Page 68 of Double Shot

“Because I trust you, you’re more than a brother to me,” he said, hesitantly. “Because I love you. Not in a sexual, romantic way, but platonic. I think that’s the word.” He looked at me when he said it. His dark gaze flicked back to meet Conan’s bright green eyes. “We’ve been broken, incomplete, for a long time. So, we worked, we made crazy money, and built a fortress. It didn’t make us happy, maybe satisfied, but not happy. Then I found her, and I was never good enough for her, I’m not a whole person. But the two of us? How well we work together, how well we complement each other? The two of usandSadie, we’re more complete than any couple will ever be capable of. There’s no room for my pride, so I did what I had to do to make it happen.” He got up out of the bed and looked down at us both. “Best decision I ever made,” he said and with a sardonic grin he severed his normally guarded gaze from us and turned to go into the bathroom.

I smiled and turned to look back at Conan who looked shocked.

“And that’s why I never gave up,” I said and grinned. Because I knew that no matter how broken Kyle felt, no matter how sharp his edges or sharded his personality, that he was one of the best people I had ever had the occasion to meet. I knew it deep down to my very soul.

Conan’s gaze roved my face, and I turned over, putting my arms around his neck and kissed him lightly.

“You are so very loved, Conan Roan,” I murmured and with no small amount of emotion in his own voice he murmured back thickly, “As are you, Ms. Brooks. As are you.”

“Kyle Lachlan, too?” I asked softly, needing to hear it.

“Aye, him too,” Conan said without hesitation. I smiled and kissed him and the kiss he gave me was so full of love and light I could taste it.

“Thank you,” I whispered finally after several moments of just simply cuddling. We heard the shower start.

“For what?” Conan asked.

“For being brave enough to love us both. Part of the reason I chose to love him all those years ago was because I could hear how they talked about him. You know? Not just Dean and Prissy, but his case workers and the shrinks.”

“Oh?” Conan asked, curiously.

I nodded carefully and met his glinting gaze.

“They all called him the boy who could never be loved,” I said. “And I knew he heard it. That he believed it. I was determined to prove them as much as I was him, wrong about that. Everyone deserves to be loved.”

Conan tightened his arms around me and kissed the top of my head, wrapping me up tight against his chest. I cuddled into his warmth and he sighed.

“You couldn’t be more right, Poppet. You couldn’t be more right.”

It didn’t take much urging for me to get the both of us up and to go join Kyle in the shower, even though we had showered just the night before after that phenomenal and mind-blowing sex.

Some showers weren’t about washing the body clean of impurities, though. Some were about cleansing the soul. I had a feeling, that for Kyle, this was one of those showers meant to soothe some aching old hurts talking about the past had brought up.

I was a firm believer that there wasn’t any ointment or cure for such aches and pains than an optimistic dose of the present and a tincture of our smiling future, so after giving him a few moments alone to collect himself, we went in to hug the man between us briefly, to shower, laugh, talk about other subjects more mundane, and to start our day.

Chapter Sixteen

Roan…

One wise man said something along the lines that the only thing that is constant, is change. And whoever he was, he wasn’t wrong. There were people who had entered or left my life and had become catalysts. My father, when he left one day and never came home, two days before the constabulary informed us of his death in a traffic accident. My mother’s new husband, the one with the iron fist and xenophobic hostilities. My drill instructor, Lach, and then there was Sadie, the first time, and then the second.

A few men in uniform screamed at me to go faster, harder, and frame every response with a shouted yes drill sergeant or a no drill sergeant. Almost everyone else had been in the camp telling me to be smaller, be quieter, take who I was and turn it down to a muted setting. A lot of my career in the military had been a form of rebellion. No one there wanted me to walk more softly, or keep my voice down. They only cared how my bunk was made, and that I stayed in formation, and did what I was expected to do.

That and I knew my stepfather would have boiled at the notion of serving in a military that wasn’t white as the Cliffs of Dover.

Sadie rescued me, and in a seemingly unplanned moment, didn’t give me permission to be myself, she demanded it, and she unapologetically loved me for it.

I gave her everything I had, and I didn’t hold back, not at the end.

It had been liberating.

I felt like a new person in that shower, all stress and worry drained out of my body.

There was no real and proper way I could thank her. There weren’t enough Viennese waltzes, duck confit, or jeweled tiaras in the world that could express that.

I certainly was going to try though.

She was changing me and had changed Kyle. I didn’t feel like quite the untarnished white knight. White knights didn’t fuck the fair princess up the backside, that was for one thing. But Lach, he wasn’t quite the black knight as he had been, suddenly he was applying himself to being attentive and soft, when he had for years been nothing but a shark, a sharp knife.

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