by Ruby Scott
“You know how she is.”
“I do.” He nodded and lowered the flowers so that they hung beside him. I let out a breath. It was bad enough that I had thrown the sign away. Linda would freak out if she found out that Lucas had gotten rid of her other beautiful and so very original gift as well. She would bounce off the walls with anger.
The rest of the walk to my car was uncomfortably silent. It had been three years since I had put up with Lucas, and both of us had changed so much that it was as if we had met each other for the first time.
Lucas had always had the potential to be good looking, and my friend from high school had said, “With a few pounds of muscle and a tan, this kid would be a knockout.” Of course, there had been more than that. The nerdy t-shirts with ironic meanings, those damned round glasses that weren’t really serving any purpose and the strangely fitting jeans would have had to go as well.
With those few pounds of muscle and the tan he must have gotten from being outside a lot, I would have liked to see what Melany would have said about him now.
“You’re staring,” Lucas drawled, leaning back in my seat.
I quickly snapped my gaze away. Had I seriously just been admiring my step-brother? The one who constantly tortured me as a teenager and made my life difficult?
Yes, yes I had, but I would never tell anyone else that.
“At your ugly face, indeed I am. I wondered if it was possible that anything could have made it any uglier. Well, ding-ding-ding, this is it.”
“I actually think that the thirty girlfriends I had while I was in Texas would beg to differ,” Lucas said, glancing over at me. His voice and face were tinged with amusement.
I sighed. “You are insufferable,” I said. “I can’t believe that you’re back. I might have to go jump off of the nearest high-rise.”
Lucas grinned, a deep, low chuckle sounding in his chest. It sent shivers down my spine, and I internally slapped myself on the cheek. Get it the fuck together, I told myself. This isn’t going to work if you stop hating him.
“Yep,” I said instead, focusing solely on the road. “Definitely going to. Maybe I’ll bring you with and shove you off first.”
“Oh, hun, I’d like to see you try.”
We hadn’t made it ten miles from the airport and we were already squabbling like old times. This was going to be a long and hard process.
###
Dinner was quiet without Linda here to coo and fuss over her baby boy who had come back a hero. Dad had come home a few hours after Lucas and I had returned from the airport. I had been looking forward to a nice, long session of reading in the den with a fleece blanket thrown around my shoulders and old movies running in the background, but Lucas had ruined that with a few simple actions of sitting down on the couch, propping his feet on the coffee table where I usually rested my mug of tea, and flipping the TV on to the sports channel.
I had high-tailed it out of there and sulked in my room until Dad came home. Since Linda wasn’t here to cook us one of her fabulous meals that she enjoyed getting off of the internet and the cooking channels, I popped some instant macaroni and cheese into the oven to bake, and quickly prepared a salad for myself. No matter what I had told my parents about the dangers of eating too many refined sugars, they had refused to cut down their carb intake, saying that grain was healthy and needed to be consumed at every meal.
Thus, we still had a lot of junky food sitting around in our house, and I had to avoid pigging out on it whenever the urge to eat everything overtook me. I still got that way sometimes, but I had already come so far in my endeavor to become a healthy, fit person and resisted the urge to eat a full box, bag, or package of the unhealthy thing. I let myself have some, in moderation.
I wondered if Lucas had eaten well. He would have had to because those kinds of muscles don’t come naturally to a skinny guy. He would have needed a lot of protein and lots of reps of heavy lifting—why was I thinking about Lucas lifting weights and eating lean meats?
I shook my head in annoyance and poured some lemon juice and olive oil onto my salad. Lucas was already in my house once again, and I wouldn’t let him get back into my thoughts and worm his way through my defenses. No, sir. I needed to stay focused, on my degree and on keeping myself healthy and strong. Lucas wouldn’t distract me from any of that, not if I had any say over anything that went on in my head.
Which, as it turned out, wasn’t a lot. My mind wandered all through dinner, wondering what could have happened to Lucas while he was in the military. What had changed him from a skinny, nerdy, mean asshole to a drop dead gorgeous, ripped and arrogant asshole?
I remembered what he had said about his thirty girlfriends in Texas. With his body, I could imagine that the girls were all over him. I hoped that he got some incurable disease from all of them that would kill him off in the near future so that I wouldn’t have to deal with him. Or maybe just stick him into the hospital long enough for me to complete school and move halfway across the country.
“So, Lucas,” Dad said suddenly, halfway through his plate of macaroni. To my surprise, Lucas had requested that I give him some salad and no macaroni at all. I had been so stunned that I had done it without complaint.
Lucas glanced up from swirling his food around his fork without lifting a single morsel to his lips.
“From the few updates we received from you—” there had been two—“you were in Hawaii and Texas?”
“Yes, sir,” Lucas said, nodding. “I was also in Los Angeles for a few weeks, but it was so short that it didn’t seem mentioning.” The tone in his voice when he said that last part changed from easygoing to the kind of intense that begged Dad not to ask him to elaborate any further.
If Dad noticed, he either chose to ignore it or disregarded it. “Oh, really? What happened there?”
“Nothing much,” Lucas said stiffly. “They decided that they didn’t need me and sent me back to Texas.”
I frowned, unable to determine what exactly it was that was bothering him so much. It wasn’t as if he had actually ever seen any combat, but he acted as if talking about his time in Los Angeles was taboo. Maybe he had done something wrong that the officers had threatened to kick him out over.
I was sure that was it after a few moments. Lucas had always been kind of a troublemaker, at least for as long as I had known him—only four years, thank God, and he had been gone for three of those. It would make sense that he would find some way to fuck up something. I was just surprised that they didn’t actually kick him out and that he had managed to serve his three years that had been assigned to him.
“Katy, how’s school been?” Dad asked me. I rolled my eyes internally. I had already told him this over the phone before he had persuaded me to come and welcome my brother home.
“Good,” I said curtly. “It’s been wonderful. I’m meeting lots of new people and doing alright in all of my classes.”
Lucas smirked over at me. “Taking any chemistry?” he asked.
I frowned at him, and then remembered the other, other time he had set my hair on fire. That one had actually been on accident, but I still had screamed at him about it for hours afterwards, because it could have easily been prevented. “No,” I said sharply. “I’m going to school to become a nutritionist and dietician. No chemistry is required past the basics that you need to get your general credits.”
He had the audacity to grin at me. “I bet you’re thrilled about that.” He leaned back, setting his fork down on his nearly untouched food. Dad glanced over at the bowl and then up at me.
“Lucas, aren’t you hungry?”
“I ate on the plane,” Lucas said, waving it away easily. But a liar can spot a liar, and I saw the telltale way he tightened his shoulders. It was so minute that someone who wasn’t so good at reading people would have missed it, but I didn’t. Why not just tell Dad that he wasn’t hungry? “But thank you.”
I frowned and opened my mouth to say something, but Dad cut me off. “Of course, y
ou must be more tired than hungry as well. You can go up to your room if you want and get some shut-eye.”
“Thanks, Marty,” Lucas said. Dad smiled, and when Lucas left the table, I finally felt as if I could relax and enjoy my meal.
###
My sleep was disturbed that night by a sudden loud sound. I jolted awake, unsure of what I had just heard, but very sure that it had come from the room across the hall—Lucas’ room.
I stood up, wobbling a bit on my unsteady feet and opened my door. I stood there for a few long moments and simply listened to the sounds that weren’t coming from anywhere, the complete and utter silence, and then I stepped across the hall.
I knocked on Lucas’ door quietly. Even the barest hit of my knuckles against the wood sounded eerily loud in this strange silence. I was used to Linda’s noise machine, I realized after a few moments. It was always discernable through their door, if only a little bit.
There was no response, and so I opened the door quietly. “Lucas?” I stage whispered. “Are you okay?”
It took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the dark. I could make out the faint outline of Lucas. He was sitting up, resting his head against the headboard, arms wrapped around him almost protectively as if he felt like he needed to protect himself from something—or someone.
“Lucas?” I reached over to turn on the lamp, but his fingers gripped my wrist and squeezed until I drew back.
“Leave the lights off,” he said, and his voice was devoid of any emotion though it was a bit rough. As his fingers let go of my wrist, I realized that he had been shaking.
“What is it?” I asked. “I heard a loud noise and came to see if you were alright.”
“You’re really concerned?” he asked bitterly.
I paused, wondering myself why I was over here. “Even if I do hate you, you’re still family,” I said eventually. “Family protects family.”
Lucas was silent for a long moment. I heard him shifting, the bed creaking underneath his weight that was dense with muscle. “You sound like my commanding officer. In the military, we were each other’s family, and we all had to look out for each other. Even if we didn’t like it; even if we felt as if it was stupid, we all had to look out for each other.” He let out a shuddering breath suddenly. “Please sit down.”
I started slightly. “Where?”
“Next to me. I need to feel someone alive next to me to keep the ghosts away.”
I shivered at his dead words. “You never went to combat, did you? They would have told us about it, wouldn’t they?” I asked, sitting carefully down next to him. He wrapped an arm around my shoulder and pulled me close so that my head was resting against his shoulder. He was still shaking.
“Just because I went to combat doesn’t mean that I never saw the effects of war,” he said. “Lots of people go to the military and come back without seeing a single day of fighting, but they are so fucked up in the head that they can’t even function properly.” There was nothing of the cocky, over confident man who had left, or even the arrogant man I had met in the airport today. This was who Lucas really was—who he had become—under all of his layers of personalities. I realized now that this was his way of protecting himself so that people couldn’t see how damaged he was. I could relate completely.
“What happened to you?” I asked quietly, listening to the rapid pounding of his heart.
Lucas took a deep breath. “I still have nightmares. Isn’t that absurd?” His geeky vocabulary reminded me of who he had been before, as well. “After being to the military and seeing the effects of war in real life, what kinds of demons could plague the mind that could be worse?”
“I don’t know,” I said, even though I knew the question was rhetorical.
“Memories,” Lucas said, and the stubble on his cheek scraped against my forehead as he shifted slightly. “There was this one day that I don’t think I will forget for the rest of my life. It made me realize just how mortal and delicate our race is.”
I didn’t say a single thing. I didn’t know why I was even here, but I was too enraptured to even think of leaving. Something had drawn me to his pain and suffering, and I wanted to hear the cause of it. His foot, bare as his torso, slid along my calf. I shivered. That wasn’t a normal reaction for the nerdy stepbrother, was it? I was confusing myself and Lucas was confusing me.
“There was this one day that my friend got carted off to Iraq. The bastard spent six months in that hellhole, and when he came back, he was different. He would start at each and every noise, and I would catch him whimpering in his sleep sometimes. When I would try to wake him, he would press a knife to my throat before I was even truly awake. He never talked about what had happened, but I heard it from some other people who had gone with him.
“They said that he had accidentally killed a village full of women and children. He had been the one that had okayed the dropping of the missiles, but just as he had said that it was okay, a little boy had wandered out onto the street. He had tried to call off the attack, knowing that this had been a setup, but it was too late.”
I put a hand against my mouth in shock. Those kinds of things were military slip ups that they like to keep quiet. Collateral damage, I thought. Those women and children had been collateral damage. “That’s terrible,” I said quietly, rubbing my fingers along his shoulder in an attempt to comfort him—or me, I wasn’t sure which.
Lucas laughed bitterly. “I’m not even to the worst part yet, Katy.” I held myself completely still as his fingers brushed against mine, and he continued his story. “One morning, I woke up and he was gone from our bunker. I went outside, thinking he had gotten up to take a walk or some shit like that. Instead, I found him cleaning his machine gun almost frantically. ‘They’re coming for me,’ he had said. I had asked him what he meant, and that’s when he looked up at me and I knew. He had gone insane. That happens sometimes. People can’t live with the collateral damage, and it drives them mad.
“Anyways, a company of soldiers came around the corner, and he started yelling at me to get down. He took out seven soldiers and then shot himself in the head. I remember feeling the spray of blood against my cheek. It got into my ear, and I couldn’t get it out for several days.” A shudder ran through him, and he tightened his hold on me. “That same scene has gone through my head for months now, every night. It’s my recurring nightmare, my ghosts that bother me.”
I reached up with the hand that wasn’t on his shoulder and touched his face. I had almost expected to find it wet with tears, but he had already cried any tears that he had ever had dealing with this friend of his. I knew how that went. Sometimes, there were only so many tears before you dried up and couldn’t cry about it anymore, even if you wanted to.
He slid his face along my hand and pressed a soft kiss to the center of my palm. I should have drawn away; it should have disgusted me, but I found that I didn’t mind. I pulled him closer and tilted his head down so that I could kiss him on the mouth. I would offer whatever comfort I could, and since I had nothing else to offer except myself, I would comfort him in the only way I knew how.
I wanted to let him know that it was okay and that he had people here with him now that would help him get through whatever he was dealing with.
He stiffened at first, trying to pull back, but I shifted so that I could keep him where he was. When he finally drew back from the kiss, I could hear the panic in his voice. “Katy, you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing,” I said, running my hand through his hair, which was just a bit over military length. I hoped that he kept it short; it looked good on him.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked, still hesitating.
“I’m positive.” I had never been so positive about anything in my life, except maybe that I would lose fifty pounds and become fit.
That was all the consent he needed, and then he was suddenly taking control. The sweet, tender kiss I had given him was replaced
by something that was almost desperate in nature, something that I couldn’t fathom.
His hands were all over me, running down my body, one cupping my breast through the thin shirt I was wearing, the other brushing the edge of my panties. He made a noise low in his throat. “I have wanted to do this to you the moment I saw you.”
The heated look I had received from him when he had seen me and recognized me hadn’t been anger, then. I smiled against his lips at that. Before I had realized that it was my asshole stepbrother, I had thought the same thing.
But now I realized that his time in the military really had changed him. For most people who sent their kids off to the army, they got them back either jarheads or even more stupid, and twice as cocky. That would have been my brother’s fate, if not for that one humbling action his friend had done. It may have been horrible, but at least he had managed to impact my stepbrother’s life in a positive way.
He worked my shirt over my head with some difficulty and reached down so that his lips brushed my bare skin. I let out a noise of surprise at the sudden movement, but I quickly cut it off as I realized that Dad was only a few rooms away. We couldn’t afford to be loud, not tonight.
I could feel him pressed against my thigh, hard and ready. I shivered at the implications, but it wasn’t with fear and disgust as I should have felt. He was my stepbrother, after all.
That didn’t matter in the moment; none of it mattered. All that mattered was that Lucas was a changed man, and I could see that it was for the better. I liked this new Lucas, even though he was a cocky, arrogant bastard during the day. I knew what kind of humble determination lay underneath it all.
When he slipped my panties off, I reached forward and caressed his face with my hand once before trailing it down his body, feeling my knuckles bump across the hard expanse of his abs—damn, was that hot—to his boxers. I hesitated, and he made a noise of impatience, sliding my hand further down his body so that my fingers caught in the soft material. I quickly slid the boxers down his legs, and he kicked them off.