Page 62 of Love Thy Brother
Rubi swished the rum left in his mug, then set it down. “It’s a long story, and to make sense of it, I have to tell you almost everything. Even shit you don’t usually want to hear.”
“Go on then.”
“All right.” He took a breath, then filled me in. Everything from teenage pregnancy to life on the run from a Spanish drug lord. Despite everything he left out, it was still a lot.Jesus.“What happened to the evil grandfather?”
Rubi’s left eye flickered. When I’d been as immersed in club life as he still was, I’d called it the death twitch. A tell that someone, deserved or not, had shuffled off their mortal coil at the hand of a Rebel King.
I processed that. Given what I’d heard, it didn’t bother me. Unless it was Rubi who’d swung the sword. He wasn’t built for murder any more than I was. “Who did it?”
At that, Rubi smiled, which eased the fear in my gut. “The good father. Pretty sure he was at the front of a long queue, but he got there first.”
“True love, eh?”
Rubi reached for his mug again. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Never thought I’d see anyone love someone more than Cam and Saint, but these last few years have been crazy on the romance front.”
He was the only man who could utter a sentence like that in a conversation about deadly gang wars. I wondered if he knew it was one of many fucking reasons why he was my favourite human.
Course he doesn’t. You’ve never told him.
I got up and meandered to the oven, peering through the glass. The pasta wasn’t done, but staring at it gave me a moment to compose myself and think of another horrific question to ask. “Were you there when it happened?”
Rubi shifted on his stool, uncapped the rum bottle, and topped us up. “I was nowhere near any of it. Spent a month with Liliana and her mum in a safehouse. Guarded them until it was clear to come home.”
“Why you?”
“Hmm?”
I leaned against the oven door, absorbing the warmth. “How come you got picked to play babysitter?”
“I wanted to do it. We had to fight for Mats. He’s our brother and we love him, and I knew protecting his family was the best way I could do that.”
Knowing he’d been somewhere else when the worst of it had gone down should’ve calmed me, but it didn’t. Agitation ripped through with a violent shiver I couldn’t hide, and it drew Rubi from his stool.
He crossed the narrow gulf between the breakfast bar and the oven. He cupped my jaw with both hands—they were warm now—and made me look at him. “What’s wrong?”
I wrapped my hands around his wrists and gave him the truth. “It bothers me that you were gone for a month and I didn’t know.”
“I was in Bristol. If you’d called, I’d have told you.”
“I never call, though, do I?”
“That’s not true. You kept me company on a haulage run just before the shit with Liliana went down. I distinctly remember getting my ear chewed off in a service station car park.”
It took me a minute to recall what he meant. A five-minute phone conversation where I’d repeatedly told him to go fuck himself, throwing his love and concern for me back in his face. “I was drunk and hungry. I’m nicer when a bender goes a different way.”
Rubi let his hands fall, his wrists slipping from my loose grip. I waited for the lecture, but it didn’t come. He returned to the breakfast bar, necked his rum, and left the room.
When he didn’t come back, I took the dinner from the oven and dumped it on the counter. It looked good, tomatoes and all, and smelled even better, but I wasn’t hungry. Without Rubi, there was no chance of me eating it.
Chill. He only went upstairs. But his absence felt like a hole in my lung. Every breath I took went nowhere and cold sweat threatened the warmth he’d left behind.
I turned off the oven and rescued my phone from where I’d dumped it on the counter. It was waterlogged and useless, but I tried it anyway, jamming the button to turn it on.
Nothing happened. It felt symbolic in a way it wouldn’t have if Rubi had been beside me, and a sudden realisation swept over me.You need him to feel human.Just like I needed Oscar. Like I needed synthetichelpwhen neither of them was around.
My veins began to itch. The shop on the corner called to me. There was no beer in the house. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to slip out for a four pack and come home with a brain too slow to hurt me. Sedated. Euphoric.
Sad.
