Lies and Other Drugs (Lies Trilogy Book 1) Page 7

  “That’s what you want to ask?” Noah was in therapist mode, and Youngblood just stood there, watching our back and forth while eyeing my naked body with interest. His cock was growing harder by the second, and I could see it’s thick outline in his slacks. Youngblood was impressive. I licked my lips.

  “I could ask when your last drink was. I could ask why you’re here. I could ask what your ex-wife thinks about you flying across the country to see a patient.” Before Noah could answer, Samuel’s bedroom door opened, and he walked down the hallway towards me, his morning wood peeking through the hole in his boxers as he smirked at my expression.

  He didn’t give Noah or Nathaniel a second glance, simply went to the sink, turned on the faucet, then bent over to gulp down some of the cool water.

  I wasn’t checking out his ass again. Nope.

  “The man I fucked, my therapist, and a murderer walk into a bar,” I began while tapping my index finger against my bottom lip. “A tad unconventional, but this could work.” I was deflecting with humor and laughing at my own jokes. ’Cause the sounds of a forced laugh were more pleasant than the suffocating silence wrapped around my throat like Samuel’s hands were last night.

  “Can you please go put some clothes on?” Noah asked.

  “Can you please go back to living in my phone and calling me in the middle of the night?” Noah and I stared at each other for a moment, sexual tension bouncing between us.

  I met Noah four weeks after William’s death. I was walking through the bad part of town, hoping someone would mug and murder me so I wouldn’t have to destroy myself on my own. Noah was lying in the street with piss on his jeans and puke on his shirt. I remembered kicking his leg to wake him up. I took him home that night and enjoyed my first therapy session while watching him sleep in his bed, making sure he didn’t suffocate on his own vomit. I cried to him about my brother. It was the most intense, emotional talk of my life, and he didn’t even remember it.

  “You wanna have a session, Noah?” I was naked for the session we had before I left for New York, too. We fucked and fought about my leaving. He wanted to stay where his ghosts were, and I wanted to rush out here to meet mine.

  Youngblood finally realized how fucking awkward this all was and shook his head, picking up a messenger bag and putting it over his shoulder. “I’m going to class,” he announced.

  “I’m going with you,” I quickly responded, running to the spare bedroom to toss on some clothes. I found jeans and an old shirt that once belonged to my brother boasting his favorite band. It was a test of sorts to see if Youngblood noticed.

  He was waiting for me, which I found surprising. “You really want to sit through my finance class?” he asked.

  “Yep,” my lips popped on the p, and Noah closed his eyes in exasperation. All the while, Samuel was sitting at the kitchen table, chomping on burnt bacon and looking at me like I was the most entertaining thing to ever happen to him.

  “Nathaniel and I have a Pike event tonight, so you and Noah can have the house to yourself,” he offered, his voice sly. I remembered our little talk last night and wondered if he was hoping Noah would whisk me away.

  “What event?”

  “One you’re not invited to,” Youngblood replied for Samuel, giving me a frown.

  Oh. I was definitely going now.

  “Anyways, tomorrow night, I’m taking you to dinner.” He dropped cash on the table, making me feel like a cheap whore. “Here’s some cash, in case you need anything. And for the record, this isn’t for the fucking amazing sex we had last night; I simply couldn’t afford you if it was.”

  “I’m leaving,” Youngblood said, not inviting me but not telling me to stay, either. It was like he wanted me to learn more about him but was too afraid to admit it. Was this what he did to William? Was he always this distant? Never letting anybody in?

  “I’ll let you run off and do your little obsessive avoidance thing, but tonight? We talk, Octavia,” Noah said, his voice deep.

  I nodded, mostly because I didn’t know how to turn down the man that I wasn’t supposed to love. Then Noah sat down at the kitchen table and ate breakfast with Samuel, neither of them saying a word as I followed Youngblood out of his penthouse.

  The moment we hit the elevator, a sense of dread hit my stomach, and I fought the urge to flee.

  “Nice shirt. William loved that band,” he said. Damn.

  I avoided the conversation. For some reason, I didn’t like that Youngblood actually new things about William. “Wanna skip class?” I asked, not really sure why I was leaning on the man I hated for comfort. The only thing that could make me spend time with him was a greater fear of something else. And I feared what I had with Noah. I feared how addicted I could get to fucking Samuel. And I feared the gun in my purse currently fastened to my shoulder as he answered me.

  “Yeah. I’ve got a place we can go.”

  William and Mrs. Mulberry were a lot alike. Both flighty, quirky, yet deep and strikingly beautiful. There were times I used to find myself staring at Mrs. Mulberry, wondering if her inability to remember normal things made her more beautiful. She aged. You couldn’t fight that. But she didn’t carry stress the same way the rest of the world did. There was a carefree nature about her that captivated me. It gave me hope that a person could not care and still be beautiful.

  They also both hated coffee. So when Nathaniel took me to a little coffee shop in the arts district because it was “his and William’s place,” I wanted to strangle him.

  He and William couldn’t have a “place.” That would mean they actually had a routine and habits and enough experiences to like things together and dislike other things. It would mean that their relationship had progressed to something far more than just the physical. Not only that, but William hated expensive coffee that required a master's degree to order, pretentious dicks that had preferred coffee places, and getting up early. Basically, this wasn’t him at all, and I kind of hated Youngblood for showing me once more that there were things about my brother I didn’t know. I hated that my brother loved someone enough to wake up at the ass crack of dawn and sip coffee with them. Because that just wasn’t who he was. But most of all, I hated that I didn’t know any of this.

  “We would meet early on the weekends, while everyone else was asleep,” Nathaniel revealed before taking a sip of his hot cup of coffee, not at all caring how fucked up that sounded. Was my brother his dirty little secret?

  “Why’d you have to hide your relationship? Your older brother came out a few years ago, and your mother is in the fashion industry. Despite being from old money, certainly they wouldn’t be against you dating a man.” If Youngblood was surprised by my extensive knowledge of his family, he didn’t show it. I spent many nights studying the Youngblood name.

  “You’re right. They wouldn’t care. William wasn’t my first boyfriend. In fact, my parents would have loved him. He was a significant improvement over my ex, Laura.” Youngblood smiled to himself, his lip tilting in amusement at some unspoken joke.

  William always had bigger crushes on my boyfriends than I did. I never fell in love, and he always fell too deeply. Broken homes usually produced two kinds of people: those who had completely lost faith in love and relationships, and those who were determined to find it. We might have had completely different views on love and life, but it worked for us. We never had the “talk.” He never came out to me, and he definitely never had to announce to our mother that he liked kissing boys. He just was. We just were.

  “I wanted to show him off, Tav,” Youngblood said, his voice barely a whisper as he looked around. I liked how William’s nickname for me sounded in his voice. We were sitting at the cafe’s covered patio in neon orange chairs while sipping Indian Summer coffee. A chalkboard sign behind his head read “Live your best life.”

  The irony wasn’t lost on me. I felt the urge to laugh bubbling up in my chest, but Noah once said my unending laughter made people uncomfortable, so I reined in the urge.r />
  “I’ve been thinking about what I should tell you. I’ve been trying to think if you’re entitled to an explanation,” Youngblood began. I could understand wanting to be selfish with memories. When a person died, it was all we were left with. “You know, whenever I’d ask William about you, he’d keep the information very surface level. He’d talk about your art. Your eccentric preferences. The only time he divulged anything of substance about you and your relationship was right here in these seats. He said that you were like one of those snapping plants that ate flies. Beautiful in your own right, but still destructive. He said you grew in the concrete, and he was nothing but a rose.”

  William was so much more than a rose. He was the garden. The sunlight. The dirt. The water. “He said you were resilient,” Youngblood continued, “always taking care of him but never really understanding.” Well damn. That hurt. And by hurt, I meant it felt like I was swimming through knives.

  “Stings, doesn’t it? Hearing things that make you question everything,” Youngblood took a sip of his coffee then placed it back down on the table. Touché, asshole.

  “The thing is, I don’t want to share him with you. ’Cause what he and I had would pluck you from that concrete, Tav. You’re so stuck snapping at flies that you’ve missed the bigger picture. So unless you can handle hearing that, at the end of the day, I loved—truly fucking loved—your brother, then we will never be anything more than enemies.”

  Could I handle it? I’ve always been selfish. William always understood me better than anyone else. Could I handle sharing my brother with the man I hated? “I can handle it.” My voice was choked. I was swallowing my truth.

  “I met William at Pike his freshman year, but we didn’t start dating up until six months before his death. When we first met, I caught him taking anti-anxiety meds before a rushing event to cope with the fact that he didn’t want to be there. He decided right off the bat that he hated me.” Youngblood continued his story, and I was hanging onto every last word. “We didn’t have love or lust at first sight. I just found myself feeling incredibly curious about him. I wanted to know who he was. Why he was sad all the time.” There it was again. Curiosity fucking up everyone’s lives.

  William was sad? He’d never mentioned that to me. Was I so self-absorbed in my own life that I hadn’t noticed?

  “He missed you. But he was also relieved to not have to fake it anymore.”

  A moody blues song played over the coffee house speakers as a woman sat beside us, lighting up her cigarette before taking in a long drawl. “Fake what?”

  “Tav, your brother was depressed.”

  Weren’t we all? Wasn’t life just some stupid cycle of being okay and not being okay and then death? I thought back to our childhood. I tried to remember a time that he was happy—truly happy. I couldn’t. With me, he was calm. With our mom, he was angry. With the world, he was numb. I was just the balm on a wound that couldn’t heal. And I liked that role. It felt good to be needed. I was the problem child. I was always the one in and out of therapy. I was the one with a diagnosis from a psychiatrist.

  “Tell me why your relationship was a secret,” I demanded, though my voice was soft. This was great and all, but it didn’t really tell me anything that granted me resolution. It just made me feel worse.

  “You’ll find out eventually, but not today. First, you have to know why I did what I did. I wanted to protect him.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” Here I was, having brunch with my brother’s murderer, and he was just talking circles around me, never really saying something of importance. Was this another game? Was he just getting off on confusing me more?

  “Why do you call me Youngblood?” Nathaniel finally asked after a long moment of silence. He was watching a couple walking by. “Your brother, he always called me that, too. I never understood why…”

  I let out a shaky exhale, knowing exactly why my brother refused to call Nathaniel by his first name. I couldn’t blame him. I guess subconsciously I was calling him by his last name for the same reason. That name once belonged to someone that was the source of a lot of pain in our life. “Our mom once dated a guy named Nathaniel,” I began, not really sure why I was telling him this. “Made us call him Nate. He was an asshole. He liked me a little more than he should have.” I stood up and went to go grab a napkin, taking a moment to cool the white-hot rage bubbling within me. Youngblood was still waiting patiently.

  “Basically, one day, my brother tried to stand up to him on my behalf, and he got the shit beat out of him. Then I beat Nate over the head with a baseball bat, and he ended up in the hospital. William hated that even when he went to save me, I had to save him.” Saying the story out loud felt like a stupid echo of all that had really happened. I could still smell the blood. Feel the invasion on my body. Taste my salty tears.

  If I closed my eyes, I could still see the disappointed expression on William’s face. “I never made the conscious decision to call you Youngblood, but I guess I hate the name, too.”

  Youngblood started cleaning up the table, stacking our cups in a neat pile that made me wonder if he ever worked in a restaurant. It was something only people that were in the service industry typically did. But I knew that couldn’t possibly be true. His parents made enough money to feed a small country.

  “Thank you for telling me. I wondered…”

  Youngblood looked at his watch before standing up. I was almost annoyed that our entire brunch was an angsty, moody chat with no resolution. I mean, I knew three things now, at least.

  My brother was depressed.

  I didn’t know him as well as I thought I did.

  My brother loved Youngblood. Or at least he loved him enough to not associate the asshole sitting across from me with the devil from our past.

  “Can we do something fun? Something that normal people who aren’t arch enemies do? We can put our feud on hold for another hour or two before I face Noah,” I offered.

  “No. I have plans,” he replied.

  “With who?”

  I wasn’t sure what it was, but something in the way he was staring at me made me wonder if he was begging me not to go. I was starting to think that Youngblood had it all wrong. He didn’t want to just pluck me from the concrete. He wanted to hold me in his fist and use my manic need for revenge to his advantage.

  Youngblood changed the conversation on a dime. “He told me about your mom’s bird. He said it kept singing all night, and you just couldn’t take it anymore. So you let the bird free and lied to your mom, saying it was her boyfriend at the time,” Youngblood began, effortlessly avoiding my question with a story about William.

  I smiled at the memory, remembering how frustrated I was with that damn singing bird my mom never let out of the cage. I thought things with wings were meant to be free. “William told me it was the only time he had leverage over you. You cleaned his room for an entire month so he wouldn’t tell your mom.”

  To this day, I still laughed when I thought about it. “Then one day you snapped. You were tired of the blackmail, so you admitted what happened.” Closing my eyes, I looked back on that day with annoyance. Not only didn’t she care, but she was happy to be rid of the bird.

  “Are you the bird, William, my mother, or me in this scenario?” I asked.

  “Would it be cliche to call me the sky?”

  “It would be poetic but really fucking dumb,” I answered.

  Youngblood wanted me to keep digging and find out all his secrets. “I’m not going anywhere. Neither are you. Cancel your plans. Oh, and I’m not calling you Youngblood,” I said. That was William’s thing, and for some reason, my obsessed brain didn’t want his thing. I wanted my own.

  “Yeah? What are you calling me then?” His upper lip quirked up.

  “How about Young?”

  “That’s an awful name,” he replied, the ghost of a chuckle bouncing in his chest.

  “It’s better than Blood.”

  We both went silent for a
moment. He didn’t look like a Young or a Blood. He looked like a rose. Or a bird.

  “Okay. Young it is.”

  Chapter 10

  Noah was sober when we got back, and I was admittedly disappointed. I could handle him when he was drunk. I’d been navigating addictions my entire life.

  William’s addiction to life.

  My mom’s addiction to pills and pain.

  My addiction to feeling nothing at all.

  But he was sober and perfect and attentive. Asshole. “You going to eat your dinner?”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I said with a sweet voice. Push push push away, pretty soon he wouldn’t stay.

  “Babe, that’s having the opposite effect on me than you’re intending,” he said in a smoky voice that sounded like sex.

  It was odd, having a normal dinner in Samuel and Young’s home. “You like to be called Daddy?” I asked. Noah coughed, adjusted his pants with a jolt, then stood up to grab another bowl full of spaghetti. He looked tired, his hands shook a bit, and I was certain that the open bottle of wine I put out was making him anxious.

  If I were more self-aware, I’d probably see my trick for what it was. I’d be able to connect my need for his failure with all the times my mom failed me. I’d be able to say that I was self-destructive because I didn’t think I deserved someone sober. I’d be able to count the number of times—three—that I’d ruined something good in my life. But he was the therapist, right? It was his job to tell me all the ways my mind was fucked up. And yet, not once had he called me out on it. Not once had he asked about Young or Samuel or coming home.

  “Tell me something about William,” he ordered before sitting down. I frowned, was this a date or a session?

  “He was depressed.” I wasn’t sure why my mind immediately jumped to that. Maybe it was the same reason I kept replaying the last night I’d ever had with him.