After he finished up, he took his overnight bag filled with a few changes of clothes and toiletries upstairs and settled into the guest room, noting the sheets were freshly changed and the layer of dust that had previously coated everything was gone.
He had the sense that Jaime was avoiding him after their tense exchange about the painting studio, which was made even more obvious during their trip into Monroe to pick up groceries. They only exchanged a few words on the drive there and back, and Jaime spent most of the time staring out the window, fingers twisted in the hem of his shirt.
It had been a long day, with even more of Jaime’s privacy and sense of normalcy stripped from him. It was no wonder that hewas reserved and quiet. So, Finn didn’t push him to speak, and they quietly worked around each other while they brought their groceries inside and Finn began preparing dinner.
“I hope you like Shepherd’s Pie,” he said, as Jaime came into the kitchen after Finn hollered that the food was ready.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had it. Not real Shepherd’s Pie, anyway. The frozen dinner version probably doesn’t count.”
Finn chuckled. “No, I don’t think it does. Where are your plates?”
As they fumbled around each other plating their meals and settling into the dining nook, the silence between them settled, more intimate than it was this afternoon.
“Are you ok?” Finn asked. Jaime was pushing his dinner around his plate more than he was really eating it.
Green eyes looked up. “It’s really good, I promise. I’m just tired. Sorry. I’m… not myself. Or I am, and this is just what I’m like now.”
Jaime said the last part with some bite, but Finn sensed it was directed inward. “This will pass, I promise. There’s always some other, newer, more tragic story for the media to move on to. It’s sad, but we’ve seen it enough in our line of work. Just get through these next few days, and things will quiet down.”
Finn knew he wasn’t addressing the larger threat of the still unidentified phone call and the Salt Creek pack’s potential involvement, but he didn’t want to burden Jaime more than he already was.
“It’s not that.” Jaime shook his head. “I can barely even talk about what I saw that night to the cops and to my therapist. How am I going to keep it together during the trial? Up on the witness stand, with a microphone in my face where every word I say will be thrown back at me, and everyone will be judging me and whether I am lying, or hiding something, or—” he took a great, heaving breath.
Finn reached across the table and grabbed Jaime’s hand, causing him to drop his fork. “Hey, it’s ok. Let’s take a couple slow, deep breaths, ok? There you go.”
Jaime’s anxiety attack hadn’t progressed as far as it had this morning with the reporters, but he could tell the boy was still shaken by it, a slight tremble in the hand cradled in Finn’s.
“I’m such a fuckingmess.” Jaime’s voice broke on the last word, and Finn’s heart broke a little along with it.
“You’re not a mess, Jaime.”
“Yeah? I can’t even talk about talking about it without falling apart! How pathetic is that? I’m not the one who fucking died. I’m not the one who had to suffer while some monster ripped me open and sprawled my insides all over the floor!”
Finn winced and inwardly recoiled at the wordmonster,withdrawing his hand at the harsh way Jaime spat it.
Not because he didn’t want to touch him, but because he knew Jaime wouldn’t want to be touched by him, if he knew what he was. Of course, Jackson Bishop was a monster for what he had done. For killing Vera, and for doing it in such a horrible, frightening, and painful way. But he wondered if Jaime would ever see a distinction between that act and the fact that Finn was a wolf, too, making him equally capable of inflicting that kind of damage with his bare hands.
Would Jaime call him a monster, too?
Finn wanted to show Jaime that he wasn’t alone; he wanted to tell Jaime about his own nightmares, the ones that still lingered years after their last mission had gone so horribly wrong. He wanted to tell Jaime that both he and Silas had battled their own mental health demons after being discharged, and about the six months of intensive therapy it took for them to be able to get a handle on their shifts and not hurt themselves or others when they were triggered.
Finn wanted to tell Jaime that strength lay in enduring it, but also in wanting to be better, in talking about it with others and taking small steps every day. He wanted to tell him that strength lay in those days when the setbacks seemed the greatest, and you still chose to get back up and take the same slow steps of progress all over again, anyway.
But that would lead to questions from Jaime that Finn wasn’t ready to answer, and answers that were dangerously close to telling him that the monster prowling his nightmares wasn’t so different from the one sitting at his kitchen table.
Jaime looked back down at his plate in the ensuing silence.
Say something. Anything!
But Finn was tongue tied, torn between sharing too much and not enough.
Jaime heaved a sigh. “I couldn’t help then, and I’m terrified I won’t be able to pull myself together enough to help now, by making people believe me.” Jaime held his hands out in a helpless gesture, and dropped them onto his lap.
“I believe you,” Finn finally said. Even if he couldn’t, or wouldn’t ever be able to show the beautiful, broken, healing man who smelled right the whole truth of who he was, he could at least give him that.
“I believe you, and they will too.”
Chapter 9
