Page 21 of Salvaged Heart
I nodded. “You still owe me one. I think you keep hoping that if you stay quiet, I’ll let it slide, but we had an agreement.”
He looked around the room as if looking for inspiration, or perhaps he was looking for an escape. “To be honest, I got nothing.”
“Nothing.” I echoed blandly. “Anders closed book Carmichael,” I left out ‘the third’ but held three fingers up in its place, “has told me every deep dark secret in his heart and has nothing left to share?”
I would bet my life that we'd barely made a dent in all the secrets he'd built up. For the last week, he had been feeding me the bare minimum, truths just below the surface to pass under the feeble guidelines of our pact, but still kept the bulk of who he was close to his chest.
“No, I’m just lacking inspiration at this particular moment.” He sat up straight on his bed, the action closing some of the space between us. I was suddenly aware I was sitting closer than we ever had before, on his bed, in his room. “Ask me a question. Whatever you want. I’ll answer, scouts honor.”
“You were a scout?” I huffed, earning me a cocked brow.
“Is that the question?”
“No! No, hold on. Let me think.”
I stood and walked the room’s circumference, biding some time. A million questions I wanted to ask Anders circled my head at all times of day, but I wasn’t sure when I’d be presented with this sort of opportunity again. I didn’t want to squander it.
I wanted to know more about his parents. Specifically, his dad, having already met his mother on multiple occasions. She never spoke about his father, and Laurel had never met him. Iwasn’t even sure he was still alive. I opened my mouth to form the question, but then my gaze snagged on the photo of Anders looking longingly at the unidentified boy I’d seen the night I crept around his room in the dark. At the time, the photo seemed pretty innocent, but now, knowing the few truths Anders had allowed me to have, I realized there was something significantly deeper there.
“Who is this?” I picked up the photo off his shelf and brought it to where he sat on the bed. He took it carefully from me, laying the picture on his lap and sweeping a finger over the boy's face affectionately.
“Off limits.” He nudged the photo back towards me.
“That’s not how this works.”
I thought he would put up more of a fight, the image clearly distressed him, but he relented with a sigh and whispered, “Jonah, my stepbrother.”
Stepbrother? “I hadn’t realized you had other step-siblings, Laurel never said.”
He met my eyes. “I would think by now you would have caught on to the fact that Laurel knows very little about me, at all.”
I didn’t have an adequate response for that. I knew better than anyone that Laurel didn’t have much of a desire to get to know her stepbrother, and this didn’t seem like information Anders was going to volunteer freely. “Will you tell me about him?”
Anders took a long time to drag the words out. He gazed at the photo, memories flashing in his eyes for several minutes before he let loose one of the most broken-sounding noises I’d ever heard from him.
“He was the son of my mother’s second husband. We only shared a home for three months but were close for many years after.”
“You loved him? As more than a brother, I mean?”
He nodded somberly, eyes still locked on the picture, a tear running slowly down his left cheek. I had seen him cry before–the day he lost it in Laurel’s car on the way back from picking up breakfast. But that was different. Anders was trying very hard to hold the pieces of his heart together, and that one tear was all he was willing to allow through the cracks.
“Are you still in touch?”
He shook his head. “No, he died seven years ago.”
Oh, Anders,my heart ached for him. I didn’t know much about his life before he came to live with Laurel's family, but the fact that he had gone through this while living with her and she had no idea was devastating. How did he stand the weight of navigating something like this alone? “Can…can I hug you?”
“I would rather you didn’t.” He cleared his throat, trying to break up the lump of emotion sitting there. “I’ve committed to telling you this story, and I will fall apart completely if you hug me. You’d never hear the end of it.”
“Okay,” I whispered in understanding. “How did he die?”
“He overdosed the night things broke between Laurel and me. That’s why I couldn’t get to her.” He inhaled deeply, his hand tapping restlessly on his knee. He had done that right before his panic attack in the car as well. I got the impression he didn’t know he was doing it, so I reached across the space between us and took it in mine to soothe it. “She didn’t know certain things about me back then, things she still doesn’t fully understand, so I let her think the worst of me instead of telling her the truth.”
“And the truth is?”
He studied me for a second, “This is the part where I tell you something really fucking honest about me, and you decide you're no longer interested in my friendship.”
“That won’t happen.”
