“I’m a grad student trying to take over a multi-billion dollar company,” I say to Lo. “If I didn’t look like shit I’d be on drugs.”
I hear Ryke bang his head against a pipe. “Fuck me,” he curses.
“Fornicating with the rats already?” I ask, cupping the warm mug.
“Fuck you, Cobalt,” he says with a grunt as he moves slowly. “The shortest one of us should have crawled through here.”
Lo immediately takes offense. “If I knew you were going to bitch, I would have done it myself, and I’m only one inch shorter than you, bro.”
Ryke hits his head again and lets out a frustrated growl. “I’m still six fucking three.”
Lo rests his forearms on his thighs as he squats and watches his brother through the door. “Besides being a giant, what’s taking you so long? You set the trap. You should know where it is.”
“It must have carried the trap with it.”
“Just use your nose,” I suggest. “Dogs have the best sense of smell.”
Lo laughs while I casually take another sip from my coffee.
“Fuck off,” Ryke curses, which sounds really less threatening through the wall.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. I take it out and read the text quickly.
Have you given *the* talk to Loren yet? – Rose
I’m not surprised Rose has reverted back to fixating on Lily and Loren’s problems. She likes caring for her sisters, but I think focusing on Lily and Lo distracts her from dealing with her own issues.
I text back: I’ll do it right now.
One less problem that she obsesses over, one less stress in her life. I pocket my phone, and as I turn to Lo, I frame Rose’s question as my own. “Is Lily having more sex than usual?”
Rose doesn’t know this, but Lo is surprisingly forthcoming about sex with Lily. He’s motivated by the fear of enabling her again, and it helps that he trusts my sage advice.
“She’s not having it, but she wants it.” He stands up, the trash bag still in hand. “This whole fucking reality show puts her on edge. And she medicates her anxiety with sex, which means I’m not getting laid for the next week, and she only gets my fingers.” He looks at the camera attached to the corner of the ceiling and wall, and he waves his fingers at the lens. Then he winks.
And that is why this show is going to be popular. The unfiltered narrative is exactly what makes good television.
“So you’re not having sex?” I say, not adding any disbelief to my tone, even though it rings in my head. They’re almost always fucking at night and in the morning. It’s easy enough to hear through the walls.
Loren rubs the back of his neck, probably trying to decide if he’s going to lie or not. When he drops his hand, he says, “No, I mean…” He takes a breath, and I wait it out patiently. “We fucked the other day. She was a little compulsive afterwards, so I want her to abstain for three or four days and see how she does with that.”
“And you used condoms?” I ask.
He goes quiet for a second and then bangs on the wall with his fist. “Ryke, hurry the fuck up.”
“Lo,” I say.
He turns on me with heated eyes. “This conversation is over.”
“I’m trying to imagine what Lily will look like pregnant,” I say casually. “Would her entire body swell or just her belly?”
“At least I’m getting laid,” Lo refutes, pure malice edged in his voice. “How long have you been fucking your hand?”
He clenches his jaw after he says the words, holding back a grimace. Lo has a way of cutting people up with words, and he’s improved from the first time I met him. He was a drunk asshole. Plain and simple. Now he’s a sober asshole who regrets when his filter doesn’t work properly.
Lucky for him, I’m difficult to piss off.
“My hand and I go way back,” I say nonchalantly and even produce a smile.
He seems to relax when he knows he hasn’t pushed me away.
“I’m not your brother.” I motion towards the crawl space where Ryke has effectively disappeared. “I’m not going to curse you out for doing something stupid. But I am dating your girlfriend’s older sister, so my own balls are on the line here.”
He nods like he understands. “The repercussions of getting into bed with a she-devil.”
“And I fucking like her,” I refute, “so make my life easier and use a condom.”
I don’t tell him that he’s not ready to be a father, that the idea (for anyone) of Lily becoming pregnant is frightening. I don’t tell him that alcoholism is hereditary or that he’s too busy to raise a kid right now. He knows all of this. He’s heard it a thousand times from Rose and his own brother.
What Rose and Ryke don’t understand is that if you say something over and over again, you can become desensitized to it. Andy Warhol used the theory in his painting of the electric chair. He repeated the image until you could no longer see it as something heinous.
It lost its meaning.
I don’t repeat what’s already been said. I want my words to mean something.
So I gave him my selfish reason.
I’m the asshat who only cares about himself.
I am what he needs me to be.
He stares at the ground for a long moment, processing. “I’ll be better about it,” he mutters under his breath.
Noise from the crawl space ends our conversation. Ryke must knock into three pipes at once. He coughs and says, “There’s so much fucking mold down here. No one should be fucking living on this floor until we hire someone to clean it.”
Lo bends down to the door again. “If this is your way of getting Daisy to room with you, you can forget it. I’m just barely tolerating your friendship.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ryke retorts. “There were rats in her room, she’s living near mold, and your first assumption is that I want to fuck her?”
Loren’s eyes narrow. “I didn’t say anything about fucking her.”
Ryke groans.
Daisy is a sore subject between them, clearly. Since Ryke and Loren have a new relationship—just meeting a year and a half ago—there’s tension involving the Calloway girls. Loren grew up with them. Ryke did not. Naturally, Lo would be protective of Daisy, but the problem I have is that he’s constantly consumed by Lily, always taking care of her, that he has no room to do so for another girl, not even one he sees as a little sister.
So while Lo believes he’s protecting Daisy from his half-brother, he’s really creating a barrier between Daisy and the only person here who’ll look out for her first rather than last.
And yet, I can’t say a word about it. I have to let these things play naturally. My interference won’t do any good. My words wouldn’t resonate with Lo the way I’d want them to. So I stay silent on the matter.
“I’ll fucking room with Scott,” Ryke says, speaking loudly so we can hear him from the hallway. “Daisy can take my room. Or I’ll stay down here and switch with her. I don’t give a shit. None of the girls should be around this.”
“And what if she hears Lily and me fucking through the walls? There’s a reason she’s on the lowest level.”
Ryke says nothing, but I can practically feel him fume from far away. Lo looks over his shoulder at me, asking with hard eyes whether he’s right or wrong.
“You can’t censor a girl who’s nearly seventeen, especially not a high fashion model,” I tell him, my words not harsh like his or rough like his brother’s. I’m one-hundred percent even-tempered, calm. At ease. It gets him off the defensive. “She’s heard and seen everything you have, if not more. I’ll call someone to look at the crawl space, but until it happens, Rose would want her sister somewhere clean.”