Page 10 of Wraith

His jaw does something complicated.

“June.”

“It’s a free country.”

“That’s…” He gestures at the basket with the hand that isn’t hiding his paper bag behind his back. “That’s a lot of rope.”

“I like rope.”

“Since when?”

“Since tonight.” I shift the basket to my other arm. “Evan, seriously, what’s in the bag?”

“I already told you.”

“You told me Molly sent you. You didn’t tell me what’s in the bag. I’ve shown you mine, so you show me yours.” I tilt my head. “What does Molly need from The Love Hole at midnight?”

He doesn’t answer, which is its own answer, and I watch the tips of his ears go red in the low lighting. My brother, who has faced down Sons of Sorrow with a gun in his face and didn’t blink, is blushing in a sex shop because I asked him what’s in his paper bag.

This is genuinely the most useful information I have gathered in months.

“Let me see it.”

“It’s nothing,” he says.

“Evan.”

“It’s personal.”

“We’re in a sex shop,” I say. “Everything in here is personal. Show me the bag.”

I really don’t care to see what sex toys my brother is buying, but I can’t think of any other way to get him to leave me the fuck alone so I can finish buying what I need.

He looks at me. I look at him. The bass-heavy music throbs from wherever it’s hiding, and somewhere deeper in the store someone knocks something off a shelf and says “oh, jeez” in the most wholesome voice, and the lavender air freshener is doing its absolute best and failing, and we stand there in the aisle of The Love Hole at half past midnight, two Wilders in a standoff, neither of us willing to blink first.

I have always been better at not blinking.

He brings the bag out from behind his back with the slow, defeated energy of a man surrendering a weapon, and he opens the top and tilts it toward me.

I look inside.

There’s an enormous dildo — really committing to the bit, is what I think at first, because it is not a modest purchase, it is aspirational — and two blindfolds, and a bottle of lube that is inadequate to the monumental task in front of it.

I look up at my brother.

He is now the color of a stoplight.

“Molly sent you,” I say.

“She made a list.”

“She sent you to The Love Hole at midnight for this specific list.”

“She’s studying,” he says, with the strained dignity of a man trying to maintain some form of composure. “So she asked me to get this.” I really don’t care. I really don’t want to know. All I really want is for him to leave me the hell alone. He pauses, and since the dildo is already out of the bag, he looks at my basket again, then looks at me. “So, what are you buying all that stuff for?”

Great. Now my brother’s trying to put me on the defensive.

“Just shopping,” I say again, but this time I let a slow smile spread across my face, the kind that has historically made Evan deeply uncomfortable, because it means I’m about to say something he’s not going to like. “Actually, you know what? I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing here.”