Page 143 of Love Thy Brother
River watched me from the doorway. “Did someone piss Orla off? This place is like a clinic.”
“No clue. I’m running low on club gossip.”
“You miss it?”
“Gossip?”
“The club. Being with me is pretty isolating for you.”
I turned off the tap. “I don’t see it like that.”
“How do you see it?”
“I see it like a man who’s been with the club his whole damn life, and yet I’ve still been lonely as hell these last few years. Longer, maybe, and it hurts, Riv. To be around people you love and it not be enough to keep you living. Even if after all this you don’t want me, something has to change, cos it’s fucking killing me.”
It was a truth I hadn’t known until I said it. Until it fell out of me like a loaded hand grenade and dropped to the floor between us. Regret churned in my belly, but relief swamped it before it took hold. The solace in honesty that River’s parents had always promised us. It was a hard truth. A painful one. But I couldn’t take it back.
I didn’t want to.
River watched me lean heavily on the sink. His dark eyes swam with an emotion that gave me hope. Or maybe it was what I wanted to see. Cos I was a fool for him and I always had been.
That’s not fair. He loves you too.
“Hey.” River moulded his body to mine, curving around my spine the way he did when we fucked like this, strong, work-hardened hands sliding over my sweaty skin, rough lips at my neck. Our clothes lay between us now, but I felt him everywhere, his soft breath warming my cheek as he whispered in my ear. “Rubi, I do want you. I want everything you do; I just don’t know how we do it.”
Neither did I, and we weren’t going to figure it out in the short time I had to spare before I left us.
I shifted to face him. “Can we talk when I get back? For real?”
River kissed the tip of my nose. “Course we can. But can you do something for me first?”
“Anything.”
“Come take that nanna nap with me. You’re gonna need it on the road.”
He guided me away from the sink and back to Mateo’s bed. There were no sheets. One pillow that River tucked under my head. “What about—”
“Shh.” River wrapped himself around me. “You’re here. I don’t need anything else.”
Wishing that was true kept me company as I drifted off to the cute sensation of his soft hair tickling my nose.
Dreaming it was true was the sweetest thing. I didn’t want to wake up. I didn’t want toleave. Everything about it cut me wrong. We’d been apart for so long. A fucking lifetime.
Three more days felt like the end of the world.
25
RIVER
Losing the garage hurt more than I was prepared for, and with Rubi gone and no one currently trying to kill us, it was all I had to focus on. “Bear and Axel need work.”
I was talking to myself. To the best of my knowledge, I was alone, trawling through the paperwork Cam had held hostage at the cottage on Beach Road when I’d left the club all those years ago. But numbskull that I was, I hadn’t heard him come home, and he popped up like a smug periscope, poking his head over the banister. “I can find them something.”
“They live in Porth Luck and they’re not criminals.”
“So?”
So nothing. I was still learning not to be a dick to my brother. “Uh. Thanks. That would be great.”
