From the end of the line, I heard Eli speak, his tone saying he had just gotten done rolling his eyes. “Even if I thought it was funny, I know better than to encourage him."
"Right? Give him an inch and he'll take a mile."
"Or five."
I adjusted the incline and upped the speed slightly on the machine. “Are you two done having your weird twin slash gay moment? Or do you want me not to give you the details?"
"Jokes about us being gay never get old," Elijah said with a sigh. "I thought we'd left them behind in high school, but here we are, in our twenties and still getting them."
"Oooh, what are you doing, step-bro?" Milo said with a laugh. "Help, I'm stuck."
"You really need to stop watching porn," Elijah said wryly.
"I mean, youaremy step-brother. So it's not incest."
"Thanks for the reminder. Now you sound like Mom."
"God, I’d almost blocked that memory out."
"Uh," I interrupted, dialing the speed down a bit. "What's this about Mom and you two?"
"Milo, don't," Elijah protested, but he clearly forgot how chatty and blabbermouthed our brother could be.
"Oh, we were what, fourteen, fifteen? Something like that. I don't know if she heard from people or if she came up with it on her own, but she sat us down for a talk."
"Thetalk?" I wondered in confusion. "That's a little late for her. She caught me and Moira when we were like...ten or eleven."
"Notthattalk," Milo said with a sigh. "She, uh...well, she wanted to tell us that if something was going on between us, that was okay by her and that while we probably shouldn't be honest about it in high school because, as she put it, teenagers are the meanest creatures to walk the earth. She would be okay with it. Everyone else in the family might give us shit, but it would be okay."
"Wow," I said with a sudden laugh. "And I thought the sex talk was bad."
"Tell me about it," Milo said with a laugh. "I thought Eli was gonna keel over on the spot and wither away into embarrassed dust."
"She was talking about us being together," Elijah grumbled. "What else was I supposed to do? You went redder than I thought possible."
"I mean, well, yeah. I was a teenager who just had my mom say that if you're with your step-brother, that's totally fine by her. Why wouldn't I turn red? But hey, at least she thinks we both had good taste."
"Remind me why I hang out with you again?"
"Clearly because we're secretly lovers."
"Milo!"
I snorted, knowing it was better just to let them get their bickering out of the way rather than try to fight it. Plus, I wasn't surprised by the story, our mom didn't exactly have a lot of tact, and combined with her rather accepting nature about most things meant she often said or did things that could mortify even the most accepting teenager.
She also wasn't exactly misguided. None of our other brothers had said anything to me, but I'd seen the occasional sidelong glance they'd given Milo and Elijah over the years. The two were only a year apart, but they'd met when they were seven and six, and taken to each other immediately, faster even than Mom and Marcus had. We still didn't know who Milo's father was, but we all suspected it had been some random man our mom had been with for comfort after the death of my dad. Clearly, she thought Milo's father wasn't important enough to be named and was happy to raise him on her own. That was until a few years later when she met Marcus and decided to bring the families together.
Sure, seeing two kids get along so quickly was sweet, even I had to admit that, even though I'd been in my surly teenage years and would have rather died a horrible death than admit my brothers were cute. Plus, it meant they had a guaranteed companion for life, something Moira and I had always had in one another, so I knew how great that was.
Yet there had always been something...odd about their relationship. It wasn't one thing, or a list of little things that you could point at and define, but there wassomething. I couldn't say exactly when it started, but somewhere in their mid-teens, so my mom's timing was on point. I had never said anything to them, and I didn't think anyone in the family other than our mom had either, but I bet we all thought it.
It certainly didn't help that on top of being around each other constantly, even living together in an apartment downtown, neither had had a love life to speak of. Milo had had a couple of boyfriends, because apparently being not straight ran in the damn bloodline through my mother's side, but mostly it was, as I suspected, just one-night stands and the occasional friend with benefits. Elijah had done a little better, but his few girlfriends had large gaps in between, and he never seemed all that concerned about dating. Which was fine on their own, but when put together, they made a rather suspicious picture.
Not that I was going to be the one to tell them that, under the jokes, I genuinely wondered if there was something between them, even if they themselves didn't understand or know it.
"You two done?" I wondered as I increased the incline.
"For now," Elijah said, because if he didn't say something, then undoubtedly Milo would continue chattering away.
