Page 9 of Imperfection is Beauty

After we watched the game, I carried Crew on my and then handed him off to Daemon so they could head back to her apartment.

Since tomorrow was the gender reveal party I planned, I made them stay at her place tonight.

Once Daemon grabbed Crew off my shoulders, I slapped his back, then pressed a kiss on Aliyah’s cheek, and said, “See you tomorrow.”

She narrowed her eyes and asked, “You going to tell me what I’m having early, big, twin brother of mine?”

I shook my head at her, “Hell no. Got something planned, no way in hell am I ruining that.”

After they left, I was sitting on the couch, watching the highlights of the game, and waiting to see if they would show which teams were looking at which players, when there was a knock on the front door.

Braydon sat his beer down on the coffee table since it was his turn to get the door this week.

He made it to the door, opened it, and then I heard him ask, “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, you can tell me where I can find my punk-ass little brother.” And at those words…

At the sound of that voice, I stood up and barreled through the house.

Seeing my big brother, I didn’t slow.

He saw me coming and braced.

My brother and I were the same height, but now, he had more muscles than I did.

I wrapped him in a bone-crushing hug, and to that, he returned the favor.

“It’s damn good to see you, brother,” I told him as I pulled away.

He nodded his now shaved head and then stepped into the room after I stepped to the side.

After I introduced him to the guys, I led him to the couch, grabbed him a beer, and then took a seat beside him.

“Missed you, bro,” he told me after he took a long pull and then sighed.

The events that led my brother to the penitentiary, well, you had to live in our world to really understand everything.

The first event that led to him being charged took place when I was eleven and he was sixteen. During a game of football, I had sacked an offensive lineman.

And when I sacked him, his leg had been braced in the wrong direction.

The audible snap of three different places lit up the area around us.

Apparently, that sack, legal as it was, had ended any hopes for that boy in the NFL.

The father of that boy didn’t like that. Not one bit.

He had been waiting for me a week later and tried to run over me with his car. And a side note right here: it was his police cruiser.

Also, his dashcam footage just so happened to be malfunctioning that day.

What we didn’t know was that the man had a brain aneurysm waiting to be burst open.

So, when my brother saw what had happened, he slammed the man’s face into the steering wheel, and it happened. He had been dead in under five minutes.

Sadly, someone’s parent at the field had captured everything playing out.

And since the man who had died was a cop, they threw the book at Van.

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