Page 50 of When I'm Gone

“He should hate me, but it’s not more than I hate myself. Someone hurt him, burned him for fuck’s sake. It’s my fault.”

Wait, what did he say? “Burned him?” Brady stares at me hard, unwilling to say anything more than he already did. I can respect that, but I’m really trying to connect the dots here.

Several long seconds tick by like hours, then it hits me like a freight train. The circular scars on his arm, I saw them when I bandaged up his hand. “Cigarette burns,” I mumble morosely. Nausea sours my stomach at the thought of someone hurting him like that. And for what? What was there to gain in causing someone that loves you pain?

Control.

Motherfucker. I hate that slimy son of a bitch.

“Brady, none of this is anyone’s fault but the piece of shit that did it. We were young and scared and way out of our element. You lost your parents that day, too. It was traumatic. Maybe we could have handled it better, but only in hindsight.”

He rolls his eyes as he attempts round two with the saw, but just before it drowns him out, I hear him mumble, “Hindsight doesn’t help my little brother.”

So I guess that’s that.

We play Bob the Builder for a few more hours, but spoiler alert: we can’t fix it. I don’t know how we’ve managed to do as much to our houses as we have, because neither one of us knows what the hell we’re doing. I’m, like, seventy-five percent sure that my dad is sending construction elves in the middle of the night to correct our mistakes and set us on the right course.

“Fucking hell,” Brady swears, wiping sweat from his brow.

I glare at my pile of two-by-fours, and I swear it glares right back. “Yeah, something like that.”

“This is fucking stupid. My dad owns a goddamn construction company, and he’s called me three times already today.”

Well, it’s probably his mom doing the calling, but I get his frustration. “No one said you had to cut them off entirely, Brady. You are the only one who can make that call.”

“Don’t you get it?” he pleads. “I want them to be the parents we should have had. I want them to love us unconditionally, not throw their underage kid on the streets. You know, I miss versions of them I’m not sure were ever real. I want the dad that took us to work with him in the summers and told us how we’d be running his business one day as a team. Or the mom who never missed a peewee football practice. I don’t even fucking know them, apparently. I never did. Do you know how fucking crazy that drives me? Did they ever love us at all?”

“Jesus, Brady,” I rasp around the tightness in the back of my throat as I yank him into a hug.

“It’s fine,” he mumbles into my shoulder, but judging by the way he’s holding on with all his strength, it’s far from the truth.

I pull him back, a hand on each of his upper arms. “I can’t answer if they loved you, but I can tell you with absolute certainty that I do. You’re my family, my brother as much as Parker or Emerson. You’re as much as an integral piece of the Adler’s as I am, and you’re stuck with us for life.”

He nods. “I know.”

“It’s not the same, and I’m sorry for that. And I’m sorry if I made you feel pushed aside when Easton came back. I had my suspicions about what kind of pain he was hiding, and Idon’t want him to feel like he can’t talk to me because I’m not sure if he’ll try with someone else. But there is no pushing you aside. You and me? We’re solid, okay? Way more than this piece of shit deck.”

It prompts a laugh out of him. “You asshole.”

“You are what you eat,” I add. We both dissolve into a fit of laughter until there are tears in our eyes and our sides ache. The lingering tension disappears, and for the first time in too long, Brady and I are back to normal.

After another few hours of bantering between more failed attempts, Brady announces that he’s officially giving up for the day. I couldn’t agree more. I’m one uneven board from burning down a Home Depot just for the hell of it. Not with people in it, obviously, but that’s beside the point.

“Go back home, man. Easton is waiting on you.” I slide my phone back into my jeans guiltily. “No, for real. I’m good, Ace. I’m happy he has you. He’s in the best hands, and I don’t want to keep you from him all day.”

I eye my best friend carefully, looking for signs that he’s not saying what he really means. Brady usually reads like a picture book, and I don’t see any alarms going off but that doesn’t mean I feel good about leaving him on his day.

“Easton is okay, I think. He’s texted me a few times and there’s no real reason for me to rush home. I can stay,” I tell him. Being in the middle of two people I care about is about as fun as a root canal.

If I’m holding out hope for a reunification of the brothers, well, that’s my own business. I’d never pressure either one of them, but I can’t give up on it.

Brady huffs a laugh that’s more sigh, as if I’m particularly dense and he’s doing me a favor by elaborating. “I’d feel better if I knew you were there with him. If he feels safe with you, then it’s important that you’re there as much as you canbe. I don’t think it’s supposed to rain this week, we’ll finish this shit-hole another time.”

He flashes me a smile, it’s a small one, but it’s real. I’d know it anywhere. It’s what gives me the assurance that he’s being truthful, even if he’s a little saddened by the circumstances. That makes two of us, but we say our goodbyes, and I tell him happy birthday again before heading home.

My phone has been buzzing away while we were working, but half of them were Parker clueing me into his every thought. Lucky me. Easton insisted he was fine, just a bit bored, but nothing serious, and that I shouldn’t base my plans around him. It’s hard not to though. It’s unusual for me to not get tired of socializing. Easton is different though, he just… fits with me. I’ve spent more or less every waking moment with him since he showed back up in our lives, minus a few where I was at work, and somehow, I’m still searching out ways to spend more time with him. Make him smile or let his guard down.

He’s holding all the cards; I never would have made a move on him if he hadn’t been the one to kiss me. Nor would I have gone that far if I wasn’t absolutely sure that he was in a good headspace for it. But now, moving forward seems a bit unclear. I don’t want to make him feel like it’s meaningless to me, because it’s far from that. Anything involving Easton is important, and this is no different. But he just got out of an abusive relationship that he’s still trying to come to terms with, and the last thing I want to do is make him feel trapped with me. So, we’re stuck in this weird middle place where I’m not sure how to navigate whatever this is between us in a way that’s healthy for him.

---