Page 38 of Love Thy Brother
“I want—you know what? Call it what you want. I wasn’t fucking drunk. I had my hog, remember?”
Barely. But I believed him. Kings didn’t drink and ride. Club rules. Ever since we’d lost Nash’s uncle to the road when I was too young to contemplate what grief did to a man.
An engine sounded somewhere down the road. Rubi dragged his intense gaze from me and stepped back to the gate. “You ever see any other vehicles hanging around?”
“Is that a real question?”
Rubi slipped through the gate and melted into the night.
I stayed where I was. If he was gonna pop a blood vessel every time a car drove past, that was his problem.
Be careful with him.
Jesus. I rose and moved to the gate in the same moment Rubi came back.
We collided.
Out of a bad and terrible habit, I reared back to push him away.
He caught my wrists. “Don’t.”
“Or what?”
“Or nothing. Just don’t. Please?”
I shrugged. “All right.”
A heavy moment thrummed between us. Then he let me go. “I wasn’t drunk that night. I was concussed. Didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. Where I was going until I got here.”
“Concussed?”
“Yeah. It was a day or so after I took that pipe to my skull. I didn’t know how heavy the hit was until later. No one did. If they had, I wouldn’t have been on my bike that night.”
“You wouldn’t have come to me?”
He winced into a slow nod. “Not like that.”
Not desperate for me. Not tearing at my clothes on the very ground we stood on. He’d have come to me as a friend. A brother. And then what? We’d have watched Jon Snow bone his auntie together before he rode off into the sunset again?
It was a lot to process.
I fished my keys out of my pocket and curled my fingers around them, letting the metal bite into my skin, slotting the missing pieces together and not liking the finished picture any better. “I didn’t notice you weren’t okay because I’d done a bag of K before you got here.”
“For real?”
I squeezed the keys tighter, latching onto the stinging pain. “When I woke up and you were gone, I thought I’d tripped the whole thing. If Oscar hadn’t seen you leave, maybe I’d never have been so angry with you.”
“That’s not a good thing, Riv. That ket’s gonna kill you.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“How do you know?” Rubi backed me against my front door, reaching down to pry the keys from my hand. “We don’t move product through Porth Luck anymore. Fuck, we don’t move it anywhere. That shit comes from London now.”
“I don’t care where it comes from.”
“You should.”
“Why? Because I’m not getting high off the family business anymore?”
