1. Asher

ONE

It would beimpossible to say where the history of Jordan and me began. There were too many passing remarks and too many held breaths to count. Was it in middle school where I knew no more than Jordan's name uttered by my mother when she spoke softly into the speaker of her phone? "How's your boy? Jordan?" Or did it start when Mother announced we were going to Disneyland for a long weekend, failing to mention a man would meet us there, as well as his son?

I wouldn't say our first meeting was where anything started. In fact, a lot of things stopped when I first laid my eyes on Jordan Mitchell. That was an exaggeration, in all fairness. The very first time I laid my eyes on him was in a 1950s diner. I was old enough, at thirteen, to notice how pretty the serving boys were. The pomade in their hair, combed to the side or all the way back, and red bow-ties on snowy white short-sleeved shirts. Already, boys were everything I thought about. Skinny limbs and sweet smiles, those diner servers were all around eighteen or nineteen years old, saving money for college shenanigans that were still far in my future, but they were nice. They weren't scary at all like older boys at school were.

Mother had her bony hand on my upper back, although I wasn't so short that the gesture was barely noticeable. I had been growing like a sprout the entire year and Mother could scarcely find the time to feed me as much as my growing body demanded. "Be nice," she whispered, hardly having to lean down to reach my ear.

"Be…what?" I ogled her in confusion. "What are you…?"

Her hand seemed to press me harder. "I want you to meet someone important."

"Sure," I muttered, my voice cracking with the changes that caused annoying pimples to pop anew every other morning. I could suffer through the pimples easily enough, washing them, putting Mom's skincare products on the way she had shown me, and squeezing them when I felt the time was right. But my voice? I hated it. The only options I had were to let everyone hear the crackling and squeaking when I laughed out loud, to hold my tongue and act like a mute, or to be the weirdo who only spoke in whispers. And no option would have won me any friends or admirers. Surely not among the boys who'd already had clear faces, had something to shave, and spoke in deep, smooth voices.

And so my mother pushed me in front of her like a lanky human shield. It wasn't until the man and the boy paid attention to us that I realized I was a trophy rather than cannon fodder. Mother beamed when I turned my frowny face to her, wanting to ask what was happening. The sweltering heat outside the diner had left my skin shiny with perspiration and my darkening blond hair stuck to my brow. "Um, hello," I said, my voice twitching an octave up on the last syllable. Damn it. The boy regarded me with a big pinch of distrust. The corners of his lips were pulled down and his eyebrows knitted in a frown. But the man was warm and kind.

"You must be Asher," he said as he got up from the booth that could seat six people rather than just the two of them. "I've heard so much about you." He wiped his hands against his rough denim pants. His checkered shirt sleeves were rolled up his tanned and hairy arms, his forearms muscled like he chopped wood for a living. Then, as he thrust his hand forward, I embraced it. What choice did I have? His grip was firm but not intimidating. His hand was calloused and I realized everything I had assumed about him was true. The cleverness of a thirteen-year-old. This was a man who worked with his arms and hands. He was big, outwardly happy to be here, but the new cold sweat on his palms said he was nervous.

I would soon learn why.

The boy, though, only nodded. "‘Sup," he might have said in a murmur. His cheeks were pink with heat, his hair messy, his T-shirt plain and tight, hugging his sculpted body in all the ways that made my hormone-riddled body flare in alarm. Unlike me, this guy was shaped like those Instagram models. His dark and shaggy hair might have been tangled and unkempt, but he carried it like it was a style. His lips were redder than if he had put a rouge on. And the contempt in his eyes made the pit in my belly colder than if I'd swallowed an ice cube.

"Oh my, Jordan, how handsome you are," my mother said in her silky voice. Heat flushed through me like there was no AC in the diner. Sometimes, when she spoke my most private thoughts aloud, I wondered how much she could guess about me. Maybe she noticed something I was unaware of doing. And when she turned to Mr. Mitchell, who I would soon start calling George — but never Dad, despite my most honest wish to find the strength and try — I knew. I knew what they were to one another. I knew what the conversations on the phone had meant.

When one of the slender young men reached our table, his arms bare and hair so blond and pale on them that it was nearly invisible, I despised my silly lack of taste. The fifteen-year-old boy across from me was so much more in so many ways. I knew I would never look at other boys the same way.

That was the end of a long era where seeing young men occupied all my free time. It was also the end of a lifetime in which I didn't know anyone who was called Jordan. And it was the end of my comfortable habit of playing video games after finishing my homework. Jordan, it turned out, was so nicely built because he played hockey. Yes, there was a rink in our town, too. Would I be interested in trying it out? How wonderful… The adults droned on about us like we weren't even present, then turned their voices lower and said things that made the other one smile, sometimes even giggle.

The weekend was a grind. The happiest place on Earth couldn't provoke a smile from Jordan Mitchell. And neither could I, although I was too scared to try very hard. When it was over, we parted ways. Mom and George promised to do something as exciting as this again soon.

Maybe our history began two months later when Mom found a suitable group for my hockey practice. He was nowhere near me, but the entire course of my life took a turn on that day. Because of Jordan.

It was emblematic that I should change my entire future because of something Jordan did. The fact that I started practicing hockey when I was thirteen for no other reason than a boy with the body of an Olympian practiced it was the foreshadowing of all that was going to happen. I didn't know it, but hindsight proved it more than once.

The obvious moment to blame for the mess we later caused was the day George and Jordan arrived with a moving company only two hours behind them. Mom had been preparing the house for days. And when they arrived, Jordan stalked inside as if he could appear smaller. Little chance of that when he had grown even bigger and more muscled in the year of our occasional encounters across the country.

"Asher will show you your new room, sweetheart. Won't you, Ash?" Mother passed us to greet George with a wet and sloppy kiss on the lips that made both of us look away.

"Thank you, Ms. Sullivan," Jordan muttered.

"Don't be silly, Jordan," George said, my mother in his arms. He fixed the cap on his head to shield him from direct sunlight and grinned a pearly grin. "Call her Eileen."

"Yes, sir," Jordan said curtly. "Thank you, Ms…Eileen."

"Come on," I whispered, bumping into him with my shoulder. It was deliberate because I saw his stiff politeness as a weakness and he was in my territory now. But the moment I bumped into him and discovered how rock solid he was, I knew I was the weak one. I gritted my teeth and avoided the impulse to rub my shoulder.

Jordan followed me up the stairs of the house he was supposed to call his home, the house that had been my home for the last fifteen years. Even then, I knew that I was uprooted. Everything about my entire life changed in a single afternoon.

I turned the doorknob and pushed the door that creaked on its hinges. The room hadn't been used in ages, but Mother had had it deep-cleaned the day before. It was equal in size to my room but lacked all the character. It had a fairly sizable bed in one corner, a built-in closet, a workstation for his laptop or desktop, a corkboard I hadn't used since Mother had gotten it years earlier, and a nice, new desk chair. The rest was up to Jordan to figure out. Lavender-softened curtains were diffusing the afternoon sunlight over the window. "This is you." I expected him to dismiss me with a grunt. That was who he was to me. I squared my shoulders and waited for a careless remark that would render my entire existence meaningless.

"You still play hockey?" He asked that question like he was musing aloud.

The remark stabbed me unreasonably deep. Was I supposed to drop out in his view? "I do. Coach says I have a promising future." The defenses geared up in me as I met his cold look of disdain.

"Cool, man." He turned away from me and examined his room. The duffel that was hanging from one round shoulder slid and dropped at the foot of the bed. He looked at me, turning only partially. I wasn't interesting enough for a complete turn, I suppose. He waited, then gave the smallest bob of his head toward the door.

I swung away, holding the doorknob, and shut his door. Screw that guy.

That encounter was the beginning, though. It held little of any great importance, but it was the turning point in our lives. Jordan and I lived in the same house. That was a fact of life. It was what Mom and George wanted. Their bedroom was also upstairs but on the opposite end of the house from my room. I had a shared bathroom with Jordan, his room, and then their private bathroom to keep me isolated from whatever sounds their creaky bed made at night. If Jordan was scarred in those early months, I had few fucks to give.

Even in those months, so early on, I had too many things to learn and change. The new need to lock the unused bathroom door that belonged to Jordan came gradually. I'd had a bathroom all to myself my entire life. Suddenly, when I took longer in front of the mirror after showering, the meathead that was my soon-to-be older stepbrother began intruding.

"Shit, sorry," he grunted the first time and slammed the door shut. Through it, he continued. "It was quiet in there for so long. I thought you were done."

"Yeah, well, I'm not," I snapped back at him and locked him out. It wasn't like I had much to shave on my face, but the sooner I started practicing, the better. I didn't appreciate getting caught by a guy who had to shave every other day to keep his face clean and smooth.

The opposite was true, too. I had to learn to knock on my own bathroom door. The first time I walked in on Jordan in the bathroom, he wore a towel around his waist. It was as innocent as a locker room encounter, but my heart thumped so hard in my chest when I saw the definition of his torso that I thought I was going to die.

The first time our parents took us to George's lakehouse was another circle of hell for my wild hormones and confused body. It turned out that when Jordan was near any body of water large enough to have little waves on a breeze, he was incapable of keeping his torso covered. I didn't understand the correlation, but Jordan was a mean swimmer and could dive for over a minute without so much as panting when his head emerged. He was a tower of cool confidence, almost nearby when I did the things other people labeled as me being fussy. I respectfully disagreed.

Jordan and I were sent to the lake one morning when George and Mom coyly suggested we spend some quality time together. I was reluctant to take off my white T-shirt with a Rick and Morty print across the chest. Jordan hadn't even put one on that morning. He just got out of bed, probably already in his swim shorts, and slipped into his flip-flops.

I carried an entire backpack with me. The lake was a short walk through the forest away from the house, in a flat field of windswept grass. An old wooden pier was still white and light blue, although the paint was peeling in too many places to fool anyone that it was being looked after. Inside my backpack was a big towel so I didn't lie on the peeling paint. I brought a bottle of water because I wasn't mad enough to drink whatever lived in that lake. I had a healthy snack and a smuggled snack, which I preferred. I had a book I'd hoped to get into for the past six months and I had my portable gaming console.

"You don't need to wear your underwear when your swim shorts have the net," Jordan said when we sat at the edge of the pier, feet dangling above the surface of the lake.

He never talked to me. Not really. He lectured, advised, and criticized. But he didn't talk. "Oh yeah? Should I take them off for you, Jordan?" I had learned that shocking him was the quickest way to silence him. I also learned that he would never, ever suspect a shred of truth in such words. There were times when I wished he would call my bluff. "Yeah, take them off for me, Asher," he would say in some fantasy and I would either have to do it or lose.

All his muscles bunched like he was going to flatten me with the pier, but he simply slipped off the edge and dove under the water's surface, barely making a splash despite his bulk. He was a tall, broad guy with a face more round than oval and a sort of deceptive beauty that made you think he was friendly. You had to get to know him in order to dislike him. But it didn't take long to learn almost everything about Jordan. He was athletic and that was the extent of his personality. He had grown up with his dad, spending all his free days at the lake house, acting more like a fish than a boy. He was often left to his own devices when George had clients request urgent work. The fact that he had survived spending a few nights alone in a big, empty house in the forest had given him a false sense of self-sufficiency. He was probably wrong. I'd read survivalist comics. I was sure Jordan wouldn't last a night if you left him in an unknown part of the forest with nothing but a knife.

I thought not. He shut up and swam underwater, but he never broached the topic of my underwear again.

Small resentments piled up. Jordan had his pick of the best skates and sticks for practice. Mom and George agreed that his equipment was more important than mine because Jordan's hockey future was coming sooner.

I couldn't wait for him to leave for college. It was still nearly three years away, but I eagerly awaited that day. It was one of the rare times when I genuinely wished him all the success in the world; a full hockey scholarship in Detroit, the first pick of a car Mom and George agreed to buy him on departure, and the finest hockey equipment money could buy. I wished him all the comforts on his way out of my life, even if I had three years left on this unfair sentence.

And suffer, I did. Day after day, I learned the same lesson all over again. He would never notice me. No matter how much of a relief it was, because he shouldn't see me as anything other than his stepbrother, I couldn't help myself. In truth, I longed for it. Jordan Mitchell was too self-centered to notice I existed, let alone that I was more than just his little stepbrother.

The time he sheared all the hair off his head and walked into the house like a prison ruffian simultaneously did two conflicting things to me. It broke my heart that he no longer had the thick locks I associated with him. And it turned me on so much that I had to leave the dinner table and bite the pillow to muffle the sounds from my throat.

The time he pulled a muscle in his thigh and had to wear a tight compression sleeve for a week, I walked on needles because every encounter with him made me imagine how far up that sleeve went. And whenever I pictured it, my face turned red.

The time Jordan announced he was taking Kate Carmichael to prom, I simmered in envy. I wished them success in smuggling some booze to the party. I hoped they would puke on the dance floor and forever be remembered for that embarrassing night. It didn't happen and I choked on bitter tears when I heard him hum to himself in his bedroom just after one in the morning that night. Happy.

The summer that followed his graduation and acceptance to Northwood, together with his best friend and the winner of the competition for the smuggest fuck in town, Beckett Partridge, had me torn to pieces. It was the longest summer of my life. I'd spent over three years living with Jordan and our entire history could be summed up as two acquaintances who didn't get along very well and had little chance of becoming friends.

As if I would ever be content with being just friends.

That summer, I knew I was doomed. I had been doomed by my mother, her husband, and his child. I had been doomed to live and exist so near the physical perfection that Jordan was, to watch him grow more handsome and to always know what it felt like to be a ghost. Sure, I sometimes made odd sounds when I slammed the doors, but I was otherwise invisible. And harmless. I made as much impact as a draft from an open window.

At the end of our last summer, I was about to turn seventeen, and Jordan had turned nineteen the month before. All he ever talked about was Northwood. He never shut up about Beckett Partridge and his famous uncle, Nate, when he spoke of college. They agreed to be roommates in the team house at Northwood. It was the best place he could imagine. There were arcade games in the basement when they visited and the older guys were welcoming, willing to joke and teach them college life hacks. He spoke about it so often that the images lived freely in my head.

I hated how happy he was to leave our house. He'd been forced into my life when nobody asked me if I wanted it. The immense size of his existence was rammed into my space, overshadowed my daily life, and he was just going to leave now. He did nothing to lessen the vacuum. Why would he? He had never bothered to notice how much of him there was. His things were scattered throughout the house when mine had to be contained to my room. His schedule kept both Mom and George busy driving him around before they'd bought him a car, so my own schedule had to fit into it. His success was so great that I stood no chance of impressing Mom and George with mine. Who cared if my coach praised my talent when Jordan was going to be an Arctic Titan?

Jordan took his life in my house for granted. He never thought twice about making his absence any less selfish. To him, it was going to be a new chapter in life. But the ripping of that bandage was going to tear a lot of unhealed wounds and Jordan wouldn't be around for that.

It's hard to admit it, but by the end of that summer, I hated him. I wished he had never come to live with us. I wished my mother had never married George, even though George tried to be everything a father should be to a boy.

The night before Jordan loaded his car with his things and drove off, we had dinner together. Beckett called him just after we ate and were supposed to play Risk. It had never become a family tradition because we had failed to become a family despite George's best attempts, but we had had a few good evenings playing that game.

George had a look of fearful pride on his oblong face, the two-day stubble sprinkled with a few paler hairs, his tanned skin a sign of both summer rest and the perpetual fieldwork. He ran a hand over his short-cropped hair and leaned back in his chair to pretend he felt as casual as he appeared.

"I guess I'll just go to my room," I said, holding back a sigh. Jordan couldn't honor his father with an evening of board games. Why the hell should I?

George gave a hearty nod and Mom patted my shoulder.

I listened to Jordan on the phone from the bathroom after I had brushed my teeth. "…can meet some girls. Why not? We have the whole evening and the next day to get settled. When's the first practice? Right, Monday evening." It went on and on.

I looked at the mirror and my hatred only burned hotter. You are the problem, Asher, I hissed internally. You get what you deserve. He never noticed you because he's not like you. He's straight, Asher. He's fucking straight. Why can't you get that through your head? He's not just your stepbrother, the child your mother adopted, but a straight one at that. Give. Him. Up.

The conversation in his room stopped at one point and I figured I might as well say goodbye now. He was leaving early. Chances were, I would sleep through his departure. Not that he would notice my absence.

I knocked on the bathroom door and opened it a heartbeat later. Jordan was in the middle of the room, bent over his huge suitcase, wearing plain green-gray hemp pajama bottoms and nothing else under the sun. He straightened and faced me. "Asher."

"Hey." I hated how meek my voice was when I spoke to him. Straight guys intimidated me and I had to work twice as hard when it was a straight guy I had a crush on. This will be good for you, I promised myself. He won't be around to distract you. You'll finally be able to live a little. "All packed?" I forced my eyes to remain on his face. The fact that his chest rose so high and stretched his pecs wide each time he inhaled was hard to ignore, but I had to.

"Almost," Jordan said. We stood in silence. My gaze dropped to the V-line of his abdomen and I yanked it back to his eyes. He inhaled deeply and said the words that set a fire under my ass. "You be good when I'm gone."

"Jesus, Jordan," I scoffed.

"What now?" He was already done with the pleasantries. And good thing he was. I hated it when he lectured me.

I sucked my teeth. "I wish you didn't always talk out of your ass." I was seventeen years old. I would be off to college soon, too. Two years between us didn't make him the wisest guy in the world. Especially not because I knew where he had been two years ago. Exactly where he stands now. Unchanged in any way I could think of. He had only grown cockier.

My stepbrother exhaled slowly. "Dad always said I had to be a brother to you." The words were coated in bitterness.

"And this is what you do? Lecture me at every turn, give vague advice, speak general truths? You're unbelievable." I regretted coming in to say goodbye. It would have been better if he'd just left without another word.

"What do you want from me?" he demanded.

I shook my head. "Dunno. And it's too late, anyway."

"What are you talking about, Asher?" he asked. His agitation was unmistakable. I didn't care anymore. He could leave angry with me. It changed nothing. For over three years, we had lived together, only a bathroom separating us, and I had spent countless evenings mentally in this room. My soul was here, watching him sleep, while my body had been too frightened to move out of my bed.

It wasn't going to change now.

The very best I could hope for was that his absence would allow me to notice the guys who had once occupied my mind so much. Maybe they wouldn't appear so faded in my imagination when Jordan wasn't there to outshine them all. "For once, I hoped to get more than empty words," I said.

Jordan's spark went out. He watched me coolly. He forced me to wait for the words he was carefully putting together. He shook his head in the end.

"What?" I pressed. "Tell me."

He blinked and surrendered the responsibility to me. It was like a burden was lifted off his broad shoulders. "Like I said, Dad told me to be your brother. And because you are not my brother, I chose the next best thing. I was nothing to you. Why you're insisting on hearing yet another general truth, I don't know, but that's how things are." He shrugged. "I didn't want to hurt your feelings, Asher, and have to explain it to Dad. You know as well as I that we're not brothers. We're not even friends. We live here because our parents love each other. It's got nothing to do with us."

What would it look like if I told him all my truths? I had chosen hockey because the first time I'd met him, I had liked his physique so much that I wanted to be more like him. I had listened to his stories of Northwood all summer long to the point where I knew it was my first and only choice, too. I had moved my soul to the team house he would live in starting tomorrow because he had been in awe after visiting. I thought the Arctic Titans were the best college team because someone as talented as Jordan Mitchell wanted to play for them.

I knew what it would look like—a pathetic little stepbrother with a head full of dreams.

Instead, I folded my lips, breathed in and out, and calmly replied, "I'm glad it's out in the open, then." I turned on my heels and walked out of his room. Screw him. Screw him and his perfect body, his dazzling eyes, his handsome face, and his endless pool of talent. Screw his confidence and his polite lectures.

But for all my attempts to erase his influence over my life, I failed. Close to two years later, I did what I had known I would do all along.

I followed him.