Page 24 of Never Say Yes To Your Brother's Best Friend

My big toe feels like someone just rammed a spike up the nail, but other than that, the rest of me is getting mixed as fuck messages. I’m hot and cold and buzzing way too hard from those strong fingers searching me for injury and assessing the situation, ready to fix and save and protect. I want to arch my foot and lean into his touch. I want his hands to continue to my heel, up to my ankle, over my calf, up and up and up, to my knee. And then higher.

For the love of meatballs and cherry pie, I need to stop.

I’m tired, and I’m over-caffeinated. We had an almost life-or-death situation involving a bare bottom that was anything but heinous. My nerves are frayed, and so is my brain. Right now, the air feels alive between us. It feels like it’s pulsing. My sore toe is pulsing too, and there’s a good chance my clit is also going to get in on the action.

“Are you okay?” His fingers brush my toes again like they’re not all sandy and gross andtoesto begin with.

“I’m fine.” I lean forward, arching in the middle until our hands meet and brushing mine over his before he jerks back. “You and Jace did the same stuff, right?”

“Yes,” he answers reluctantly.

“Do you think my brother was…contaminated? Do you think he was dirty? Do you think that wherever he is, he’s beyond redemption?”

The agony on his face is razor-sharp. It’s boiling water poured straight onto my wounds, and salt rubbed into my chest cavity. It’s impossible to take a breath. How could I have ever thought, at the first meeting when he talked about burning Jace’s letter, that I could legitimately hate this man? “No! Of course not.”

“If you both did the same job, side by side, then why should he be good to go and you not? Because he died? Because the job took his life? Purification by death?”

“That’s not fair, Aspen.”

“I know it’s not. It’s not fair toyou. You’re doing yourself an injustice. You can’t heal if you keep telling yourself you’re all yucky and fucky on the inside. Fuckyucky. It might not be fair, Rick McDonald, but it is logical, and it’s good logic.”

“You’re right.” He stands slowly, all the power in his body obvious under his black clothing. “It’s late. We should be sleeping.”

“You mean I should be sleeping so we don’t have to talk about uncomfortable things anymore, and you should be prowling the house, making more piles, and pretending you’re sleeping?”

“I’ll sleep too. If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.”

Well, if that’s what it takes to get this conversation to stop. We’ve gone from shallow waters to the deepest parts of the ocean really fast, and neither one of us is ready for that. My heart is pounding so hard that I can practically feel it in my ears since they’re picking up on the wildness going on in my neck just below them.

I’m running out of time. Two weeks is two weeks not long enough. I know I’ll have some line of communication with him after. I don’t think he was joking about the pen pal thing, and I could probably push for more, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t change the fact that in ten days, I’m not going to be here anymore. Still, I can’t push this any further tonight. I want to help, not dig deeper gouges into either of us.

“Okay.” I reach for my boots and stand on one of the wooden platforms so I can brush my feet off before putting them on. “Let’s get some sleep.”

I don’t know if he actually will, but I hope he tries.

For himself. Not for me.

Chapter nine

Rick

I’m an impossible idiot. Impossible because I didn’t think it was a thing for me to break down and say all the shit I said out loud at the park. It was a slip-up, a spill, but then it kept spilling. It was like the crap bottled up inside me could no longer be contained. It just flowed and flowed and flowed, which makes me a royal numbskull. A total toad. A fried-up fart.

I’ve been thinking about it all night.

After I made sure Aspen got to bed, I listened from my office down the hall. Not in a creepy way, but just to make sure she was okay. The park washeavy. I wanted to make sure what I’d said didn’t give her nightmares. I wanted to make sure she didn’t cry herself to sleep thinking about her brother. She didn’t.

Despite the caffeine, she settled right in, and within moments, she was asleep.

I kept listening. I kept watch. I sat in my office for the remainder of the night and made lists of charities and places where I could donate the remaining artwork and then the largerfurniture pieces. I was serious about that. Everything. I wanted everything out.

I made lists and more lists and researched until my eyes felt like they were going to fall out from staring at a phone screen and my laptop screen in the dark. Then, I sat some more with my head tucked into my hands, staring at the desktop, staring at my knees, seeing nothing at all.

I thought about family.

That word. It always meant less than nothing.

It was something I never had. Something I was never going to have. The only family I had was the one I’d been adopted into when I joined the military and then when I went further. Jace was family because he was like a brother. They were all like my brothers.

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