Page 34 of Never Say Yes To Your Brother's Best Friend

I reach down, grab the sheet, and wrap it around both of us.

“Even if you were the biggest mud bog this planet has ever known, with slime and quicksand and a prehistoric monster living inside you, you wouldn’t be too dirty for me, Patrick McDonald. You might have had no one, but that’s not true anymore. Don’t you ever say that you wish you could trade yourself for my brother or anyone else. I do not freaking accept that trade, and neither would Jace.”

He’s so quiet. Even his breathing is still. But when I shift to curl my face into his neck and breathe him in again, to feel hispulse there too, and I brush my fingers over his face, they come away wet.

I’m too small to hold him properly, but I get my arm halfway across his chest and slip my leg over one of his. We’re totally naked, and it feels good to be skin-to-skin.

I might be burning and burning, but right now, this is what we need. Just this level of closeness. Neither of us needs to be fucked seven ways to Sunday. We need something so much harder and deeper. A thousand times more intimate. We just need this. Each other. Folded over one another, protecting each other, and keeping each other safe.

“When you first got here, you looked at me like you wanted him instead of me. Like I was the wrong one,” Rick says.

My poor heart is broken glass, but his? It’s been obliterated. It’s been ground to sand. Ashes to ashes. Glass back to sand. Does it work that way?

“No.” I trace a pattern on Rick’s broad chest, rubbing a small circle with my palm after. “No. I’m so sorry if you thought that. I never meant to ever have you feel that way. I never, ever thought that.”

“I wanted out. Before I ever went home. Before my grandpa was ever dying, and pulled all those strings to get me back here. I. Wanted. Out. I used that as an excuse. I abandoned Jace and the others. I made them a promise. They were my brothers, and I left.”

I take small breaths to keep the tears stinging my eyes at bay. “Wanting out isn’t a crime. Feeling trapped isn’t wrong either. It means we need to make changes. It’s your mind’s way of telling you to listen or your body’s way of telling your mind that you’re done. You didn’t abandon anyone. You didn’t choose for anyone to get hurt or die. You had no control over that. If you were there, it still might have happened.”

“Not Jace. It wouldn’t have been Jace. I wouldn’t have let it happen.”

“Sometimes, Rick, things happen whether we want them to or not. You can’t torture yourself thinking you could have saved him. You might have died too,” I say.

“Or it could be him being home safe with you and the rest of your family.”

“Stop it.”

Rick sighs. “I can’t stop. I don’t think I’ll ever stop thinking about it.”

This time, when I stroke his cheek and put a finger to his lips, it’s not to tell him to be quiet. I don’t want him to be quiet. He needs to get it out. I was wrong before not to let him say what he needed to say. I wait, my fingers resting against his bottom lip. Maybe that’s all there was. Maybe there is nothing else.

I look up, even if he wouldn’t want me to see him flayed open like this. His cheeks are wet, but his eyes are closed. His breathing is deeper.

“When was the last time you slept?” I whisper, smoothing his hair back. It’s damp along the edges of his face. “I mean, really slept?”

He doesn’t open his eyes, but he does lean into my touch. “Don’t know. A long time.”

A few of the wrinkles smoothen out on his forehead. He looks younger, smaller somehow. This hard, highly skilled, deadly man who needs someone to care so badly. Someone to keep watch. Someone to need him and want him, a heart for a heart.

It’s been over a year since my brother passed, and while I’ve been fighting with the grief, he’s been fighting too. Fighting the guilt along with the pain.

After I know he’s sleeping because his breathing is so even and peaceful, and he’s finally, finally not battling it out with me or himself or anything else, I slip out of bed. I pull up the covers,tucking them around him, and then I put on a fresh T-shirt and a pair of shorts. This night is probably going to feel like a fever dream for him. It feels a little bit like that for me too. It feels like I was dismantled and put back together all wrong. Painfully. All of me hurts for all of him.

He’s wrecked me and ruined me with his honesty and our shared pain, with his heavy loneliness and the simple human need to connect with another person.

I slip back into bed, on the other side, above the covers, but I rest my hand on Rick’s chest. He’s still breathing deeply and evenly, the way he should. If he has nightmares, I don’t think they’re hounding him now. My body is still electric, but I close my eyes. They’re heavy and gritty. My brain is exhausted, and I know if I lie here long enough, my body will eventually be as well. I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to keep watch. Even if I do that while I’m sleeping, I won’t leave.

This marriage, this agreement, and the letter might all have an expiration date, but I think we’re always going to be connected now. As more than just pen pals or text buddies or people who married and got an annulment.

Jace thought we needed each other.

Honestly, I thought he was wrong. But that was before.

Now? I think he might be so, so right.

Chapter eleven

Rick

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