Page 66 of A Brother's Secret

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Data…

“Don’t do this to yourself,” I said softly when we were safely shut into our motel room. Disney was sharing the other bed, but he was giving us some privacy, smoking a joint out front. She sighed out and looked up, her expression bleak and I knew exactly what she was up to. Blaming herself, taking it all on her shoulders and bearing the brunt of everyone’s pain with a heaping side of guilt.

It was something that was quintessentially Mali. I just didn’t think it was something she could turn off. I dropped onto the end of the bed beside her and she looked over at me and just sort of keeled over, resting her head on my shoulder. She sniffed, and I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. I’d rolled the dice. She could have flown off the handle at me, vented some of that rage at herself and maybe some of the pain she was feeling. She was always super sensitive about hurting other people. Hated it, but sometimes, like now, it couldn’t be helped.

I put my arms around her and just held her while her eyes leaked and she shuddered silently against me. I didn’t know how she could do that, sob without making a sound, but when she did, I could tell just how much she was hurting. The crying jag in Ft. Royal was her angry crying. When she wept with no sound, she grieved.

“Who we mourning, baby.”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice feeble and water logged, “Lexi, I guess.”

I could see it. I nodded and held her tighter, kissing her hair, breathing her in, saying the only words of comfort I could for this impossible situation, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, it’s stupid…”

“It’s not stupid,” I rejected the notion out of hand. “You built a life as her, relationships, and that’s a pretty powerful thing.”

“But I wasn’t her, it was all a lie,” she argued pathetically.

“May have been a lie, but you definitely were her. I wish I could make this one better.”

“You do, I’m just… I’m just scared. I don’t want to hurt you, or anyone, like that again.” Then she said the words that send my insides heaving, “I totally didn’t expect you to show up. I thought I was as good as dead when I posted that message.”

It hit me, like a stone dropped into a well, a leaden rock of reality disturbing the surface of my neat little pond I had constructed in my mind. I choked it down and sucked in a deep breath, letting nothing show on the outside how deeply and awfully her confession affectedme.

“Not on my watch,” I chided gently and then I held her close and closer because I really didn’t want to have to imagine a world without Amalia init.

I hadn’t realized she’d lost hope that hard, had never in a million years entertained the idea that my proud, brave, strong, woman would ever contemplate giving up. Shit, it fucking rattled me to my core. Scared me like no other, and made me feel helpless that it’d been that close. A near thing… but not on my watch. I’d swooped in and saved the day, but fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck… at the last fucking second!

“I don’t know what I would do without you,” she said tearfully and looked up atme.

I pursed my lips and searched her beautiful face and committed as hard as I had ever committed to her before when I said, “You don’t ever have to findout.”

She threw her arms around me and I held her back and realized that for as strong as Mali was, she indeed had a breaking point and we were fucking at it. I needed to take herhome.

* * *

She wassomber and somehow less the whole ride back. One word answers or noncommittal grunts were about all she could muster to the rest of the guys. Disney had helped by giving her a joint and standing outside the room with her as she smoked it. I watched them talk softly and a new friendship was tentatively born. Out of all my brothers, Disney knew a thing or two about hiding who hewas.

We didn’t sleep well. I think both of us were thinking too much, but neither one of us were really in a place to talk about it. At least not yet. I was still reeling from her admission. I knew she harbored a darkness in her. I think all of us did; me included. It was a very different animal all together knowing that she had thought about it. That it had been more than a mere moment of what Dani called ‘L’appel du vide.’ Those little self-destructive, fatalistic thoughts we all held inside of ourselves. Like standing on the edge of a cliff taking pictures and suddenly thinking that you could just take that one last step and it would be over and the thought of that is appealing… Even though you know you would never doit.

What had led my beautiful, strong, brave, Amalia Rose into such a line of thinking looking at that blinking cursor on that thread? I wanted to know. What made her actually type the message? What made her click send, thinking it would bring almost certain death upon her and what made her okay withthat?

The stark reality that I could have lost her, were I not as good as I was at what I did, well, it gnawed at me, chewed me down to the raw, bloody, bone. When did things get so bad for her that she decided to answer l’appel du vide, which literally translates to ‘the call of thevoid’?

I shuddered, thinking back to the conversation that Dani and I had had that late night when she had left Thirteen sleeping and had come out to the bar. She’d been having nightmares again but hadn’t wanted to wake him. I had been up at my systems doing work for a client. She’d poured a generous measure of alcohol and had sat watching me and we’d talked… and it was one of those rare moments I had felt Amalia with me because the feeling had been eerily the same. Dani, confiding in me, while I’d listened and just been there. It’d been so starkly reminiscent of the times with Mali under our tree, I could almost hear the distant rustle of the breeze through the leaves.

I split off from my brothers when we reached the town. They looked up and over at my unexpected change of plans, but I gave Trig the hand signal for ‘home’ and he raised a hand, giving me the okay. Mali perked up a bit when I made the turn and settled in again against my back, but I could feel her damn near vibrate behind me in counterpoint to the bike. She didn’t know what was up and I could feel her tension over it. Still, she didn’t shout any questions or make any demands as to our destination, choosing to trust me, and for as tense as she was, the fact that she trusted me, even now, to do right by her, made me relax.

When we turned onto my street, she jumped slightly. A lot had changed in the neighborhood over the years, so I figured between that and the deepening twilight, she didn’t readily recognize some things. When we got to the house she’d gone very still. I turned us into the driveway, the garage trundling open. The doors were new, automated, and something I had put in. There was a sensor that knew it was me by Bluetooth and my particular cell phone drawing near. My own design, actually.

I pulled into the cavernous space and turned the bike around so it faced out and killed the motor. Mali got down groaning, her body likely as stiff as mine. I got off with a grunt of my own as muscles ached and screamed from too long kept in the same position. Neither of us was getting any younger, it seemed, but neither were we old and used up. I kind of dreaded this just being a preview of coming attractions.

“You’re quiet,” I observed and she turned, working the chinstrap on her helmet loose.

“It’s different,” she said. “From the outside, it’s the same house, but not quite how I remembered at the sametime.”

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