Page 47 of The Spider & the Storm

She groaned, lifting her head and letting her hands fall to the table. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about this shit.”

I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear the details about my brother’s sex life—or lack of, apparently. It was bad enough I’d had to hear them going at it down the hall all these years. The last thing I needed was for his girlfriend to confide in me about their premarital problems. But Melanie was also my friend, and it was obvious that she was desperate to talk, so I shook my head.

“No, it’s okay. I get it. You need to vent.”

“I just love him,” she stated simply. “I love him so fucking much, and I want him to come back to me—tobothof us, honestly. And I think that’s what makes it so hard to leave. Like, I just think,What if he’s suddenly better after I’m gone, and I miss the chance to see him normal again?Or worse, what if, Idon’t know, he … he is like thisbecauseof me? What if I did this to him?”

“No. You know that’s not true,” I insisted adamantly.

The truth was that our parents’ deaths had fucked us both up. It was just that, for me, all that had happened was the amplification of my existing issues. But for Luke, he’d been so focused on fixing me that he never stopped long enough to realize he needed to be fixed too.

Now, he was broken—maybe even beyond repair—and that was, in a way, my fault. Not hers.Mine.

If he hadn’t been so damn concerned about me, he wouldn’t have been so carefree with himself. He wouldn’t have sought a Band-Aid to patch his wounds and instead taken himself to the ER to get stitched up.

Melanie sniffled and wiped her eyes again, nodding. “I know. I just … I just hate this. I hate that I can remember a time when everything was so fun and easy, and I hate that I know nothing will be like that ever again. And yet”—she laughed beside herself, shrugging—“here I am, because I love him too much to give up.”

Nobody will ever love me like that, I caught myself thinking as I stared at the tears drenching her face.

We ate the rest of our dinner, and then I excused myself to shower and hang out in my room with some Nine Inch Nails and my sketchbook. My feelings and fears of living a loveless life felt too big to keep them stifled, so I let the Sharpie do the talking.

Big, sweeping circles and jagged lines formed the spider, standing in the middle of a field, barren of everything but countless, nameless headstones. He wore an expression asvacant as the dark, cloudless sky, save for one rogue tear clinging to his cheek.

Destined to care only for the dead because nobody alive cared for him.

I swatted a tear from my own face at the same time the door down the hall opened.

Melanie had gone to bed a while ago, and those footsteps now didn’t belong to her.

I listened as Luke quietly walked past my room and down the stairs, and I dropped the sketchbook and marker to go after him and see what he was up to, where he was going.

He was already down the stairs by the time I caught up with him, and he was heading in the direction of the kitchen.

“Oh, hey,” he mumbled, glancing briefly over his shoulder.

His eyes barely met mine for a second before looking away.

He didn’t bother to ask how my interview had gone. Didn’t even express any interest in what I was still doing awake. His lack of care for anyone else dug beneath my skin, deeper than ever before. And when he reached the fridge, opened the door, and pulled out a bottle of beer, I smacked it right out of his hand.

He hadn’t expected it. Neither had I. The glass clattered loudly against the tiled floor, but didn’t break, resounding through the otherwise hushed kitchen. Luke stared at the amber glass, nearly black in the lack of light, before turning to me. Fuming and insulted.

He took a step toward me. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Charlie?”

“What the fuck is wrong withme?” I jabbed a finger at my chest.

“Yeah,” he challenged, shoving hard against me, sending my body backward toward the wall.

I regained my footing and shoved him back. “I can’t believe you even have the balls to ask me that fucking question when you should be looking in the fucking mirror.”

His back hit the refrigerator. The impact left him stunned, confused as to how to react. The years separating twenty and twenty-three weren’t that big. They had made us nearly the same height—I was taller now—and the hours at the gym had made me stronger. He might’ve been able to lift more than me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t put up a good fight against him—even if I knew he was likely to win in the end.

“You stay out of my way, asshole,” he warned, pointing a finger at my face. “You understand me? If I wanna have a beer, I’m gonna have a beer. Now—”

“Yeah? And what does your girlfriend say about that? Doesshehave to stay out of your way too?”

Luke’s jaw tensed for a moment before saying, “Melanie has nothing to do with this.”

“Oh, no? That’s news to me. Probably to her, too, considering she was crying earlier about how much she wished you’d stop fucking drinking.”

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