Chase

For eight straight hours, I’ve had images of Bro’s sex room seared into my brain.

And she’s in every last image.

Her legs spread in invitation on a red velvet chaise. Bent over an ancient metal desk, offering me her ass. In one, there’s a Bro vending machine, and I keep putting dollars in so I can eat her like an ice cream cone. That one’s a little weird, I confess.

It’s possible I have a problem. I can’t decide if I need to do her again and get her out of my system, or attempt to offer an olive branch and let my mother introduce me to that nice fifty-year-old woman she met on her cruise who would make a much better daughter-in-law than Ambrosia May what the hell are you thinking Berger.

That’s what Mom always calls her. And my mother’s a fucking saint. She doesn’t cuss.

Ever.

I’m trying to think about my mother and not Bro Berger when I arrive at Yankee Stadium.

Unfortunately, she’s the first thing I see.

Bro, that is. My mother’s still on her cruise.

Ambrosia’s sandwiched between her brothers, a little speck between two boulders, but I see her first. She’s doing what she always did when we were growing up—she’s laughing.

She was always laughing with her brothers. Maybe not always—she didn’t like it when they strung her craft beads on their used dental floss. Or when we used her flowery hair things as fishing bait. Or when Ares would fart on her dolls’ heads.

But when her brothers weren’t terrorizing her, or when she wasn’t putting itch cream in their jock straps or honey on their field hockey sticks—all those mosquitoes in the summer, and Ares and Zeus always scratching down their pants and getting honey on their nuts… I still have nightmares for them.

Point is, she never smiled at me. She never laughed with me. She had this perfect little life, smart parents with good jobs, a big house, and two brothers who’d pummel you first and ask questions later if they thought you looked at her wrong. But she was always too good for me, and she thought her brothers were too.

She was probably right.

But look at me now, baby.

She catches my eye, and her smile drops off.

That’s Bro Berger for you. Still too good for the riffraff from the wrong side of the tracks.

A billion fucking dollars in my bank account, and she’s the only person in the world who sees me.

Zeus lifts a hand and waves to me. “Hurry up, dude. Beer’s waiting.”

“Why is he here?” Bro asks.

“I got bored.” Zeus grins at her. “You gonna give us a show?”

“I’m giving you spiders for Christmas,” she hisses. “Except I’m going to send them in October when you’re not expecting them.”

The woman knows how to terrorize her brothers, and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

We’re escorted in through the players’ entrance. Fucker didn’t get four seats, he got a private suite, which is good since Bro brought three friends. And my fat bank account is still new enough that I might buy grocery stores, business suits worth more than my hometown, and small pharmaceutical firms doing experimental research in combating the effects of pesticides and factory chemicals, but being treated like royalty still gives me a thrill.

Bro takes a seat in the two short rows of stadium seats at one end of the room, which would be comfortably-sized if we were all buddies, but are definitely too small for the seven of us. Her friends take the seats around her after grabbing snacks and drinks from the trays and buckets set out on the bar along the back wall.

I know Parker from Crunchy—she has two masters degrees, one in business administration and the other in marketing, fifteen years of experience, and she’s been stuck in a worker bee job for years.

Not because she wasn’t applying for promotions, but because she kept getting passed over.

I’m fixing that.

The other two women, I don’t know at all, but the one who reminds me of Snow White with long hair is vaguely familiar. The shorter one with the spiky hair and librarian glasses strikes me as the terrifying sort, and not in the good way.

Zeus hands me a beer and straddles a chair. “She’s avoiding you, man. What’d you do?”

Ares is behind me. He crushes a full beer can with his bare fist. Beer drizzles into my hair and down my neck. I jerk out of the seat. I could probably take him down with a well-aimed glass bottle, but at least when we were kids, there were only three places where his body was actually vulnerable, and two of them I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

“Hey, you’re wasting good beer,” Zeus says. “Knock it off and drink it like you have opposable thumbs.”

Ares is twisting the can in his hands, grinning. “I did it.”

Zeus does a double-take. “Oh, hey. You did.” The brothers share a fist bump. “And that was one of the steel cans.”

“That was so fucking cool,” the spiky-haired one with Bro says.

“Don’t encourage him.” Bro points at Ares with the death finger that her mother used to use. “If you sleep with any of my friends, so help me, I will rub ghost chilis all over your mouth guard, smear Icy Hot in your cup, and I’ll call ESPN and tell them you still wet the bed.”

That, too, is classic Bro. And now my dick is sword fighting my zipper. I know what she can do when she channels that passion.

“What if he pours beer on Chase again?” Zeus asks with a smirk.

“Why would I care?”

“Sia,” Snow White chides in a whisper.

“He’s the numero uno dick-o,” Bro whispers back.

“I know, but still…”

Her other friend, the scary one, points at me. “Hey, you’ve got some glitter right here.” She pulls her eyelid over her eye.

Parker ducks her head over a bag of peanuts. Snow claps her hand over her mouth, but I still hear giggles.

Bro, on the other hand, is watching me like she knows what’s up in my pants.

“You make her scrub the toilets at work or something?” Zeus says. “Man, she hates toilet duty.”

Good to know. “We had a disagreement about employee motivation factors.” Getting into details go could one of two ways. Either Zeus and Ares toss me out the front of the suite for saying sex room in relation to their sister, or the NHL gets a new idea in their suggestion box.

Possibly both.

“You do what she says if you want to keep her.” There’s three hundred fifty pounds of unpredictable Viking telling me to let his sister have a sex room at work. One day we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or my dick is going to split the zipper in my jeans as it votes in favor of Bro’s idea.

Zeus’s eyes narrow. “I’m serious, dude. She asked us to find her a job with the Rangers.”

“The fuck she did,” I say before I realize which head I’m talking with.

“Free world, dickhead,” Bro says, earning another poke from Snow. “They’d take my suggestions seriously.”

“Fine.” I’m sweating like a Canadian in Florida. I have got to get a grip on this throbbing in my nuts. Even if I’d prefer she get a grip on my nuts. Fucking Zeus and his You like my sister, don’t you? “Send it through HR.”

Parker, who I belatedly remember knows exactly what we’re talking about, chokes on a peanut. We all hop up and fight over who’s going to give her the Heimlich, and for once, my dick gets the memo that something honest-to-god serious is going on and gives me some breathing room.

Zeus grabs me by the collar and dangles me to get me out of the way. “I got this,” he says.

Ares grunts and digs an elbow into his ribs, tripping over the seats.

“Stop it,” Bro shrieks. “You two yahoos will put her breastbone through her spine before you get the peanut out.”

“I like breasts,” Ares says.

Parker’s coughing and sputtering. Snow gives her a good hard whack, and peanut chunks fly across the box.

“Water,” Parker rasps. She points at the Berger twins. “No touchy. Nooo touchy.”

Bro shoves a bottle in her hand, Zeus signals Ares to sit, and I ease back into my seat, being careful with my tender balls.

I definitely have a problem.

Once everyone’s certain Parker isn’t going to choke again, the game’s about to start. We stand for the National Anthem, and the scary one—Eloise, I’ve learned—whoops and hollers for every last one of the Yankees as they’re introduced, even the batting manager. “He is so hot,” she says.

The first batter goes up, and Zeus pokes me with an elbow that would probably earn him a trip to the penalty box if he were on the ice. “Hey, man, you remember that time we buried all of Ambrosia’s troll dolls with just their hair sticking up and threatened to run over them with Dad’s old push lawnmower?”

Bro’s eyes take on a nuclear glow, and I have to shift in my seat to accommodate my once-again growing lightning rod. “Sure,” I say to Zeus.

“Pink one was scary,” Ares grunts.

“Not like that unicorn on her school binder.” Zeus shudders. “The one with the rainbow horn? Something wrong with its eyes.”

“There wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t put devil eye stickers over the real eyes,” Bro says. “You possessed my unicorn.”

“No, it was freaky before it got possessed. I wouldn’t touch that thing.” He slugs Ares. “That you?”

“No way. Scary horse bad.”

Bro’s looking a little possessed herself, and my balls are aching again. Pretty sure I can’t solve this problem with a quick trip to the bathroom either. As long as she’s within a quarter mile radius, and pissed off over anything, I’m going to be worse off than if I were force-fed a handful of little blue pills and tossed in a sultan’s harem.

“Your handiwork?” she says to me, and now I’m thinking of her handiwork. Her hands. On my cock. Squeezing. Stroking. Guiding it to her mouth—

“You would’ve known if it was me,” I say.

It was definitely me. And I would’ve hit the kitten posters in her room with them too if I’d known it bothered her.

For the first time in my life, I wonder if I was a shithead.

Always proudly claimed hellion. Never considered shithead. It’s enlightening. Not sure how I feel about this.

Ares crushes another beer can.

While I move yet one more seat closer to the women, Eloise abandons Bro to claim the seat beside Ares. “Can you do two at once?” she asks.

“With my eyes shut,” he says.

“Hold on.” Zeus lifts his phone. “Let me get this on camera. Fellas ain’t gonna believe this shit without proof.”

I move one more seat down, but I’m grinning.

Because damn. I’ve missed these nimrods. “They don’t change, do they?” I say to Bro.

“Nope. But they hit harder now.”

Just like old times.

I chuckle to myself, steal a handful of her popcorn, and settle in to watch some baseball.