Mateo:will do... after you tell me how your appointment goes
Embry:You know, you could easily sleep between now and then.
He left me on read, leaving me to interpret his response asno fucking chance.
I sighed. Sometimes I thought about what it would be like if our lives were flipped. If he was the one who’d bled out in the dirt and I’d had to watch him recover so slowly, it was worse than fucking death. Pictured it and wound myself so tight I nearly puked. I didn’t have time for that today, but the threat of it was enough to drive me to my feet and out of my lonely room.
Saint was waiting by Alexei’s fancy car.
“We’re taking the yuppie wagon?” The one I’d bled out in while Mateo had ragged it all the way to the hospital.
Saint shrugged and opened the passenger door.
Unconvinced, I planted my boots. “Why can’t we ride? You think I’m gonna sack you off on the way?” Saint was usually ten steps ahead of everyone except Alexei, but on two wheels, on the open road, no one could catch me, not even him. “Brother, I’m not a brat.”
Saint took a moment. Used to his delayed speech and better at interpreting his tells these days, I waited instead of assuming he had nothing to say. “You might be tired,” he said eventually. “After.”
“After what? They’re not sticking a camera down my throat again.”
Saint flinched.
On my behalf or his, I couldn’t tell, but I appreciated the second-hand horror. That shit wasthe worst. “Seriously. They’ll just ask me what I’m eating and tell me to drink more water.”
He cocked a brow. “How do you know? You’ve never been to your outpatient appointments.”
“Educated guess.”
“You don’t have a medical education.”
“You’re not a doctor either.”
It was the longest verbal rally I’d had with Saint in months. If it had been on literally any other subject, I’d have appreciated the hell out of it.
As it was, for the first time ever, I wanted him to shut the fuck up.
I got in the car. He closed the door like a fucking parent and slid behind the wheel. He looked strange against the sleek interior of the Jaguar SUV. We both did. “You think we’ll get pulled in this?”
Saint pressed the button to start the engine and the car purred to life. “Maybe, but we didn’t steal it, so what they gonna do?”
“Ask who it belongs to?”
“Teddy Jones. Our accountant.”
Right. Sometimes I forgot Alexei was technically dead.
Saint fell silent, turning the AC on low and setting the radio to the soft rock station he preferred to the thrashing metal we overdosed on in the clubhouse bar.
Mateo liked moody dubstep. I didn’t really give a shit. Anything that made my brothers happy, and for Saint, today that was apparently Chris Isaak, though he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel too fast to keep the maudlin beat of the song.
Saint didn’t have many obvious tells. But I knew this one. “Still missing your smokes?”
“Yeah.” He took a moment to elaborate. “I don’t know why, though. I mean... why now? The smell makes me wanna puke, but I can’t stop thinking about that sweet burn in my chest.”
It was a lot for Saint to say at once. And a lot to reveal. Any other brother, I might’ve marked it with a fraternal arm rub, but not this brother. His issues with touch weren’t sexual like mine, but they were as deep-rooted and tragic. “Maybe now the burnonyour chest has healed, your life is more familiar than it was when you were recovering.”
“Repeating yourself, father?”
“Hmm?”
