Page 35 of Collateral Damage

Chapter Fourteen – Jess

“You cheating piece of shit!” Dylan, Chris’s sister, shoves the cards off the table, then grabs her beer, taking a long pull from it before slumping back against the couch. We’re sitting on the floor around the coffee table, playing a game of Uno.

Well, we were playing until Dylan lost.

Chris’s deep chuckle hits me square in the chest, and I laugh along with him. “Don’t be a sore loser, Squeak.”

“Sore loser? You fucking cheated! I said Uno seconds before you did, and you know it.”

Chris looks at me. “Angel, you be the referee. Who said it first?”

I raise my hands. “Nooo, thank you. I’m not dumb enough to get in the middle of a sibling fight again. Especially between you two.”

The last time we had a game night had been at Dylan’s apartment. We were playing Bananagrams next to the apartment complex’s pool. Dylan had made up a word Chris hadn’t recognized, and I tried to look it up to solve the argument. When Dylan had snatched my phone from me, Chris snatched it back. They’d wrestled over it, and my phone had ended up in the pool. They both felt terrible about it, and my insurance had covered the mishap, but I learned pretty quickly it was better to let those two duke things out on their own.

Dylan snorts. “Figure you’d take the side of the guy who gives you orgasms.”

Chris wipes a hand over his face. “Fucking hell, Squeak.”

I laugh. “I’m not taking his side. Didn’t you hear me just say I wasn’t getting involved?”

“Not getting involved is taking his side. You know this fool sees it as a victory.”

Chris picks his beer up and tips it in Dylan’s direction, letting her know she’s hit the nail on the head. She lobs her bottle cap at him, and it lands on his chest. He picks up the cap and twirls it in the air like he’s flipping a coin, and winks at her.

There’s never a dull moment when Chris and Dylan are in the same room. The two couldn’t be more different if they were born to different mothers on different continents. Sure, they both have the same warm brown eyes, and Chris’s closely cropped hair head hints at the same deep brown Dylan has, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Chris is tall and built, while Dylan barely comes up to his pecs and has a lean, athletic frame with an ass I am jealous of. Chris is serious and keeps things close to his heart. Dylan isn’t afraid to spill the deets. There is no such thing as boundaries where she is concerned.

Maybe Chris is the serious one because he’s seen so much tragedy in his life. First, his high school sweetheart died, and then his parents a few years later from carbon monoxide poisoning. He’d already enlisted by then and was deployed to Iraq when his parents were killed in the freak accident. They were staying at a bed-and-breakfast in Vermont for their twenty-third wedding anniversary, and there was a faulty gas heater in their room. The building’s detectors were on the fritz, so no one knew till it was too late. Chris took over Dylan’s care, but six months later he was redeployed, and Dylan had to go stay with her Aunt Caroline, their dad’s sister, until she started college in the fall.

From what Dylan told me, it hadn’t been pleasant staying with her aunt. But I know she’d downplayed it to Chris, not wanting him to feel bad because even though he’d been deployed for a time, he still stepped up and took over the parental role for Dylan, giving her everything she needed and more. There’s nothing serious about Chris now, though. He has Dylan in a one-handed grip and is tickling her till tears run down her face.

“Say I’m not a cheater.”

Dylan sucks in air. “But you are a cheater.”

“Say it.”

“Never.” She tries to suck in a breath but is too busy laughing.

“I can stay here all day, Squeak.”

“I’ll say you aren’t a cheater if you stop calling me Squeak.”

This makes me laugh. For as long as I’ve known them, Chris has called Dylan squeak. It was apparently because he’d started out calling her pipsqueak when she’d stopped growing, and then the nickname got shortened. I could always tell she didn’t hate it, but every now and again, the same old argument would come up.

“I guess that’s a no then,” Chris says and tickles her ribs.

“Okay, okay. You aren’t a cheater. You… aren’t a… cheater.”

Chris lets her hands go. “That’s what I thought.”

She sits up, gasping for breath, and punches him on the shoulder.

“Ouch! That hurt.”

“Fucker.”

This right here gives me the warm fuzzies. Seeing Chris and Dylan together and how strong their bond is brings home how much I’ve missed out on in my family life. As if on cue, my phone rings and I reach across the table to answer. I hesitate for a second before picking it up.

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