaline. When he came out to her, she was sad and a little angry, but they’d worked it out and managed to form a strong bond of friendship. He
had
loved her, and he missed her every day of his life.

His voice broke when he answered his brother, and he didn’t bother to hide his tears. “I didn’t kill her, Aidan. I just took her sailing.”

“Aye,” Aidan said, nodding as if it all made perfect sense. “Brought her back in a body bag, didn’t you, though?”

Patrick’s choked cry was cut off by a roar behind them.

“Boys! Enough!” Jonathan O’Dowd strode up to them like a charging bull, his barrel chest puffed out and his hands balled into fists. “Not in my house.”

“Da, we were just airing out some things between us,” Patrick said, feeling the absurd need to take some of the focus away from Aidan. Apparently, it was the least he could do, he thought, as his heart seized with grief and guilt.

“Oh, I know exactly what it was you were doing.” Jonathan closed in on them where they stood facing each other, and clasped both Patrick and Aidan by the back of their neck. While he was a head shorter than his boys, Jonathan’s presence, with his ruddy complexion and his startling white hair, seemed to dwarf them.

Patrick immediately lowered his chin and stooped his shoulders. A surreptitious glance through his eyelashes told him that Aidan had done the same. It was an instantaneous reaction from being scolded by their brash, old-world-Irish father—like a cat being scruffed. The fight went out of them.