Best Friend's Brother #3 (Best Friend's Brother Romance Series - Book #3) (2 page)

I know it was a cheap shot. I’m the one who had
stopped it. In my defense, he just had to keep running his damned mouth. I
threw a hard right and landed it squared in his gut. I heard him suck in air
and then he doubled over. He was trying to say something and I didn’t need to
hear it in order to know it started with “mother” and ended with “fucker.” As
soon as I did it, I felt like shit.

“Man Vic, I’m sorry,” I said, crouching down next to
him. The big son-of-a-bitch wrapped me up in his massive arms and knocked me
back to the mat. He had me pinned and I couldn’t breathe. Dean was trying to
talk to him, but I’d unleashed the animal and it didn’t want to go back into
its cage. I don’t know exactly how long it took Dean to convince him to let me
go, but I was getting lightheaded and on the verge of passing out before he
did. Served me right for being an asshole, I guess.

“What the hell? Are you two trying to kill each
other right here in my fucking garage?”

“Sorry,” I grunted.

“Little bastard sucker-punched me!”
Vic said.

“He said he was sorry,” Dean tried.

“I don’t give a shit if he’s sorry or not. Asshole
sucker punches me, he’s going down.”

“All right then, you took him down. You crush him
any longer, you’re
gonna
kill him. It’s over, Vic.”

Vic
squinted
his tiny
little green eyes at me and said, “Don’t fuck with me again, kid.” I thought
about fucking with him, but I guess I was smarter than that. I just nodded and
took in another lungful of air.

CHAPTER
THREE

IAN

I made it out of the ring alive, but not before Dean
gave me a twenty-minute lecture on how fighting wasn’t about getting mad. It
was about staying in control. If I wanted to act like an animal, he said, I
should be fighting in the street. He actually told me if I couldn’t control
myself then I may as well join a gang. I laughed at that, but that only netted
me an extra five-minute lecture on respect. Before I left, I conceded he was
right about it all and that I was just having a bad day. I saw the shift in his
eyes when he suddenly remembered Emma. I hated that shit. I’d rather have him
beat the shit out of me like Vic, than pity me. Dean didn’t say anything about
that though, which made me grateful. He just clapped the side of my face with
his hand…as a show of support, I guess.

I hibernated in the apartment the rest of that day.
I played video games and watched television and slept way too much. Sleep was
an escape. I didn’t have to think about Alexa or Emma or feel anything like the
emotions that tore through me every hour of the day when I was awake. I woke up
at six in the morning the next day and realized that talking about Emma to
Alexa must have been keeping these feelings at bay. It felt like there was
something sitting on my chest and as each hour went by it got harder to breathe
instead of easier. Finally, feeling like I couldn’t stand it any longer, I
drove over to see my mom and dad. Maybe it would help just to talk about her
for a while with people who loved her as much as I did.

As soon as I walked in the front door I knew I had
made a mistake. That pall that hung over the house since Emma died was still
there. I stop by nearly every day and I keep hoping things will change and I’ll
walk in and find my own parents here. I found my mom in the kitchen. She was
sitting at the table with a cup of coffee in her hand, staring at a spot on the
wall.

“Hi Mom.”

“Ian!” She jumped up to hug me and spilled the
coffee all over the table. “Shit!” I realized then that Mom was not having a good
day. She rarely ever cussed.

“
It’s
okay, Mom. Here, I’ll
get a towel.” I went to grab a towel and when I got back, she was still
standing in the same spot, staring at the coffee as it dripped down off the
table.
“Mom?”

“Oh you got a towel, thank you. I can’t believe how
clumsy I am lately.”

“
It’s
okay, Mom. It’s
really not a big deal.” I started mopping up the coffee on the table and she
grabbed some paper towels and got down on her knees on the floor. She wiped up
the spots the coffee had reached but she stayed down there like that, looking
down at the floor for way too long. “You need help up old lady?” I asked her.
Before Emma died, she and I used to joke about her turning forty-five and how I
was going to put her in a home soon. It was funny then, because she always
seemed so young to me. Looking at her now, it was
like
Emma’s death had taken decades off her life. I sadly realized it wasn’t funny
any longer. She finally pushed herself up and said, “Thank you. Have you eaten?”

“No, you want me to run and get us something?” I
usually brought them something but I’d been so damned distracted today. “Is Dad
at work?”

“No, he’s here somewhere. He’s probably out in the
shop in the backyard. That’s where I keep finding him.”

“He didn’t go to work? Is he okay?” I knew when Dad
didn’t go to work it meant he was having one of his bad days.

She shrugged. “He won’t talk to me about how he’s
feeling. I think he’s getting a little tired of me talking to him so he spends
all of his time out there, avoiding me.”

“I’m sure he’s not avoiding you Mom. He probably
just needs to grieve his own way.”

She nodded
and
 
said
, “I’m going to fix you something
to eat.”

“I don’t mind grabbing something and bringing it
back…”

“Nonsense!
I have groceries; I can cook for my son. What do you want?”

“Whatever you have is fine,” I told her. I wasn’t really
even hungry, but she seemed to need something to do. “If you insist on cooking,
I’ll go out back and see Dad until it’s ready…unless you need any help?”

“No, you go on,” she said kissing me on the cheek.
“Maybe you can snap him out of his funk.”

I doubted it. I could barely manage my own. I made
my way out to the backyard and the little shop my dad built there. He liked to
make things out of wood so he’d built the shop when I was in high school. For a
few years there I think he was too wrapped up in my crap to find time to work
in it. When I finally got my shit together though and he had more time and less
stress, he started making some pretty cool stuff. He’d made a welcome sign for
the front of the house and some bird feeders that he put in the trees out
front. He had built a bookshelf for Emma’s room and I had an end table at my
place that he’d made for me.

I could hear the circular saw running when I got
close. I looked in the small window to make sure he wasn’t near the door with
it before I went in. What I saw nearly made me turn around and leave and keep
going. That weight was back on my chest and crushing down even heavier now. He
had a wooden sign he’d made for my sister. He showed it to me a few weeks
before she died. It was for her dorm room and he’d put her name on it and
burned flowers into it. He was planning on giving it to her when she came home
for winter break. Now he was cutting it up into little pieces. It looked like
he was trying to make mulch out of it as he fed it through the saw over and
over again. The worst part was that he was sobbing as he did it. In twenty-two
years, until my sister died I‘d never seen him cry. I still wasn’t used to it.
I stood there, battling with myself. Did he need me to go in there, or did he
want to be left alone? I didn’t have to wonder too long before there was a big
crash in the kitchen. I had to go check on Mom. I went running into the house and
I found my mother sitting in the floor, surrounded by spaghetti noodles and an
upside down pot. There was water all over the floor around her.

“Mom!
Are you okay? What happened?”
I knelt down to feel the water
with my hand and make sure it wasn’t hot.
It wasn’t, thank God. She was
sobbing again.
“Mom?”

She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were so
swollen it looked like she could barely see out of them. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“I can’t do anything right anymore.”

“Oh Mom,” I sat all the way down in the water on the
floor next to her and put my arms around her. We sat there for a really long
time while she cried and I decided that no matter how much time passed they
were never going to be the same. I felt like I’d lost my sister and my parents.

I spent a few more hours there. I got Mom cleaned up
and tucked her into her bed. Then I cleaned up the kitchen and checked on Dad
again. He wasn’t crying any longer, but I still didn’t go in. Now he was
burning Emma’s name into a new piece of wood. I had no idea what for and I
wasn’t going to ask. I went back inside and got out some more spaghetti
noodles. I cooked them and made some sauce with what I could find in the
pantry. I looked in on Mom. She was asleep. I went out to finally talk to Dad
and I found him with his head down on his workbench, asleep as well. I doubted
either of them had been getting much sleep at night. I left him alone again and
just left a note for them on the chalkboard in the kitchen, letting them know
that dinner was ready. I locked the front door on my way out, but I realized
that the pain locked in there with them was probably worse than anything that
could walk in the door.

I picked up my own dinner on the way home and when I
got there, I locked myself in the apartment with my own grief. I ate about two
bites but nothing tasted good, so I threw it all away. I found a mindless
comedy on HBO and lay down on the couch to watch it. About half an hour into
the movie my text message alert went off. I nearly kicked myself in the ass for
hoping it was Alexa when I reached for it. It wasn’t. It was Kristie.
Surprise.

She must have been in “sane” mode because the text
said, “
I’m sorry for bothering you. I
just want to make sure you’re doing okay. I feel so bad about Emma and can’t
stop thinking about how hard it must be on you.”

I guess her sanity brought out the insanity in me
because I texted her back:
“Thanks, Kristie.
I miss her so bad.”

“I
know baby,”
she texted back.
“You shouldn’t be alone. You should let me come over and just hold
you.”

As good as that sounded at the moment, I wasn’t
quite that insane yet. I tried to avoid answering by saying,
“How are you doing?”

“I’m
good. I got a new personal trainer though. I was having nothing but problems
with Jose. I gained five pounds last week.”
I read that and
laughed out loud. Poor Jose, she blamed him for everything.

“So
who are you going to now?”
I asked. I wasn’t sure why I was
feeding into this…any of it. I just desperately didn’t want to be alone right
now.

“I
got a female trainer. Her name is Violet March. Do you know her?”

“Not
personally, but I’ve heard good things.”

I heard she was a ball-buster, but that’s what Kristie
needed,
Someone
to stand up to her and not take her
crap. She was quite the snob when she wanted to be.

“So
how is the fighting going?”

In Kristie language that translated to: Are you
still raking in the bucks? Kristie liked the finer things in life.
Unfortunately for her she hadn’t found a sugar daddy that she was okay with
being seen with in public. So, she settled for me because she thought there was
a chance I’d be famous someday.

“Good,
I’m winning, a lot,”
I texted back.
“I have one tomorrow night.”

“Oh
yay!”
she replied. Then there was a pause between texts
for about fifteen minutes. The one that came then said,
“Can I go?”

I told myself that at least she was asking now and
not just showing up. That was an improvement, right?

“Yeah.
How about we have dinner after?”

 
What the hell? Did I
just ask my crazy ex-girlfriend to dinner? I guess I was the one that just said
you shouldn’t hold people’s past against them. Everyone can change.

“I’d
love to,”
she texted back. We made arrangements to meet after
the fight. I ended the conversation feeling better. It was something to look
forward to…I think.

CHAPTER
FOUR

ALEXA

“Alexa?
Can I come in?” My dad was knocking on my bedroom door for the third time that
day. I was still in bed. I hardly got out of bed anymore. I was so focused on
feeling sorry for myself that I hadn’t thought about what I was doing to him.
The poor thing, I was such a mess and he was so worried about me. I felt
terrible, but I didn’t know how to shake this unrelenting pain. I don’t even
think anyone who hadn’t experienced it would understand that this kind of
emotional pain is real, physical pain.

“Yeah Dad, come on in.”

He pushed open the door and stood there for a minute
while his eyes adjusted to the dim light. The sun was still out, but I had
pulled the drapes so none of it was allowed to filter in. It had begun to piss
me off that it dared to still shine while Emma lay in a cold, dark hole in the
ground.