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Luke was his boyfriend. His lover. Possibly his first. A man he cared about, maybe even loved. He had to hide those feelings back then, but also after Luke’s death.
Fuck me. How could I be so stupid?
Chapter twenty-eight
“Have you heard from him?” Brady asks.
I shake my head. “I don’t expect to. Did he tell you how long he needed?”
Brady shrugs and looks around the apartment. “Not really, a few days was all he said.” Then he looks at me, forcing me to meet his stare. “Davey has never once, not once, in the dozen-plus years we’ve worked together, asked me for a day off. He’s never asked me for anything. I figured this was pretty big.”
“It is.” I look away from him and move to the couch.
“Are you okay?”
“Meh,” I say.
“Are you sure you want to stay here alone?”
“I don’t know.” I run my fingers through my hair and fall back onto the couch. I can hear Brady trying to search for alcohol without me realizing he’s searching for alcohol.
“There isn’t any.”
“Any what?”
I laugh. “There is no alcohol in this apartment. Davey has actually been sober longer than I have now. He quit several weeks ago.”
Brady raises his eyebrows at that.
“Are you going to come marching over here to see if I’m okay every time Davey and I have a fight?”
“At least there doesn’t seem to be bloodshed this time,” he laughs.
Not unless you count my shattered heart, I think. This is way worse than the fisticuffs of before.
“Do you know why he left?”
I nod. “I have an inkling. But I don’t know what’s going on in his head at the moment. It’s like some switch flipped and he shut down… and then left.”
Brady nods and looks at me, his eyes full of sympathy. “Yes,” he says.
“What?”
“Yes, I am going to check on you.”
I laugh. “Alrighty then.”
He walks over and plops into the chair next to the couch.
“You don’t trust me? Think I’m always on the verge of taking a drink?”
“No, that’s not it at all. I’m going to check on you because I can. Because I love you and like it or not, I really like the fact that you are just across town. So, yes, I am going to check on you whenever you and Davey have a fight.”
That statement implies there is a future me and Davey to even have fights. God, I hope that is true. “I know you don’t exactly approve of us together—”
“Carter, you’re my baby brother. No one is ever going to be good enough for you, not even one of my closest friends.”
I smile. I’m grateful, so very grateful, that he is the one who busted my lip open when we were kids all those decades ago.
