Page 15 of A Matter of Fact

“When I was sick. When we were kids.” Sebastian traced his finger around the rim of the glass. “You used to give me saltines and ginger ale, but with a bendy straw.”

“I’m thirty-seven.”

“Bendy straws,” Sebastian repeated. “It almost made being sick worth it. You were so nice.”

Rhys grimaced and looked out the window, away from his brother. “Was I not normally nice?”

He didn’t need to ask; he knew the answer.

“You’re our father’s first-born son,” Sebastian said softly.

The remote control clattered when Sebastian dragged it across the table and the TV lit up. He clicked through until he found a movie Rhys had never heard of and then he set it to play. They sat together in silence. Sebastian ate through an entire sleeve of crackers, and Rhys didn’t know how his stomach didn’t bloat into a balloon that would send Sebastian into another stratosphere.

Rhys didn’t watch the movie.

He watched his brother. He watched the clouds drift through the sky outside the window. He picked at his cuticles, and he questioned every life choice he’d ever made.

“How did you do it?” he finally asked, turning to his brother.

Sebastian blinked, a flurry of movement, but his stare remained focused on whatever was happening on the TV. “How did I do what?”

“Give yourself permission to be happy.”

Sebastian scratched at the side of his nose and paused the movie, rotating his head to face Rhys like he’d seen a ghost.

“What?” Sebastian asked, setting down the remote.

“You heard me.”

“I didn’t give myself permission for anything,” his brother said. “Remington just…happened. I didn’t have control over it.”

“I find that hard to believe.” The idea of not having control over something as important as your heart…Rhys didn’t accept that. He’d implied as much to his brother in the past, and it was the basic way that he lived his life. Rhys needed to have control over everything he could, if only to counter the weight of all the things he didn’t.

“Maybe you don’t understand because you’ve never been in love.”

Rhys stood, crumpling the empty cracker sleeve in his hand and grabbing his plate. He glared down at his brother, still on the floor.

“I’ve been in love,” he hissed.

The insinuation that he never loved Callahan was like a knife. He knew how things had ended, and he knew how it looked to everyone else. He knew what people thought. What his brother thought and what Callahan thought. And he knew he had a track record. He knew it. But to say he’d never been in love…

“With Ashley?” Sebastian threw out the name of Rhys’s most recent ex-fiancee, and Rhys threw his plate into the sink, not caring if it shattered.

“Not with her.”

“Then who?”

“Do you seriously think, Sebastian, that I was not head over heels in love with Callahan McMillian?” He stormed back into the dining room with a fresh glass of ice for his brother’s ridiculous ginger ale habit. “Really?”

“I didn’t love Daniella.”

“That’s not news.”

“I…” Sebastian stared at the tumbler of ice in front of him. “I didn’t know if Callahan was like that for you.”

Like that.

A distraction.