Page 89 of A Brother At My Back

“Were you really shot?” she asked and I jolted. She raised her head from my chest and turned to look at me, her eyes wide.

“I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be, eh. It’s all good.”

She studied my face for a long time and I felt my heart sink as she tried to sort through her tangled emotions. Seeing that asshole again had scrambled her but good. I patiently waited her out, waited for her to decide I really meant what I said and that it was okay to relax again. She settled, laying her head back down, fingertips playing along a scar on my stomach from a knifing when I was a teen.

“Got knifed there,” I said and she stilled her fingers.

“Where were you shot?” she asked.

“My leg.”

“Oh.”

More silence, and I wished I could see her face and what she was thinking.

“And the scar on your back?”

“Glamorous tale that one,” I said.

“I’m listening.”

“Fell out of a tree when I was nine.”

She laughed slightly and sighed. “The one on my ribs is where Silas kicked me with his damn cowboy boot. You know, the kind with the metal tip on the toe. Everyone thinks it’s a surgical scar because of the dots on either side from the stitches, but nope.”

“What excuse did you give them that time?” I asked.

“Kicked by a horse, fell into a barbed wire fence. They weren’t buying it, but I wasn’t about to tell them otherwise.”

“Mm,” I murmured and traced fingertips over her skin, idle patterns from my dusty memory back when I wanted to make my dad proud before cancer took him and I got angry at the world.

“I can’t stop wondering how this changes things,” she murmured.

“It doesn’t. Not really. You’re changed, and you know you've changed but it’s not like you did anything in cold blood, eh. You did the world a favor.”

“I don’t think killing anyone is doing the world a favor,” she said.

“This time,” I said, tracing along the line of a scar on her side, “it was.”

“I feel like I’m this awful person now,” she confessed, and I laughed a bit at the notion.

“The fact you feel that way mean’s you’re not, eh. An awful person wouldn’t care if they were awful.”

She pushed herself up and looked at me, “That is both incredibly smart and incredibly profound,” she said.

I smiled one-sided, “I have been known to be both on occasion, I reckon.”

She looked wounded, “I didn’t mean it like that!”

“Hush now, Wahine. I know you didn’t.” I pressed her back down over my heart where I carried her always, now.

She sighed out and asked, “You’re sure this doesn’t make me a monster?”

“Nah, Wahine. You’re a monster-slayer if anything. You brought your friend justice, today.”

She sniffed and I felt bad for bringing Lia up. She shuddered against me and I put my arms around her to hold her through this fresh storm of tears and man, I wished I could take her pain away.

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