Bewitched by Bella's Brother (21 page)

complete clarity.

It didn’t matter. Just didn’t. It didn’t matter if they had a cold or an allergy or if Jordan’s pet bug died or if he found a lizard and wanted to set it loose in the kitchen or if Asa came home from a really bad day and needed someone to

rub his feet or his shoulders or make his drink or just give him a hug, it didn’t matter. Didn’t. Fucking. Matter.

Sebastian wanted to be there. He wanted to be there

more than anything in the world.

He got on the computer and in one hour, he’d secured

his plane ticket, transferred his job back to Auburn, and given his regrets to Dr. Two-ex-husbands-no-happy-kids

Schlesinger. Ten hours later, he left his car in long-term parking, took his laptop and his ten favorite T-shirts and three favorite pairs of jeans, and got on the plane from Spokane. He even remembered socks and underwear.

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Two hours after that, he was at Sac International,

looking for a cab and hoping he had enough money in his

account to pay the outrageous cab fare this was going to cost him.

He did.

In another two hours, he was home.

He still had his key from the summer, and Bella was

asleep sitting up on the couch in the lamplight. She heard the door open and saw him come in out of the still-warm

summer dark, and launched herself into his arms like a jet-propelled-body-rocket.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded in the middle

of a rib-cracking hug. She looked like shit: her hair was falling out of its braid, she was wearing an old T-shirt and pajama pants, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in two nights.

“It’s my home, heifer! Where should I be?”

She laughed against him and grabbed his suitcase.

“They’re upstairs—Jordan’s asleep—but wake him up

anyway, he’s been asking for you. Asa’s….” She grimaced.

“Asa’s hella sick, baby. He’s in and out and weird… he keeps asking for you, Sebastian, and he always forgets you’re not here….” Her voice trailed off and she brightened. “Except you are here! Sebastian’s here, and you’ll make everything

better!” Her voice broke a little. His self-confident Bella sounded suddenly young and lost and needy. She hadn’t

sounded this bad when she’d confessed to her misspent

youth. In his memory, she had never sounded lost.

“You’re going to stay, right?”

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All summer long he’d been wishing for a brick with

which to whap himself upside the head. God finally dropped one from heaven, and it nearly smacked him senseless.

He was needed. Asa, Bella, Jordan—he’d thought the

whole time that he had needed them, and it terrified him. If he needed them, he was vulnerable to them—oh the horror!

He needed to be self-sufficient, able to live on his own like a grownup, but that wasn’t true, was it? It was two ways,

wasn’t it?

“Stay? Are you kidding? I have to—I just dropped out of

school and gave up my lease.”

She dropped the suitcase this time to cling to him and

cry.

Eventually she picked it up again and grabbed his hand,

hauling him toward the stairs. “Jordan’s room first,” she said decisively. “Give him a hug, tell him you’re staying; he’ll sleep better. Where do you want your bags?”

“In Asa’s room,” he said decisively, and she paused on

the staircase to grin tiredly.

“Good.”

Jordan was sleepy, like she said, but he wrapped his

skinny little arms around Sebastian’s neck so tight he

almost left bruises.

“You’re here… you’re here, and it’s not Thanksgiving!”

“You feel icky, Big J—where else am I going to be?”

Jordan leaned back into the bed smiling, his big hazel

eyes lighting up and then growing hooded and sleepy, just that fast. “Are you going away again when I’m better?

Because I can be sick for a long time.”

Yup. Still a little conman in his Big J.

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“Nope—I’m gonna be here as long as your Dad wants

me. That means you’ve got to get better soon so you can go back to school!”

Jordan’s eyes were closed but his smile was very

satisfied. “He missed you a lot. You’re going to be here forever.” He was still feverish, so no spots yet, but that didn’t stop him from reaching tiredly to scratch at something on his arm.

Sebastian stopped the scratching with a gentle hand,

then laughed softly and kissed his (still warm) forehead.

“That’s the plan, little man.” He left Jordan sleeping as he slipped out of Jordan’s bedroom and into Asa’s. Bella

stopped him on her way out, thrusting a bottle of ibuprofen and a glass of water into his hand.

“Make him swallow this,” she murmured. “Right now

he’s giving me shit about it and he’s burning like a fucking furnace.”

Sebastian smirked and tried to make her laugh. “Baby,

the day I can’t get a man to swallow is the day I turn in my gay card.”

She did laugh, just for him, and he kissed her cheek.

“Go to bed, Bella-love—my shift, okay? You look like

shit; it’s time for the bench to take the field.”

Bella rolled her eyes and gave him a push toward her

brother’s room. “Then go—that benchwarmer’s ass is only

getting flatter!”

Sebastian eyed the bedroom warily when he walked in.

The once orderly, tranquil space was now a disaster. The hamper was full—bedding and clothes were stuffed into it and bulging out, and given the smell, he assumed they were soaked with sweat. There were about a thousand water

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bottles lined up on the headboard and the sink by the

bathroom, and the end tables, as well as cloths that had once been wet but had since dried draped on all of the

spaces left over. Poor Bella—she
had
been overwhelmed, hadn’t she?

His suitcase and carry-on were there on his side of the

bed—the side away from the alarm clock. Or, it used to be his side of the bed. Right now it was occupied by six-feet, five-inches of massy, muscled male, wearing sleep shorts and a white T-shirt. No spots as of yet—but they were

coming.

Bella had texted him details when he’d been on the

plane (not that she’d known that was where he’d been when she texted). Julie’s youngest had brought this plague upon both their houses, and she’d coughed directly into Asa’s face as he’d bent to give her a glass of water. She’d cleared up the last of the spots on the day Asa and Jordan had developed the fever. Sebastian had thought bitterly that this was yet another thing he had missed by not being there. If he’d been there, at least he would not have been so surprised when it happened. But then, looking at Asa’s room left no space for bitterness, now did it?

Asa’s big, muscular, safe body was wrapped his arms

securely around Sebastian’s pillow—the one with the

rainbow flag pillowcase, the one concession Sebastian had made to moving in.

Sebastian’s heart broke just a little as he watched Asa

snuggle his cheek into that pillow like a kid squishing a teddy bear.

“Here,” he said softly, bumping Asa’s knees with his

hand. “Scoot over, big guy, and you can hug the real me.”

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“Sebastian?” Asa turned his head and squinted into

Sebastian’s face with that same befuddled, dear look of

Bella’s initial sketch. Bella
had
known her brother, even then when she hadn’t thought so. Here he was, all power and

patience and steady, steady love—and just enough

earnestness to be surprised when someone like his dumbshit lover didn’t know how to take all that good shit in one pretty package.

Sebastian placed a gentle kiss on his lover’s forehead.

“Hey, baby. How you doing?”

Asa grunted. “I feel like shit. Why’d you come back?”

“Because you feel like shit.”

“I’ll be fine.” Asa rolled forward and hunched a shoulder protectively, like he was curling away from pain.

“Don’t give a crap,” Sebastian told him, rubbing a soft

hand on the back of that shoulder, thinking he had some

oatmeal soap that might help Asa deal with the itching that would happen in a couple of days.

“Don’t you have a future?” Asa asked, and Sebastian

had to smile. It took the chicken pox to bring it out, but apparently he had a little bit of asshole in him. Well, good.

Sebastian had some flake and some snark and some

neurosis. If it took a little bit of asshole to deal with all that, then they were well matched.

“Sure I do, big guy—and right now, he’s overdue for

some fever drugs and hogging my pillow.”

Asa grunted. “It’s hard to be mad at you when you talk

pretty,” he said sourly, and Sebastian grunted back.

“Wait until I force your mouth open like a sick cat and

shove ibuprofen down your gullet— you’ll find it plenty easy to hate me then.”

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A shadow of that faint smile dusted Asa’s lips. “Yup.

Sweet talk—gets me every time.”

He was stalling.

“Asa, I love you, but if you don’t take your medicine, I’ll wait until you’re asleep and shove it up your ass. It’s your call, but so far you haven’t bottomed. I think that would be a lousy way to start.”

Asa’s shoulder shook in spite of his exhaustion. “Okay,

fine—but I can see why that doctor thing is only a pretty piece of paper for you.”

Sebastian gave him the medicine and watched as he

downed three tablets and pretty much the entire glass of water. Sebastian took the glass from Asa and scooted him to the middle of the bed so Sebastian could sit up and lean back against the headboard and talk to him.

“Was that so hard? Really? Jesus, why are you such a

baby about it?”

Asa made a child’s sound. “Rips up my stomach. I’ll

crap blood for a week.”

Sebastian raised his eyebrows. “That was an unexpected

answer.”

“I’m old, Sebastian.” Asa’s eyes were closed as he spoke, and he leaned unconsciously into Sebastian’s hand, which was stroking through the hair at his temple. “I’m old and I have complications. Why do you think I let you go?”

Sebastian grunted, and kept stroking his hair. Asa’s

hair needed washing—and brushing—and Sebastian could

see the occasional silver or wiry black strand in the mess of it as he smoothed it back from Asa’s face.

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“That’s why you let me go? I thought at first it was

because you didn’t need me, but I can see I wasn’t the only dumbshit in the bag of diapers, was I?”

Asa lifted his head to Sebastian’s lap, wrapped limp

arms around his waist, and burrowed that uncomfortably

hot body into his hip. “Of course I need you,” he grumbled. “I just got used to living without, that’s all. Figured, you needed to go finish your education, I could live without you until you were done. Didn’t mean I didn’t need you—or at least the hope of you.” That grip around Sebastian’s waist tightened, and Sebastian leaned over and placed a kiss on that great leonine head.

“I need you too. The real you. Even hot and sweaty and

sick and old and crapping blood. Now get some sleep and

build up your strength, because when you get better, I’m going to have to hit you up for the cash to bail my car out of long-term parking at Spokane International airport, and the shock alone is going to knock you on your ass.”

Asa let out some little puffs of air that might have been a laugh, and then he followed orders and fell immediately asleep. Sebastian had actually had one hell of a day himself, and he dozed off sitting up in bed, his arms wrapped around the big baby with the chicken pox who also happened to be the love of his life.

The next four days were a blur of tending to the two sick Bryne men. Jordan was needy and Asa was fractious and

both of them needed medicine and cold cloths and basic

tending. Sebastian got there and took over his share of it—

and for all that he thought of himself as a selfish creature, Bella told him later that he was a pretty damned awesome nursemaid.

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Sebastian rolled blood-shot eyes at her; she
would
say something like this at four in the morning after they’d

changed Jordan’s bedding for the third time that day. “I’m no better at it than you are, heifer. We just love them, so we stretch our skill set.”

Bella had to laugh at that—but not loudly. She was as

tired as he was.

Finally—finally—they got to a place where Asa and

Jordan could sit up in bed and watch television together. Of course, it was about the time the first lesions appeared, and that made them both itchy, irritable, and genuinely

unpleasant, but Sebastian was so relieved they were going to be okay that he actually tolerated their unpleasantness with limited bitchiness in return. Besides, their recovering patient nastiness gave him a chance to ditch them in front of the TV

in Asa’s room while he settled down to clear up some loose ends.

Except just as he sat down to make the plane

reservation to go back and get his stuff, the door opened, and Brenda and Bjorn Bryne walked in. When Sebastian had arrived, they’d stayed away at Bella’s request—nobody

wanted the elder Brynes to get sick, no matter how small the risk. But they’d stopped by once about two days before for a hasty conversation with Bella and to drop off some chicken soup that Sebastian had appreciated even if Asa and Jordan hadn’t been up to eating it.

Now they walked in looking very proud of themselves—