Page 89 of I'll Be There
CHAPTER TWELEVE
“It’s a little early, isn’t it? Don’t you need your beauty sleep?”
Conner sat on a picnic table overlooking the platinum of Evergreen Lake as the dawn began to dent the vault of night. He didn’t respond to Justin’s question. Nor to him dragging a lawn chair over.
Justin plopped down into it. “What are you drinking?”
Conner glanced at the bottle in his hands. “Root beer.”
“So not whiskey. Good choice.”
A loon called over the dark waters, mystical and lonely. The wind stirred the trees, whispers in the night.
“So, not going to shower. Or sleep?”
He took another drink, the root beer warm and sitting poorly in his churning gut.
“I’m pretty easy to leave, apparently.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize we were havingthisparty.” Justin turned his chair, put his bare feet up on the bench.
Conner looked at him. “Go away.”
“Not a chance, little bro. I didn’t come back from the dead to let you wallow in some sort of pity party. So your girl walked away from you.Youdidn’t send her away, didn’t break her heart for seven years.”
Conner scrubbed a hand over his hair, already rucked up from hours of waiting as Micah went into surgery to repair his leg.
Micah wouldn’t lose it. Would walk again, would live. And Reuben too, who’d woken long enough to meet Justin. Hear a smidgen of the story.
Maybe, hopefully, they wouldn’t know the full of it. Conner didn’t even want to acknowledge the dark satisfaction that pooled inside him when he’d pulled the trigger. Both times. He took another swig wishing, maybe, it might be something stronger. But he’d never been that guy, preferring something a little more adrenaline-laced to dull the pain.
Your life is too big for me, Conner. Too dangerous.
He roughed a hand down his face. Stared hard into the dark waters. “It’s over. I know Liza. She’s stubborn, and when she makes up her mind, she means it.”
He finished the root beer. Stared at the bottle. With a rush, stood up and threw it as far as he could, a spurt of pain in his heave that he didn’t bother to quiet.
The bottle smashed against a tree.
“You’ll have to clean that up in the morning, before kids run over it in their bare feet.”
“Leave me alone.” Conner shot him a look. “Whydidyou come back?”
Justin considered him, rubbed a hand across his chin. “Apparently, it’s to stop you from being me.”
Conner sank down again on the table. “I’m not you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a good man. You show up, and stay.”
When he looked up at Justin, his brother wore a grim, pained expression, even in the dim wash of the cabin light. “But, you’reaboutto be me. You’re about to walk away from a woman who loves you.”
“She walked away fromme!”
“She’s scared. Frankly, I’d be terrified if I had to marry you. Look at you. Bloody, sooty, and you smell. You look like a freakin’ commando.”
“Iwasa commando.”
“Right. We’ll, it’s unnerving.”
