Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 23821 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 119(@200wpm)___ 95(@250wpm)___ 79(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 23821 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 119(@200wpm)___ 95(@250wpm)___ 79(@300wpm)
Leaving for school was easier than I thought it would be—with the one exception of Varro. Being apart after nine years of constant togetherness was painful.
It turned out the whole sharing-a-brain-with-someone thing was not something you could just turn off and on. I was in Chicago, getting my business degree, but Varro was calling, texting, and emailing because he was excited to give me the news.
“Motorcycles?”
“Yeah.” It sounded like he was vibrating, he was that happy.
“You’re kidding?”
“No,” he snapped. “Why would I be kidding?”
“Why are you mad?”
He was always pissed off lately. The happy-go-lucky guy I’d known for years and years had disappeared once we weren’t living together anymore.
“I just don’t need one more person telling me it’s stupid.”
“So now I’m just another person.”
“No.”
“That’s what you just said.”
“Fuck you, Brian!” he yelled, and then he was gone.
I was stubborn and didn’t call back, so the next communication I got was an email directing me to join the SuperbikeSteel website so I could watch videos and basically stay on top of all the news related to racing on the international stage. My foster brother, first crush, first love, had decided he was going to race motorcycles for a living.
I called Nico, absolutely frantic.
“Don’t get me started.” He was trying not to hyperventilate himself.
A trust Varro’s grandfather had set up for him that he received when he turned twenty-one made his dream happen. We were all worried—the whole family—and when I checked in with Varro, finally got him on the phone, I asked him.
“Why not a car?”
“Too constrictive.” He yawned and made a noise like he was stretching, which I could imagine him doing. All the long muscles moving under his smooth skin…
“Brian?”
“Sorry.” I coughed. “But, uhm, motorcycles are dangerous, V.”
“Oh c’mon,” he husked. “Riding a motorcycle at two hundred miles an hour—it doesn’t get any better than that.”
I understood, of course. Speed had always been Varro’s greatest love.
And so it went. Nico and I were the boring ones: he was going to be a doctor; I was learning about finance and marketing. Varro called me from places like Monaco at all hours of the night and day, always drunk, always with noise in the background. Circumspect Varro was a thing of the past.
After I graduated with my bachelor’s in business administration, I went to work for a real estate developer while going to school for my MBA at night. It felt good; I was on track toward my goal of security. Varro didn’t get that. He wanted me to go on the road with him.
It became a weekly thing. He’d call from clubs, parties, places I didn’t want to know about, and beg me to come to wherever he was and stay with him.
“Are you doing body shots off a model?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
I’d groan and tell him I was hanging up.
“Just come stay with me.”
Always he entreated me to just get on a plane. And I understood: he didn’t know what had happened. It wasn’t his fault I fell in love with him. He wanted his best pal back, his adopted brother. I was the one carrying the torch and interfering with our lifelong friendship. But we were also simply growing up.
“We weren’t going to live together forever.”
“Why not?”
I was incredulous. “Because we’re grown men.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you’re gonna want a family someday––so will I.”
He scoffed. “You’re my family, Brian.”
“I’m a member of your family, yeah, but—”
“No. You’re it.”
He didn’t understand.
“Come see me. Come watch me race.”
I felt like crap about it, but being around him, having him manhandle me, hug me, kiss me in the whole touchy-feely way he had, was agony. My body heated when I was near him; my skin ached to touch and be touched in return.
I was hungry to taste him, and it was a consuming, unrequited desire. The only way I knew how to deal with it was to impose distance.
I went home for Christmas only when I knew he couldn’t make it. Mrs. Dacien always had the same lament, that someday, before she died, she would like all her boys home together. Little did she know that I checked the Internet and the company blog, stayed on top of his status on Instagram and YouTube to make sure I knew where he was at all times. There were no surprises. I became the master of last-minute changes.
“So you’re not coming now?” he would snarl into the phone from his parents’ home.
“No, I gotta work,” I reported, and really, it wasn’t a lie. I covered the office all the days before and after the holidays so people with families could have the time off. “I have a real job, you know?”
“Racing is—”
“A real thing, I know.”
“You’re such a dick sometimes.”
“Well, then, lucky for you, you don’t have to see me.”
He hung up, and it hurt, like a knife in my gut, but it saved me the pain of seeing him and not having him. I was also sparing him the humiliation of being grossed out by my advances. I was keeping us both safe from a shitload of grief.