I slam the door behind me without caring about my neighbors.
It hurts. My chest feels knotted, and my stomach is churning, and every inch of me feels hot.
Maybe I shouldn’t have left him like that. He’s fragile right now, even if he’s acting like a dick. But everything he was saying brought back too many fucked-up memories and I need a little space to process it.
In the wake of everything that’s happened, I’ve only been dealing with the soft, broken side of Tadhg. I’d let myself forget about the angry version of him, but apparently it’s back.
An hour later,the adrenaline has left my system. I’m tired in the wake of it, but I have a cocktail in front of me and Scott is smiling warmly at me across the small high-top table.
Of course we couldn’t go to The Feral Possum, because who knows if he’s there now. Instead, we’re in some bougie wine bar in Mission Flats that is a little too pretentious for my taste, but at least I know there’s no chance I’ll run into anyone with a snake tattoo on their neck for the next couple of hours.
“Are you okay, Micah? Have you been working too much?”
He raises a dark eyebrow at me while he gives me an evaluating look. Scott is a sweetheart, and I do miss him when he’s not around, even if I have no interest in anything more than a friends-with-benefits situation.
Not to mention, he’s 6’1” and has that thick, ex-athlete body type that I’m hopelessly thirsty for. Ortho nurses, man. I can’t help myself. They’re all so square-jawed and deliciously brawny, who wouldn’t want to put them on their knees for you?
“I’m fine,” I say with a sigh, rubbing a hand over my face. “I just… Did I ever tell you I used to have a stepbrother?”
Scott cocks his head, which I take as a no. I jump in and give him an extremely abridged version of the story, including our childhood trauma and the fight we had in the apartment just now, but leaving out anything to do with Tadhg’s criminal affiliations or the fact that he came to me with a fucking gunshot wound.
I give him a vague explanation about Tadhg being on sabbatical from work and needing a place to crash temporarily, which Scott politely accepts without digging deeper. The fact that he was a giant asshole tonight is the real point of my story, anyway.
“Wow,” he says when I finish. “That’s definitely an extreme reaction. It kind of seems like he was jealous. Is he really protective of you or something? Or possessive?”
The words hit me at a weird angle. I hadn’t really looked at it that way. I just assumed Tadhg was channeling his father and using me as a dumping ground for all that irrational rage and vitriol.
“I don’t think so. I mean, we literally hadn’t seen each other since we were kids. He’s just an angry person. Like I said, his dad was such a dick, and who knows what he’s had to put up with since I left.”
I fall silent for a second, taking a sip of my drink as an old, buried memory floats to the surface.
“You know how I’m dyslexic?”
Scott smirks. “Yes, I remember finding some very creative, practical ways to study anatomy together in school, thank you.”
I snort, but brush past the memory. “Well, it got a lot better once my mom was sober and I was in a decent school and had the support, et cetera. But when we were still in Oklahoma with Patrick and Tadhg, it was bad. I hated reading and it made mesuper anxious, but I loved books. Especially because watching TV or doing anything that made a lot of noise was risky because you never knew what would set Pat off.”
Scott gives me a sympathetic look that peeves me, but I ignore it and power through.
“So, Tadhg used to read to me a lot when we were kids. We’d squirrel ourselves away somewhere, even in a closet or something with a flashlight if Patrick was on a rampage, and he’d read to me in a quiet voice.Narnia,Lord of the Rings, shit like that. I actually don’t know where the books came from. Looking back, I think he might have stolen them from school for me.”
The thought makes me almost laugh, but the sadness washing over the whole thing makes me swallow it.
“Well, one day Patrick caught us. And it was bad. He was shit-faced and pissed about something else, he stumbled on us reading together under a blanket. Ripped the book out of Tadhg’s hand and tore it in half. Started yelling, called us little f-slurs, all that horrible shit.”
I keep my voice down so no one overhears me and gets offended, because even second-hand, it’s an unpleasant collection of words. I can already feel myself shutting down emotionally, becoming detached the way you have to when you want to recount a story like this.
“Anyway. Just like all the other times Pat was pissed, Tadhg took the heat for me, because you’re right, he was protective. He was a little older and a lot bigger, and it was his dad, so I think he felt like he owed it to me or something. So, he says it’s all his fault and Patrick ends up dragging him off to do fuck knows what. Awful shit, I’m sure. Like an hour later, Tadhg comes back to our room. He’s covered in bruises and looks like he’s been crying, but he isn’t crying. His face is like… stone. Totally blank. And Patrick stands in the doorway and watches while Tadhggoes through the room, pulling out every book from their hiding places and ripping them all to shreds in front of me.”
I can practically see it. It was a million years ago, but now that I’m thinking about it, it feels so fresh. Maybe because the anger that Tadhg held then is so identical to the anger I saw in him today.
“It was awful. I was crying, so he starts yelling at me, saying all the same shit his dad says to him.‘F’this and‘F’that. He was so angry. It was just… rage. We were always close, and having him turn on me like that, even though I understood it was because Patrick was making him do it; that hurt so much more than anything Patrick ever did to me. That night I was so scared I couldn’t sleep, and Tadhg crawled into bed with me and apologized a million times. But it was never the same after that.”
Shrugging, I look at Scott for the first time since I started telling the story, and he has a weird expression on his face.
“What?”
He frowns but doesn’t answer for a long time.
