He just stabbed his food, though.
I swear, getting him to have a decent conversation was like pulling teeth from a goddamn pitbull.
“Brutus.”
“No,” he said in a curt voice when his gaze whipped back up. “I don’t know what’s happening right now, but no. I’m hungry, and then I need to do another patrol, and then I have to try and sleep in this godforsaken bed. So, right now? No.”
And then, he went back to eating.
I just watched him for a while. Usually I loved the one-sided conversations he and I had. No one ever lets me talk the way he lets me talk. I could fire off about anything, and it never phased him. I could tell him anything on my mind, even the wildest shit, and he’d just shrug it off like it was nothing. Like the other day, I told him about the first prank I ever pulled on my parents. I stretched tape over their doorframe so that when they got up in the morning to head to get coffee, they’d run right into it.
Had Dad cussing at me for fucking days over it.
Every once in a while, I could even get him to chuckle with some of my stories. Like the time I told him about the senior prank I helped my senior class in high school pull off. The principal’s kid was in our graduating class, and one day she snuck the keys to her father’s classic vehicle. We were justsupposed to take it out on a joyride with the rest of the class so that we could take pictures and cover his office with them. But what we ended up doing was covering the entire damn thing in aluminum foil for him to find and unwrap the next morning.
That was the first time I ever heard Brutus’s laugh. That big, bombastic, brutal laugh. It barked out of his throat with a raspiness that rushed against my ears not like sandpaper, but like tires on gravel. I made it my mission to get him to laugh some. To get that stern, brutal face of his to light up every once in a while.
It was hard, though.
And I had a feeling it would be impossible tonight.
“Gotta go,” I heard him say.
It pulled me out of the recesses of my mind and I saw him already lumbering out of the bed. He grunted as he turned and contorted, setting the bowl and glass down on the bedside table before he shoved himself upright. I watched him stretch his hands up toward the ceiling, and I realized that he couldn’t even stretch out all the way without his knuckles raking against the popcorn texture.
“Need to pop that space between your shoulders?” I asked as I got up. “Here, if you pull your arms behind your back, I can?—”
His arms immediately dropped, and he spun to face me. “I’m fine, Anna. Stop fussing over me.”
I went to fire back at him, but I heard a vibration. My hand immediately rushed to my boobs where I kept my cell phone.
Yes, I kept my cell phone in my bra.
I dipped my hand in to fish it out just as Brutus pulled out his phone. The screen lit up his face, and for a moment, I stared at the scar that cut through his right eyebrow. I never noticed it before, and it made me wonder how he got it.
“Gotta go,” he muttered as he slid the phone back into his pocket.
I checked my phone just to make sure I didn’t have a notification, but I didn’t. I never did. Who the fuck was gonna contact me, anyway? The only people I hung out with were either under this roof already or coming to and from the safehouse.
It’s not like I had friends or shit.
“Where are we headed?” I asked as I fell in line beside him. “Another patrol? We could take the?—”
“No,” he said as he turned to face me as we stood in the hallway just beyond his bedroom door.
I scoffed and crossed my arms over my chest. “You know, Bee, if you keep telling me ‘no’, I may actually start to take it personally.”
“Not like you’re good with the word, anyway,” he mumbled as he began walking away from me again.
“Hey!” I exclaimed as I reached out for his wrist.
I tugged at him, and he yanked his arm out of my grasp. “What, Anna?”
I was over the attitude. “The hell do you mean, what? I try and give a damn about how you’re feeling, and suddenly, I’m public enemy number one? The fuck is that shit?”
I watched him grind his teeth together as he stared off down the hallway. “Cap’s calling church. You know you can’t come.”
I scoffed. “Then why the hell didn’t you just say that? Why am I all of a sudden being treated like some sort of pariah in your life?”
