“Just talk to me, Liam, please.”
The door closes behind me and I whisper, “I can’t.”
I punch the bar of the stairwell door, and it swings open. There’s no way I can politely wait for an elevator. I stop on a landing halfway down. I can’t see anymore, my eyes are burning. I wipe my nose on my cuff like a kid. I pace, wiping tears away, and desperately attempt to hold in a sob.
Maybe this is for the best. Maybe this is exactly right. Maybe it will be a scent match and she’ll be perfect for him. A perfect match, blonde and bubbly. She could bake him all the cookies he could ever want. Give him a real Christmas with lights on the house and breakfast in bed. Whatever real people do who weren’t raised by a trailer trash pack.
I put my back against the wall and try to take some steady breaths. Once the desire to puke passes, I take the stairs all the wayto the basement garage. I pass Beckett’s SUV. He’s parked crooked, which is unlike him.
Shit. I didn’t even ask him about the concussion. I pull open my driver’s side door, fall into the seat, and stall out. What the fuck are we going to do?
Chapter nine
LIAM
IcircletheletterB on my keyboard with my fingertip. I shouldn’t have let him drive away last night. He was hurt.
The fight had been ugly. It’s hockey, which is little more than a blood sport on ice. Pierce and I watch every game. The fights are fun. They are satisfying on a primal level. It’s like putting a pacifier in all your alpha instincts.
Except when Beckett is part of the fight.
I think Pierce gets off on it. Watching his teddy bear packmate utterly destroy a wall of alphas coming at him is more than satisfying for Pierce, bordering on sexual.
But I can’t. I just can’t watch someone I love get hurt. Not again.
I give the B key an affectionate tap or two and push away from my desk. I hear Pierce’s whistle from down the hall. A floorboard squeaks as I move from my office into the living room, heading for the kitchen. This is an older house, built before the conceptof “open floor plan” and “great rooms” really caught on. Beckett hated it. Pierce argued it was closer to the rink, so it made more sense than the open, airy new-build in the gated community where a bunch of other players had homes.
An easy commute wasn’t the real reason he pushed for this house so hard. There weren’t enough places to hide in an open floor plan house.
Yet another thing we’ve been keeping from Beckett. Not that we’re keeping our shitty childhood and the near-constant physical and emotional abuse from him. Not really. But it’s fucking trauma. Sometimes working through it is worse. It’s not like you can fix watching your best friends get beaten bloody by parents more interested in drugs than their kids by reading a book and queuing up a self-help podcast.
It’s fine, though, because Pierce probably didn’t know that was the reason either. But I could always see it in him. Since the day we met when we were like three, Pierce had always needed an exit at best, or a place to hide at worst.
His parents were drug dealers.
Mine weren’t much better, but they didn’t care enough to beat me.
But Reed? His house had been an oasis right up until his mother died.
And now we live in a house where it’s easy to hide and keep secrets.
I turn into the kitchen. Pierce has his head in the fridge. I check Beckett’s location on my phone. He’s still at the hotel.
“Let’s get it over with,” Pierce says, not bothering to pull himself out of the fridge.
I don’t respond. There’s no point in having this argument again.
Pierce resurfaces with a carrot and a slice of American cheese. He folds the slice in half, and then in half again, and again, until it’s astack of tiny squares. He’ll pull off one square at a time. That was a Reed thing. His asshole dad couldn’t be bothered to unwrap the cheese when making him sandwiches for school. Which, frankly, was better than Pierce’s pack, who couldn’t even be bothered to buy food in the first place.
It was almost ten years ago, and Reed is still a part of our lives. And we can never speak his name.
“You’re not going to bitch me out today?” Pierce peels off two tiny slices of cheese and pops them into his mouth.
I lean against the wall, hands behind my back. Pierce is tall, not taller than Beckett, but his attitude gives him an extra foot in height. He’s wearing his hair super short these days, making him look polished rather than the scruffiness that was his main personality trait when we were younger. He looks like he should be wearing suits, not ratty gym clothes.
“Ah, silent treatment. You know how I hate that.” He takes a bite of his carrot. He hates baby carrots, mostly because I think regular carrots afford him opportunities to make dick jokes.
The gym is closed on Thursday afternoons. We’ll open back up after dinner, but Thursdays are our old pro night. We don’t usually do any personal training. We just let the muscle heads and muscle mommies do their thing. It’s not that they don’t like beginners or lightweights, but having a night where they can geek out without scaring the normies has been popular. And profitable.
