Lane
God, I was fucking going to kill my brother with just my bare hands. I should have done it years ago, but had never found the balls to actually follow through with it. At the moment, I couldn’t even begin to understand what the fuck was wrong with me. Or him.
How the hell does he talk me into this shit?
I was becoming successful in my own right, running my own business, but I might as well have still been the little boy staring out my bedroom window, wondering how I was going to fix Jake’s current mess.
How was it that I couldn’t take charge of my own identical twin brother?
Oh, right, I was four and a half minutes older and technically had been in charge of cleaning up his fuck-ups since we were nine when our parents died in a car crash. We’d been sent to our grandparents, and they did their best, but they had zero clue what to do with a wild child like Jake.
Neither did I.
Throughout our childhood and adolescence, I was consumed by worry that our last living family members would give up on him. And that would have been worse than the alternative—telling the truth.
With my shoulders held high, wearing a fake smile and a polite demeanor to hide my broken soul, I spent the majority of my teen years sacrificing anything I might have wanted for the sake of my brother.
Like college. I was accepted to Vanderbilt; my brother wasn’t. So we stayed close to home and went to the University of Pittsburgh where my brother got to play D-1 baseball. I got an undergrad business degree, an MBA, and an education in sleeping with my brother’s hand-me-downs.
Except, all I ever wanted was to get the heck out of Dodge. I hated being close to home or anywhere that resembled that gray, colorless, craptastic place. And by home, I meant anywhere in the Northeast; any-fucking-where there was a change of season. Fall, with its leaves dropping casually all over the place, like they didn’t have a care in the world. Those pesky little pieces of life and their flitting to the ground were only followed by an icy chill, snowflakes in the air, and cold wind in my face—a constant reminder of the jagged ache of our loss and my mistakes.
But I went to Pitt and slogged through the shitty weather like a good and devoted brother, and I even stayed on afterward. Apparently I found some sick satisfaction in handling my brother’s dirty work and prolonging my own suffering.
Like now. My brother was casually sleeping with the yoga instructor at his gym, Fizzle Fitness. And she was teaching a five-thirty class he couldn’t make, so he sent me, his identical twin, to take his place.
“Practice in the back row, she’ll never know, Lane,” he insisted over lunch.
“Seriously?” I asked. “Jake, we’re twenty-five years old and you still want to play the bait-and-switch routine like when we were kids?”
Brushing aside my objections like he always did, he said, “I’m just in a bad spot, and I gotta do something for the gym. You understand putting work first, right? Still, we all need to get laid, bro, so do me this one favor. Yeah?”
And like that, I gave in to my asshole brother.
I did like yoga, but I preferred the quiet kind. The type where I could actually allow my mind to run free from responsibility. I didn’t need the flashing, thumping, party-scene class version.
But there I was, positioned in downward dog on my thick black mat, stretching out my tendons in the last row just like Jake suggested, trying to keep Lexie, the instructor and his current main squeeze, from coming over. I was flashing my brother’s girl a smirk like he would—should—have been doing, when two college girls walked in right as class was about to start. One chick set up her mat in the front row, and the other one dropped down right beside me.
I couldn’t be upset; the girl next to me was smoking hot. Intrigued, I took in her long wavy brown hair that she was twisting into a messy bun, small tits in a bright blue halter top, and tight hips and a round ass poured into tight black yoga pants. The disappointing thing was she fucking stank, and my eyes began to water from the stench wafting my way, like booze and stale sweat. This girl smelled like a bar after a long Saturday night.
Was she drunk? Was she even legal?
Slightly turning my head the other direction as I concentrated on Lexie’s instructions, I breathed the air coming from the too-skinny, nondescript blonde on my left.
Some punk, new-age, rap combo blared through the speakers, and I took in the absolute ridiculousness of my surroundings—the DJ with big cans on his ears was jamming to his own tunes completing the picture.
Welcome to Crazy Town.
The lights dimmed further and beams of black light swirled around the room as if we were in a dance club, giving everyone some spots of neon glow in the darkness. Which made this the least likely place to unwind, in my opinion. To actually relax, I looked forward to the beer or two I planned to have after class.
We were jetting through sun As and Bs, hopping back to chatarunga, and jumping up to our hands faster than I could even take one breath. I was pretty sure I was getting whiplash when all of a sudden something landed on my hip, knocking me forward right onto my stomach, and it didn’t move, just lay there heavily on top of me, pinning my hip bone to my mat.
“What the hell?” I said as I turned over, instantly holding my mouth closed because the foul odor from earlier enveloped me.
“Bess!” The girl’s friend from the front came running back, a blur of bright pink Spandex with her huge ponytail of curls whipping around her face, paying no mind to Lexie still trying to conduct class. “Bess! What happened?” she screamed at the brown-haired young woman sprawled across my mat.
We were both met with silence. I was still on the floor where I’d slid over on my knees, so I gently nudged the young girl, but she didn’t respond. Her friend dropped down next to me and violently shook the still body in front of us. As I watched, my gaze fell on the unusual tattoo on the unconscious girl’s arm, a crying eye that looked as if it were begging me to help.
“Bess, honey, Bess, wake up!” she yelled to her friend before whispering, “Oh my God, she’s dead.”
I moved my hand to the smelly but beautiful girl I had come to know as “Bess,” and felt her wrist for a pulse. When I felt a thready beat, I said to the woman whose name I didn’t know, “She’s alive.”
We were causing a scene with the unconscious girl on my mat and her friend slumped to the floor next to her, the friend shaking and quivering, almost turning blue herself, yet Lexie kept right on teaching.
What the hell is wrong with her? Why isn’t she handling this?
And then I remembered. I was supposed to be the owner of the club we were in, so naturally, I’d be handling this situation. On my own. As Jake.
Like I said, I was going to kill my brother.