“You were about to kiss her! You call that nothing? Are you saying the two of you wouldn’t have ended up on the floor after that?”
“No way,” Frost told him. “No way in hell. I would never do that to you.”
“So it’s just a coincidence that I catch the two of you together last night, and today Tabby breaks up with me?”
Frost shook his head. His mouth felt dry, and his stomach was sick. He couldn’t deny the truth of what Duane said. This was no coincidence. This was his own fault. “I swear I did not see this coming, Duane. I knew Tabby was unhappy, that’s all she told me.”
“And you didn’t play a role in any of this? Is that your story? Come on, Frost, you can do better than that. I know you have feelings for Tabby. Was this your plan all along? Break us up so you can have her for yourself?”
“If you think I would ever deliberately come between you and your fiancée, then you don’t know me at all.”
“Oh, I know you too damn well, Frost. Nobody knows you better than me.”
Duane leaped off the steps of the food truck and shoved both hands hard against Frost’s chest, forcing him backward. Frost regained his footing and had to stop himself from responding in kind.
“Knock it off, Duane. You’re upset, I get it. You’re hurting. I’m hurting for you, too. I can’t believe this is happening to the two of you, and I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” his brother yelled. “That’s all you have to say? This is your fault! Everything was great between me and Tabby, and then suddenly, she was moody and distant and upset, and I didn’t understand what she was going through and I was pushing her too hard. You know when that happened, Frost? You know when Tabby started pulling away from me? When I introduced her to you.”
“Duane, listen to me,” Frost began, but his brother interrupted him.
“Screw that! I don’t want any more excuses from you. You never answered my question. Tell me the truth. Are you in love with Tabby?”
Frost lowered his voice. “Whatever’s going on here is between you and her. This has nothing to do with how I feel.”
“In other words, yes.”
“In other words, I’m done. I’m leaving. You need to cool down.”
He began to turn away, and he took his eyes off Duane for a second. He heard the swish of his brother’s sleeve and a rush of air as Duane’s arm swung toward his face. Frost dodged but not fast enough, and Duane’s fist collided with his chin. The impact snapped Frost’s head back, and he staggered as pain shot through his jaw. Duane swore as his hand stung with the blow.
Frost felt his own fists open and close. He took a slow, deep breath and tried not to listen to the roaring in his head. He had to go now, or he’d regret what happened next.
“I’m not fighting with you, Duane,” he warned him, but his own anger rose out of his chest. As he spoke, he tasted the copper of blood in his mouth.
He headed for the gate, but Duane bellowed after him and charged. His brother threw himself into Frost’s back, and Frost stumbled forward and nearly fell. When he got his balance back, he tried to walk away again, but Duane jumped across the distance between them and grabbed Frost’s shoulder. This time, Frost lost it. As Duane spun him back, Frost unleashed his left fist on his brother’s face. The impact hammered Duane’s nose, which broke with a spray of blood. Duane crashed down. He looked up from the ground, blood smeared across his face and pouring from his nostrils, his eyes wide with shock.
Frost stood over him. They were both breathing hard.
“Okay, Duane. You want me to say it? I’ll say it. You’re right. I do have feelings for Tabby. I didn’t want it to happen. I wish it weren’t true. But I have never told her that I felt that way, and I would never let anything happen between us. The only thing I ever wanted was to see the two of you happily married. That’s the truth.”
His brother swore at him from the ground, long and loud. Over and over.
“See you, Duane,” Frost muttered, rubbing his swollen jaw.
He walked away, but Duane’s curses chased him out of the food park and onto the street, getting softer and more distant, like an echo slowly sinking into a deep canyon.
37
Frost sat at the counter of a twenty-four-hour pizza café a block from the street food park. He ordered a beer and a slice of pizza for himself and Shack, who was in a carrier on the bar stool next to him. The kid behind the counter noticed the blood on Frost’s knuckles and the purplish bruise on one side of his face. When he brought a tap glass of Fat Tire and a slice of sausage pizza on a paper plate, he also brought along a plastic zipper bag filled with crushed ice.
“For your chin,” he said.
“Good man,” Frost replied.
He took a ball of sausage from the pizza slice and pushed it through the door of the carrier. Shack began to play hockey with it. Frost took a bite of the pizza itself and realized that he wasn’t hungry. Instead, he drank his beer and held the bag of ice against his face, where it numbed his jaw.
There were a couple of teenagers at a corner table in the café, but Frost was the only person sitting at the counter. Everyone else was in the nightclub next door. Live rock music blasted through the wall, and the thump of the bass made Frost’s beer glass vibrate. He grimaced at the noise. His head spun.
Silently, he swore at himself for fighting back. Duane had touched a raw nerve, mostly because all his accusations were true. Frost had tried to walk the safe side of the line with Tabby for months, but he’d been kidding himself. All along, he’d been playing with fire.
Now the fire had burned them down.
He wondered what his sister, Katie, would have said. He could almost hear her voice in his ear as if this were the most delicious gossip in the world.
You and Duane? In love with the same girl? Oh, Frost, that is too funny.
It wasn’t funny at all, but Katie would have laughed.
Frost shook his head. He knew his parents wouldn’t laugh. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, his mother would be on the phone to ask him what on earth he was thinking by getting in the middle of his brother’s relationship. And by breaking his brother’s nose. It didn’t matter that Duane had thrown the first punch and kept going when Frost tried to stop the fight. Frost was the younger brother, but he was supposed to be the adult between the two of them.
“You want another?”
Frost looked at his beer glass. It was empty. “Sure, why not?”
“So who got in the way of your fist?” the kid asked as he brought Frost his beer. The name tag on his apron read “Lido.”
“My brother, actually.”
“Ouch. That’s biblical. So what happened between you guys? A girl, right? It’s always a girl.”
“It’s a girl,” Frost said.
“Who won?”
“I’m pretty sure we both lost.”
“I hear you,” Lido replied. “Sorry, man.”
He left Frost to return to the pizza oven as two gay men came into the café hand in hand and began perusing the menu that was posted behind the counter. While they mulled their order, Frost drank his beer and listened to the rock music roaring through the wall. The volume made it hard to think about anything else, which was fine.
He studied the indie rock band posters crowded on the café wall and recognized almost none of them. Pinned among the band posters, oddly, were half a dozen postcards featuring the ruins of Machu Picchu among the green Peruvian mountains. For some reason, he found himself unable to take his eyes off the postcards. They made him think about going somewhere far away.
His phone rang. There was no one he wanted to talk to right now, but he checked the caller ID anyway. It was Trent Gorham. Frost frowned, and then he answered the call.