Enemies With Benefits: Loveless Brothers, Book 1

by Noir, Roxie

  “You’re sure? You know what, just come look,” my mom says to Violet. “I don’t even remember what all we’ve got right now…”

  “I’m fine, really,” Violet says, but moments later my mom’s leading her back into the house so she can read the contents of the fridge aloud to her.

  As soon as they disappear, the eyes feel like lasers. I wander over and take a seat, pretending to ignore them.

  “You owe me five bucks,” Daniel says to Seth. “I told you she’d show.”

  Seth sighs dramatically, reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, and hands Daniel five dollars.

  “I thought that when Mom told you she was coming, you’d tell her not to,” he explains.

  “You think Violet listens to anything I say?” I ask.

  “That’s what I said,” Daniel offers. “I knew she’d show if Mom invited her.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” I say.

  “You weren’t here this morning when we were discussing it,” he says smoothly. “Otherwise I would have.”

  “Violet didn’t tell you?” Seth asks.

  “She forgot,” I say, doing my best to keep my composure.

  “Or you were too busy to talk,” Seth says, lifting his beer to his lips and grinning.

  Sitting next to Daniel, Charlie frowns and leans forward.

  “Seth, you swore,” she says.

  “I didn’t say a thing.”

  “Then why’s poor Eli blushing right now?”

  Shit, my face is getting hot.

  “I’m not blushing,” I say.

  “Don’t make Eli blush, he hates that,” Levi adds, out of nowhere. “Go fish.”

  “He really thought no one knew,” Daniel says, his voice calm and gentle as always. “And now his …woman… is looking through the fridge with his mom.”

  He reaches out and pats my shoulder. I glare at him and the stupid smile on his face. He’s definitely enjoying this too much.

  “Be gentle with Eli,” he admonishes.

  “She’s not my woman,” I mutter.

  Where the hell is Violet?

  They’ll lay off when she gets back.

  “That’s patently untrue,” Levi says from the floor. “Give me all your lanternfish.”

  I lean forward, rubbing my face with my hands, trying to find the simplest way to explain to all of them — including a six year old — that we’re nothing more than frequent sex partners.

  “Violet and I have an arrangement,” I say, as delicately as possible.

  “An arrangement,” Daniel says, mostly to himself.

  “Yes,” I say, glancing down at Rusty. “We, uh, spend some time together, but we’re not dating.”

  Silence from the brother squad. Silence and interested stares.

  “We don’t even get along otherwise,” I point out.

  “You’re saying you’re friends with benefits?” Seth asks.

  “Are you even friends?” Levi asks.

  “I know, right?” I say.

  Seth leans forward, looking thoughtful. His eyes narrow.

  “You’ve been spending most nights at her place,” he says.

  “Yes,” I confirm, wary.

  “Are you seeing anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Do you eat meals together?” Levi pipes in.

  “I bet he cooks for her,” Daniel says, leaning back in his chair. “You cook for her, don’t you?”

  I do. More often than not I make us dinner in her kitchen while she has a glass of wine and helps out. Her onion-chopping skills have come a long way in the past month.

  “I cook for everyone,” I say. “I cook for you assholes —”

  “Eli.” That’s Daniel.

  “I cook for you jerks and you’re not giving me the third-degree about it.”

  “Eli,” says Charlie, leaning forward. She’s sitting cross-legged in her chair, a beer in her hand, her curly hair spilling over her shoulders. “These boys are all missing the point. Do you enjoy one another’s company?”

  Yes.

  I think I like arguing with Violet more than I like talking to anyone else.

  “Where exactly are you going with this?” I ask.

  “She’s your girlfriend,” Charlie says, putting the beer to her lips.

  “Enjoying someone’s company doesn’t make her my girlfriend,” I point out. “You’re not Daniel’s girlfriend.”

  I swear to God Charlie turns the faintest pink, but maybe I’m imagining things.

  “Daniel and I aren’t fu —”

  “Char.”

  “ — uh, we’re just platonic friends,” she finishes, rolling her eyes at Daniel.

  “She is always listening,” Daniel mutters.

  “Uncle Levi, what’s platonic mean?” Rusty asks, still sitting on the floor.

  “It means they’re not in love,” Levi says. “Give me all your giant tube worms.”

  Rusty sighs dramatically and tosses three cards onto the floor in front of Levi, who chuckles. I lean over and look at Levi’s Go Fish cards.

  They look like something out of a horror movie: all jaws and teeth, some weird eels, some shapes that look nothing at all like animals.

  “What are you playing?” I ask.

  “Abyssal Zone Go Fish,” Levi says, tossing another card of giant tube worms on top of the three he just got from Rusty.

  “They’re weird fish who live at the bottom of the ocean where it’s always dark,” she explains. “Charlie gave it to me.”

  I look over at Charlie, who’s drinking her beer again, any imagined blush gone.

  “Cool, right?” she says. “Anyway, your girlfriend.”

  “Violet is not not my girlfriend,” I say, as calmly as I can. “We are not —”

  “You should probably let Violet know she’s your girlfriend,” Daniel interrupts.

  “She’s not.”

  “She is,” pipes up Seth.

  “She’s not! She’s the one who doesn’t want to be my girlfriend!”

  I’m met with total silence, including my own.

  I’ve never said that out loud before.

  I’ve never exactly thought that out loud before.

  They’re all staring at me. Even Rusty, a six-year-old, is giving me a look.

  “Uh oh,” Seth says, just as the sliding door opens again.

  Violet and my mom step through, chatting about something, holding bottles of Cheerwine. They don’t seem to notice that we’re all totally and completely silent.

  “We have Cheerwine?” Seth finally asks.

  “It’s in the basement fridge,” my mom says breezily. “You’d know that if you listened to me.”

  “What’s going on out here?” Violet asks, walking toward us.

  She takes a seat next to me, then leans over and looks at Levi and Rusty’s game.

  “Are those giant tube worms?” she says. “Cool.”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Violet

  To my great relief, I’m having a lovely time. Not that I thought I’d have a bad time at Clara’s house, but I did have some concerns. It’s hard not to when you spend time with the mother of the man you’re banging like a screen door.

  I’m coming to appreciate that phrase, by the way. It has a certain ugly, redneck charm.

  Dinner is delicious. Eli made lamb, mint, braised brussels sprouts, and some sort of refreshing, crunchy salad that apparently his brother, Levi foraged all the ingredients for. I sit next to Rusty, who tells me all about bioluminescence and geothermal energy at the bottom of the ocean. I think I impress her by knowing that the gulper eel’s jaw accounts for a quarter of its body.

  But most of all, I sit back and listen. There’s a rhythm to this family, a back-and-forth between the brothers that’s as easy and natural as the tides. One second they’ll give each other hell and the next they’re passing the gravy, all with the kind of ease that comes with living with someone for a lifetime.

  I don’t have any siblings. My
dad left while I was still a baby, so it was always just me and my mom, and now it’s just me.

  When the meal’s over, I stand up and try to help clear the dishes, but Clara shoos me away.

  “Hell no, Violet, you’re a guest here,” she says.

  “Mom,” Daniel calls from the kitchen.

  Clara rolls her eyes at me.

  “I don’t know how I raised such a tightass,” she whispers. “You know, studies have shown that people who curse more are happier, smarter, and more creative than people who don’t?”

  “The studies weren’t on six-year-olds,” Daniel calls.

  “Go sit for a spell in the living room,” she says. “Where’s Eli? Eli, go give Violet a tour while we clean up before dessert.”

  “Well, which is it?” he asks. “Sit, or a give tour?”

  Clara just sighs exasperatedly and walks away.

  “Give me the tour,” I say, and loop my arm through his.

  * * *

  “This flowerbed right here is where I broke my arm because Levi convinced me I could fly if I ate thirteen dandelions,” Eli says, pointing at a row of flowers around the side of the house. “I jumped off the roof. In his defense, I think he wanted to see if it would work as much as I did.”

  “How’d you get up there?”

  “There used to be a trellis on the side of the porch with some morning glories,” he says. “I was six and he was eight, so we were light enough to use it like a ladder.”

  “With zero supervision, of course,” I laugh.

  Eli just shrugs, grinning.

  “There were five of us, one of my mom, and my dad was still working all hours back then,” he says. “Levi was practically considered an adult while he was in grade school.”

  The tour of the house has been light on architectural details (“I think this was built sometime around 1860 or something like that,” Eli told me,) and heavy on memories of childhood incidents where one or more Loveless boys got hurt.

  I have no idea how Clara’s maintained her sanity this long, let alone started an academic career late in life. The more I hear of the time that Caleb fell from a tree, Seth ate a slug, or Daniel somehow impaled his shoulder on a sharp stick, the more impressed I am with her.

  Apparently Daniel’s never told anyone how he impaled his shoulder on that stick when he was twelve. To this day, he refuses, though Eli thinks Charlie knows.

  “And way back there in the woods is the bootlegging shed,” Eli says, pointing off. “It’s kind of falling down now, though Levi keeps threatening to restore it.”

  “Who bootlegged?” I ask. According to Eli’s very sketchy history of the homestead, it’s been in his family since it was built.

  “Who didn’t?” he says with a grin. “Mostly my great-granddad Lowell, I think. At least he was the one who got into the most trouble, but then he married the sheriff’s daughter so it all worked out in the end.”

  “Worked out how, exactly?” I ask.

  “He stopped getting in trouble,” Eli says.

  “He stop running hooch?”

  “I don’t believe he did,” Eli says, laughing. “He died before any of us were born, but I’ve been led to believe that I’d have gotten along with great granddad Lowell pretty well.”

  We mount the steps to the front porch. It’s actually all one porch, wrapping around the outside of the house, and we walk across it and go inside.

  “I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be giving you a tour of,” he says, glancing around the entryway. “Though I’m fairly certain that when we’re done there’ll be a quiz and I’ll fail it. Come on.”

  He leads me up the stairs.

  “These are stairs,” he says, helpfully. “Up here are most of the bedrooms, that’s a bathroom. It’s got a shower that works okay.”

  “So informative,” I murmur.

  He points at a door.

  “I shared that room with Levi for a while, then Daniel for a while,” he says. “Now it’s Daniel’s, and Rusty’s across the hall. I’m staying upstairs in the attic bedroom.”

  “Do I get to see that?”

  “And why would you want to?” he asks, casting a glance back at me, and I laugh.

  “Curiosity,” I say. “You’ve been to my house a thousand times by now and I’ve never been here.”

  He stops at the bottom of the next staircase, gives me the grin that I always feel in places.

  “That the only reason?”

  “Yes,” I say. “If you think I’m going to get up to any hanky-panky with all your brothers, your mom, and your niece downstairs, you’ve got another think coming.”

  “Hanky-panky,” he says, his voice going low as he reaches out, takes me around the waist. “The hell is that, Violet?”

  “Oh, shut up,” I say, climbing the stairs in front of him. “It just slipped out.”

  “I do like the sound of it,” he teases, and lightly smacks my ass. “Hanky-panky. You know, I doubt they can hear us all the way up here.”

  The attic’s small, a short hallway with just two doors on it. Eli opens the left one and leads me into a space with windows at either end, a sloping roof, a bed, and a desk.

  And… that’s pretty much it.

  “Ta da,” he says, closing the door behind him. “Impressed?”

  “You do remember that I live in a trailer, right?” I ask. “And this is way nicer than anything in my house?”

  “Yeah, but does yours come with a six-year-old alarm clock who has no regard whatsoever for late nights?” he laughs.

  “True,” I admit as Eli slides his hands around my waist, his thumbs rough against my skin, under my shirt.

  “I gotta find my own place,” he murmurs, bending to kiss me.

  It’s a nice kiss. A restrained kiss, one full of barely-held-back heat, a kiss that’s not leading anywhere.

  After a moment, he pulls back.

  “Thanks,” he says, thumb playing over my back. It’s a habit he has, like he can’t ever quite sit still. “You didn’t have to come.”

  “I wasn’t about to turn down an invitation from Clarabelle Loveless,” I tell him. “I’m not that brave.”

  “Seriously,” he says. “I know it’s not what we discussed.”

  I almost ask him if that still matters. I almost say that what we discussed a month ago doesn’t have any bearing on where we are, right now, but I shy away from it. I’m afraid that it still matters to one of us, and ironically, it’s not me.

  Besides, right now — these stolen moments in his attic bedroom while his entire family mills around two floors below — isn’t really a good time or place.

  “It’s fine,” I tell him instead. “They’re nice. I like them. I never had brothers.”

  He laughs. Kisses me. Hands on my back, desire moving through me slow and steady, but I ignore it.

  “Occasionally I wish I hadn’t either,” he says. “But overall they’re pretty all right.”

  We kiss again. His hands move higher. His thumbs are on my ribcage, that soft skin right below the underwire of my bra, and without meaning to I press against him, our bodies flush.

  I force myself back.

  “No hanky-panky,” I tease.

  “How about just panky?” he asks, that half-smile on his face. “I’m probably good for another five minutes, I bet we could get up to some over-the-clothes stuff like teenagers —”

  “ELIJAH!!” a voice bellows from below.

  Eli shuts his eyes for a moment, then walks to his door.

  “WHAT?” he shouts.

  Footsteps pound up a flight of stairs.

  “Where’s the cake knife?” Seth’s voice asks from the second-floor landing.

  “I don’t know,” Eli says. “Who used it last? Ask them.”

  “Daniel says it was you,” Seth says.

  I wander further into Eli’s room. There’s not much in here: a dresser, a bed, a desk, a small bookshelf. I mosey to the bookshelf, run my fingers along the spines. It’s half n
ovels and half travel guides, their spines striped with use: Iceland, Spain, Thailand, France, Egypt, Italy, Mongolia, China, Turkey. They’re well-worn, the pages grimy.

  It’s a list of places I’ve never even considered going. A trip to Mongolia may as well be a trip to the moon, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve never been to Canada. I’ve never even been west of the Mississippi.

  “I wasn’t even here Thursday night,” Eli says. “I was at — I wasn’t here, I don’t know what she’s talking about…”

  I pick up the book on Thailand, curious. It opens to a page about how to haggle in marketplaces, and idly, I flip through it a little.

  Some of the pages are flagged. Some have notes in them in Eli’s handwriting, and the page on the best time of year to go has both.

  So does the page on living in Thailand as an expat. According to a quick scan, it’s affordable, the quality of life is decent, and the rest of Asia is a short flight away.

  I put the book back. I’m not doing myself any favors, snooping through his stuff and reminding myself that while he traveled the world and went to Thailand and China and Egypt, I was here. This bookshelf is a list of places that are all probably a hundred times more interesting than Sprucevale.

  I wonder when he’ll realize that.

  “Then use another knife,” Eli is saying, still shouting down the stairs. “That’s not — you did what?”

  “She said it’s not whipping,” Rusty’s voice says.

  “We don’t even — you know what, hold on, I’m coming down,” Eli says, then turns to me. I tear my gaze away from the bookshelf, away from the thought that sooner or later, he’s going to realize the mistake he’s made coming back here.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I gotta head back down, I think my mom is trying to make whipped cream with half and half.”

  “That’s not how you do it?” I ask.

  “Not you, too,” he says, opening the door. He puts his hand on the small of my back as I leave, descending the stairs in front of him.

  “I don’t know how to make whipped cream,” I say. I force the books and the doubt to the back of my mind. “As far as I’m concerned, it comes in a tub from the grocery store.”