Page 40 of Merrick

“If you’re mad at me for keeping one, then yeah, Merrick, you can’t keep your own. I’m tired of the double standard of you.”

That was…aggressively fair, even if he hated the way the comment made him feel. Merrick frowned, licking up a drop of beer from the side of the can before taking a swallow to cleanse the wrong answer out of his mouth.

“His name is Wilder,” Merrick said. “Though I don’t see why that matters.”

“Your house is clean and you’re quiet,” Bryce said. “It’s curious, is all.”

“I thought we were here to talk about what a horrible brother I am.”

Bryce’s eyes widened and his upper body reeled back into the corner of the couch. “Is that what you think?”

“That I’m a bad brother?”

Bryce nodded, and Merrick shrugged.

He wasn’t one of those people who intentionally sucked all of the air out of the room. He never meant to commandeer conversations or hold all the space, but he struggled to find another way. Merrick knew all of this about himself, so of course it was hard to believe that he’d created a tolerable living situation for his brother to grow up in. He’d hoped Bryce moving to LA would have been a chance for them to start over as adults, but Bryce had gotten involved with Holden so quickly, they never had a chance.

“You’re not a bad brother,” Bryce told him, brow knit together in a way that made him look a lot like their mother. “You are a lot, though.”

“I know.”

“But I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for you.”

Merrick was desperate for the gag, anything to stop himself from vomiting words into his brother’s lap. Instead, he bit the inside of his cheek until the pain sucked him back into the present. He focused instead on his bruised ass and how it hurtwhen he sat wrong on the couch, his overused cock and how heavy it lay against his thigh.

“I like that you have a lot to say,” Bryce told him. “Because it meant that I also needed to have a lot to say. It made me smarter, quicker, and I’m grateful for all of that.”

“You don’t have to do this,” he muttered.

“I don’t know how to start fresh with you,” Bryce said. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to be brothers who are adults.”

He snorted, a noise in the back of his throat that choked him until he coughed and sputtered. Bryce watched him warily from the other end of the couch, and Merrick chased the emotion down with a swig of beer.

“Is that what you want to do?”

“I think it might be easiest.” Bryce’s mouth quirked up in the corner. “You can start by telling me about Wilder.”

“Or you can start by telling me about Holden.”

Bryce’s cheeks flushed the slightest pink at the mention of his boyfriend’s name, and Merrick wondered if he had the same tell about Wilder.

“You work with him.”

“That doesn’t mean I know him.”

Bryce arched a brow. “Maybe shut up sometime then and let him get a word in.”

“He’s quiet!” Merrick protested, and Bryce leveled him with a sharp look that served as a reminder everyone around Merrick was quiet by default because he rarely gave them another choice. “Okay, that’s fair.”

His brother rolled his eyes and glanced at the coffee table, clearly used to the wood being a mess, covered with Merrick’s various drawings and paintings. Merrick had spent the morning cleaning, though, and the only piece out was one he’d started working on at Wilder’s over the weekend. It was a little interpretive, but he’d wanted to capture the colors he’d seen onthe backs of his eyelids when he had an orgasm during that spanking. He wasn’t doing a good job of capturing their depth, but Wilder liked it anyway.

Bryce leaned over the table and tapped the corner of it. “Dry?”

“Enough.”

His brother picked the paper up and studied it, eyes darting from color burst to color burst. “I’ve never seen you do one with such a dark background.”

“Trying something new,” he said, which was true in more ways than one.