Page 105 of Branded
Twenty-Eight
Kailey
Smitty had called me when he’d gotten to the hotel, told me about Raph, and…I’d wanted to go to him, to be there as he struggled to find a way to help his friend.
Hell, I wanted to go to Raph and give him a big hug.
How…
How Monica could do such a thing, could hurt Raph in that way, live that lie…
It was all kinds of fucked up that I couldn’t begin to process.
A baby…was something innocent and fragile and not a joke, not a scam.
Not a lie.
But Smitty had it covered.
He, Theo, Cas, and Marcel had taken Raph out.
Gotten him liquored up, the venom out, and put him to bed, Smitty staying in his room to make sure he stayed asleep and hadn’t done anything stupid.
He was ready to play, though, from what Smitty had told me.
“Ready to fight and hit and be a mean son of a bitch” were Smitty’s exact words, and I felt more than a little scared for their opponent that night.
Raph was bound to take someone’s head off.
I’d thought about going up there, something driving me to be with them—maybe it was Raph’s pranks that regularly had the team in peals of laughter and usually left the person on the receiving end of them grinning. Or maybe it was the mischief-filled smiles he directed toward me in the hall, the way he’d taken to poking his head in occasionally since the ice had broken between us, asking me about my “dragon babies” from my game. Or perhaps it was the dog harness I’d found on Herman, embroidered with his name, just a few days before.
But it was mostly…I felt like part of the family
And I hated that he was hurting.
Hated that someone would do that to him.
Unfortunately, the only thing I could do at the moment was pop into his house, to make sure Monica had remained gone and to retrieve his plant.
The last I’d taken upon myself.
A stupid, silly thing to do, but also one that I was going to do anyway.
Me and Tawny were going to be good friends until Raph was ready to take her back.
Now, however, Tawny had been fertilized and watered, had been set in a nice sunny window, and I needed to go to my meeting with Marcel’s dad.
I had the skeleton of what Leo had asked for, and then a slightly modified version of the website he’d asked me to create, tweaking some items I thought would provide a better user experience, some simple design things I preferred to do if I was the one doing the creating. However, because this was my first presentation and meeting with him since I’d taken the project on, I anticipated that there would be a long list of issues to address.
The functionality was there.
But clients often had thoughts.
And usually that meant more work for me—and often workarounds.
That was this job, however, and I couldn’t complain.
Plus, these little projects, being able to use my skills in ways that I didn’t always get to day-to-day, meant finding fulfillment in something that wasn’t just work.
