Page 85 of The Spider & the Storm

I knew I wasn't leaving anytime soon.

And you know what?

Nothing told me it was the wrong thing to do.

Not my intuition. Not my tormented brain. Not Luke's disembodied voice.

For once, with Stormy girl in my webbed grasp, everything felt okay.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CONNECTICUT, AGE TWENTY-THREE

It had been a year since we’d last seen Melanie.

It'd been about that long—minus a day—since Luke had left his job at her father’s auto repair shop, and it’d been just as long since we’d heard anything about how she was doing.Whatshe was doing.

Not that her father had offered much information to his daughter’s ex-fiancé when my brother stopped by the shop to quit and grab his things, other than to let him know that she would be fine.

I wondered often if she actually was—fine, I mean.

Because we sure as hell weren’t. Yet we were getting by.

Somehow, the world hadn’t stopped turning the moment Melanie walked away, no matter how much I felt like that spider on the back of my door, caught in the middle of a storm he couldn’t imagine weathering.

Somehow, Luke had quickly found himself a new job at another mechanic’s shop. My work at the cemetery was still going strong, and I could say with absolute certainty that my brother hadn’t stepped foot inside a bar.

Over the past year, the wins might’ve been few and far between, and I might’ve had to squint a bit to see them at all. But they were there, and that had to count for something. I just wasn't sure I could say we werefine. Not in the way I hoped Melanie was. But I hoped we would be eventually, and apparently, Luke did too.

“We should go out. Do something,” he suggested one night after I picked him up on the way home from work.

I raised a brow with a blend of suspicion and shock. “Uh, what?”

He and I never went out. But there he was, in his grease-stained coveralls and backward hat, motor oil beneath his nails and smeared over one cheek, asking if I wanted to do something.

“We should. You know, just to get out of the house for once.”

I actually laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

He lifted one shoulder and glanced at me, his gaze nonchalant. “Why? You don’t wanna do anything?”

“I didn’t say that. I just …” My lips turned downward as I shrugged. “What would you even wanna do?”

“Well, I’d suggest a bar if I didn’t think you’d rip me a new asshole.”

I lowered my brows and slid my unamused glare in his direction.

Luke smirked and huffed a laugh. “I dunno. What would you wanna do? Grab some dinner? Go to the library? Pick up chicks at a comic store? I mean, what kinda shit does a guy like Charlie Corbin even like to do?”

It was my turn to smirk as a chuckle rumbled through my chest. “Is that something people do? Pick up chicks at comic stores?”

“You tell me, man. You’re the nerd around here.”

“Hate to break it to you, but I don’t go to comic stores.”

“Get the hell out of here. Yes, you do.” Luke stared at me, incredulous.

Now, I was laughing and shaking my head, unable to remember the last time any moment between us had been this lighthearted and—dare I say it—sort of normal.

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