Sean cocked his head, looking baffled, and bounced up and down restlessly on the balls of his feet. “So? What of it? The guy's dead, right? He’s not going to bother you.”
Connor gave him a pained look. “Sean—”
“Our dad was completely bonkers, but nobody holds it against us,” Sean observed. “Or if they do, fuck 'em. Come to think of it, your own daddy wasn't much of a prize either. And we've established that she never screwed you over, right? So?”
There was no arguing with Sean's hammer-blunt logic. He did not feel like trying to explain the anger, the remote, glittering coldness he had seen in her eyes as she looked at him over her father's dead body.
He resorted to simple rudeness. “Piss off, Sean.” Sean's eyes narrowed. “You do still want her, right?”
“That's not the problem!”
Sean snorted. “Nah. The problem is that you're a gutless wuss with shriveled little balls the size of peach pits.”
Connor turned away, making a choking sound.
Sean flashed his Wonder Boy grin. “Too much woman for you, huh? Great news. Maybe I can catch her on the rebound. Mend her broken heart. I'll put my all into it, know what I mean?”
Suddenly he was holding a fistful of Sean's faded Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, dangling him six inches off the ground. “Don't even think about her that way,” he hissed. “Or I will take you apart. Got it?”
Sean grabbed Seth's fist and hauled himself up so that he could breathe. “Baiting you is so satisfying,” he croaked. “Davy and Connor are so jaded, they don't react at all, but you, whoa. You're a sure thing.”
Seth flung him away. Sean rolled smoothly up onto his feet and brushed the pine needles off his jeans, unperturbed. A good sport. He had to be, with Davy and Connor for brothers. Something cramped inside him, hard and painful, at the thought. He'd been hard on Jesse, too. Jesse had been a damn good sport Jesse had forgiven him, even when he didn't deserve it. He turned his back on them and struck out into the meadow. “If Kearns calls, tell him I'm driving back today,”
“Chickenshit,” he heard Sean mutter.
He didn't turn around. He couldn't handle brotherly banter. He'd rather stare at rocks or trees. After ten months without Jesse, he was out of practice at being nagged and teased. He pushed through the fir trees, cursing as they slapped at him. Goddamn nature. He'd never figured out why people went out and wallowed in it voluntarily. Jesse had tried to get him to go hiking, but Seth had resisted to the bitter end.
The way he resisted everything. Always.
That thought stopped him cold, right in the middle of a clump of baby trees. Their pointy tops were about as high as his heart. They trembled in the breeze. He stared at them, wondering why he'd pushed away Jesse's efforts to help him. Just like he pushed away the McClouds. He pushed away the whole damn world. He beat the world to it, every time, before it had a chance to give him the old heave-ho.
The same way he'd pushed away Raine.
A strong gust from the snowy peaks swept through the grove, setting the baby trees swaying. They sprang back upright, soft and flexible. He shivered without his jacket, but he couldn't go back for it, and face the bright, probing eyes of the McCloud brothers. Not yet.
The van was packed and ready to go. His business needed him, after all those months of neglect. The routine of his life was waiting for him, safe and predictable.
But day followed day, and he kept replaying the same footage in his mind. Every single time he'd made love to Raine was imprinted on his memory. Every word, every scent and sigh. Her textures and colors, her tenderness and courage. The woman was incredible. She deserved better than an evil-tempered, foul-mouthed son-of-a-bitch like him.
Amazing. He was having a pity party. He could hear Jesse sniggering in the back of his mind, telling him to stop jerking off. Stop paying those old negative tapes, that was how Jesse had put it when he was in psychobabble mode. God, how that had annoyed him.
Seth stepped out of the trees and found himself on a wide, grassy shelf. It dropped abruptly into a canyon where a waterfall leaped and gurgled. It wasn't a tall, impressive waterfall, but still he stared at it, startled. Almost hypnotized by the milky cascades of foam that spilled down on either side of mossy green fingers of rock. The water tumbled into a churning pool below, where it glowed a deep, transparent green.
For the first time, he got a glimmering of a clue as to why people went out, braving bug bites and boredom, to look at stuff like this. It really was pretty. Spectacular, even.
He wandered closer and stared at it for a long time. The constant rushing, pounding sound of the water created space and quiet in his mind. Enough space to watch a new idea unfurl without flinching from it.
He pushed Raine away because some part of him was sure that she would end up pushing him, sooner or later. He couldn't risk the abandonment, the bewilderment. He would rather skip that part, and cut directly to the frozen solitude phase.
A flash of movement caught his eye. The buck had stepped out of the forest. The two of them looked at each other, a long, cool moment of mutual distrust. The buck melted discreetly back into the trees, drawing Seth's attention to a square, gleaming stone set in the meadow grass. He walked up to the spot. It was a gravestone, set flush to the ground. The grass was cut short around it, and it was scrubbed severely clean of the lichen and moss that decorated the other rocks. He squatted down and brushed away the leaves and pine needles.
Kevin Seamus McCloud
January 10, 1971-August 18, 1992.
Beloved Brother.
A buried memory stirred in the back of his mind. Jesse had mentioned his partner having lost a brother some years back, but the information had been of no interest to him at the time.
Sean was thirty-one, just like this Kevin would have been. He must have lost his twin ten years ago, when he was only twenty-one.
This time, when the ache started up, he didn't try any of his usual tricks to distract himself. Seth just gritted his teeth, and breathed and waited. The decade-old marble slab told a mute, painful story, with the blunt simplicity of stone. He squatted there and quietly listened to it.
It hurt. It shook him. His jaw ached, and his throat ached, and his legs fell asleep. The cold wind swept around and through him. He just kept brushing away the dead leaves and pine needles that blew across the marble and endured the tumult inside him without trying to understand or control it.
When he finally got onto his feet, he stood for a long time until the pins and needles faded. He used the time to scan the meadow grass around him for some color. If there had been any wildflowers around, he would've picked some and left them on Kevin's grave, since nobody was watching. He couldn't follow up on the weird impulse, though, because there were no wildflowers to be found. Just frostbitten grass, red-brown needles, fir cones and dead leaves.
When he could finally put weight on his feet again, the wind was up. It tossed the trees and made the forest rustle and creak. Something had changed. The wind, the weather, the landscape in his mind.
He was going to stop pushing the world away. That would be his tribute to Jesse's memory. And he would start with the McClouds. He owed them, big time. He could never have gotten Raine out of there alive without their help. He would swallow all the irritating, brotherly bullshit they dished out, and be grateful for it. And if he needed them more than they needed him, well, tough shit. That was nothing to be ashamed of.
And Raine. Oh, God, Raine.
Wind swept through the trees with nail-biting, knuckle-gnawing urgency, in the hospital, when she was zonked out on Demerol, she'd told him that she loved him. She had ordered him not to die. That was promising, but he hadn't grown up with a junkie mother without learning Rule Number One. Things people said when they were stoned did not count Ever.