And I’d wanted more.
I was the one that didn’t communicate that to him.
With my mind on Brian, that reminded me that he’d sent a nude to me earlier. With everything about rescuing Luke, I’d completely forgotten about it.
“Hey big guy, you still here with me?” Jake said, waving his hand in front of my eyes.
“Oh, yeah. Just remembered something,” I replied lamely, taking a sip of my drink.
“You know, you really have it all Adam. It’s hard to watch sometimes, as we all struggle to keep up with you.”
I blinked and nearly spat out my drink. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re single, for one—”
“—Jake, it only looks like I have it all because you’re having trouble in your marriage. You need to make it work with Erin,” I scolded, going into older brother mode.
He sighed. “I know, I know. It’s just easy to envy you with this new relationship, and you love your job, and you picked this awesome place to live out here on the water…” he gazed out at the black, sparkling lake.
“Dude, you could have easily bought a lake house too. You got just as much inheritance money as I did,” I said firmly.
“Yeah, yeah…” he waved away, taking another sip. “I’ll make it work with Erin. But I still can’t get Claudia out of my mind…”
“Don’t bring her up to Erin again,” I commanded. “Don’t go back to that bar. Forget about her. It’s your duty to stay by Erin’s side,” I lectured. “You hurt her, you need to fix things.”
“I wasn’t finished,” Jake said sharply.
I paused, scanning his face carefully.
“When I told her about my crush on Claudia, and how it’s always been something that was stuck in the back of my mind, she confessed that she was having an affair. We’re getting a divorce.”
“What!” I boomed.
And then tears started coming out of his eyes, and I was backpedaling everything I said about making it work. I did my best to console him.
“I’m here for you, Jake. All of us are.”
By all of us, I meant all of our family.
Then he dried his eyes, and muttered “Thanks…”
There was a pause as his eyes flickered back and forth. He was thinking hard about something.
“Do you think I should… I should fix things with Claudia?”
“What?!” I cried, then calmed myself. “…do you really think things are completely over with Erin?”
He nodded. “Completely over. They’ve been over for a while now… remember last Thanksgiving when we were all pretending to be one big happy family?”
I thought about last Thanksgiving. The one where Brian refused to come with me because he didn’t want to seem like a couple. I had to go alone.
It was the loneliest day of my life; in part, because I got to watch Jake and Erin be all cute as newlyweds, feeding each other pumpkin pie with whipped cream.
“I remember,” I said, a sharp edge to my voice.
“That was all fake. That was something me and Erin were doing to get our parents off our back. We’d been having issues for months — her talking all the time about some guy she worked with. He was just her friend, she said…”
Then my brother took a sip of his drink and stared out into the blackness. He turned to me and said with heaviness to his words, “If you have a gut instinct about something… you need to trust it. I had an uneasy feeling about Erin and this guy for a while, but I didn’t believe myself. It’s something that eats at you. It rots you, Adam. And when you’re almost too weak to walk away, that’s when it breaks you.”
My eyes went wide and I drained my drink. There was a quiet that settled between us.
Then I asked, “Do you know who the guy is?”
If he was someone in this town, there was a good chance that I probably knew him.
He slowly sipped his drink again, then said, “Dave DuPont.”
* * *
I tried to convince Jake to stay the night, but he wouldn’t have it.
“She’s gone over to a hotel with him anyway, so my house is empty. I’ve got to go figure some things out over there… but thanks for the offer,” he smiled weakly.
I gave him a tight hug and then he was gone.
Then I felt the crystalline blue gaze on me like darts burrowing into my back.
“I heard it…” Luke said, standing in my kitchen, wrapped from head to toe in the blanket.
“How much?” I asked.
“All of it…” he said, his eyes puffy and red.
“Oh, Luke!” I said, pulling him into a tight embrace. He melded into me.
I felt protective. I felt like this was something I could shield him from.
“My dad!” he cried. “It was my dad!”
I didn’t have the hear to tell him that I’d known about the reputation of Dave DuPont for years, and Erin certainly wasn’t the first married woman he’d gotten into his bed.
“It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay,” I soothed.
He cried for a little bit longer, and then I coaxed him over to the couch.
The tears were all dried up now, and he was just staring into the distance. “My family… it’s all really over, isn’t it? My parents are getting a divorce.”
“Yeah, it’s happening,” I said, putting my hand on his. “But you have me. You can talk to me about anything, Luke.”
The way he looked right now, I truly wanted him to be able to tell me everything. I wanted him to dump all of his secrets, all of his pain, all of everything into me. I could handle it; I could help him carry it.
After some moments passed where I simply held him, feeling his warmth flood through me, he asked softly, “…do you still have ice cream?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot! Sorry…”
Luke leaned up to let me get up, and I got to work
