Page 142 of Winning Brynn

“You’re being weird.” I side-eye my brother as we ride the elevator up to my floor. He has his hands shoved into his pockets, shifting relentlessly from foot to foot, while he whistles the theme song of a nineties TV show that I haven’t heard since I was a kid. “Will you cut that out?”

Immediately, the fidgeting stops. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re irritating me.”

He rolls his eyes. “I’m always irritating you.”

True.

He might have stopped pissing me off so much in the last few months since we aired all our shit in the woods and he dropped the overbearing big brother act, but he’s still Alex, and, therefore, still irritates me daily.

The elevator bell dings, and Alex motions with his hand to let me out first. Yep. He’s being weird. The man wouldn’t know manners if they punched him in the jaw, yet here he is acting chivalrous.

It isn’t even the first instance today.

We’ve just returned from having lunch at my favorite restaurant, where he spent an hour and a half recounting memories of us as kids with an uncharacteristic tear in his eye, before insisting that he get the bill.

My eyes narrow. “Seriously, you’re freaking me out.”

He huffs a laugh, but the sound comes out choked and gargled. Scratching the back of his neck, he steps into the hallway beside me and wraps an arm around my shoulder.

Chivalrous and affectionate. What the fuck is going on?

“Are you dying?” I ask him, my heart twisting with genuine concern, because it’s the only explanation I have for his behaviour.

“No, I’m not dying.” He gives me a real laugh this time. “But will you please stop asking questions. You’ll ruin it for yourself.”

“Ruin what for myself?”

He closes his eyes and looks to the ceiling. “God, give me strength.”

The hallway lights flicker as we get closer to my apartment, and I grow more confused and paranoid with each step. “Why are you walking me to my door anyway? We live in the same building.”

“Brynn?”

I look up at him, his face flushed with exasperation. “Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

We stop in front of my door, and I wheel around to give him a piece of my fucking mind for talking to me like that, but the softness in his eyes makes me pause.

He drops his arm from my shoulder to face me head on. “Before you go in there, there’s a couple of things I want to say.”

“I hope an apology is one of them.” I scowl back at him.

His lips twitch with a smile. “Nope. You’ll understand why in a minute.”

Leaning back against the doorframe, I fold my arms across the front of my white sundress that he insisted I wear for lunch, and wait for him to continue.

“I just wanted to say,” he begins, sucking in a long breath that shivers when he releases it, “that it has been the honour of my life being your big brother.”

“Alex,” I breathe, “Why are you—oh, God. You really are dying, aren’t you?”

He ignores me. “I know that I missed out on a lot of my childhood after our parents died. We’d lost our only family, and we had no grandparents or distant relatives coming to save us, so I stepped up to the plate. I swore to protect you always, and to love you enough to fill the gap that losing Mom and Dad left. It fucked me up in a lot of ways, but my new therapist is helping me deal with that.”

Guilt swims in my stomach. “I’m so sor—”

“Let me speak, for Christ’s sake,” he snaps, but his face remains soft, his eyes still swirling with unfiltered affection. “What I’m trying to say is that no matter how difficult it was, or how fucked up I am now, or even that I didn’t get the chance to really be a kid, I have never once regretted it. I would do it again, and again, and again. Because you have always been the thing that kept me going. It would have been so easy to have given into the darkness, but you were always there, shining so fucking bright that it cut through all the bad shit. So, yeah, maybe I sacrificed a lot. But you saved my life, Brynn, just by being you.”

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