Rare (24 page)

That earned me a solemn stare. “My dad has a big bird on his leg that doesn’t come off in the shower.”

“A big bird, huh? Is it an eagle?”

“Maybe.”

I reached absently for a piece of paper. I’d drawn tons of eagles over the years, mainly for bikers, soldiers, and cops. They weren’t my favorite thing to draw, but I managed a rough outline and held it out. “Like that?”

Liam frowned, scrunching his face up in a way that reminded me of the way Pete looked at my work, the way he scrutinized it, like he thought he was missing something really important. “Sort of. The beak is bigger.”

Under his earnest direction, I adjusted the proportions of the bird. By the time Pete’s bare feet appeared in my line of sight, the poor thing looked more like flamingo.

I looked up his sweatpant-covered legs until I found his face. His expression was tight and stressed, but otherwise unreadable. His gaze dropped to his nephew.

“Your mom’s waiting for you outside.”

Liam scrambled to his feet, keeping a tight hold on the sketch of the bird, like he expected it to be snatched away from him. I waited for Pete to reach for him and take him to his mother.

He didn’t, so I figured I’d have to do it myself.

The kid glanced at Pete as we passed him, like he wanted to say good-bye, but he didn’t. Instead, he found my hand so I could lead him to the front door. Heidi was nowhere to be seen when we got there. I wondered for the few minutes it took me to find her if she’d left her son behind on purpose.

I crossed the street to the old war monument she stood beside. I’d already decided I didn’t like her, but I sure was jealous of the cigarette she had jammed in her mouth. It had been more than a year since I’d last smoked, but like every other vice, the temptation never went away.

I relinquished Liam to her. She appraised me with a critical gaze. “Pete’s
boyfriend
, huh? Maggie seems quite taken with you. Have you been seeing my brother for long?”

“A while.”

Heidi appraised me with her dead eyes. “Well, good luck to you. That boy’s tied to his mother’s apron strings. He always has been. No amount of living this twisted lifestyle is going to change that.”

There was nothing I could say to that. I walked away, and I was halfway across the street when Liam called my name. I turned and he waved.

“Bye, Uncle Ash.”

Huh.

P
ETE
WAS
in the bedroom when I let myself back into the apartment. He was in the process of trying to pull a hoodie over his head while he growled into the cordless apartment phone. It took me a moment to realize he wasn’t speaking in English. I paused in the doorway. Pete only spoke Italian to Maggie, and I’d never heard him to speak to her the way he was now. I didn’t know much Italian, but it was obvious he was still
pissed
.

The call ended abruptly. Pete stared at the phone in his hand for a split second before he launched it at the wall. The phone shattered as it hit the ancient brickwork. I started forward, but Pete’s unforgiving profile stopped me short. Instead, I leaned on the dresser and tried to pretend that shit was normal. “So that was your sister, huh?”

“Yep.”

“What about Liam?” I paused as I considered my words carefully. “I didn’t know you had a nephew.”

Not carefully enough, it seemed, because he shot me a glare hard enough to splinter ice. “Yeah, well. I’m hardly uncle of the year, am I?”

I refrained from pointing out that the kid seemed to like the idea of the uncle he barely knew; that and the Lego sets Pete sent him every Christmas. “Is Heidi coming back?”

“Probably not. Persistence isn’t her style.”

“Why now? I mean, why did she come now? Was it because of the accident?”

“In a roundabout way.” Pete laughed bitterly. “But trust me, she wasn’t inquiring after my health.”

“What did she want?”

Pete was silent for a moment. Indecision seemed to swim in his eyes before he shrugged like we were discussing the weather. “What she always wants,” he said flatly. “Money.”

“Money?”

“Yeah, money. What the fuck is this, anyway? What do you care what she wanted? Forget about it.”

I was stung by the venom in his tone. He’d always had a short fuse, but his temper was quick and hot, over in a flash and rarely aimed at me. But he was cold now, colder than I’d ever seen him, and he was lying to me, or at least holding something back. Part of me was relieved by his anger—it was the most animated I’d seen him in weeks—but most of me was filled with an ominous sense of foreboding. The sensation of dread crept under my skin and threw me off balance. Even at my worst, I’d never felt so alienated from him.

“Heidi said she’d talked to Maggie. Do you want me to go check she’s okay?”

Pete drove his fist into the wall with a low growl. “Don’t
do
that.”

“Do what?”

“Let me shit all over you. It’s not right. I know you think I’m a bastard, so you should say it.”

“I don’t think you’re a bastard.”

“Well, you should, and you’d be right, but you know what? She deserves it.
Your
sister is fucking amazing and you don’t even want her. Mine? Yeah, mine’s a bitch I can’t seem to get rid of. Ironic, huh?”

The first defensive flash of my own temper ran through me as his words hit home. Why did everything have to come back to Danni? I’d never asked her to walk into my life. “What the hell did Heidi say to you?”

Pete cocked his head to one side, sneering. “What she always says, Ash, only this time, she brought her kid along for effect. Do you know how she found out about that train wreck?”

“No. I—”

“By accident,” he bit out. “Her douche bag husband came to Chicago on business, and she saw an old newspaper on the L. She figured the city would have paid me off by now.”

“Paid you off?”

“Yeah, when you get crippled on duty, they give you a payout to keep you from suing their asses. My darling
sister
came for her share. Going on past history, she figured we’d divvy it up.”

He’d lost me. “You’re not crippled.”

“Oh yeah?” Pete took a step forward. For the first time ever, his close proximity made me uncomfortable. “I can’t walk from the bedroom to the kitchen without needing a nap. How the fuck do you expect me to go back to work?”

“I don’t.” I thought we’d already figured out he wasn’t going back. “Is Heidi in trouble?”

It was the wrong thing to say, but I didn’t catch my mistake until it was already made and Pete’s eyes darkened with fury.

“No, she’s not in trouble. She’s a selfish bitch. Do you know what she did with her share of the money my uncle stole from Maggie? The money my dad died for? She got a boob job. So don’t stand there and try and make me feel bad about this.”

“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” I snapped. “I’m trying to understand. I didn’t know any of this. You never told me.”

“Never told you? What the fuck? Ash, we’ve been together too long for you to pretend you didn’t know my family was screwed up.”

I stared at him. Did he really believe I was playing dumb for the sake of it? “I didn’t know anything about it. You never told me Heidi was involved in what your dad’s family did to Maggie. I didn’t even know Maggie wasn’t her mom.”

It was his turn to stare. “You must have known,” he said. “How the hell could you not know?”

“You didn’t tell me.”

Pete opened his mouth and shut it again. For a moment, he looked as lost as I felt. The silence was heavy and overbearing, but the uncertain cogs turning in his jumbled brain gave me a flash of hope.

Until a switch flipped in his eyes and the stranger who’d come home from the hospital was back.

“I’m gonna go and stay with Maggie.”

A
FEW
months ago, I tattooed a woman just shy of her eightieth birthday. The old chick was all kinds of insane and her weathered skin was a nightmare to ink, but I remembered the quote she wanted etched on the back of her hand. It was a quote I’d inked onto dozens of clients, but each time it made less sense than the first:

“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Bullshit. Plenty of things should’ve killed me, but as Pete pushed me away, I felt weaker than I had in a long time.

It would’ve been easier if he’d hit me. I followed him outside, but when Mick pulled up, he got in his van and left without looking back.

Mick came back a few hours later. “What the
fuck
was that?”

“I… I don’t know.” My tongue felt too thick for my mouth. I shifted on the stoop. I had yet to find my way back inside. “I’ve never seen him like that before.”

“Neither have I.” Mick dropped down beside me. “This head injury has thrown him for a loop.”

I blew out a long breath. “It wasn’t even about that.”

“What was it about?”

“I have no idea.”

“Then it probably
was
the head injury, Ash. I know he’s a grouchy motherfucker, but he loves the bones off you. This isn’t him walking away. He’s just freaking out and dealing with it by being an ass. He’ll be back.”

I tilted my head and rested it on the cool brick wall, exhausted. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Mick snorted. “Hell, no. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now, but he’ll be back, and when he is, I don’t want to be the one responsible for your twenty-a-day habit.”

Damn it.

Mick left to go and do whatever he was doing with his time now. I sat on the steps for a little while longer before finally retreating inside to clear up the mess Pete’s temper had left behind.

I swept up the shattered phone with a heavy heart. The doctors had warned me about temporary or even permanent personality changes, but I’d figured they meant something I would see straight away, something others would see too. This change in Pete was subtle… a creeping sensation that something wasn’t right. Add in the secrets he’d kept from me, and I couldn’t be sure any of it related to his injuries at all. I didn’t get it. He loved me, I knew he did, and God, I loved him. How had we come to this?

The day turned into evening, and then into a dark cold night. Maggie called me as soon as Pete was asleep. Whatever reason he’d given for sleeping on her couch didn’t make any sense to her, and she didn’t understand why I wasn’t with him. I didn’t understand either, and after a moment’s deliberation, I gathered my sketchbooks and jogged over to her place. Pete might have been lost enough to run away from me, but I’d be damned if I was just going to let him go.

Maggie let me in. I kissed her good night, deflecting her fussing, and sent her to bed. I approached the couch carefully and took Pete’s hand. Though he spent most of his time asleep these days, he’d become jumpy. He wouldn’t admit he was having weird dreams, but I knew he saw Tim die every time he closed his eyes. Not tonight. Tonight he was sound asleep and unnervingly peaceful, like getting away from me really had been all he needed. Fuck. I pulled my hand away like I’d been burned. Was that the problem? Was it really just me?

I sat back on my heels. A few days before the accident, we’d dumped Maggie’s broken old couch and given her ours. For some reason, Pete had seemed reluctant to part with it. Her blankets and throws matched the ones at our place, and for a moment, it was all too easy to pretend nothing was wrong. If I closed my eyes and listened to him breathe, it felt like we were at home. But we weren’t at home, and as I turned out the main light and sat alone in the dark, I realized that I didn’t have a clue what to do next.

In the end, I stayed where I was. I spent the night on the floor by Maggie’s coffee table, watching over Pete and sketching like a man possessed. When he stirred around dawn, I took my cue and left. It wasn’t exactly moving forward, but as the pattern continued in the nights that followed, it was all I could do. I spent my days trying to catch up on the sleep I missed and drawing custom pieces to sell in the shop. Pete’s logic was skewed right now, but he was right about one thing: he wasn’t going to be working for a while. Ted had given me indefinite leave to look after him, but if I wanted to do that, I had to figure out a way to bring more money in. For me, that meant breaking probably one of the only rules I’d ever set myself: designing tattoos for someone else to ink in my absence.

I hated that. I didn’t have much of an ego, but the very thought of another artist using my work made my skin crawl. Still, at least churning out designs kept me busy in an otherwise empty apartment. I was used to kicking around by myself for days at a time, but without any idea of when it would end, this felt indescribably worse. My footsteps echoed on the hard wood floors, and every shadow seemed to go on forever. Needless to say, I spent most of my time on the roof, until the weather changed. Storm clouds and heavy rain forced me indoors, and it was only then that reality really hit home.

Pete had left me, and as it stood in that moment, it didn’t look like he was ever coming back.

???
—
J

I shut my phone without replying to Joe’s message. He’d returned from his trip and found out Pete wasn’t at home, but I wasn’t in the mood to talk about it. I was in the bank, paying the bills Pete usually handled on his laptop, and that was about as much as I could handle. I hated banks. They were worse than hospitals, soulless and cold. Pete told me once I was probably an anarchist in another life. Either that or a hippie.

My phone vibrated all the way home. I tried to ignore it, but the distant hope that it could be Pete made blocking it out impossible.

Of course, it wasn’t Pete; it was Joe. In the end, I relented and sent him a message politely asking him to leave me alone. It wouldn’t work for long, but I figured he’d give me the rest of the day to sulk in peace.

I went home and got in the shower. I didn’t linger, but when I ventured into the empty bedroom, I wished I had. Life without Pete was hard. I spent every night watching him sleep, but his complete conscious absence in my life was unbearable. I took a pillow and huddled up on the couch. I was dozing off when my phone beeped again.