Page 51 of Love Thy Brother
He chuckled, low and rich. “I’m not leaving without you.”
So he could walk me home and steer me into my house, like he had every night since he’d been here. But as fun as that was—and it wasn’t—I was over it. I couldn’t spend another night pacing my living room while he watched me from who the fuck knew where. “Just wait for me, yeah? I’m gonna try and be nice for more than ten seconds at a time.”
I made myself walk away before he answered, but when the end of the day came, he was where he always was, leaning on the wall by the back door, one boot kicked up behind him. The only thing different was the curiosity that replaced his usual justified apprehension.
“You have Cam’s keys?”
He cocked a brow. “Stashed them up my arse, mate. Why?”
“Because...” I held the back door while he sidled through it. Let him hover while I locked it, then pointed to the coastal road. Half a mile along, we could turn inland and walk to the ugly retail park. “I need to shop. Let’s roll.”
Whatever he’d expected of me, a trip to the supermarket clearly wasn’t it. Nor was a hike along the quietest part of the sea road, but he followed me anyway, catching me up by the corner shop—the last business before Porth Luck became more scenic than civilised. “Nothing you want in there?”
Yes.“Not today. Oscar’s coming home tomorrow so I need to put food in the fridge.”
“That’s nice of you.”
I shot Rubi a sideways glance. “He’s a nice man. Like Embry, right?”
“You don’t like Embry.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Your choice, bro.”
“I’m not your brother.”
Rubi stopped beneath a broken streetlight, a spooky half glow cast down on his face, the night cold enough for his breath to mist the air. “If you’re talking flesh and bone, you know I’ve never seen you like that.”
“No?” I trailed to a halt too and spun to face him. “Not even when we were kids?”
Hurt that had nothing to do with me flared, old and weary, in Rubi’s gaze. “You were Cam’s brother, not mine.”
Right. Because he’d had a brother of his own, dark-haired and skinny. Eyes like his name. LarkSapphireMatherson. “I thought that’s why you never hit on me. Because you had some weird brotherly affection you couldn’t think past.”
Humour warmed Rubi’s face again. “I did hit on you. All the time. Just never outside of my wild imagination.”
“When did it start?”
“Hitting on you in my head?” Rubi closed the distance between us too fast for me to evade. He brought us together, one hand on my hip, the other gripping my chin. “Are you asking me when I realised you were the most beautiful boy I’d ever seen?”
No. Yes. Whatever the answer was, I didn’t know it. With Rubi’s hand wrapped around my jaw, I didn’t know much of anything. I stopped caring that his overwhelming presence in my day-to-day life was temporary. That I had no idea where he lay his head at night.
I stopped caring that every seizure-inducing push and pull we shared had never brought anything but heartache and pain.
I want him. And I was tired of sayingno, to myself as much as to him.
Rubi pressed our foreheads together, a rumbling groan vibrating from his strong chest. “I can’t breathe around you, but when we’re apart, I drown, Riv. Cos I’m fucking empty inside without you.”
I wanted to tell him I knew how that felt. That the years I’d been gone from the club had hurt me more than anything, even losing my parents, the pillars of our entire lives, to such a horror show of tragedy. But he’d lost people too.
Lark.
Both his parents.
My ma, who’d raised him better than his ever tried. And he hadn’t run away. He’d stayed and propped up his best friends—his brothers—despite knowing, like I did, that he could lose them all too.
A shiver passed through me, cold and vicious. Like the world would be without him in it.
