Page 55 of Velvet Betrayal
Kieran grunted, didn’t move. He let his head roll back, eyes on the ceiling. For a second, it looked like he might pass out for good.
“Stay with him,” Tristan said, and vanished.
I dragged a chair next to Kieran and sat. “Hey,” I said.
He opened one eye.
“I think I’m supposed to keep you talking. So you don’t pass out again.”
He made a noise. “Okay. Where do you want to start?”
Good question. I probably should have been thinking about smalltalk, jokes, stories, anything to keep him occupied…but all I could think about was Rosie. Rosie with Julian, safe. Rosie eating an orange Kieran had peeled for her this morning. Rosie making Kieran wear a glitter sticker on his forehead.
Rosie getting to know her biological father for the first time, only for him to be sitting here now with a head wound.
It wasn’t the first time…butany timecould be the last. It was why he couldn’t be her father–not legally, not safely, not in this world where death was waiting around every dark corner.
“You’re not getting a monologue,” I muttered, resisting the urge to grab him and shake him and tell him to be more careful. “If you want to stay awake, you’re helping.”
“Dealer’s choice,” he mumbled. “I could tell you about my childhood. Or you could tell me the first time you regretted losing track of me.”
“Childhood.”
“How dark?”
“Kieran.”
He thumped his head back—grimaced—eyes closed but voice steady. “Okay. So my dad used to take us crabbing down in Quincy. Early mornings, just us and the junkies, tying raw chicken wings to string. Never caught anything worth eating. Never saw anyone else do it, either. But Dad kept coming back, week after week. When Liam got old enough, he joined in.”
“You liked it?”
“Hated it. Smelled like rot and bleach. But it was the only time he didn’t treat me and Tristan like employees. He’d get Cokes from a busted vending machine and let us drink them before breakfast. Some days he’d just sit there, not talking, for hours. Like he wanted to remember what it was like to be ordinary.” He licked a fleck of blood from his lip, eyebrow twitching. “Nobody’s ordinary in our family. But I wanted it. So bad.”
I pictured it. Two boys, sitting on a pier, string in the water and nothing to show for it but the hope that maybe, today, their father would just say good job, son. I could see the chicken wings dissolving in saltwater, the ritual of waiting for something that would never come.
“It’s weird, wanting something you know you’ll never get,” I said.
Kieran opened his eyes. “You get used to it. Then you want it for someone else, and it’s worse.”
We sat there, letting the city’s neon leak through a slit of window. Tristan’s voice echoed from the hall, a bandsaw of numbers and threats, relentless and sharp. For once, it was comforting. He was an asshole, but he always got results.
When the silence got too heavy, Kieran said, “Thanks. I didn’t think you’d bring me here.”
“I panicked,” I said, which was true, but not the whole truth. “Also, you said you didn’t want a hospital.”
“You could have left me.”
“You know I couldn’t,” I said, staring at my shoes.
He gave me a look—tired, almost young, like the kid on the pier finally getting a break. “You can’t do it, can you? Give up on me.”
“I should. I’ve tried. Doesn’t stick.”
He smiled, thin and crooked. “You always did like experiments.”
Years ago, I’d have kissed him. But I didn’t want to make it easy. I wanted him to feel the cost, the risk of coming back for me, every time. “If you do something that stupid again, you lose your veto. I’ll drag you to the ER and put ‘Mickey Mouse’ on your chart just to see if you like waking up in cuffs.”
He laughed, then winced, hand to his stitches. “You’d be a nightmare nurse.”
