Page 53 of Love Thy Brother
Headlights appeared in the distance. I didn’t pay them much attention, too focused on the warmth behind me. The footsteps hurrying to catch me up.
Rubi called my name. Once.
Twice.
Then louder. “Riv!”
The urgency in his deep voice turned me around. I was a fast walker—I’d put some distance between us while he’d stayed in place.
He was running now, his long legs eating up the ground, his wide eyes fixed on the road. On the approaching vehicle that sounded too close for the specs of light I’d seen on the horizon.
I knew the timbre of a speeding engine as well as I knew my own hog, and it was never a sound that alarmed me. But Rubi’s face, man. I’d seen his features splinter with terror before. Seen him charge down a disaster he couldn’t derail.
Only this time, it wasn’t my dad’s name on his lips, it was mine.
“Riv! The car. Get out of the fucking way.”
I wasn’t in the way. I couldn’t be. Rubi’s kiss had routed my brain. My entire fucking being. But I wasn’t dissociated enough from reality to be goddamn jay-walking.
The engine grew louder.
I ripped my gaze from Rubi and whipped back to face it. A black car with mismatched lights, like my boots. A rough diesel engine that needed some tender loving care to make her purr right.
It was twenty feet away.
Ten.
Five.
It was mounting the pavement, and it wasn’t going to stop.
11
RUBI
The smack of our bodies was louder than the tatty Vectra. The collision of limbs. Of the flesh and bone we’d been talking about.
Falling was silent. A rush of air that didn’t even last the time it took me to register that the speeding car hadn’t hit me, but I had no idea if it had hit River.
Too late.Fuck.Fuck.Everything about us was always too late. And like every-fucking-thing else, gravity tore us apart. We fell like cannonballs, and my last thought before I hit the water was this:Karma.A year ago, I let go when I should’ve held on. Now it didn’t matter how hard I clung to him, he was ripped from my arms anyway.
I smashed into the black icy water. Into the rough-as-fuck sea, concrete waves slamming into my barely healed ribs, the blind fury of the ocean instantly a cloak of suffocating death.
Mother of Dragons, this is not how I want to die.
Or was it? My body fought the powerful surge of nature, thrashing against the current. Against the endless dark of the freezing water. But as it dawned on me that I had no idea which way was up—if I was swimming or kicking my way to my own damn grave—a sudden, comforting haze of not giving a fuck washed over me.
Drowned me.
I stopped flailing. Stopped fighting the inevitable and gave in to the call of the void. For a second, I floated in glacial nothingness and it was bliss. It waspeace. Then I remembered River, that he was in the water too, and fresh panic took hold.
Lungs burning, I punched the water and kicked my legs, fighting the paralysing cold in my muscles, seeking air or sand or the fucking rain. Anything to guide me back to him.
What if he’s already gone?
What if all you did was kill him a different way?
As the thought took hold, a gap in the dark sparked in my vision—the north star—and I kickedharder,as if I could boot away the hopelessness waiting in the wings. KO that fucker with my questionable stroke style.
