Chapter 7: The Unwanted Audience
The blueberries were frozen into a solid, violet lump. Jack wrestled the bag, his knuckles white, until it finally gave with a crackle of ice. He dumped the pellets into a bowl, the sound like scattered marbles. The quiet in the kitchen was vast, filled only with the whisk against steel and the hum of the refrigerator.
No one spoke. The silence wasn’t empty; it was dense, charged with everything they’d done and hadn’t said.
Andrew poured the batter onto the hot griddle in perfect circles. It sizzled, releasing the smell of vanilla and browned butter. Dri leaned against the counter beside him, her shoulder touching his arm. She watched the bubbles form and pop on the surface of each pancake. “Flip on the third pop,” she murmured, repeating something from a show they’d watched curled on the couch weeks ago.
“I remember,” Andrew said, his voice low. He flipped them with a precise flick of his wrist.
Jack stood by the sink, the forgotten cleaning rag still in his hand. He felt like a spectator in his own home, watching a play of domesticity he hadn’t auditioned for. The scene was normal. That was the terrifying part. Andrew, shirtless in a pair of Jack’s sweatpants that hung low on his hips, moving with a calm efficiency. Dri, in one of Jack’s old t-shirts, her hair a damp auburn tangle down her back. They looked right. They looked like a unit.
He had made the unit. He had shoved them together. Now he was marooned outside it.
“Plates are in the cupboard to the left of the dishwasher,” Jack said, the words too loud in the quiet.
Andrew didn’t look up. “I know.”
Of course he did. He’d been living here for months. He knew where the plates were, where Jack kept the spare toilet paper, which floorboard in the hall creaked. This was his home, too. The realization settled in Jack’s gut, heavy and irreversible.
They ate at the small kitchen table, the same one where Jack had consumed a thousand silent, solitary meals. Andrew stacked three pancakes onto Dri’s plate, then his own. He slid the plate of remaining pancakes toward Jack’s empty spot. An offering.
Jack sat. He took a pancake. He poured syrup, the amber stream pooling in the divots.
Dri took a bite, closed her eyes. “Oh my god. Pope.”
A faint smile touched Andrew’s lips. He watched her eat, his own fork idle. “Not bad.”
“Not bad? It’s stupidly good.” She nudged Jack’s foot under the table. “Tell him they’re good.”
Jack shoved a too-large bite into his mouth. The flavors were perfect, sweet and tangy with bursts of warm berry. It was infuriating. “They’re adequate.”
Andrew’s smile didn’t falter. He knew.
The meal continued in a silence that gradually softened, edged with the mundane sounds of cutlery and chewing. It was a ceasefire. A temporary peace brokered by blueberries.
After, Dri insisted on washing up. Andrew dried. Jack was exiled again, standing uselessly in the doorway.
“Go sit down,” Dri said, her hands submerged in soapy water. “You’re hovering like a storm cloud.”
He retreated to the living room, falling into his worn leather armchair with a sigh that felt dredged from his bones. He grabbed the top journal from the stack on the side table, a dense article on novel anticoagulants. He stared at the graphs, the letters swimming. His mind replayed the shower’s muffled sounds, the sight of them emerging clean and quiet together.
He didn’t hear them finish. He just felt a shift in the air. Andrew walked in first, his movements silent on the rug. He didn’t go to the other chair. He sat on the middle cushion of the couch, his posture straight, hands on his knees. Dri followed, a dish towel still in her hand. She dropped it on the back of the couch and, without a glance at Jack, lay down, stretching her full length along the cushions. She put her head in Andrew’s lap.
Andrew’s hand came to rest automatically in her damp hair, his fingers combing through the curls.
Jack’s grip tightened on the journal. The page wrinkled. This was a different claiming. Quieter. More devastating. He looked back at his article, a flush creeping up his neck.
“Jack.” Andrew’s voice was a quiet command.
Jack didn’t look up. “I’m reading.”
“You’re not.”
The challenge hung in the air. Dri’s eyes were closed, but Jack could see the subtle tension in her body. She was listening, waiting.
“I’m fine right here,” Jack said, his voice clipped.
“You’re over there,” Andrew corrected, his fingers still moving in Dri’s hair. “We’re over here.”
Jack finally met his brother’s gaze. Andrew’s hazel eyes were calm, implacable. There was no malice, no triumph. Just a simple statement of fact, and an unyielding expectation.
“Come sit,” Dri said softly, her eyes still closed. “The journal will wait. It’s waited ten years.”
The accuracy of the shot stunned him. He put the journal down, the pages fluttering. He stood, his body aching. He felt ancient. He walked the three steps to the couch and stood before them, a supplicant.
Andrew nodded to the space on Dri’s other side.
Jack sat. The leather sighed under his weight. He was perched on the edge, a foot of empty cushion between him and Dri’s bent knees. The distance felt like a canyon.
Andrew watched him, his expression unreadable. Then he did something Jack didn’t expect. He reached across Dri’s body, his hand wrapping around Jack’s wrist. His grip was firm, calloused. He pulled.
Not hard. Just insistently.
Jack allowed himself to be tugged, sinking back into the couch cushions until his thigh was pressed against Dri’s legs. She shifted, not opening her eyes, and lifted her legs. She dropped them across Jack’s lap.
The weight was warm, solid, anchoring. He froze.
Andrew released his wrist and went back to stroking Dri’s hair. The silence expanded, but it was different now. It pressed in on Jack from all sides, a physical thing. Dri’s ankles were crossed over his thigh. He could feel the fine bones beneath her skin, the steady pulse point. He stared at his own hands, clenched on his knees.
“You run,” Andrew said, his voice so low it was almost inaudible. He wasn’t looking at Jack; he was looking down at Dri’s peaceful face. “I follow.” He finally lifted his eyes. They held Jack with a force that was both a threat and a promise. “Stay.”
One word. It wasn’t a request. It was the laying down of a new law, born from blood and seed and shared surrender.
Jack’s breath shuddered out of him. He looked at Dri’s legs in his lap, at Andrew’s hand in her hair, at the identical lines of their own profiles mirrored in the dim lamplight. The walls he’d spent a lifetime building felt like sand, washing away with the tide of this impossible reality.
Slowly, almost against his will, his right hand unclenched. He lifted it, hesitated, then let it fall to rest on Dri’s shin. The skin was soft, still slightly damp from the shower. His thumb moved, a faint, unconscious stroke.
On the other side of her, Andrew’s free hand, which had been resting on his own knee, shifted. His fingers stretched out across the cushion, brushing the back of Jack’s left hand where it still gripped his own knee.
Jack flinched at the contact. Andrew didn’t pull away. He let his fingers rest there, a bridge.
Three points of contact. Dri’s legs on Jack. Andrew’s hand in Dri’s hair. Andrew’s fingers touching Jack.
The circuit was complete.
Jack didn’t move. He sat in the dim, quiet room, the medical journal forgotten, the world outside the windows irrelevant. He felt the weight, the warmth, the terrifying connection. His thumb kept tracing that small, steady circle on Dri’s skin. Andrew’s finger stayed, a light, persistent pressure on his knuckle.
Dri let out a soft, sleepy sigh and burrowed her head deeper into Andrew’s lap. A curl of her hair stuck to the corner of her mouth. Andrew gently pulled it free.
No one spoke. The clock ticked. The lamp hummed.
They stayed.
They stayed until the angle of the light through the blinds shifted from pale grey to a thin, watery gold. The quiet was a living thing between them, humming with the memory of the kitchen, the shower, the weight of legs and the brush of fingers. Dri eventually stirred, the physician’s internal clock pulling her from the doze.
“Shit,” she mumbled, lifting her head from Andrew’s lap. She blinked, looking from one brother to the other as if re-calibrating. “I’m on in an hour.”
Neither man moved to release her. Andrew’s hand stilled in her hair. Jack’s thumb paused its circles on her ankle.
She squeezed Andrew’s thigh and patted Jack’s hand. “I mean it, you two. I have to go stitch people back together.”
They let her unravel herself from the tangle of them. She stood, stretching, the hem of Jack’s t-shirt riding high. She looked down at them, a soft, bewildered expression on her face. “I’ll… see you later?”
“You’re coming back,” Jack said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“After your shift,” Andrew added, his voice a low rasp.
“Yes.” A smile touched her lips. “I’ll bring food. Something that isn’t pancakes.”
She leaned down first to Andrew, cupping his jaw. Her kiss was slow, deep, a silent conversation against his mouth. He tilted into it, his hand coming up to cradle the back of her head for just a moment before letting her go.
She turned to Jack. He looked up at her, his hazel eyes guarded but soft. She didn’t hesitate. She braced her hands on the arms of his chair and kissed him, too—firmer, a spark of familiar challenge. He met it, his hand coming up to grip her hip, claiming the kiss for a few extra seconds.
“Be safe,” he muttered against her lips.
“Always am.” She grabbed her bag and shoes from by the door, giving them one last, unreadable look before slipping out.
The click of the front door was definitive. The house exhaled, settling back into a silence that was suddenly loud with her absence.
Jack and Andrew didn’t move. They listened to the sound of her car engine starting, the crunch of gravel, the fade down the street.
Jack let out a long breath. “Well.”
Andrew shifted on the couch, turning his body to face his brother. “She kissed you harder.”
Jack’s head snapped around. “What?”
“When she left. She kissed me like I was made of glass.” Andrew’s expression was thoughtful, analytical. “She kissed you like she wanted to start a fight. Or finish one.”
A slow, unfamiliar smirk pulled at Jack’s mouth. “Maybe she just knows what she’s getting with me. Consistency.”
“Consistently an ass,” Andrew said, but there was no heat in it. He leaned back, stretching his arm along the couch back. “My pancakes were better than adequate.”
Jack snorted, finally pushing himself out of the armchair. He walked to the window, watching the empty street. “They were edible. Don’t let it go to your head.”
“She said they were stupidly good.”
“She was being polite. She’s a doctor. She has a bedside manner.”
“She doesn’t have a polite bone in her body,” Andrew countered, a thread of amusement in his voice. “You heard her in the kitchen. She tells you exactly what she thinks.”
Jack turned, leaning against the window frame. He crossed his arms. “I got her off three times before noon. I’d say my performance was a bit more than adequate.”
Andrew’s eyes glittered. “I was the one who got her there the first time. And the last. In the shower.” He let the statement hang, a simple fact. “She couldn’t walk straight after.”
“She was wobbly before she ever got in that shower,” Jack shot back, but the competitive edge was blunted by a grudging respect. “You… pay attention.”
“So do you. You just pretend you don’t.” Andrew stood, mirroring Jack’s posture against the opposite wall. “She came for you, too. In between. When you were fucking her and I was just watching. That was for you.”
The air between them crackled, not with jealousy now, but with a strange, combative camaraderie. They were dissecting a shared victory, circling each other like athletes after a game.
“She likes being watched,” Jack conceded quietly. “By you.”
Andrew nodded once. “By us.”
Silence again, but it was easier now. Lighter.
Jack pushed off the wall. “She’s bringing Thai. From that place on Charles. You like the drunken noodles.”
“I know,” Andrew said. Then, a pause. “You remembered.”
Jack shrugged, moving toward the kitchen to finally dump his cold coffee. “I pay attention.” He threw the words over his shoulder, an echo. “Sometimes.”
He heard the soft sound of Andrew’s chuckle behind him. It was a rare, rough sound, like stones shifting in a stream.
“Sometimes,” Andrew agreed.