Mister Wrong

  When I came to the place where I’d left my mark on her, I touched it. This would fade until one day, there’d be no trace of the mark I’d left on her. Could it be that I’d left a different kind of mark behind though? One that wasn’t so temporal? Was that the reason she was here? Because my mark on her was more than skin-deep?

  Cora moved beneath me, lifting off her back to slip out of her robe. I found the tie and unknotted it slowly, letting myself memorize the feel of the material rubbing against the pads of my fingers, the strength of the knot, working against it for what felt like forever until, suddenly, it seemed to come undone all at once.

  I slid the robe off of her shoulders, down her arms, off her hands, never allowing my eyes to look anywhere but into hers. A beautiful as she was, as spread out below me in a little cover-up as she was, I’d always known where that beauty originated from, its hidden source—her eyes.

  My hand curved around her cheek, the other winding behind her back, and I pressed myself into her, lowering her back to the bed. This time when our mouths met, they moved slowly, as though time was an infinite entity and life was nothing beyond this moment.

  “Matt,” she whispered against my lips, her fingers trailing down the canyon of my back.

  Hearing her say my name, having her in my arms when she said it, made something low and uneven vibrate in my chest. Her mouth came around to my ear, where the sound of her shallow, uneven breaths ignited something inside me I wasn’t sure I could ever extinguish. When she whispered my name again, this time right beside my ear, I pressed myself between her legs, feeling dizzy from the thought of her saying my name like that when I was moving inside her.

  When her hips lifted up to meet mine the next time I ground against her, I grabbed a fistful of her nightgown and pulled it up around her stomach. I didn’t stop rocking against her, my mouth claiming hers once more, as I made love to her, half-dressed, my body not yet entering hers.

  I could tell from the way she was breathing that she was close. From the way she was twisting in my arms, her nails digging into my skin. I was just as close, feeling my own release rising from inside.

  “Please, Matt,” she breathed.

  My jaw ground to keep me from losing it the moment her hand gripped me, stroking me in a way that had me close to blacking out again. What was I doing? Why was I stalling? What had I needed to tell her before we did this again?

  The reminder found its way into my consciousness, but just as it rose from my chest, another voice settled into the air around us.

  “Hey, Matt!” The sound of feet moving quickly up the stairs outside. “We need to talk!”

  The sound of a door being opened

  The sound of silence, the kind more deafening than a sonic boom.

  The sound of my brother’s sharp inhale as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  Those were the sounds I’d also remember from tonight. The ones that would follow me to the grave, along with the others.

  “What the fuck?” His words came out in a rush of air.

  Lifting off of Cora, my eyes found hers and held there for a moment. In them, I tried to tell her it would be okay, that I’d take care of this. But her face was frozen in shock, her eyes filling with guilt, as she scrambled out from beneath me, adjusting her cover-up and pulling at the sheets to cover herself.

  “How could you?” Jacob’s voice was quiet, quivering.

  His eyes connected with mine once I turned to face him. Everything I expected to find was there on his face: betrayal, shock, outrage . . . even a shadow of sadness.

  “You son of a bitch. I knew it. I knew you wouldn’t waste your chance to slide into my spot.” His volume grew with every word, his eyes becoming feral. “I can’t believe you.” Jacob’s eyes shifted over my shoulder.

  Instinctively, I slid into his view.

  “I can’t believe you,” he spat again, thrusting his arms back at where Cora had retreated up against the headboard.

  “Jacob, I’m sorry.” Her voice caught as though she was guilty of this whole mess. To blame for everything that had gone wrong in the course of our twenty years together. “I never meant for you to find out this way. I should have come to you first. I should have explained—”

  “Explained what?” Jacob shouted, sweeping a couple of glasses from the table with his arm. They crashed to the floor and shattered. “That you’d had enough of me? That you wanted to move on to the other brother? Just to see if you were missing out on anything? Just to see if he could give you something I couldn’t?” The vein running down Jacob’s forehead was bursting through the skin, his body quaking from the emotions coursing through him. “Just to see if he could make you scream his name louder when you opened your legs for him?”

  “Jacob!” I slid off the bed, keeping myself between him and Cora as I approached, my hands raised. “This is more than just some endless battle between us for her. This is more than one of us coming out the winner and the other the loser.” Every step I took toward him, he took one toward me. “This is more than that. This is more.”

  When I stopped moving, he did too. A few feet separated us, but from the betrayal on his face, I knew that while physical space might be one thing, after tonight, an impossible distance would be between us going forward. Unlike me, he wouldn’t be content to wait on the sidelines for years on end while another man loved the woman he did. He wouldn’t be content to do right by her no matter what, even if that meant letting someone else take the credit for his efforts.

  “Yeah, no shit this is more.” His eyes dropped, narrowing when they fell on my open fly. “This is my brother, my best friend, fucking the woman who was supposed to be my wife behind my back. On our own damn honeymoon.”

  “This isn’t our honeymoon.” Cora’s voice came from behind me. “You never showed up for the wedding to make this a honeymoon.”

  Jacob’s eyes latched onto her. “We’ve been over this a million times already. I don’t know what happened. I don’t remember.” He started pacing, rolling his neck. “For all I know, you could have been behind it. Drugging me so you could sneak off with this guy and finally get him out of your system.”

  “Jacob, stop,” I ordered, trying to keep my voice and body calm. It was challenging, especially with the way he was the total opposite.

  “I’ve never been looking for ways to get Matt out of my system,” Cora said slowly. “I don’t want him out of my system.”

  I was expecting it, so I was able to block him before he got a step toward her. “Step back, Jacob,” I ordered, but he didn’t listen. Not that I was expecting him to.

  Now that we were closer, I could smell it. The liquor. He’d been drinking. Not enough to be stumbling, slurring drunk, but enough to lower his inhibitions and make him more dangerous.

  “You step back, you traitorous bastard.” Jacob shoved me, but I didn’t budge. “That’s my girl. My fiancée. Not yours.” His finger stabbed the air in Cora’s direction.

  “She’s not something to possess.”

  He rolled his head to the side, cracking his neck. “No? Because you seem to be under the impression you can just take her without asking permission.”

  “He didn’t take me.” From the sound of movement, I guessed Cora was climbing off the bed. I wasn’t going to look back to confirm it though; I didn’t dare take my eyes off of Jacob for one second in his current condition. “This was my choice. My decision. I’m here with him because I want to be, not because he took anything.”

  For the briefest moment, sadness settled into his eyes. It was unmistakable, raw, and fleeting. This wasn’t the way I’d wanted things to happen. This wasn’t how I’d wanted him to find out. Despite my brother’s downfalls and mistakes, he deserved better than this.

  I was a knot of emotions, a dozen different agendas pulling me in different directions. Protecting her, protecting him, wanting to explain, wanting to go back in time, looking for the rights words to say that could fix all of this.

  This cou
ldn’t be fixed though. The damage had been done. All I could do was try to protect them both.

  “Jacob, I’m sorry. This wasn’t what I planned. We’d never want to hurt you, but she’s made her choice.” I moved with him as his paces went wider. “Can you try to respect that?”

  Jacob stopped, turning so we were facing each other, his eyes unrecognizable. “Can I try to respect that? Sure, I guess I can try to respect that.” He paused for a minute, his eyes lifting like he was considering it right then. “Sorry, not going to work for me.”

  I caught a glimpse of it in his eye before his body went into motion, but not in time to move. Just enough time to brace myself for it.

  Jacob’s fist came around fast, and right on target. When it cracked me in the jaw, all I concentrated on was staying on my feet and not retaliating. This wasn’t the first fist I’d taken from my brother, but it was the first one I’d taken without paying it back. Part of me took it because I knew I deserved it. Another part realized getting into a fight with my brother wouldn’t solve a damn thing.

  So I let him have a free one.

  Cora gave a little cry. I heard the sound of her feet rushing closer, but I lifted my arm at her, shaking my head.

  “How’s that for respect, brother? Not that a piece of shit like you would know anything about it.” Jacob shook his fist, bouncing like he was just getting warmed up.

  Moving my jaw around, I positioned myself directly in front of him. “Respect it or don’t, but she’s made her choice.”

  His arm moved so fast this time, I didn’t have time to brace for the hit. The sound of his knuckles connecting with my jaw pierced the air, the sound of Cora’s shouts echoing with it.

  I staggered to the side a few steps, but I didn’t go down. I couldn’t. If Jacob needed to use me as a human punching bag to diffuse his anger, fine. If he was so exhausted at the end of beating the shit out of me that he didn’t have any energy left to target at her, that worked just fine for me.

  “Jacob, stop!” Cora came up behind me, her hands dropping to my shoulders as she pulled on me like she was trying to yank me away from him. “This is your brother for god’s sake. Enough.”

  “That’s right. He is my brother. You’d think that came with some kind of loyalty, wouldn’t you?” Jacob was shaking out his fist again. A couple of his knuckles were bleeding. Or maybe that was my blood. I could taste it in my mouth and feel it trickling down from my lip. “Then again, you’re my fiancée and I just found you beneath another man, so maybe loyalty’s gone extinct.”

  “You are the last person to be talking about loyalty,” Cora snapped.

  “And the last person I’m going to take morality lessons from is a two-timing whore.”

  Breaking out of Cora’s hold, I stormed toward him, shoving him so hard he fell back into the wall. My arms were trembling at my sides, my fists curling, begging to be put to use.

  All that did was make him laugh. Like we were all in on some joke and had just discovered so. Lifting his arms out at his sides, Jacob stopped when he was a few steps in front of me. “This is your chance, Matt. Your chance to get me back.” He turned his head so his cheek was facing me, his arms still raised like he was offering himself to me. “To take it out on me for all the times I know you wanted to. For all the times it was my arms she went into instead of yours. All the times she picked me over you. All the times you heard her sighs coming from behind my bedroom door. This is your chance to beat the shit out of me like you wanted to do all of those times.”

  My body was trembling. From wanting to let him have it, from trying to hold back. I felt like so much adrenaline was filling my body, it was seeping out of my pores. “You’re wrong.” I closed the distance between us by a step. “I didn’t want to beat the shit out of you back then.”

  He huffed. “You hated me for it. You hated me because I had her and you didn’t.”

  My head shook slowly, and I held my hands up like I was making a truce. “I didn’t hate you. I loved her.”

  So much for my truce. It wasn’t Jacob’s fist that came at me then—it was his whole body. Barreling in my direction, he drove me into the wall on the other side of the room. The breath rushed out of my lungs from the impact right before he drove his fists into me like he couldn’t land them fast enough.

  Cora rushed up behind us, looking like she was about to get in the mix and try to tear us apart. The thought of her coming between us when Jacob was like this shot panic into my bloodstream.

  “Cora, no.” My head shook when my eyes found hers. It was enough to stop her, though I knew it wouldn’t last for long.

  Jacob’s hits continued to pummel my stomach until I felt myself about to double over. Twisting, I managed to get my shoulder into him, and I lunged forward, driving him across the room until we rammed into a table. A lamp tumbled over the side, breaking when it hit the floor, but neither of us acknowledged it. We were in a different world.

  Now my fists were flying, connecting wherever they could. Jacob grinned up at me as I continued to land hit after hit, like he was enjoying this.

  “See? Doesn’t that feel better?” Jacob laughed right before kicking my feet out beneath me.

  I hit the floor hard, making the pictures on the walls shake. He was on me instantly, pinning my arms and delivering hit after hit, his aim on my face. I didn’t know where the surge of strength came from, but the next moment, I was back on top of him, swinging at him while he swung at me. Our knees, elbows, and fists were a blur of motion.

  I’d never felt this way before. This kind of rage. The kind that made everything in my vision glow red. I’d never realized I was capable of the power I possessed or what it was capable of doing. I felt it all bubble to the surface right then. All of the times I’d suppressed my feelings, every time I’d buried them deep, they all burst free at the same time, fueling my anger and my fists.

  The fight felt like it would never come to an end. It was clear neither of us would be the first to tap out, and even though we’d been at it for a while, neither of our strikes were dimming in power or enthusiasm.

  “That’s enough! Both of you!” Cora had been silent in the corner for long enough. She came charging forward. “You’re both going to kill each other.”

  She grabbed my arm, pulling it back before it could connect with Jacob. That left one side of me vulnerable, and Jacob didn’t waste a moment. The instant he hit me, I went flying back, but I wasn’t the only one. With the way Cora was still holding on to me, she staggered back and tripped over one of Jacob’s shoes that had come off during the brawl. She hit the ground hard, the back of her head ramming into the table behind her.

  The sound it made when she hit it was the most disturbing noise I’d heard yet.

  Jacob and I went instantly still, both of our heads turning toward where she’d fallen. I crawled toward her, my vision blurred from what I guessed was a black eye or two starting to form. Jacob rolled onto his side, heaving for a breath, trying to make his way toward her too.

  “Don’t. Just don’t.” Cora’s hand moved behind her head, rubbing it.

  I stilled, not sure what to do. I wanted to go to her, but from the look on her face, that was not what she wanted.

  “Look at you two. You’re brothers. Twin brothers.” She sat up, motioning between Jacob and me bloodied and broken on the floor. “You’re fighting over a girl. Over me. I won’t come between you.” Her head shook as she started to stand. She wobbled a few times, but she shook her head when I moved to help. “I refuse to be the reason you two rip each other apart. We’ve been through too damn much for that.”

  She didn’t know, or she hadn’t accepted, that she’d been what had come between us for years. This was nothing new. This was just all of those years coming to a head. A bloody, brutal one.

  Her eyes filled with tears when they met mine, but she didn’t let a single one fall. “I can’t do this.”

  When she headed toward the door, I moved to stand. “Cora—”
r />   She didn’t stop, didn’t look back. I didn’t even know if she heard me. She was leaving, and I understood why. She loved us both. In different ways maybe, but she cared about us and couldn’t stand to be the reason we killed each other, literally or figuratively.

  She was moving through the door when Jacob’s throat cleared. “I was with someone else.” He didn’t sound anything like the person he’d been minutes ago. He sounded like the brother I remembered, the one I loved and respected. “That’s why I didn’t make it to the wedding. I went out, met someone, got drunk, and let her take me home.”

  Cora turned slowly in the doorway.

  “I made a mistake. I’ve made lots of mistakes, Cora.” He sighed as his confession continued, his eyes never wandering from hers. “I never wanted to hurt you. I loved you, but I’m a self-destructive, greedy son of a bitch. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t say anything. She stood there framed in the doorway, the rain coming down behind her. Instead of a look of despair covering her face, she looked more peaceful than anything else. “Thank you for being honest,” she whispered, stepping back onto the porch. “Good-bye, Jacob.”

  She didn’t say anything else. She just turned into the night and rushed down the porch into the rain.

  “Cora!” I called, pushing myself to a stand. It took more effort than it should have, but that might have been because every bone in my body felt either broken or bruised. Same for every muscle.

  She didn’t stop, and a few moments later, the dark swallowed her.

  “Cora!” I tried again. My first few motions forward were more a hobble than a step.

  “Going to need to move faster than that if you’re going to catch her.” Jacob had scooted back into a wall, wiping his face off with his shirt. It came away with streaks of blood and sweat.