Page 24 of Jake and Conner
I shut up. Of course he knew. He wasn't stupid, and we'd had this conversation more than once.
Conner turned to walk into the living room. His dog and I followed. "I kind of had a feeling you would show up," he said, as if he had to justify taking his pills.
"How did you know?"
He shrugged. "I know you. People always tell me I'm stubborn, but you're no better when it comes to... well... certain things."
"You mean things like getting you back?"
He gave me a wry smile. "Yeah, things like that."
"That's not even why I'm here."
Conner sighed and sat on the couch. His dog jumped up next to him, even though she didn't fit without resting her head and front paws in Conner's lap. Which she promptly did, as if to insert herself between me and him. Conner absent-mindedly petted the fur on her head. "You're here because you want to know what's going on."
"Well... That's part of it." It was awkward to be the only person standing in the room, so I sat in one of the arm chairs next to the couch--since Kitty had made sure there wasn't any space on the actual couch for me.
"What's the other part?"
"I wanted to thank you."
Conner gave me a blank look. "Thank me?"
I gave him a smile. He had no idea what was going on. I enjoyed moments like these when I could stump him. It didn't happen too often. It had been a bit of a game for me when I was a child to see how outrageously I could behave without him batting an eyelash. I had to become a teenager before I learned that subtlety worked better to surprise him. He was too used to my rambunctious behavior to be impressed by it. I had to act in ways hedidn'texpect.
One time I wrote him a poem and he totally lost his shit.
It was a crappy poem, to be honest, made only crappier by the fact that I'd tried to write it on a bunch of cookies and some of the words ended up being illegible, but he loved it anyway.
"I wanted to thank you for coming to my house," I explained. "I know you did it because you were worried and that means a lot."
"You don't have to thank me. Just stop giving me reasons to worry about you."
"I didn't do it on purpose or anything."
"I know." A pause. "Are you okay now?" Conner eyed me intently. It seemed he'd forgotten that he should be feeling a little awkward in my presence. Good.
"I don't know," I admitted, thinking of Uncle Dean's words. I needed to letsomeonein. If that was true, I wanted that someone to be Conner. "I think I'm going to be okay eventually."
"I'm glad. Holing yourself up in your house isn't like you."
He was right about that. "It's just..."
"Trouble at work?" Conner supplied helpfully.
"Kind of, yeah. I don't usually let it get to me. People die. You can't save everyone. I know all that."
"So what was different this time?"
"I don't know... I guess... I got to know the guy a bit before we lost him, and all this time I spent talking to him I knew I probably couldn't save him. I just kind of kept hoping for a miracle anyway, you know? That I could somehow pull it off. He told me about his mate and his kid. It was brutal."
Conner's voice was sympathetic. "That sounds bad."
"It was. But I shouldn't have let it mess with me like that. I just feel so bad for his mate and his kid and..." I stopped myself because my voice was getting dangerously close to breaking and no matter what Dean told me about Conner not thinking any less of me, I was not going to sit here and cry about things I couldn't change.
Besides, Conner could easily pick up on my mental state anyway. I didn't have to cry for him to know how I felt about all of this. "You know his mate and his kid have no reason to blame you for what happened, right?" he asked.
"It's not a matter of knowing it, it's..." I huffed, because I didn't know how to say it.
