Page 46 of Threadbound

Twenty

At some point, Jamie had finally fallen asleep, although waking up only four or so hours later meant that he didn’t feel at all rested. Probably better than he would have if he hadn’t managed to get any sleep, but still ragged and hollowed-out. And worried.

Bran’s explanation about the people who’d attacked him didn’t make much sense to Jamie, even within the parameters of what little he knew about organized crime. Admittedly, that wasn’t something he knew much about, but he’d seen a bunch of movies that had mobsters and gang warfare and even depictions of the Yakuza, but all of them had fought aboutcrime. Money, guns, drugs, prostitution rings, human trafficking. Something illegal. Or industrial secrets. Notideology.

Sure, he knew that there had been wars and even gang conflict over religion as late as the nineteenth century. And religious belief had fueled hate crimes against Muslims and Jews for the better part of the last two millennia, but people didn’t just hunt down your kid and kill them because they didn’t like your church.

Did they?

The obvious answer was that Bran was lying to him, although Jamie didn’t get that sense and definitely didn’t want that to be the truth. The alternative was that it was as messed up and complicated as it sounded, but that didn’t help him understand or give him a way todosomething about it.

Jamie frowned to himself as he got up and carefully padded into the kitchen to make coffee, checking over his shoulder periodically to see if the noises he was making had disturbed Bran.

The smaller man slept on, a slight furrow to his sleeping brow.

Not wanting to make too much noise in the main room, Jamie stayed in the kitchen, leaning back against the counter, drinking his coffee, liberally dosed with sweetened creamer more for the calories than the taste. Not that he minded creamer—he liked a little in his coffee, just enough to take the bitter edge off. He didn’t actually like it as sweet as he’d made it, but he’d thought the sugar might help with his agitation.

He also made himself a bowl of instant oatmeal using the obligatory electric teakettle that you simplyhadto have if you lived anywhere in the UK. Jamie didn’t mind tea—he wasn’t into tea the way Rob and Trixie were, but it was an acceptable beverage. He owned the electric kettle, though, and used it far more often to make oatmeal or hot chocolate or instant noodles.

Even though stress and worry were suppressing his appetite, Jamie knew that he really did need to eat. He’d barely had any casserole last night, although he’d eventually managed to choke down a bowl, but on top of the day before’s lack of food, he was feeling both woozy and nauseous, and he knew that was a recipe for nothing good.

Jamie hopped up on the edge of the counter—he only just barely fit—and pulled his bowl into his lap, half-watching Bran and thinking. About Bran, of course. And the members of thenot-mafia who had tried to beat him to death. Or at least into a bloody pulp, although Bran hadn’t argued otherwise when Jamie said they’d tried to kill him.

Jamie put a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth, grimacing around the sticky-thick texture, which tried its best to stick in his throat. Normally, he liked oatmeal just fine, although he tended to save it for cooler months. He’d gone with it today because it was quieter than cooking in a pan or pouring out a bowl of cereal, and he was regretting it a little. But he’d made the goddamn oatmeal, so he was going to eat it and not waste food and money. He took another bite.

Bran shifted a tiny bit in his sleep, his forehead creasing further as a small sound that might have been distress slipped through barely-parted lips. Jamie froze, watching to see if whatever it was that disturbed Bran’s sleep continued, prepared to wake him if he seemed upset, but Bran’s features smoothed out again and his breathing evened.

Jamie took another bite of oatmeal, then washed it down with a mouthful of slightly over-creamered coffee, the frown on his own features more to do with the situation than with his regret over his breakfast choices, although they certainly weren’t helping.

Jamie couldn’t decide if he was more disturbed by everything that had led up to Bran being in his apartment, or by the fact that he felt so strongly protective toward a man he barely knew. Two half-dates, several encounters that might be describable as stalking, and an argument about why Bran wasdrawn to himshould definitely not have Jamie trying to figure out what he could do to keep this man safe.

It should have had him do his due diligence in seeing Bran loaded into the ambulance, and that should have been an end to it. But Bran’s panic had felt like a vice around Jamie’s heart, and he just couldn’t leave Bran to the undoubtedly irritatedministrations of the EMTs. Bran would undoubtedly have been fine, but…

Jamie couldn’t do it. He couldn’t explainwhyhe couldn’t do it, but he just couldn’t.

In the same way that he couldn’t help putting himself between Bill Eckel’s fist and his younger half-siblings or his momma, he couldn’t help trying to take care of Bran—going with him in the ambulance, staying with him at the hospital, goingbackto the hospital to be with him. And then bringing him home.

Last night, he’d asked Bran if he wanted to go back to where he was staying—if he’d be able to take care of himself, and although Bran had said he probably could, he’d also looked scared. The same kind of scared that Jamie recognized from the time Billy—the oldest of his half-siblings, although he’d only been five at the time, and Jamie’d been almost thirteen—had accidentally broken one of Bill Eckel’s beer steins, collected over many years from various thrift shops and flea markets and the occasional tourist shop somewhere on one of their family road trips to some cave or lake in Kentucky or Tennessee.

It had been on one of the rickety tables next to the hideous plaid orange and brown couch that Bill spent most of the weekends sprawled on, watching sports or fishing on TV and drinking beer—out of whichever stein was presently his favorite.

Bill hadn’t been in the room at the time, either because he was getting a snack or using the bathroom or had gone to get something, Jamie couldn’t remember, but Billy had been running through the room with his newly-acquired toy airplane. Some cheap thing their momma had picked up, probably at a thrift store or church sale.

He’d hit the corner of the table while making a sweeping turn with his toy plane, and knocked the stein to the ground, wherethe thin carpet of their house didn’t manage to provide enough cushion to keep the handle from snapping off.

Billy’s face had held the same expression of mindless terror that Bran’s had as they were strapping him to the gurney. And Jamie just couldn’t let him go like that, anymore than he’d been able to keep himself from claiming responsibility for the knocked-over stein.

One would think that he’d have learned from the bruising and aches the first, or second, or dozenth time, and that he’d have known better than to follow Bran into the ambulance—or than to intervene in the beating in the first place—but apparently Jamie just wasn’t wired that way.

He sighed and forced another spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth, wishing he’d made another breakfast choice and vowing to not buy oatmeal again for at least a year.

What’s wrong with me? Why do I keep getting myself into these things?He knew, logically speaking, that he probably didn’t deserve the blame for anything his step-father had done all those years ago, but the child who had been on the receiving end of Bill Eckel’s fists had frequently asked his momma what he’d done wrong, and the man who had emerged on the far side of it still wondered if he hadn’t in some way borne some amount of responsibility. If he’d been less clumsy or more attentive or followed the rules better—nevermind that he didn’t fit within the parameters set by the rules of Bill Eckel’s household.

That same man wondered now whether or not he’d somehow drawn trouble to himself. That he shouldn’t have agreed to go out to dinner with Bran in the first place, that he should have called the cops when Rob suggested he had a stalker, or that he should have just gotten curry with Rob and Trixie when they’d asked him to.

But he hadn’t. He never did any of the what-ifs that pushed and shoved their way through his mind, although he supposed that’s why they were what-ifs and not memories.

In theory, Jamie understood that he wasn’t responsible for the decisions other people—Bill Eckel, his mother, the people who’d attacked Bran, even Bran himself—made. All he could be responsible for was himself.

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