Justin sat back down on his seat and rubbed his chin. Could Phil possibly be right? Silently, he tried to think of a time when he had helped his brother with no strings attached. “No,” he sighed. “It’s not too much to ask. I’ll do it.” He paused. “For you.”
Phil looked at him as though he were speaking another language. “Are you sick or something?”
“Huh?” Justin asked, raising his eyebrows at his brother.
“The last time you said you’d do something for me you were lying in a hospital bed after you had your appendix out. I don’t even think you remembered what your name was when I asked if you’d clean my room when you got home. You opened one eye, looked at me and said, ‘Uh, huh.’”
“And I cleaned your room!” Justin pointed his finger at Phil. “So, therefore, you owe me.”
“You cleaned my room many times!” Phil protested. “Either you couldn’t stand the sight of it so you popped in to pick up a few things, or you felt the need to go through my things so you could use them for blackmail.”
Justin moved his stapler so that it was parallel to the tape dispenser. “I can stand the sight of messes,” he insisted, looking up at his brother.
Phil rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Just please, Justin, do this for me. If Lalie asks you about a bet, say that we bet on a Twins game.”
“Fine,” Justin agreed. “But only because you’re my brother and because you’re so terrible at lying that you couldn’t do the job yourself.”
“Thanks for the complement.”
“Anytime. Meet me at my place at four, okay?”
Phil nodded, gave Justin a weak smile and then left the room without a word. Justin stared at the door, half confused, half understanding his brother completely. Phil was absolutely right about him. Was there ever a time when Justin did something for Phil out of the goodness of his heart?
He gulped. What kind of person was he?
After helping Justin pick out a few things for the wedding that Adelyn had deemed the “groom’s responsibility,” Phil came back to his apartment prepared for a relaxing night with his girlfriend… only she was nowhere to be found. He finally found a note on the kitchen counter, saying she went out with a few friends and would be back later that night.
He settled down on the couch with the manuscript that the publishers had sent for him to go over with his agent, and started to notice a few changes that the editors had made to his book. He marked them with a red pen, flipping the pages over as he went. Just as he’d turned to page twenty-two, the door creaked open and Lalie and Cindy walked inside laughing.
“The look on your face when he asked for your number was priceless!” Lalie exclaimed as the two of them set their purses down on the kitchen counter.
Phil’s eyebrows went up, though he hid his expression in the pages of paper, raising them to cover his face as they approached him, giggling like schoolgirls.
“Didn’t you hear us come in?” Lalie asked.
Phil ignored her.
“Phil… hello…”
“Oh!” he exclaimed as he lowered the pages. “I didn’t know you were talking to me.”
“Who else would hear us come in?”
“I don’t know, Lalie,” he said lazily. “I wasn’t really paying attention. As you can see, I’m trying to over my book.” He gestured toward the pages and then put his nose back into them. “Excuse me.”
“Wow…” Cindy said in awe as she picked up a few sheets from next to Phil on the couch. “You wrote a book?”
Phil grabbed them from her and set them back down in the right order. “Yes,” he said, his voice cross.
“What’s it about?”
“Nothing.”
When neither Lalie nor Cindy replied, Phil peeked over his stack of papers to find them still staring at him. Obviously, they’d picked up on the fact that something was wrong.
Lalie removed the papers from next to him and set them down on the coffee table so she could take a seat in their place. “Is everything okay?” she said, her face close to his. “Do you want to talk about anything?”
He gave her a big, fake smile. “Nope. I’m perfectly fine, Lalie. Just trying to have some peace here, if you don’t mind.”
Cindy must have gotten the hint, because she started moving to get her purse. “I better get going Lalie… I have to be up tomorrow at six o’clock for work.”
“Okay, Cindy, it was a fun day!” Lalie said as she pushed up from Phil’s shoulder to stand. “We should get together soon.”
“Yeah,” Cindy agreed. “It was nice seeing you two.”
Phil didn’t bother to say goodbye as Lalie let her out the door. He simply went back to his book… only he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. When Lalie’s gaze caught him again, he found it impossible to comprehend any of the words on the page. Finally, he put the book down on his lap and looked back at her.
“What?”
“What’s your problem, Phil? Is it so wrong of me to have friends? Is that what this is about?”
“No,” Phil told her. “It’s about a particular friend of yours. Please, do not bring her over here again. You can bring any of your other friends, just not HER.”
She sat down next to him, lifted the papers from his lap and plopped them on the coffee table next to the others.
“Lalie!” he exclaimed, reaching out for them, but she shoved him back into the couch. “I’m busy, Lalie… please, just leave me alone?”
“No, I will not leave you alone. Tell me what went on with Cindy and then maybe I’ll let you go back to your book.”
Phil settled back against the couch cushions and folded his arms tightly over his chest. “Fine. I’ll tell you what happened. I had a crush on her, Justin told the entire school, and she picked on me for the rest of the year. It was horrible, and I thought I would never have to see her again.”
Lalie stared at him.
“When I see her, Lalie, I feel like that all over again, and let’s just say that that’s a period in my life that I would like to forget.”
“Why didn’t you say anything before? Phil, if you would have told me about this, I wouldn’t have invited her over.” She leaned against him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pressing her lips to his cheek.
He looked in the other direction, but didn’t pull away. “I didn’t want to talk about it before,” he explained, “and I don’t want to talk about it now.”
She sighed. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?” he breathed, finally looking at her.
“Shut me out. I thought we were finally getting to a point where we could tell each other everything, and here you are again, keeping me in the dark.”
“In the dark about what, Lalie?” he exclaimed, pulling away as his eyes widened in surprise. “I tell you more than I tell anyone. You probably know more about me than Justin does, and he makes it his business to pry into my life!”
But Lalie didn’t look surprised… she only stared at him with the most serious expression he had ever seen upon her face. “Don’t pretend that you tell me everything, Phil, because this thing with Cindy just proves it. You deliberately kept it to yourself. It makes me wonder just how many things you’re not telling me.”
“I tell you everything!” Phil insisted.
Instead of fighting back, Lalie fell back against the couch with an exhausted sigh. “Sometimes I wonder if it even occurs to you to…”
“What?” he whispered.
“You don’t even think about it,” she went on.
“About what!?” he demanded, impatient.
Suddenly, she turned her head to look at him. “Everything!” she exclaimed. “You don’t trust me enough to be honest with me. You think that if I discover something awful about you, I’ll leave.”
“That’s not true!”
“It’s not?” she asked, standing up, and picking up the papers from the coffee table. “You sit there and hide behind your stupid book, but what you don’t realize is that I learned more about you from that damn book than you ever told me!” She plopped the papers on his lap as he stared up at her in shock.
“Like what!?” he demanded, panic lacing his voice. “What did I write in there you didn’t already know?”
“You’re afraid,” she accused. “You don’t want me to find out too much about you because once I do, you’re convinced that I’ll leave you.”
Phil could only blink at her.
“Admit it!”
“Fine!” he yelled, standing up so suddenly that the pages fell from his lap and fluttered to the floor in complete disorder. “You caught me, are you happy now?”
But instead of yelling back, she stepped across the pages on the floor and threw her arms around his neck, burying her face into his shirt and hugging tighter than ever before.
The next day, Justin and Phil met for lunch at Justin’s favorite restaurant in uptown Minneapolis. Phil was looking particularly depressed, so when the two brothers were walking down the block from their parking spot, Justin poked him in the arm.
“You okay, Phil?” he wanted to know. “You look… well, sadder than usual.”
“Thanks, Justin,” Phil grumbled. “You always know what to say to make me feel better. Congratulations.”
“I’m trying to be serious,” Justin insisted as they trudged along.
“You?” Phil scoffed. “Serious? I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Justin turned to Phil and glared at him. “Fine,” he said, turning up his nose. “If you don’t want my sympathy, then I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
“Good!” Phil shot back. “I would actually prefer it if you’d keep your fat mouth closed. In fact, I’ve been hoping you’d do it since they day you said your first word!”
By then, they had stopped walking, and passers by were looking at them as though they were afraid that a fight would start at any moment.
“You don’t even remember what my first word was,” Justin shot back, grabbing Phil’s sleeve and pulling him along the sidewalk.
Phil mumbled something that Justin couldn’t hear.
“What?”
Phil quickly glanced over at his brother. “I said… your first word was Bill. You were trying to say my name.”
Justin blinked. “Really? My first word was you?”
“Yes, really,” Phil told him.
They had finally made it to the restaurant, and Phil opened the door. Bells fastened to the top of the door jingled as the two brothers stepped inside. The hostess seated them in a booth toward the back of the small building, and they opened their menus.
Justin was deciding between a cheeseburger and a grilled turkey sandwich when he felt a sharp pain in his left shin. “What the hell?” he exclaimed, glaring across the table at Phil.
“Shh!” Phil hissed. “Don’t say anything.”
“If you didn’t want me to say anything, then you shouldn’t have kicked me!” Justin hissed back at him.
“Do not turn around.”
Being Justin, he turned around anyway, and met eyes with the most attractive girl he’d seen in quite some time. Her hair was jet black and her eyes were crystal blue… and didn’t she look like someone he’d once known? When he glanced back at Phil, his brother’s face was as red as it had ever been.
That was when it hit him, and he turned back around as quickly as he could. “Holy shit, Phil…” he said in a hushed voice, his eyes going wide. “That’s… that’s…”
Phil leaned forward, no doubt about to tell him to shut the hell up, when a new voice entered their conversation.
“Phil, hey! I can’t believe we’ve bumped into each other this many times in the past week,” Cindy Blackburn said, her smile sweet and her eyes sparkling.
Justin’s eyes went from Cindy to Phil, whose face was an even brighter shade of red… if that was even possible. Justin laughed nervously. Phil was obviously not into talking at the moment. “Hey… Cindy, right? Remember me? I’m Phil’s little brother, Justin. How’ve you been?”
Cindy grinned even wider. “Of course I remember you,” she said as Phil sank even further into the booth. “You weren’t very nice to your brother.”
“Well…” Justin said as he folded his menu back up. “I know a few other people who weren’t nice to my brother either…” He glanced at Phil, who looked like he might crawl under the table at any second. “Besides, brothers are supposed to fight. Right, Phil?”
“Uh…” Phil offered.
“There you go,” Justin said. “He agrees. And we’re friends now, so that’s all that really matters.” He kicked Phil hard underneath the table.
Cindy almost looked offended. “You’re not insinuating that I was mean to Phil, are you, Justin?”
Justin gave her a wide eyed, serious look. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, mustering up the straightest face he could manage.
Across the table, Phil put his face in his hands.
Justin laughed again as he gave his brother’s foot another swift kick. “Phil’s not feeling well,” he decided. “It’s obviously been a long day.”
“I can see that,” Cindy muttered.
“In fact,” Justin went on, “I don’t know why I dragged him here when he wasn’t hungry.” He looked over at Phil with a concerned expression. “The smell of this place is probably making you nauseous. Let’s go.” Without waiting for an answer, he scooted across the seat to exit the booth, gently pushing Cindy out of the way.
Phil didn’t have to be told twice. Before Justin knew it, Phil was standing behind him.
“Oh,” Cindy said, looking between the two brothers. “I was just going to ask you two to join me and my friend,” She gestured to a frizzy haired brunette who grinned and waved at them.
“It was nice to see you again,” Justin said, his smile in place. “Hopefully we can catch up later. Bye!”
They turned around and Justin tried to walk out of the restaurant as naturally as he could. He was dying to ask Phil what had happened the last time he’d bumped into Cindy.
Chapter 23
Keeping the Peace
Family: Timberlake
Non-Nsync Fiction
I'll Never Stop {Fiction}
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