I’m not too upset about it. I figure it means you’ll have to be in the same room as me for at least an hour,” Finn retorted. There was a long pause, and Noah could practically feel his twin’s unspoken hurt through the phone line.
“Finny…” Noah started, using his childhood nickname.
“Never mind,” Finn cut in.
“No, it’s just that I’ve been getting a lot of assignments this year.”
“You’ve worked nonstop for eight months. Right. Like I said, never mind.”
“Finn—”
“Gotta go. See you Friday, brother.”
Noah sighed as Finn cut the call off. He’d known Finn was mad about his extended absence, of course. When two people were as close as Noah and Finn, a hand’s breadth of emotional distance quickly became glaring and ugly. Noah had started doing stories abroad five years ago, but this year he’d purposely amped up his career in an attempt to…
Shit, he wasn’t sure what he’d been trying to do. Noah just knew that he and Finn were twenty eight years old, god damn it, and they were going to have to learn to live apart sometime. Before this year, they’d still been sharing a fucking apartment. While part of Noah loved living with his brother, loved being around the only other person in the world who really got him, part of him knew that if he wanted an adult life he’d have to make some changes.
If only Finn hadn’t been hurt in the process. Noah had tried to explain at first, but Finn had been oblivious. When Finn had brought home yet another girl who professed to be interested in dating both of them, Noah had moved out. He loved his brother to the bottom of his world-weary soul, but those girls were beyond weird. Noah had never taken any of them up on their hints about a threesome, though it wasn’t Finn’s presence that offended Noah.
How could he be offended by the person who was a natural extension of himself?
No, it was the girls that killed the deal. There’d been three candidates over maybe six or seven years. They were all the same odd type, cold and anxious and hypersexual. They seemed hungry in a bleak, dark way that gave Noah the creeps. And for Finn’s part, Noah couldn’t understand why his brother would want to settle for a woman who didn’t want Finn for herself. That possession was a defining mark of a relationship, to Noah’s mind, and he couldn’t see any way around that.
Looking at his watch, Noah realized that he needed to sleep so badly that he wouldn’t make it back to his apartment. Especially not if he had to be back on a plane in…
“Twelve fucking hours,” Noah moaned.
Pointing his Land Rover toward the Hilton, Noah forgot his rumination on his twin in favor of anticipating the hot steak and warm bed he was headed toward.
Home On The Range
Josiah Beran reclined at his desk in his home office, chewing on the stub of an unlit cigar, looking out the wall-to-wall window that displayed a beautiful slice of Montana wilderness. The sun was just beginning to set, tingeing the blue sky with dewy pinks and purples. The cloudless sky looked especially blue splashed against the vivid green of rolling hills, capped by the verdant darkness of rocky mountains in the distance.
His mind wandered from the scene before him, his reflections turning inward. The twinge in his lower back, the ache in his bones, they warned him to take things easy, not to push so hard. Not that he’d obey, but with every passing year Josiah found it harder and harder to silence his body’s complaints.
Most simply put, Josiah was growing old. He was older, more tired, and seemingly crankier with each passing day. His hair was going from salt-and-pepper to white, his once-glorious physique slowly diminishing. Though he didn’t think of himself as a vain main, after a lifetime of bodily perfection, it was difficult to accept that he was in decline. In a few years, he would have to either relinquish his spot as Alpha of the Montana clan or wait until some