Page 47 of Love Thy Brother
I voiced the question I hadn’t asked Rubi. “Why did he do it then?”
Cam blew out a harsh breath that rattled down the line. “Because Rubi never told him you and him had been fucking. So he wasn’t, uh, doing that with Orla either.”
“We haven’tbeen fucking. Piss off with that narrative.”
“Whatever. Point is, they had some kind of abstinence pact that neither of them knew the rules to, so they both fucked it up.”
“Wow. Okay.” I rubbed my eye. I’d forgotten to put goggles on earlier and metal dust was a bitch. “What about the rest of it?”
I wasn’t worried about Nash and Rubi’s beautiful friendship. They were both too nice to punish each other for long. Rubi, though. If he’d been his usual self, I’d have pried the details from him days ago. But for once in his life he didn’t seem to want a conversation, and that disturbed me more than anything.
“Hey.” Cam brought me back to the present. “Where you at? Can he hear you?”
I glanced at Rubi again. Nothing had changed. “He can’t hear me. He’d see me if he ever looked up, though.”
“Go somewhere else.”
“Like where? He’ll follow me if I leave the garage.”
“Does he follow you to the bog too?”
Not quite, but he’d notice if I went. If I was in there longer than he’d decided was socially acceptable for me to take a piss. “Just tell me, man. He’s busy enough.”
Cam took a breath and seemed to steel himself. “Embry thinks Rubi’s on the edge. Like, fucking seriously.”
Embry.I pictured the pretty chaplain, like I always did, but the insane, irrational jealousy wasn’t there today. Maybe I’d finally grown up. Or maybe imagining all the horrible reasons he’d come to that conclusion were too horrifying to leave room for much else. “Why does he think that?”
“Rubi told him he wants to die.”
Air left my lungs. “What?”
“Don’t make me say it again.” Cam’s voice cracked a little. “Just tell me you understand why it scares me so much. This ain’t no figure of speech. Not from him. He’d never say something like that and not mean it.”
Because of my mum. The woman who’d taught Rubi to cook and treat women like queens, before heartbreak and grief had killed her. “When did he say it?”
“The day you came to the compound. After you left. But I haven’t told Nash. I don’t think he could handle it, and he has enough going on right now.”
“Like what?”
“Nothing I want the details about.”
Something involving my sister then. But I didn’t feel the same urge to protect Orla that Cam always had. That pig-headed impulse to interfere in her life. I stayed out of her shit and she stayed out of mine. The fact that she looked after herself better than I ever could was beside the point. “What does Embry think?”
“You really want to know?”
I brushed aside his scepticism. I deserved it. “It’s his job, isn’t it? To know if a brother needs help?”
“It’s a tough job,” Cam said. “Especially with a herd of men who don’t fucking talk. But his face, man, when he told me. He believed it, and so do I.”
I believed him too, and combined with Rubi’s meltdown on my doorstep a few weeks ago, it scared the shit out of me. Rubi wasn’t a dude who hid his emotions. He laughed. He cried. He let people know that he cared. That helovedthem. But this... fuck. How long had he felt like this? What if he’d been drowning for months and told no one?
I can’t lose someone else like that.
My pulse, so often too fast, nosedived into the gutter, a slow tattoo that turned my blood to cement-laced sludge. I took another peek at Rubi. This time, he looked up in the same moment, but his gaze skated over me, absent, before it settled on his work again.
Cam spoke. “You know I never meant it to be like this, don’t you?”
I was lost in Rubi, vision blurring as I stared too hard, eyes burning with more than just the fact that I’d forgotten to blink.
