Page 119 of Reacher
I fought the grin on my face. I knew he’d moan about the actual people.
“Your brothers all have their smarts, Ice.”
He shot me a glare. “Has-Been? Seriously? He isn’t gonna listen to a word I fucking say.”
Probably not. “He’s not dumb, Ice. He wanted to learn.”
“He’s a pain in my ass.”
“He has a higher IQ than you, is that what your beef is?” It was no secret that they’d both been tested, and Has-Been was literally only a few points ahead of him, but it was enough to cause a rivalry, alongside the intense dislike they seemed to have for each other.
“He’s a prick. That’s my fucking ‘beef’.”
He sighed then, and rubbed his face.
“I’ll try. I can’t promise I can teach these assholes, but I’ll try. Just please, don’t take this away from me. I need to stay busy. I need… I need so many things, but keeping busy might just stop me from doing something dumb.”
That brought something else to mind.
“Uh… on the subject of that…”
He looked at me warily.
“What?”
“When we were looking for you, uh… we had to use your equipment, to try and track you, and we saw something.”
He glanced at Stitch then back to me.
“You snooped around my computer?”
“It was already on, and what we saw was onscreen. Jesus, we thought it was a fucking suicide note.”
He stood up, smoothing his shirt down. He wasn’t wearing his cut, and why was I only noticing that now?
His fingers shook slightly.
“Uh… so what if it was?”
Fucking hell. Stitch was frowning at him.
“It was?”
He looked at both of us in turn.
“I’m not saying it was… I’m just saying it was how I was feeling, and hell… I mean, I needed help and I got it, right? Even if right now I feel like I could claw my skin up, to try and stop the itching, I’m better, right? That’s what the doctors said.”
Suddenly I was pretty sure he was as far from being out of the woods as a person could be, and I didn’t know if we could save him from himself.
Forty-Two
Reacherwasedgy,andthat made me edgy. Something was going wrong in the club again, and he wasn’t talking to me. When I tried to get up to force him to do so, he cursed and pushed me back down again.
“Dammit, Reacher, stop babying me!”
He recoiled from me like I’d just slapped him.
“Is that what I do? Is that why everyone is accusing me of that, all of a sudden?”Oh god. I reached for his hand.
