“Fuck you!”

I didn’t know why I’d said it. I just wanted him to shut up. I wanted him to stop. He didn’t understand. No one could.

But his words had made a dent. I felt them sinking in, burrowing inside of me.

His brother was an alcoholic? What did that even mean?

“You enabled him?”

“Yeah. Like you enabled Damian.”

I shook my head, bowing until I was almost a ball, just barely standing on my feet. It wasn’t the same. “I didn’t enable—”

Gentle hands found my shoulders. He lifted my head, then groaned at whatever he saw and just lifted me up. “You did enable him, but you didn’t know you were enabling him.”

He ran his hand through my hair, down my back. He was holding me like a child, but maybe it was appropriate. I was acting like one.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he whispered into my neck, pressing a kiss there.

Grant coughed, clearing his throat. “Um… I’ll give you guys some time, yeah?”

Reese took me back to my bed, but got up again with me still in his arms. He crossed the room as Grant shut the door. He left the bathroom light on, the door ajar, and he hit the lights in the bedroom. The room was cast into darkness, a soft glow from the bathroom shining in.

It helped. I don’t know how, but it helped. It lifted some of the whatever-the-hell-I-was-feeling off me, just slightly. There was still so much there. Almost too much.

He flipped on my fan next, giving us a modicum of privacy so we could speak freely.

Then he settled on my bed, resting against my headboard, with me on curled up on his lap. He tipped my head back so I could meet his gaze, and he tucked my hair behind my ears.

“I idolized my brother. He was the star in the family. Charismatic. He always had a girlfriend—and always one of the hot ones. For a guy, that says something. He was popular. There’s about five years between us, so I was young enough not to see the signs growing up. Drinking, partying. I thought that was normal, and he was the star athlete, right? Then things changed. I was starting varsity as an eighth grader when it was his senior year. He rode the bench during the first few games. Suddenly basketball wasn’t his thing. Suddenly he didn’t want anything to do with the game. Football, though. He boasted how he wished I had played varsity on his team. He would’ve destroyed me, hazed me. And baseball. He let me know that if I made varsity baseball, I’d better watch out for his pitching hand. So I heeded his warnings. I stayed with basketball. I didn’t even try for baseball, even on my own grade’s team. I didn’t want any issue with him.”

His voice grew thick, strained. His arms tightened around me. “I thought things would be fine. They weren’t. He didn’t want us at his baseball games, said there could only be one kid who got Mom and Dad’s attention in the family. They went to my basketball games, so if they did go to his baseball games, he wouldn’t see them there. It was a brainwashing/mind-fuck thing on a whole other level, because he wanted them there. He just wanted them to feel like shit because they supported me his senior year. It worked.”

His tone turned gravelly.

“His drinking was worse that year. He crashed his car, but our parents just felt so guilty. They felt bad for him. I realize that now—that they knew I was going to be something and Roman wasn’t. Or he wasn’t going to be a star athlete, and that had always been his thing. He’d banked on a professional career.”

He sighed.

“He got a scholarship to school. Joined a fraternity. My parents thought everything would be fine. He was out of the house. Had a new girlfriend. Then the drinking got worse. He was skipping classes, skipping football practice. He had his second car crash that year, and this one smashed his leg. He was off the team. His grades were so bad, he lost his place in the fraternity. So he came home. And he kept drinking. And it got worse. Worse and worse and worse, to the point where his friends still in high school threatened me for him.”

I gasped.

He kept going. I didn’t think he’d heard me.

“His leg healed, but it almost didn’t matter. He got his first DUI a month after he was driving again. He went to rehab. Thirty days in and out. Then to a sober living home. But as soon as he could start drinking, he was. I was a freshman in high school, then a sophomore during all of this, and he started getting hired for jobs because they liked having Reese Forster’s brother working at their establishment. If it was a bar, they threw parties for him. If they were retail, they used my name on their banners, saying ‘Come in on game day! 50% off in honor of Roman’s little brother, Reese Forster.’”

He began grinding his teeth. I could hear the clicking sound.

“He burned his way through all the jobs in town—and I didn’t grow up in a small place. It was a suburb of a bigger city. Didn’t matter. By the time I was a senior, Roman was a full-blown alcoholic. Cops knew him by name. He’d had so many probation officers. I was removed from the house when I was a senior, because he kept going back. My parents kept taking him back. Parents’ guilt, it’s fucking powerful. But my coach noticed bruising on me from where Roman had ‘wrestled’ with me, which was really when he would try to beat the shit out of me, laughing as he did it. Social worker came in and surveyed the situation, because by then our parents were slipping too. My mom gave up. She just stayed in her bedroom all the time. My dad started joining Roman with the drinking. And I was sent out of there. Best goddamn time of my life.”