Page 114 of The Spider & the Storm

“I mean, everything!” That same hand swept over the entire room, making sure to pass over him in the process.

He reared his head back as his brow furrowed. “What's wrong with everything? Wait, are you talking aboutme?”

That hand now pressed to my forehead, my fingers rubbing against my brows. “No … I … I don't fucking know.” I dropped my hand to the pad in my lap and dragged my eyes back to my brother's. “You're gonna tell me you're just fine with life? You're happy?”

Luke scoffed like it was the most asinine question I could've asked. “Of course I'm not happy, Charlie.”

My mouth fell open to reply, only to close again. Had I really believed he was content to do what he'd been doing for the past couple of years?

“But here's the thing about me,” he continued, leveling me with a stern glare. “I don’tneedto be happy. I just need to get from one day to the next, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I need to eat, I need to work, I need to sleep, and I need to fuck. That's what Ineedto get by.”

“And you're good with that?” I asked as my eyes narrowed with skepticism.

His gaze shifted from mine to the comforter. “Never said I wasgoodwith it, but it's what I have. And anyway, this isn't about me right now. We're talking about you. If you need more than that, if youwantmore than that, then fucking get it, man. Don't sit there, getting all mopey, and act like this”—he lifted his hand toward the ceiling in a mock gesture—“is holding you back. If you want things to change, then fucking change it. And just because you struck out with this chick doesn't mean the right one won't come along eventually. Jesus fuck, Charlie. You're twenty-five, not … fucking … forty or some shit.”

It had been my choice to hold myself back and only look out for my brother. To devote my nights to cooking dinner and my mornings to waking him up, out of fear that he wouldn't do either himself.

But he would've done the same for me, wouldn't he?

Hadn't he done it just by not ditching me with our grandmother when we were teenagers?

I pushed past my questioning brain to say, “You’re assuming there is a right one.”

He nodded encouragingly, glaring at me like I'd lost my mind. “Uh, yeah, idiot. There is. So, don’t go thinking you need to change everything for these women, okay? Change if you want to, but not for them. ‘Cause the right one’s gonna come along oneday and fuckin’ love that you wanna get married after a couple of dates.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “I didn’t ask Marie to marry me.”

“Yeah, but with the right one, you fucking would, and you know it.”

He was teasing, but somehow, somewhere deep in the pit of my rolling gut, I knew he was probably right.

“And she’ll go running for the fucking hills.”

“Man, are you kidding? The right chick’s gonna be like,Yes, Charlie, I will be your bride of Frankenstein. Let me just go sew myself a dress made from the skin of my victims, and I’ll meet you down at the courthouse,” he said in a mocking, high-pitched tone.

“You’re an asshole,” I said, but I was laughing and feeling better somehow, lighter. Grateful that he had barged into my room and insisted on talking.

“Ah, there’s that smile I love.” He reached out to clip his knuckles against my cheek. “You’re gonna be fine. I’m telling you. Like, ten, fifteen years from now, you’re gonna look back on this little bitch moment. And then you’re gonna look at your wife, Morticia, and your three freaky little kids and think,Damn, Luke was right…again.”

“Oh, yeah, you think so? And where the hell are you gonna be?” I looked at him with an incredulous, disbelieving cock of my brow while also hoping that he was right despite my devotion to him and keeping what was left of this family together.

Luke smirked with a faraway look glinting in his eye as he lifted one shoulder in a shrug before swinging his gaze back tomine with a laughing, forced smile. “I dunno, man. At this point, I'll just be lucky if I'm not dead or in prison.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MASSACHUSETTS, PRESENT DAY

“I guess I wasn't so lucky, huh?”

Luke's somber, melancholy voice woke me from an otherwise dreamless sleep that had been deeper than any I'd had in recent years. My eyes snapped open to stare at the wooden beams stretching the length of my living room, and I lifted my head to drop my bleary gaze to the sketch pad in my lap. Dingy bars of a blackened cell and an unintentional squiggled mark from my open pen looked back at me.

Disoriented, I tried to remember falling asleep, tried to remember when my lids had grown too heavy to keep open. But I shook my head, unable to piece together the last moments before my unintentional nap.

“Weird,” I grumbled to nobody before grabbing my phone from the table between the two wingback chairs.

Darkness had blanketed the sun, and it was almost time to open the gate for Stormy.

Stormy.

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