Page 8 of Abduction
Tommy and I stepped into the elevator, and he must have been able to tell how pissed I was. He looked over at me, raising his eyebrows, checking in.
“You okay?” he asked. I shook my head. He was my twin; there was no point in hiding this from him.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I need to talk to Dad.”
The doors to the elevator slid open, and I stepped out into the sprawling apartment the three of us shared. Tommy and I also had places of our own in the city, but for the most part, we spent time here. Made it easy to check in and make sure we didn’t lose track of each other. Though the way my father had been acting, it seemed as though he thought he couldn’t find me anywhere.
I started toward his office, and Tommy followed right behind me.
“Josh,” he warned me, but it wasn’t enough to stop my strides as I powered on forward. I refused to let this go. I wanted to talk it out. We were family, and it was the least we could do, wasn’t it?
“He’s probably already in bed,” Josh added, dropping his voice slightly, though I knew it wasn’t true. Our father stayed up late into the night whenever he could, filling his days and nights with strategizing and scheming. He wasn’t in bed yet. He would be up, planning some new path of attack on someone he wanted taken out of the scene. And if he was up, he could talk to me.
“No, he’s not,” I growled as I rounded closer to the office door. I was about to push it open when Tommy grabbed my shoulder to stop me.
“Come on, Josh, you know better than this,” he told me. There was an edge of desperation to his voice, as though he couldn’t stand the thought of us fighting. He had so often been the one to get in the middle of Dad and me; maybe he couldn’t face it any longer. Especially not at the end of a long night like this.
I stood there, outside the door, flexing my hand, and considered my options. If I went in there, Dad would be pissed. He would be pissed I had fucked up, and then that I’d tried to come here to defend myself when I was drunk. It would turn into a far bigger issue than the one it was now, and I didn’t much like the thought of that. A wave of tiredness hit me, exhaustion from the night just passed, and I felt the fight slide out of me.
I dropped my head to my chest and turned away from the door. I was sure Dad could hear us out there, though he knew Tommy would take care of it. He always did.
He steered me away from the door to the small bar we kept in the apartment and poured me another drink. Probably not the smartest move, but I took it from him anyway and sipped on the expensive scotch he’d just poured for me.
“You okay?” he asked, and I nodded. I should have been grateful to him for managing to put off some major blowout between Dad and me, but honestly, I was just tired. Tired of always feeling like I was on the outside of this family—like Tommy and Dad were in it together, and I was the loser scrabbling around in the dark trying to make it all fit together.
“I’m sorry for what happened with the account,” I muttered finally. I wasn’t great at apologies, and I knew I should have been by now, given how many times I screwed things up.
“What’s been going on with you?” Tommy asked me as he grabbed a glass of wine from the bar. “Your head’s not been in it lately. Is something going on?”
I sighed. I wished I had a better answer for him than the one I did, but in truth, I knew I had to tell him what was really going on.
“I just feel like...there should be somethingmorethan all of this,” I told him, gesturing around vaguely.
“Than what?”
“Than just stepping up and doing everything Dad wants of us.”
“You do a lot more than that,” he pointed out. “You think Dad would have wanted you drinking at the bar all night?”
“No, no, I get it,” I agreed, waving my hand. “But even when I do stuff that’s outside of that...it still feels so empty, you know?”
I finished off the scotch and poured myself another. I got the feeling I was going to need it if I was going to sleep tonight. My thoughts were already racing, and I didn’t want to let them run any further.
“What do you mean?” Tommy asked, frowning. It was different for him—he had always been able to find the comfort and security he needed in this life because he was good at it. He had slipped into the role Dad had needed of him practically when he was still a teenager, and he’d made it work from there on out. Honestly, though? I had never really fit, not the way he had, despite how much I had tried. I wished I could just snap into the role they needed me to take up, but it always seemed to slip away from me, even when I tried my best to make it work.
“Like...what’s-her-name, tonight,” I replied. “The girl who was with me. She...she was hot, she was nice enough, but I just couldn’t feel anything for her, you know? It’s like I’ve forgotten how...”
I trailed off. I didn’t normally get this emotional or up-front with my brother, but I didn’t know who else I could talk to about this. He was the closest thing I had to someone who could understand what I was going through, and I knew he wanted to help, I knew he did. It was just so hard for me to be honest about the way I felt, to come clean and tell him the truth about what was going through my mind. Maybe I would have been a little more committed to the work if I had someone to come home to, somereasonto do all of it beyond...well, beyond just feeling as though I didn’t have a choice because of who my father was, who my family was.
“You’ve got me,” Tommy told me, planting a hand on my shoulder. “And I promise, all of this will have meaning when we take over. Dad’s not going to be around forever, and he’s not going to want to run this business for the rest of his life anyway. When we’re doing this, we’ll call the shots. It’ll be different. I promise.”
I stared at him for a moment, trying to work out if I really believed him. I wanted to. I did. I wanted to be able to believe things could be different sometime down the line, that we’d be able to make this work, but the older I got, the more I found myself doubting it, the nagging at the back of my mind warning me there was never going to be a comfortable place for me in all of this.
I needed to get some sleep. If I stayed up any longer, I was just inviting in more of the doubt, more of the distrust, more of the worry into my system, and I needed to let it all go. I needed to rest. Maybe I’d feel better about all of this in the morning.
