Possessive Older Brother

Mickey had been home for less than twenty-four hours, and already everything felt right again.

Not Worcester-right. Not dorm-room, practice-at-six, somebody-stealing-his-protein-shakes-from-the-communal-fridge right.

Home right.

He'd woken up late to the sound of somebody moving around downstairs and spent maybe thirty seconds staring at the ceiling before remembering where he was. His old room. His parents' house. Christmas break.

You.

That had gotten him out of bed.

The rest of the day had gone exactly the way he'd been hoping it would. Nothing special, technically. That was the best part.

You'd spent half the morning sprawled around the living room watching movies neither of you were paying much attention to, arguing about what counted as a Christmas movie and throwing increasingly stale popcorn at each other. At some point Mickey had gotten you into a headlock over some stupid comment, you'd turned it into an actual wrestling match, and he'd nearly put both of you through the coffee table before remembering he outweighed you by— Well. Enough.

"Jesus Christ," he'd laughed, catching himself against the couch. "Ma would actually kill me. Imagine explaining that. Yeah, sorry, I broke the table with the baby. Merry Christmas."

Lunch had been the same. Easy. Familiar.

He'd driven, obviously. You'd stolen fries off his plate, obviously. He'd complained about it while moving the basket closer to you, also obviously. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, Mickey had felt the last few months loosen their grip on him.

College was good. He loved football. Loved his teammates. Loved the independence, even if half the guys on his floor were fucking animals.

But he had missed this. Missed you. More than he'd admitted, probably. Not in some pathetic way. It wasn't like he sat around Worcester staring at your contact photo every night like some loser. He had a life. Practices, classes, parties, friends, girls.

Still. There was something deeply satisfying about slipping back into this without effort. No awkward adjustment period. No polite catching up. No discovering you'd become somebody he didn't recognize while he was gone.

You were still you. He was still Mickey. And whatever changed outside this house, this didn't.

That comfortable certainty lasted until sometime after lunch.

You were back in the living room, Mickey stretched across one end of the couch with one socked foot hooked over the arm, when you mentioned that your partner was coming over later.

Mickey looked at you. "Your what?"

Partner.

Right.

Okay.

Apparently this was information he was supposed to already have.

He covered the pause by reaching for his drink.

"When the fuck did that happen?" The question came out sharper than he'd meant it to. Mickey caught it immediately and forced a crooked grin over the irritation. "Jesus, relax. I'm askin'. You didn't tell me."

Maybe you had. Maybe there'd been a text he'd skimmed between meetings or practice or one of the hundred other things constantly happening at school.

Except he would have remembered that.

Wouldn't he?

Mickey tried to let it go.

It was fine. Of course it was fine. You were allowed to date people. He'd dated plenty of people.

Hell, he'd spent years telling you that anybody you brought home would have to survive the Mickey Sullivan Inspection first, but that was a joke. Mostly.

So when your partner showed up that evening, Mickey made an effort. A real one.

He shook their hand. Smiled. Asked questions.

Where'd you meet? How long's this been going on? What are you studying? What do you do?

Normal older-brother shit.

The problem was that every answer seemed to make something under Mickey's ribs pull tighter.

They knew what you wanted to order before you said it. That shouldn't have bothered him.

They knew about something you'd started doing a couple months ago. That definitely shouldn't have bothered him.

They touched you like they didn't have to think about whether they were allowed to. That—

Mickey took another drink.

He could feel himself becoming an asshole in real time. Short answers. Little corrections nobody had asked for. Jokes with just enough edge that the room went quiet for half a second afterward.

Once, when your partner told some story involving you, Mickey actually interrupted to say, "Yeah, they've always done that," as if somebody had accused him of not knowing. Nobody had.

By the end of the night, even he couldn't pretend he was being normal.

Your partner eventually left.

You went upstairs.

Mickey stayed downstairs.

Hours later, he sat alone at the kitchen table with one bare foot against the chair rung and a beer sweating between his hands.

The house had gone properly quiet. Christmas lights from the living room threw weak colored reflections across the kitchen floor. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs, a pipe clicked in the wall.

Mickey stared at the label on his bottle.

He'd been a dick. There wasn't really a nicer way to phrase it.

Your partner hadn't done anything.

That was almost worse.

If they'd been an asshole, Mickey could've worked with that. If they'd talked down to you, ignored you, treated you badly—great. Easy. He'd know exactly what this feeling was. Protective. Justified.

Instead, they'd been perfectly fucking pleasant. Which left Mickey with himself.

He heard footsteps on the stairs.

Mickey looked up when you came into the kitchen. For half a second he considered pretending he was just getting water. Then he looked at the beer in his hand.

"Hey." His voice came out quieter than usual. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down at the table. "Listen, I was kind of an asshole tonight."

There. Easy. An apology. He could do those.

Mickey exhaled through his nose and rolled the bottle slowly between his palms. "I don't know what my problem was. They seem... fine." Even that sounded reluctant, and he grimaced at himself. "That's shitty. Sorry."

He should've stopped there. Instead, after a moment, he looked up at you again. "I just don't get why you didn't tell me. I mean, we're supposed to talk about this stuff." Something uncomfortable was already gathering behind his sternum, but now that he'd started, apparently he was going to keep digging. "How long have you even been together? And they come over here a lot? Do they..." His brows pinched together. "Do they stay over?"

The question sounded invasive as soon as it left his mouth. Mickey rubbed a hand over his jaw. "Okay. None of my business." He took another drink, then immediately ruined the concession. "But if it's serious, I should know, right?"

He leaned back in the chair, thumb worrying at the edge of the beer label. "It's just weird. I go away for school and suddenly there's this whole part of your life I don't know anything about. They know shit about you I didn't even know." He gave a short laugh, but there wasn't much humor in it. "I used to know everything."

That sounded insane. Mickey shook his head before you could say anything. "You know what I mean. I've always been here for you. I pick you up when you need me, I bring you shit, I fix stuff, I listen to you. I know when something's wrong before you even fucking say anything half the time." He gestured vaguely toward the front of the house, as though your partner might still be standing somewhere beyond it. "And now this person just shows up and suddenly they're the one who gets all that?"

He heard himself and frowned. "No, that's not—fuck." Mickey dragged a hand down his face. The bottle landed against the table a little harder than he'd intended. "I don't even know what I'm trying to say."

Except he did seem to know, because after a few seconds he looked at you again and asked, "Why do you even need them?"

The question came out quieter than everything before it.

Mickey's brow furrowed. "Seriously. What are they doing for you that I don't?"

And there it was.

For a second, he didn't understand why the sentence felt different from all the others. Then the evening began rearranging itself in his head: the irritation every time your partner touched you, the stupid little flare of resentment when they knew something about you he didn't, the private jokes, the casual familiarity, the awful feeling of having missed some version of you while he was away. Worse, Mickey had just spent the last several minutes listing everything he did for you like he was trying to prove something.

His grip tightened around the beer bottle.

Oh.

Oh, shit.

Mickey went very still.

He wasn't horrified, exactly. Mostly he looked blindsided, as though he'd followed his own argument somewhere he hadn't realized it was going. His eyes dropped briefly to the table before finding yours again.

"...Is it because I went away?" The question was softer now, stripped of most of the defensiveness he'd been hiding behind.

"Did I fuck this up somehow? Because I went to Worcester and I wasn't here, and they were?" He stopped, swallowed, then tried again. "I mean, I do all that stuff. I'm here whenever you need me. I know you better than anybody. I..."

His mouth closed. Mickey stared at you. The rest of the sentence was suddenly obvious enough that saying it aloud felt dangerous.

Why wasn't that enough?

Why wasn't he enough?