A hand closes around my arm and yanks me sideways.
I scream.
Chapter 16
Lance
The bruises have bloomed, purple and green spreading across my ribs where Brando caught me in the second round, and I have a dull throb behind my left eye that’s already turning colors. But the physical stuff fades. It always does.
It’s the rest of it that stays. The footage Benny catalogued before his body was even cold. Another chain wrapped around my throat.
Art wouldn’t hold that over me, though.
He wouldn’t.
Cavall is curled at my feet—ninety pounds of black fur and German shepherd instinct—a pink stuffed duck named Virgil wedged between his paws. He knows when it’s been a bad night, and he always presses his weight against me and lets out soft whines like he’s trying to hold me together.
My phone buzzes on the cushion beside me, but I ignore it.
It buzzes again.
I grab it, ready to chuck it across the room, but the name on the screen stops me.
ART:
I’m outside. Open up, dickwad.
Great.
I haul myself off the couch, cross to the door, and pull it open.
Cavall beats me, tail going.
Art’s standing there with a six-pack in one hand and a paper bag that smells like Chinese food in the other. His tie is loosened, his hair’s mussed, and he’s got that boyish grin on his face, the one from when we were kids and he’d show up at my window with a stolen bottle of his mom’s wine and a plan to do something stupid.
“You look like shit,” he says.
“Thanks.” I step back to let him in, eyeing the to-go bags. “You bring egg rolls?”
“Who do you think you’re talking to?” He shoulders past me and heads straight for the couch, dropping the food on the coffee table and cracking open a beer, before leaning forward to ruffle Cavall behind the ears.
“Sit down before you fall down,” he says.
I close the door, and move back to the couch, sinking into the cushions with a groan. “That obvious?”
He shoves a bottle at me.
For a minute, neither of us says anything.
We drink and the quiet settles between us in that easy way it never does with anyone else.
This is something most people don’t understand about Art and me. We don’t need to fill the space. He’s the one person in my life who’s always just let me exist asme. Two fucked-upkids from fucked-up families trying to survive a world that was never built for people like us.
“Heard you won.”
“Yeah. As planned.”
“Brando was a big guy.”
