I needed to quit being a baby. “I was, but he had to take a little vacation so I'm staying with a friend until he comes back," I explained to him vaguely, suddenly not in the mood to really share with him more than I needed to. What was the point? Why had I been fighting Will growing up and moving on with his life, so much?
Will knew even less about the Widows than I did. Growing up, it was as if he'd just cut our dad out of his memory and life. Existing without him, while I'd been the one stuck with the memories and the wishes.
"Huh. I have leave coming up in a couple of months, are you gonna stay there?"
Where the hell else would I go? "I'll be here."
The awkward silence that followed left me feeling weird. Since when had talking to Will been a strain? Was this what Sonny and I sounded like when we talked on the phone? No way. Speaking of Sonny... "Hey, umm..." I really didn't want to tell him. A part of me genuinely didn't think he'd care but that was the difference between us again. Will liked Sonny enough but then again, did he even like me now? I didn't want to answer that.
The point was, he deserved to know so that it wouldn't the same situation I found myself in with Sonny. "Dad had another kid." Shit. That wasn't exactly the way I wanted to blurt it out.
The disheartened, uninterested "Oh," confirmed that my brother didn't give a crap. “That's...cool."
Yeah, he didn't care. At all.
When he immediately started talking again, I knew I'd messed up. I'd pushed too far. He'd done the same thing when we were younger and I thought he wanted to talk about Mom. Will would bring up something else or suddenly remember that he needed to do something. "I need to go, Ris, but I promise I’ll call or email you as soon as I know when I’m going back to the States, and we’ll figure it out, all right?” he mumbled out the sentence so quickly it made him sound desperate.
Maybe I wasn't the only chicken in the family. “Deal.Love you.”
“Love you too. Be safe and we’ll talk soon,” Will said right before disconnecting the line.
I sighed and pocketed my phone, immediately sensing Dex’s hulking presence behind me for the first time. His lips were a hard slash, eyes deceptively distant on me before he spoke. “Your brother?"
"Yeah."
There was so much about our phone conversation that bothered me. It wasn't that I wanted or needed to have a long conversation with my brother, but it'd been so long since the last time we'd spoken, getting rushed through a five minute conversationdidn’t seem fair.
Dex narrowed his eyes. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
He rolled his eyes. "What is it? Looks like somebody just told you Santa wasn’t real."
Oh lord. The man who got pissed off about his property taxes going up wanted to make a statement by comparing us? Please. I snorted. "Nothing," I insisted.
"Somethin's botherin' you. Tell me."
Dex wasn't going to drop it so I groaned. "I haven't talked to him in months. I've emailed him at least a dozen times and he never responds." I rubbed a hand over my forehead. "I mean, I know he's not a kid. He's a grown man, he doesn't need me anymore. I guess I'm just being a girl and getting butt-hurt that he has a life without me."
His nose wrinkled but he didn't comment on my rant.
I took in a deep breath and shrugged, forcing a smile onto my face. "Anyway, let me know when you want to leave, okay?"
~ * ~ *
If I thought for a second that I'd have the ability to think about something other than my conversations with my brothers and whatever was going on with Dex, I'd have been terribly wrong.
I'd be in the middle of logging the number of hour sessions that one of the artists had done for the week and suddenly, I'd think of the action hero Dex had in his spare bedroom. Or I'd be sitting in the front, uploading pictures onto the shop's website when I'd hear Blake on the phone with hissonand I'd start imagining what the little boy in Colorado looked like.
My whole day went like that after the two hours I'd spent in the pool andtheaerobics class at the YMCA I took.
Dex, Dex, Sonny, Dex, Will, Brother, Dex, Dex.
And then some more Dex.
My gut told me that I was insane. That constantly thinking about him wasn't normal. Then again, what was normal about Dex?
Nothing.
