Twolongyears, each day a lesson Sid hadn’t signed up to learn. In the darkest depths of his mind, blackness reared its ugly head. Depression? Or just a bad fucking mood? They’d warned him about both, but with the last of the afternoon sun beating down on his neck, it was hard to tell.
“Sid?”
A sigh bubbled up Sid’s throat. He knew that voice. It was one of the best but always meant trouble if he could coin sisterly concern as something negative and get away with it.
He pushed off the wall and turned slowly to face the human he’d shared a womb with twenty-eight years ago. “What are you doing here? More to the point,howare you here? The grounds are closed.”
Anna Harrison smirked. “I know the gatekeeper.”
“Banging him, more like,” Sid retorted. “You think I don’t know you were here on Friday?”
“So what if I was? I canbangwho I like.”
“Nice.”
“I thought so too. Not that I need your opinion.”
“Why are you here then?”
“Can’t a sister check up on her big brother?”
Sid bent to retrieve the spade, favouring his stronger right leg. “Less of the big. You’re the oldest, remember?”
“I’m also a foot shorter than you becausesomeoneate all the food before they were even born—whoa.” Anna caught Sid as his balance deserted him, holding him upright with a strength that belied her slender frame. “Why didn’t you just ask me to pick it up?”
“I didn’t need you to pick it up.” Sid recovered and dangled the spade from his tired fingers. “You’re the one manhandling me for no fucking reason.”
“You want me to let you fall?”
“I wasn’t going to fall.”
Without warning, Anna stepped back.
Sid wavered, catching himself on the drystone wall with a split second to spare. “Dick.”
“You wish.”
“Is that an innuendo? Because if it is, it’s freaky as hell.”
Anna grinned. “I know, right? But, no, I’m not throwing penis innuendos at my brother. My point is you wish I was a dick instead of me asking you a perfectly valid question. Here’s another one for you: why are you still so difficult about this?”
“I’m not—” Sid stopped. He could bicker with Anna all night long and nothing would change. She was usually right, and he was usually wrong. “Whatever. Why are you actually here if you’re not tapping Mitch from security?”
“Do I need to think up a reason, or is checking up on you okay?”
“I don’t need you to check up on me.”
“Okay, then we’ll go with a fictitious invitation to dinner next week.”
“You could’ve texted me that.”
“And wait a week for you to read it? No thanks. I’m impatient.”
Sid couldn’t argue with that either. Anna had always been the storm to his lazy Sunday sunshine, though these days, she was a hurricane and he was the muddy puddle left behind.
Puddles aren’t bad. You built a whole garden out of them once.
Edible pond plants.
