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“What’s going on with you?” Adam asked.
“What?” Jonny visibly startled like Adam had come up behind him unexpectedly. But he hadn’t. They’d literally been sitting in the car together for the last half hour.
Either Jonny had turned into even more of a weirdo since the previous Friday, or something was up.
“You’re acting weird. Something’s obviously going on,”
“No I’m not. Not it’s not,” Jonny said, then added “...going on.”
Adam squinted at him “Right. Not suspicious at all,”
“Shut up,” Jonny snapped, shoving Adam for good measure. Adam smacked him in the arm in the hopes he had another tattoo or something, but no dice.
Jonny knocked his glasses down his nose in retaliation, so Adam kicked him sharply in the shin. Mum opened the door at that point and told them to behave, but they kept it up right until they started eating.
Jonny was uncharacteristically quiet all throughout dinner. Dad, being dad, didn’t notice, and Mum seemed thankful for the rare moment of peace, leaving Adam alone to get to the bottom of it.
When Jonny dipped out to go to the loo and stayed in there for more than five minutes, Adam got up and followed him to it. After putting salt in his unattended water. Obviously.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he planned on doing once he got there. He decided, lacking in options, to press his ear against the door.
The only two outcomes were that he’d hear piss and walk quietly and ashamedly away, or he’d finally get a clue as to what was going on with his lanky bastard of a brother.
Thankfully, it was the latter. Through the door, Adam suddenly became privy to what was unmistakably a romantic conversation.
He could only hear one end, and even that was muffled, but there was no doubt as to what kind of talk it was. The question was; who on Earth was it with? Was that why Jonny was acting so strange? Did he have a girlfriend he didn’t want them to know about?
There was only one way to find out. After an incredibly unpleasant few minutes of eavesdropping, the call ended with a beep.
Seizing his chance, Adam ran into the toilet and shut the door behind him, blocking Jonny’s path of escape. Jonny whipped around at the noise.
“Who are you having phone sex with in our parents bathroom?”
“I’m not- I wasn’t-” Jonny floundered “Pusface!”
“So this is why you’ve been acting weird all evening. You’ve got a girl and you don’t want mum and dad to find out,”
“Adam. It’s not a-”
“So who is she then? Workplace MILF? Strange woman you found in the road?” Adam jeered, before suddenly registering what Jonny had said “Wait, what do you mean it’s not?”
Jonny hugged himself, looking away so Adam couldn’t see his face. He wasn’t getting annoyed like he usually did when Adam goaded him, and it was colouring his entertained confusion with a tinge of worry.
“Jonny?” Adam asked in the most reassuring voice he could muster, which wasn’t very good nor effective.
“Just drop it, Pusface,” Jonny said, or more accurately, his back did. He was now facing the complete opposite direction.
Adam sighed. He had a brief moral debate with himself over whether stealing Jonny’s phone to satiate his own curiosity was too far considering the oddly serious mood, but it was Jonny they were talking about, so of course it wasn’t.
He wrestled the phone off of him easily, aided by the element of surprise due to the fact the git was still staring at the wall.
“Adam! You bastard! Please,”
In a tangle of limbs and grunts, Adam managed to navigate to the most recent contact in Jonny’s calling history and read it before the phone was wrenched back out of his hands.
“Henry?” Adam read aloud, before the implications of what he’d just seen hit him “Oh. Oh, right,”
Jonny didn’t say anything else, just stared at him kind of the way Wilson did when Adam would watch him shit in the garden. Fear and shame crossed with something hard to place.
“It’s okay if you’re, you know,” Adam felt his face grow very warm all of a sudden.
“I’m not gay,” Jonny said quickly “Or… I don’t know. Maybe I am. I don’t know. It’s all kind of new. He works in the same office as me,”
Jonny looked like he was about to piss himself, explode, die, or invent a way to do all of the above, so Adam raised an awkward hand to steady him.
He wasn’t reeling at the news as much as he probably should be. Jonny, and his proper job and his relatively proper love life with real, occasional women. Jonny, who happily engaged in as much mildly homophobic and decidedly un-PC banter as the other men in the family.
If anyone of the Goodman family should be having steamy phone conversations with an estate agent called Henry he was the least likely, surely.
But, somehow, it didn’t phase him more than any of Jonny’s other sad romantic escapades. And he didn’t care about the gay possibility, obviously. The only part that annoyed him was that the jammy git had scored with two genders before Adam had even scored with one.
“Pissface. Take a breath. It’s fine, okay? It’s not like I care about your weird love life anyway. Women, men, whatever,”
“Right, yeah, cool. That’s cool.” Jonny sounded more relaxed, but only for a moment “Please don’t tell mum and dad yet. I swear to God. I’ll slash your tires. I’ll put bleach in your water,”
“Alright, alright. Jesus. I won’t. You could’ve stopped three sentences ago and I wouldn’t,” Adam raised his hands in surrender. It somehow didn’t feel right to take this particular news and shout it to the rooftops, despite the entertainment it would definitely provide.
“Do you reckon they’ll, you know…? Mind?” Jonny asked after a moment, unconvincingly casual.
“Yes. They will never let you have any crimble crumble again and you’ll have to eat dinner in the car every week,” Adam deadpanned.
The joke didn’t seem to land. Jonny had the sad dog look on his face again, so Adam sighed, patting him on the back.
“Course they won’t, you idiot. Worst that will happen is dad will corner you to talk about male erections more than he does already and mum’ll hound me extra about procreating her some grandchildren,”
Jonny cracked a smile. He opened his mouth to reply but was cut off by Mum banging on the door.
“Boys? Are you alright in there? You’ve both been in the loo an awfully long time,”
“All good,” Jonny called. Mum, predictably, opened it anyway.
“Come on, your dinners’ll get cold. What are you even talking about that’s so secret you need to do it in a toilet?” Mum whined.
Jonny stared at Adam, wide-eyed.
“Uh. Not much. Nothing exciting, you know. Weather events and such,” Adam stuttered.
“Weather events,” Mum looked witheringly at them, before heading back through to the dining room. She muttered something irritatedly as she left, of which Adam only managed to catch ‘unbelievable’ and ‘they’re worse than Martin’.
“Thanks, Pusface,” Jonny said quietly, once she was out of earshot.
“No problem, Pissface,”
“Seriously though, weather events?”