Page 40 of Love By Design

“There’s nothing calm about your house,” I said, ignoring the cacophony of color to my right. I followed Finn down the hallway to the bedroom he’d converted into an office, finding his massive desk in the middle of the room, covered with a plastic tarp. He’d taken down all of his ornately gold-framedpaintings and stacked them against the front of the desk, each getting their own covering to keep them safe from the catastrophe that was about to be the paint job he’d solicited me for.

“And I’m not hiring it out because you’re free, and I did the analysis on the cost of my time versus my skill set, and?—”

I interrupted him, lifting a hand in surrender, “Alright, Finn. Just say you want some one-on-one time with me next time, though.”

He rolled his eyes at me, and I laughed, dropping into a squat beside him to look down at the already open can of mauve paint.

“Calming, you say?”

“That’s what the article said.”

He handed me a roller brush, and I groaned. “I read the article.”

“Of course you did.”

I killed time by painting my palm and my forearm with the dry roller, waiting for Finn to dump the paint into the tray and tell me where he wanted me to start. When he pulled out an extension rod, I raised a curious brow.

“I want to color wash it,” he said, moving quickly to dip his roller into paint and smear a garish streak across the ceiling before I could protest. We both blinked up at the streak of pink on his ceiling, and I chuckled under my breath.

“This is going to feel like being back inside the womb,” I teased, picking a wall to start. There was no way my arms had the strength to handle the ceiling, not after the spanking I’d given Silas the night before.

Painting turned out to be a welcome distraction because it was mindless and my mind was otherwise occupied with Silas. Finn blathered on about something I wasn’t quite listening to, which explained how he caught me off-guard asking, “So how was your date last night?”

“Good,” I said, before realizing what I’d admitted to.

We both froze, and I turned slowly, finding Finn standing on top of his desk, paint roller raised and a triumphant smile on his face.

“Good?”

“It wasn’t a date,” I corrected.

“What was it?”

There were a dozen answers, and none of them were right. I settled with, “It was a hookup.”

“Did he stay the night?”

“Yes.”

Finn lowered the paint roller. “That’s…”

“Don’t,” I warned.

“You don’t ever let people stay over, Marshall,” he said, like I didn’t know.

“It was an extenuating circumstance,” I said, but my cheeks burned, and they had to be a darker pink than the wall I’d just been painting.

“Fucked him until he forgot how to drive?”

“It wasn’t a date,” was all I could say.

“What’s the not-date’s name?”

“Does it matter?” I re-wet the roller and turned back to the task at hand, which was decidedlynotplaying the game of conversational chess with my brother.

“Very much.” He started painting again, the wet roller squelching against the ceiling behind me.

“Silas,” I finally said.