Page 150 of Love Thy Brother
River:you feel lucky, boo?
Rubi:The second I get home :)
I couldn’t help the smile that turned my face inside out.Home. His house. My house. The glittery paving slab I walked up on in my Rubi-themed daze. I was starting to realise it didn’t matter.
He was my home. And nothing felt right without him.
River:I miss you x
The message didn’t deliver.
His phone died.
I knew that. Iknew it. But I couldn’t help the sinking feeling in my gut. The anxious thoughts that crept up on me as I made my way back to the chapel. What if the battery didn’t work? Or it failed them halfway home? The M1 was littered with smart motorways. The ones that killed people. What if—
“You want dinner?” Cam’s strong hand clamped down on my shoulder, anchoring me to the earth, though his voice sounded as far away as Rubi felt. “Don’t know what the fuck it’ll be yet, but there’s always enough.”
Instincts were a weird thing. I wanted to stay and I knew I should. But shaking my head was an automatic response I couldn’t seem to block. “No, thanks. I’m gonna go home.”
The fragile peace between us froze Cam in place, swallowing the argument I saw written all over his face. Maybe if Orla had still been in the room, she’d have spoken for him. If Rubi had been here, and he’d turned those hazel eyes on me and got around me that way. Even Saint and his weighted silence might’ve stopped me.
But it was just us, me and Cam, and we did what we always did.
We fucked it up and I left.
I rode out alone. Mostly. As the sun set, I was dimly aware of a brother tailing me, but I didn’t look to see who until I pulled up outside my empty house.
Folk parked a respectful distance away and tipped me a nod.
Old me would’ve told him to go fuck himself, but I wasn’t the same dude I’d been a few months ago.
I nodded back and went inside. Made that fucker a cup of tea and took it back out. “You’re gonna get bored out here. I’m taking a shower and going to bed.”
Folk accepted the tea and set it on the wall by his bike. “It’d be the same experience if you played naked Twister all night. I’m watching the house, not you.”
“Why?”
“Not my job to ask, but I’m assuming it’s in case all the closure from the last few days doesn’t hold.”
“You think it won’t?”
Folk regarded me with a gaze as old as time, though he was probably around Cam’s age. “I’m not on the council. What I think about anything isn’t important, and I don’t know much about what happened here with your garage. But if you’re asking me if anyone is going to come out swinging from what went down in Truro the other night, I’d have to say no.”
It was a fair answer. I accepted it with a wry grin and stepped away to head inside.
A hand on the door, I turned back to him. “You’re wrong, you know.”
Folk reached for his tea. “About what?”
“About what you think not being important. If you’re loyal, you matter. It’s how it worked at my dad’s table, and that isn’t going to change as long as Cam’s around.”
Folk’s gaze flickered to the horizon. “I’ve seen that. But it’s a hard lesson to learn when the world has shown you something different.”
I understood more than I wanted to. I left Folk alone and went indoors. My plan really was to take a shower and go to bed, but the second the door shut behind me, excess energy—excessemotion—spiked in my gut and I found myself pacing the living room.
Oscar had been here. I could tell by the rattle of the boiler, the banjo abandoned on the couch, and the water bottle on the coffee table.
For something to do, I hung the banjo on the whisky-barrel bracket fixed to the wall and dumped the bottle in the bin. I thought about calling him, to check in since the text I’d sent that morning that it was safe to come home, but logic told me if he wasn’t here with Aras, he was at work. At fuckingsea, and that made him as uncontactable as Rubi.
