Brass-Check for Unomega
Recipient: unomega
Author: amoama
Title: Brass-Check
Pairing: Brad/Ray
Word Count: 2600
Rating: PG-13
Summary/Warnings: Brad is the emotional retard who broke them. Thanks to S for the awesome (and speedy) beta.
Ray knows why it happened. They both do really. That’s not the point. The point is Ray doesn’t want to do it anymore.
Ray thinks about permanently wiping everything from Brad’s hard drives. Or writing off his bike. These are some of the things he fantasizes about now. Things to cause Brad pain. Because he's pissed. Because Brad is the emotional retard who broke them.
Instead he moves back into the spare room (his room), clears his shit off the bed and starts sleeping in it.
In the eyes of everyone else, nothing’s changed. In fact, everything is as it’s supposed to be.
Ray is a better flatmate than he ever was before. He stops doing all the things that Brad used to think irritated him. He eats like a human being and he doesn’t screech out pop songs in the shower. The silence and the spotless environment make Brad’s skin crawl but Ray’s oblivious to these kinds of changes.
Ray even touches him more in public. Casual, teasing, like with all the other guys. Brad growls warnings at him, because that’s what’s expected of him.
Ray meets someone. She’s the TA in his media class, doing a Masters while working as a finance journalist. She moonlights as a dominatrix on the local BDSM scene. She comes over and they study together in companionable silence until they get tired of it and then she demonstrates her new outfit or whip or whatever. It’s fun. Ray likes her. But he also likes that Brad can probably hear them. He starts listening for the tell-tale sound of the front door slamming. Most nights he comes right after he hears it. Elise never stays the night and after about three weeks she stops coming round.
They don’t talk much around the house. They avoid each other and Brad channels his guilt into training. He also enjoys his freedom. He doesn’t check in or explain where he’s off to, he doesn’t ask about Ray’s day.
He does leave notes on the kitchen counter with longitude and latitude and the amount of days he expects to be away disguised in a phone number if he’s being sent somewhere. It's often just a guess but Ray once said it helped him. He knows Ray likes to eat the paper so there’s no evidence of them contravening the regs.
There’s no evidence of them contravening anything anymore.
The next time Ray finds the phone number (post-woman-kissing-Brad-in-their-kitchen) he almost chokes on the paper as he swallows and he kind of gets heartburn afterwards. Then he gets drunk and walks round the house in baggy white y-fronts reading Richard III out loud in dramatic voices. He thinks seriously about recording it and sending it to Al Pacino. Then he passes out.
Ray doesn’t sleep in their bed while Brad’s away because Brad will be able to tell. Instead he lays out his sleeping bag and sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He wishes he’d made Brad adopt one of Poke’s Retriever pups then at least he’d have some company to lie on the floor and wallow with. Ray frowns into the darkness and thinks he should move out. And get a dog.
The house smells amazing when Brad gets back (pizza amazing) and from the sound of it some of the guys are round. Brad has the clearest flashback from coming home after his last mission of Ray sat in the front room studying, humming something tuneless, looking for all the world like Brad coming home was totally coincidental to his plan for the day. It wasn’t till Brad got him naked, laid out on the sofa, fingers at Ray’s entrance that he realised how stretched and lubed Ray already was. Ray had given him a small satisfied smile and shrugged, “Ready when you are, Brad.”
Brad walks into the kitchen. Hasser, Garza, Chaffin, and Stiney all raise their beers to him as he enters and Ray hands him a bottle so he can return the salute. “Gents.”
“Howdy, Brad.” “Iceman” “Did you get some?”
Brad helps himself to what remains of the pizza.
“We achieved our objective.”
The pizza is exactly what he’s been craving after the past two weeks of eating cardboard and he closes his eyes briefly as he swallows. He sees his hands holding down Ray’s hips, pressing into the skin. He eats the next two pizza slices far too quickly and then excuses himself and heads to the shower. It’s only when he’s out of the room he realises that he still hasn’t looked Ray in the eye and it leaves him feeling uneasy.
Ray kicks the guys out on the (valid) excuse that Brad will flay them alive if they stop him getting his much needed sleep. Ray leaves the final few slices of pizza on the counter for Brad when he’s done with his shower and heads to the front room to watch TV.
He ends up playing Mass Effect and eventually Brad joins him on the sofa smelling minty-fresh and drinking another beer. He watches Ray play and commentates on everything he does until Ray sighs and turns it off. They share the rest of the beer and don’t really talk much. It’s weirdly okay.
Ray turns and sits facing Brad on the sofa. His feet poke themselves under Brad’s leg. “I’m going to move out,” Ray says. And then he adds, “I might get a dog.”
Brad puts a hand on one of Ray’s ankles. He thinks about gripping properly and pulling Ray closer. He controls himself, though, and just strokes the ankle lightly, staring at Ray’s feet where they disappear under his leg. He feels all tight inside, like there’s too much pressure. Then he looks up, determined to look Ray in the eye. He doesn’t want to have not done that, again. He realises why he was reluctant to do it when he sees how big and kind of watery Ray’s eyes are. His own mirror Ray’s instantly, he can feel the weird prickliness of it. He leans his head against the back of the sofa.
“What kind of dog? Don’t tell me you’re going to take one of Poke’s mongrels?”
Ray’s ankle flinches out of Brad’s hand.
“Don’t let Poke hear you call Mulan that. And I might. I called him yesterday and he has two pups left, both pretty well trained already.”
Brad puts his hand back on Ray’s ankle. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Ray.” It’s so quiet in this house that he almost whispers it. Ray’s sitting opposite him and he’s home from a fucking difficult mission and suddenly it feels so empty here that Brad doesn’t know what’s left to say.
Ray gets up first and goes to his room. Brad goes to sleep where he’s sitting. There doesn’t seem much point of going to the bedroom. His bedroom.
Ray rents a place closer to uni and moves his stuff over there in two trips. It’s small and a bit pokey but it has an old-fashioned triangular desk in one corner and it looks like proper student digs.
Brad walks round the house Ray’s just moved out of examining each room for the ways in which it betrays Ray’s absence. The kitchen has tins and sauces and measuring cups that Brad never uses. It has too many chairs. The front room has a sofa with a worn seat-cover in a seat Brad never sits in. The shelves are exactly half empty and all his own books have fallen sideways, unsupported. The table has a ridiculous dark stain in the middle that’s utterly gross and obvious and Brad decides to burn the table. He sleeps in the spare room because it’s less Ray’s room than the main bedroom.
Ray has dreams where Brad’s voice drones out at him, “Ray. Need my RTO”, “Ray. Need my RTO” over and over. Ray wakes up sweating because he can’t make himself go over to Brad. He hates himself for those dreams. He calls it his PTSD because that can happen to the most badass of warriors. Heartbroken is a communist invention that Ray refuses to have apply to him.
When people ask why Ray moved out the party line is a dismissive shrug and a “just felt like a change.” If pushed a list of faults is reeled off, with increasingly wild embellishments, until the asker is distracted enough that they’ve forgotten the question. “Brad’s farts light the gas oven from the next room. It’s fucking dangerous, homes.” “Ray’s compulsion to mate with farmyard animals was making the house smell like a barn and I stepped in one cowpat too many.” “Did you know the Iceman actually needs to live in sub-zero temperatures? My balls were in danger of freezing off, I had to go to the doctor about it.” “Yeah Ray, that’s exactly why the doctor had to examine your balls.”
There’s no goodbye sex when Ray moves out. He knows better. (Brad doesn’t). They don’t even hug. But Brad holds the door open for Ray to carry out the last of his bags and Ray stops in the doorway, looks at Brad and tells him he still wants the phone number if Brad goes away.
“Just text it to me.”
Brad nods and Ray goes to leave.
(It’s not like Brad didn’t know this would happen when he walked up to that girl in the bar. Or that this would be how it ended when he heard the door unlatch and drew her into a kiss, daring himself to go through with it, to put it all on the line.)
This was always how it would end.
“Ray.”
Ray shrugs one heavy-laden shoulder and then shakes his head. It’s as defeated as Brad’s ever seen him. Fight gone out.
Brad shuts the door and just sits at the kitchen table and stares at his hands for hours and tries to remember what it means to be alone.
Ray gets the puppy and calls it Dirtbag. It goes quite well for about a month except Dirtbag is growing fast and the apartment gets small quickly and it reeks of dog piss all the time. Ray doesn’t have too many classes but leaving the dog at his place stops being an option.
When Brad next goes away Ray uses the key he never returned and starts leaving Dirtbag there during the day. There’s a yard out the back so it works out much better.
Brad comes back to find them both outside his house running in mad little circles on the grass. Ray looks up at him laughing. For a minute they both forget and they just stand there grinning at each other stupidly.
Then Dirtbag starts barking at Brad and Brad switches his attention to the dog. He puts his hands out and lets the dog inspect him. Dirtbag is nervous for about forty seconds then he’s all over Brad. Brad sits on the edge of the decking and buries his face in Dirtbag’s neck.
“Hi there boy. How you doing?”
“Dirtbag, this is Staff Sergeant Uncle Bradley. You’re going to stay with him when Daddy can’t look after you.”
Brad lifts his eyebrows but he doesn’t really know which part of that introduction to question.
He settles for, “Jesus, Ray.”
Ray gives him his widest smile and Dirtbag noses at Brad’s face. Brad kisses the dog, who head-butts him. “Nothing POG about you, is there?”
“He’s fucking Recon, Brad. You should see him swimming. He’d be past you in seconds.”
Brad grins into the dog’s fur.
“Let me get changed and take a fucking shower and then we can take him to the beach and test out that assertion.”
Ray shrugs his agreement like he doesn’t give a shit either way. Fuck it, Ray thinks, he’s the one who came over here knowing Brad would be coming home, wanting him to meet Dirtbag, not being able to stand the idea of the house being empty when Brad got in. So what if Ray doesn’t know what’s good for him? He’s already here, so fuck it.
Brad gets out of the shower and Ray and Dirtbag are both lying on his bed. Both caked in mud from the garden. It’s started raining outside and they’re soaked. Ray’s eyes are closed and his fingers are carding through the dog’s short, matted fur. They look scrawny and Brad feels sad looking at them.
“Fuck, Ray, did you have to? Look what you’re doing to the bed covers.”
Ray opens his eyes to glare knowingly at Brad.
“What the fuck, Brad?” Ray’s not even speaking loudly, “It’s not like you’re sleeping in here.”
Brad’s taken aback. He doesn’t get how Ray could know that.
Brad sits on the edge of the bed, there’s just about one unmuddied corner of duvet. He starts stroking Dirtbag’s belly, just for something to do.
“Well you’re sure living up to your name, aren’t you boy?” His fingers brush over Ray’s as they both work pointlessly at unmatting wet fur. After a while their hands still, fingers gently intertwining.
Ray couldn’t really say when he forgave Brad or stopped being angry. All he has to cling onto now is the hurt. The brutal fucking reality of seeing Brad kissing a frizzy headed amazon in their kitchen and knowing exactly what Brad was trying to do. Ray sees it in his head over and over; just at the moments when he thinks he’s over it, the picture blindsides him and it’s Brad telling him that he’s not enough and that he doesn’t trust Ray.
But they’re lying in their bed with their hands in a five-month old, wet, Chesapeake Bay retriever and Brad’s eyes have severe bags from whatever he’s been off doing, so Ray just says it, “You did to me what she did to you.”
Brad’s face is blank but his hand tightens around Ray’s.
Ray pushes on, “What you felt, that’s what I feel.” And then, because he really hasn’t given Brad enough verbal abuse over this, he follows it with. “You’re a prick.”
“You wiped my hard drives.”
“I backed them up.” Because Ray did, and Brad knows it.
There’s a pause and Ray holds his breath because he doesn’t really know if Brad can get with the program.
But Brad does. “What do I need to do?”
“Who say’s there’s anything you can do?”
“You got us a dog.”
“Yeah and you owe Poke for your share of him.”
“Okay. So what do I need to do?”
“You need to never do it again. Ever. You only get this one free pass and it’s not even free because I get blowjobs whenever I want because of this.”
“Okay.”
“You need to not be an emotionally amputated asshole and if you need space or fucking whatever you can just tell me and not punish me for being around and fucking being in love with you.”
“Ray.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the dog.”
“I’m telling it to you.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Brad takes a moment, takes in the scrawny, sopping, mess of Ray plus Dirtbag splayed out beside him. He doesn’t really know how he ended up with these dirty hicksville rejects taking over his life but he sees that there’s no getting rid of them. He finally finds the words that go with the picture.
“We’re family, Ray.”
Ray smiles and pushes himself up, throwing himself over the dog, onto Brad.
“Goddamn right you motherfucking retard.”
Author: amoama
Title: Brass-Check
Pairing: Brad/Ray
Word Count: 2600
Rating: PG-13
Summary/Warnings: Brad is the emotional retard who broke them. Thanks to S for the awesome (and speedy) beta.
Ray knows why it happened. They both do really. That’s not the point. The point is Ray doesn’t want to do it anymore.
Ray thinks about permanently wiping everything from Brad’s hard drives. Or writing off his bike. These are some of the things he fantasizes about now. Things to cause Brad pain. Because he's pissed. Because Brad is the emotional retard who broke them.
Instead he moves back into the spare room (his room), clears his shit off the bed and starts sleeping in it.
In the eyes of everyone else, nothing’s changed. In fact, everything is as it’s supposed to be.
Ray is a better flatmate than he ever was before. He stops doing all the things that Brad used to think irritated him. He eats like a human being and he doesn’t screech out pop songs in the shower. The silence and the spotless environment make Brad’s skin crawl but Ray’s oblivious to these kinds of changes.
Ray even touches him more in public. Casual, teasing, like with all the other guys. Brad growls warnings at him, because that’s what’s expected of him.
Ray meets someone. She’s the TA in his media class, doing a Masters while working as a finance journalist. She moonlights as a dominatrix on the local BDSM scene. She comes over and they study together in companionable silence until they get tired of it and then she demonstrates her new outfit or whip or whatever. It’s fun. Ray likes her. But he also likes that Brad can probably hear them. He starts listening for the tell-tale sound of the front door slamming. Most nights he comes right after he hears it. Elise never stays the night and after about three weeks she stops coming round.
They don’t talk much around the house. They avoid each other and Brad channels his guilt into training. He also enjoys his freedom. He doesn’t check in or explain where he’s off to, he doesn’t ask about Ray’s day.
He does leave notes on the kitchen counter with longitude and latitude and the amount of days he expects to be away disguised in a phone number if he’s being sent somewhere. It's often just a guess but Ray once said it helped him. He knows Ray likes to eat the paper so there’s no evidence of them contravening the regs.
There’s no evidence of them contravening anything anymore.
The next time Ray finds the phone number (post-woman-kissing-Brad-in-their-kitchen) he almost chokes on the paper as he swallows and he kind of gets heartburn afterwards. Then he gets drunk and walks round the house in baggy white y-fronts reading Richard III out loud in dramatic voices. He thinks seriously about recording it and sending it to Al Pacino. Then he passes out.
Ray doesn’t sleep in their bed while Brad’s away because Brad will be able to tell. Instead he lays out his sleeping bag and sleeps on the floor beside the bed. He wishes he’d made Brad adopt one of Poke’s Retriever pups then at least he’d have some company to lie on the floor and wallow with. Ray frowns into the darkness and thinks he should move out. And get a dog.
The house smells amazing when Brad gets back (pizza amazing) and from the sound of it some of the guys are round. Brad has the clearest flashback from coming home after his last mission of Ray sat in the front room studying, humming something tuneless, looking for all the world like Brad coming home was totally coincidental to his plan for the day. It wasn’t till Brad got him naked, laid out on the sofa, fingers at Ray’s entrance that he realised how stretched and lubed Ray already was. Ray had given him a small satisfied smile and shrugged, “Ready when you are, Brad.”
Brad walks into the kitchen. Hasser, Garza, Chaffin, and Stiney all raise their beers to him as he enters and Ray hands him a bottle so he can return the salute. “Gents.”
“Howdy, Brad.” “Iceman” “Did you get some?”
Brad helps himself to what remains of the pizza.
“We achieved our objective.”
The pizza is exactly what he’s been craving after the past two weeks of eating cardboard and he closes his eyes briefly as he swallows. He sees his hands holding down Ray’s hips, pressing into the skin. He eats the next two pizza slices far too quickly and then excuses himself and heads to the shower. It’s only when he’s out of the room he realises that he still hasn’t looked Ray in the eye and it leaves him feeling uneasy.
Ray kicks the guys out on the (valid) excuse that Brad will flay them alive if they stop him getting his much needed sleep. Ray leaves the final few slices of pizza on the counter for Brad when he’s done with his shower and heads to the front room to watch TV.
He ends up playing Mass Effect and eventually Brad joins him on the sofa smelling minty-fresh and drinking another beer. He watches Ray play and commentates on everything he does until Ray sighs and turns it off. They share the rest of the beer and don’t really talk much. It’s weirdly okay.
Ray turns and sits facing Brad on the sofa. His feet poke themselves under Brad’s leg. “I’m going to move out,” Ray says. And then he adds, “I might get a dog.”
Brad puts a hand on one of Ray’s ankles. He thinks about gripping properly and pulling Ray closer. He controls himself, though, and just strokes the ankle lightly, staring at Ray’s feet where they disappear under his leg. He feels all tight inside, like there’s too much pressure. Then he looks up, determined to look Ray in the eye. He doesn’t want to have not done that, again. He realises why he was reluctant to do it when he sees how big and kind of watery Ray’s eyes are. His own mirror Ray’s instantly, he can feel the weird prickliness of it. He leans his head against the back of the sofa.
“What kind of dog? Don’t tell me you’re going to take one of Poke’s mongrels?”
Ray’s ankle flinches out of Brad’s hand.
“Don’t let Poke hear you call Mulan that. And I might. I called him yesterday and he has two pups left, both pretty well trained already.”
Brad puts his hand back on Ray’s ankle. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, Ray.” It’s so quiet in this house that he almost whispers it. Ray’s sitting opposite him and he’s home from a fucking difficult mission and suddenly it feels so empty here that Brad doesn’t know what’s left to say.
Ray gets up first and goes to his room. Brad goes to sleep where he’s sitting. There doesn’t seem much point of going to the bedroom. His bedroom.
Ray rents a place closer to uni and moves his stuff over there in two trips. It’s small and a bit pokey but it has an old-fashioned triangular desk in one corner and it looks like proper student digs.
Brad walks round the house Ray’s just moved out of examining each room for the ways in which it betrays Ray’s absence. The kitchen has tins and sauces and measuring cups that Brad never uses. It has too many chairs. The front room has a sofa with a worn seat-cover in a seat Brad never sits in. The shelves are exactly half empty and all his own books have fallen sideways, unsupported. The table has a ridiculous dark stain in the middle that’s utterly gross and obvious and Brad decides to burn the table. He sleeps in the spare room because it’s less Ray’s room than the main bedroom.
Ray has dreams where Brad’s voice drones out at him, “Ray. Need my RTO”, “Ray. Need my RTO” over and over. Ray wakes up sweating because he can’t make himself go over to Brad. He hates himself for those dreams. He calls it his PTSD because that can happen to the most badass of warriors. Heartbroken is a communist invention that Ray refuses to have apply to him.
When people ask why Ray moved out the party line is a dismissive shrug and a “just felt like a change.” If pushed a list of faults is reeled off, with increasingly wild embellishments, until the asker is distracted enough that they’ve forgotten the question. “Brad’s farts light the gas oven from the next room. It’s fucking dangerous, homes.” “Ray’s compulsion to mate with farmyard animals was making the house smell like a barn and I stepped in one cowpat too many.” “Did you know the Iceman actually needs to live in sub-zero temperatures? My balls were in danger of freezing off, I had to go to the doctor about it.” “Yeah Ray, that’s exactly why the doctor had to examine your balls.”
There’s no goodbye sex when Ray moves out. He knows better. (Brad doesn’t). They don’t even hug. But Brad holds the door open for Ray to carry out the last of his bags and Ray stops in the doorway, looks at Brad and tells him he still wants the phone number if Brad goes away.
“Just text it to me.”
Brad nods and Ray goes to leave.
(It’s not like Brad didn’t know this would happen when he walked up to that girl in the bar. Or that this would be how it ended when he heard the door unlatch and drew her into a kiss, daring himself to go through with it, to put it all on the line.)
This was always how it would end.
“Ray.”
Ray shrugs one heavy-laden shoulder and then shakes his head. It’s as defeated as Brad’s ever seen him. Fight gone out.
Brad shuts the door and just sits at the kitchen table and stares at his hands for hours and tries to remember what it means to be alone.
Ray gets the puppy and calls it Dirtbag. It goes quite well for about a month except Dirtbag is growing fast and the apartment gets small quickly and it reeks of dog piss all the time. Ray doesn’t have too many classes but leaving the dog at his place stops being an option.
When Brad next goes away Ray uses the key he never returned and starts leaving Dirtbag there during the day. There’s a yard out the back so it works out much better.
Brad comes back to find them both outside his house running in mad little circles on the grass. Ray looks up at him laughing. For a minute they both forget and they just stand there grinning at each other stupidly.
Then Dirtbag starts barking at Brad and Brad switches his attention to the dog. He puts his hands out and lets the dog inspect him. Dirtbag is nervous for about forty seconds then he’s all over Brad. Brad sits on the edge of the decking and buries his face in Dirtbag’s neck.
“Hi there boy. How you doing?”
“Dirtbag, this is Staff Sergeant Uncle Bradley. You’re going to stay with him when Daddy can’t look after you.”
Brad lifts his eyebrows but he doesn’t really know which part of that introduction to question.
He settles for, “Jesus, Ray.”
Ray gives him his widest smile and Dirtbag noses at Brad’s face. Brad kisses the dog, who head-butts him. “Nothing POG about you, is there?”
“He’s fucking Recon, Brad. You should see him swimming. He’d be past you in seconds.”
Brad grins into the dog’s fur.
“Let me get changed and take a fucking shower and then we can take him to the beach and test out that assertion.”
Ray shrugs his agreement like he doesn’t give a shit either way. Fuck it, Ray thinks, he’s the one who came over here knowing Brad would be coming home, wanting him to meet Dirtbag, not being able to stand the idea of the house being empty when Brad got in. So what if Ray doesn’t know what’s good for him? He’s already here, so fuck it.
Brad gets out of the shower and Ray and Dirtbag are both lying on his bed. Both caked in mud from the garden. It’s started raining outside and they’re soaked. Ray’s eyes are closed and his fingers are carding through the dog’s short, matted fur. They look scrawny and Brad feels sad looking at them.
“Fuck, Ray, did you have to? Look what you’re doing to the bed covers.”
Ray opens his eyes to glare knowingly at Brad.
“What the fuck, Brad?” Ray’s not even speaking loudly, “It’s not like you’re sleeping in here.”
Brad’s taken aback. He doesn’t get how Ray could know that.
Brad sits on the edge of the bed, there’s just about one unmuddied corner of duvet. He starts stroking Dirtbag’s belly, just for something to do.
“Well you’re sure living up to your name, aren’t you boy?” His fingers brush over Ray’s as they both work pointlessly at unmatting wet fur. After a while their hands still, fingers gently intertwining.
Ray couldn’t really say when he forgave Brad or stopped being angry. All he has to cling onto now is the hurt. The brutal fucking reality of seeing Brad kissing a frizzy headed amazon in their kitchen and knowing exactly what Brad was trying to do. Ray sees it in his head over and over; just at the moments when he thinks he’s over it, the picture blindsides him and it’s Brad telling him that he’s not enough and that he doesn’t trust Ray.
But they’re lying in their bed with their hands in a five-month old, wet, Chesapeake Bay retriever and Brad’s eyes have severe bags from whatever he’s been off doing, so Ray just says it, “You did to me what she did to you.”
Brad’s face is blank but his hand tightens around Ray’s.
Ray pushes on, “What you felt, that’s what I feel.” And then, because he really hasn’t given Brad enough verbal abuse over this, he follows it with. “You’re a prick.”
“You wiped my hard drives.”
“I backed them up.” Because Ray did, and Brad knows it.
There’s a pause and Ray holds his breath because he doesn’t really know if Brad can get with the program.
But Brad does. “What do I need to do?”
“Who say’s there’s anything you can do?”
“You got us a dog.”
“Yeah and you owe Poke for your share of him.”
“Okay. So what do I need to do?”
“You need to never do it again. Ever. You only get this one free pass and it’s not even free because I get blowjobs whenever I want because of this.”
“Okay.”
“You need to not be an emotionally amputated asshole and if you need space or fucking whatever you can just tell me and not punish me for being around and fucking being in love with you.”
“Ray.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the dog.”
“I’m telling it to you.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
Brad takes a moment, takes in the scrawny, sopping, mess of Ray plus Dirtbag splayed out beside him. He doesn’t really know how he ended up with these dirty hicksville rejects taking over his life but he sees that there’s no getting rid of them. He finally finds the words that go with the picture.
“We’re family, Ray.”
Ray smiles and pushes himself up, throwing himself over the dog, onto Brad.
“Goddamn right you motherfucking retard.”