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He. Is. A. Brother.
“Youare, however, slacking on your training,” he continues, his fingers drumming an insanely distracting beat against my ribs.
“I’ve been studying!” I protest feebly.
“Uh-huh.” He looks down at me knowingly.
Ihavebeen studying. But I’ve also found time to do other things, as Lincoln well knows. Including celebrating my brother’s birthday just a few days ago. Not to mention spending another evening over at Micah, Mason, and Cabe’s place for dinner.
“I have been!” I insist again.
“Then I’m sure that test was a piece of cake and you’re in no need of the distraction I was planning to offer you,” he teases, a faint smirk pulling back the corners of his mouth.
I smack him as I simultaneously move out from underneath his arm and stop his forward momentum. Unfortunately, the quick movement makes my head spin once more, reminding me of my need for food.
“Espy? Are you okay?” Lincoln snaps out of his playful mood and jumps immediately into threat-assessment mode. It would be sexy if it weren’t so sweet. Can it be both?No, not sexy.I shake my head to try to dislodge the inappropriate thought.
“I could use some lunch,” I admit, grimacing as my stomach growls loudly right on cue.
“Right.” He nods, reaching out to spin me around and continue on our path out of the building. “Come on, short stack—let’s get you fed.”
* * *
“This is pretty good!”I manage to get out around the giant bite of burrito I’m currently chowing down on.
Lincoln decided to take me out to a little Mexican restaurant a few blocks off campus, and it’s more than hitting the spot. The cafeteria food is good, but it gets repetitive after a while, and while Cabe has proven to be an excellent cook, his dishes are a bit more refined than the pile of cheese and carbs I have in front of me now.
“I come here with my unit sometimes. It’s a good way to get a lot of calories as quickly and cheaply as possible,” Lincoln shares, eating a bite of his much healthier-looking spinach enchiladas. “I wasn’t sure you’d be into it though. I tried bringing Leo once, and I got a ten-minute lecture on ‘proper Mexican food.’” He shudders comically.
“I mean, American Mexican food is in a category all of its own. Not really fair to compare them,” I laugh. “My mother was an amazing cook. She had this green pozole recipe she swore was handed down for generations in her family, and sometimes we’d come back from school and she’d just be randomly making it. She never let us request it, and we could never predict when it would make an appearance. She’d tell us it was magic and she’d find herself buying the ingredients without having planned to, somehow just knowing when Em and I needed it most.” I trail off for a moment, lost in my memories of the tangy, acidic smell of the green soup base. “I wonder if there’s a place to get hominy around here. She taught me the recipe when I was only six or seven, but I haven’t made it in years.”
Out of nowhere I feel tears welling up, and I try to discreetly wipe them away while feigning needing a sip of water. Lincoln neither comments on my sudden emotion nor does he change the subject.
“Tell me more about her?” he prompts, gazing at me with soft but unpitying eyes.
So I do.
I don’t actually have that many solid memories of my mom since she passed away when I was ten, but once I get talking, I find it’s hard to stop. My burrito lays abandoned on my plate as I recount how she used to sing to us all the time, and how those songs often pop into my head when my mind wanders. I talk about being confused when I was really little that I spoke two different languages, and how my mom was often the only one who understood me in my baby chatter, switching back and forth between English and Spanish. I talk about visiting her family in Mexico one summer, and how I ate so many avocados Leo convinced me my skin was going to turn thick, green, and bumpy, just like the fruit. It took me years to eat avocados again after that, despite all my mom’s reassurances that my skin would stay just the same as hers, only a little lighter.
The words pour out of me, but instead of feeling empty I feel a certain energy invading my body. I don’t think I truly realized until this moment how much I’d been blocking out from my earliest years. Things went so wrong after we lost her, and I made it a point not to dwell on the “what could have beens”. Recently I’ve been finding it harder and harder to keep those rigid mental boundaries in place—the ones that have steadfastly protected me over the past two years. Dr. Morgan has started poking at my feelings for my brother lately, and how it felt when he left for college and essentially abandoned me to my father. That line of thinking feels like an emotional nuclear bomb—one I have no interest in detonating.
“Espy?”
I blink and refocus on the man in front of me. I must have trailed off at some point while reminiscing.
“Sorry,” I titter, a bit embarrassed to have lost the plot.
I feel suddenly vulnerable, sitting here with Lincoln, talking about my mom. It feels like the barrier I erected between my past and my present is eroding, and the longer I sit here with him in this Mexican restaurant, the more likely it is that the dam will burst and my trauma will come pouring out. He’d at least be able to run away from that shit, but I know with certainty that I’d be left to drown.
“Didn’t you say something earlier about having a distraction for me?” I ask, eager to navigate back to solid ground. “Besides feeding me, that is.”
Lincoln looks at me searchingly for a moment, but whatever he finds he wisely decides to let lie. “I did.” He nods, taking a long sip of water. “But honestly, you might not be up for it now.”
I bristle.Not up for it?Did I truly let my mask slip too far, and now he’s seen the scared, damaged girl I’ve been trying so hard to hide he thinks I’m too delicate to do anything more than hide in my brother’s dorm room? I take all the anger I was feeling about my own vulnerability and redirect it straight at him.
“I’m up for anything,” I declare, laying down the metaphorical gauntlet with narrowed eyes.
“Yeah?” he asks, raising a single eyebrow as he takes in the challenge in my voice.
