In the Zone (Portland Storm 5) (29 page)

“I, uh…” He dragged a hand through his hair, looking as sheepish as I’d ever seen him. He looked all around us, as though making sure no one else would hear, but we kept walking toward my car.

“I’m not going to say anything,” I assured him.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind what this was about. If he hadn’t seen me when I’d caught him and Shane making out on the stairs last night, he’d sure as hell seen me when I got home from Brie’s house and found the two of them half dressed in my kitchen. They’d come down for snacks after the first round—at least that was how it seemed. I’d grabbed a bottle of water and headed upstairs to my room without saying a thing to either of them. There were too many other things on my fucking mind at that moment to worry about what Colesy thought about me knowing he was gay. He’d left before I got up this morning.

He’d been tense all through morning skate, screwing things up that he wouldn’t usually otherwise. I’d known exactly what was behind it, but that wasn’t something I could talk to him about with all the other guys hanging around and listening in. If
he
brought it up, that was one thing. I couldn’t—and wouldn’t—be the one to do that, though.

“I figured it out not long after the season started and I haven’t outed you yet. I’m not going to change that now.”

Colesy let out an audible breath of relief.

Everything that had happened between him and my brother last night had only weighed on my mind the whole night when I should have been sleeping, as much as everything I’d told Brie about my relationship with Garrett. Shane might be here to find some way to get back at me, but he wouldn’t do something to hurt anyone else in the process. If he’d come here with the intention of finding some way to hurt me, what was he doing with Colesy? It didn’t line up in my head, making Brie’s assertion—that Shane wanted to make things right between the two of us—seem more plausible. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it, though, no matter how much sense it made.

I didn’t know if he had any intention of forming a real relationship with my teammate or if it was just a vacation fling. Either way, my previous assumption that he was here to cause me trouble was proving pretty flimsy.

Colesy set his jaw, as if he was chewing something over. “You already knew?”

“Yeah, I did. But I doubt the rest of the boys know. You keep it under wraps pretty well.”

He nodded, but he looked about as far from being convinced of that as we were from taking a swim on the surface of the sun.

“Even if they do know,” I said, “who gives a fuck? That shit doesn’t matter, and if it does matter to someone, they can take it up with me.”

He stopped cold then, and I turned to face him.

“You don’t have to— I mean, I don’t expect—”

“You’re a part of this team,” I cut in. “You’re one of us. Nothing else is important, and anyone who tries to make an issue out of it is going to have to answer to me. That’s all there is to it, Colesy. I don’t give a damn if you’re screwing my brother or if you dress in drag or if you’ve slept with half the gay men in Oregon or if you dye your skin pink. What matters is you’re my teammate and my friend. Now come on. Let’s go have lunch with the rest of the boys.”

“Yeah,” he said, surprise coloring the word as it slipped out. But then he caught up with me again and climbed into the passenger seat of my car, and we went to meet the team at Amani’s.

When I got home that afternoon, Shane was sitting in the living room with his laptop open, a cup of coffee on the table in front of him. All three of my dogs were surrounding him, Dexter and Shadow hanging out by his feet on the floor and Pepper curled up on the sofa by his hip, looking longingly at his lap. She wasn’t a fan of the laptop being where she wanted to be, and she had never been terribly picky about whose lap it was she wanted to be on. Never mind the fact that she was too damn big to be a lapdog whether someone had a computer sitting there or not.

Shane looked up when I came in, shutting the lid of his computer. “Good practice?”

I shrugged. “Good enough.” Actually, it had been awful. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep again, and I couldn’t get my mind off everything that Brie and I had talked about until well past midnight. Bergy had been all over me all morning, breathing down my neck as though that would clear my head.

The only good thing about the practice was that it was the first time Nicky had gotten back on the ice with us in a while. He wouldn’t be playing tonight—the doctors still hadn’t cleared him for that—but at least he was starting to participate again.

I collapsed back on the opposite end of the sofa, and Pepper took that as her cue to claim my open lap before it was otherwise occupied. I rubbed her head absentmindedly and scratched her ears, trying to ignore the similarities between how she was all over me and how Brie’s cat had been last night.

“Did you have lunch?” I asked since I couldn’t come up with anything better to say. Shane and I hadn’t talked in the easy way brothers did in so long I didn’t think either one of us remembered how it was done. There wasn’t a fucking easy thing about this.

“Leftovers from last night.”

At least there’d been plenty of that, even though it was more snack food than anything I’d consider a meal. I nodded, letting out some sort of grunt.

We sat in silence again, each of us looking at the other every now and then. At least he was as uncomfortable as I was. I’d prefer it if we were at ease with each other, but I didn’t know if that would ever be a possibility again.

“You give Cole a hard time today?” he asked out of the blue.

Or maybe it wasn’t out of the blue. Of course he would expect me to do that.

“No,” I replied cautiously, looking down at Pepper’s blissful expression as I gave her love. It was safer to look at her because I knew how she would react. I didn’t have the first clue where my brother wanted this conversation to go, but I had no intention of saying the wrong thing. I wanted every word out of my mouth to be right. There were enough things in this life that I regretted already, and I damn well wasn’t going to add to the list today.

“I told him his secret’s safe with me as long as he wants it to be a secret. And I told him that if and when the time comes that he doesn’t want it to be a secret any longer, he could count on me to stand next to him.” Not behind him. Beside him, or maybe even in front of him if it came to that.

The same as I would do for Shane. The same as I should have done for Garrett.

I finally got the balls to look over at him. He was studying me, much as he’d done last night when I’d come upon him and Colesy. Staring hard. Trying to figure me out as much as I was trying to figure him out.

“You gonna give me a hard time today?” he asked.

Those same fucking tears from last night choked me. I swallowed before I spoke, but my voice still sounded strangled when I said, “No.”

“How long have you known?”

“Gran let it slip a few years back. She thought I knew,” I added. “She wouldn’t have said anything if she knew I was supposed to be in the dark.”

“I didn’t want to keep it from you. I just—”

“Scared I’d turn on you?”

He shook his head. “Nah. I knew you never meant that shit. I just didn’t know how you’d react since you blamed yourself for Garrett.”

“You blamed me, too,” I scoffed.

“No, I didn’t. Never.” He was suddenly very sober, serious. “Mom and Dad don’t blame you, either, you know. They’re waiting for you to realize it wasn’t your fault. Waiting for you to be able to come home again.”

“I come home every summer.”

“You come to Nova Scotia every summer, but you never come by the house. You never call any of us. You keep to yourself and avoid anything to do with him—especially us.” He took a sip from his cup and carefully returned it to the table. “Look, I get it. It’s hard to go back there. It was two years before I could step foot inside that garage—”

“I’m not afraid of a fucking garage.”

“No, you’re afraid of what it’ll make you feel to go back there. But it’s time, Keith. You’ve spent too many years of your life trying to run from the past.”

“I’m not running now.”

“Maybe not. But you’ve still got your back turned to it.”

“Which means I’m not hurting anyone.”

“You’re fucking hurting yourself, Keith!” He stood up, pacing to the fireplace and back a few times. “And if you don’t knock that shit off soon, you’re going to hurt Brie, too.”

I
knew
he’d been fishing for ways to use her or my relationship with her against me. I should have trusted my gut on that one. “Keep your nose out of things between me and Brie. Just stay the fuck away from her.”

“I don’t have any intention of getting involved. If you’d calm down for a minute—”

“I
am
calm,” I growled.

“Bullshit. You look like you want to hit something.”

“Maybe you.”

“Hit me then, if that’ll make you feel better.”

Hitting him wouldn’t make me feel better, though. Maybe letting him hit me would. “Just stay the fuck away from Brie,” I muttered.

“Fine.” Shane crossed his arms, glaring at me. “No, not fine. Because I saw how you watched her last night and I’m not going to sit here and let you fuck that up like you’ve tried to fuck everything else in your life up.”

“Screw you.”

“You’re not my type, but that’s beside the point.”

“So what is your fucking point, then?” I shouted. Pepper got off my lap and ran out of the room when I raised my voice, and both Dexter and Shadow followed her. Maybe it was better if they weren’t around. I didn’t want them to think they were in trouble, and I pretty much never raised my voice around them. “Would you get to it, already?”

“The point is you’re my fucking brother and I fucking miss you, you ass,” he shouted in return. “I need you, and I’m sick and tired of fucking sitting around waiting for you to get over yourself and come home. We’ve been trying to give you your space and let you deal with your grief in your own way, but it’s been years and I can’t do it anymore. I need my fucking brother back, and you’re the only one I have left.”

“You’ve been doing all right without me.”

“Says who?” he scoffed. “Gran told you I’m gay, but I guess she forgot to mention that I’m bipolar, huh? Did she tell you I’m on all sorts of meds, and they’re the only thing that keeps me from pulling the same shit Garrett did?”

“You’re bipolar?” I vaguely recalled Mom using that term to describe her depression years before. I had never noticed her problem much, other than a few times over the years when she would get really down for a while, or maybe she would have these crazy bursts of energy and she wouldn’t level out until she went back to the doctor and got her medications adjusted.

“Same as Mom and Garrett,” Shane said. “I probably still wouldn’t know, if not for Mom insisting I go get checked out after Garrett died. She said she’d seen the signs in both of us for years, but she’d always told herself that it was all in her imagination, that it was only her own disease talking and trying to convince her she wasn’t alone in it all.”

Not much of what he was saying sunk in for me. One thing kept repeating itself in my head over and over again, though: Garrett was probably bipolar. And undiagnosed. So he wouldn’t have been taking anything to help keep him straight, to keep everything level.

“Did you hear me?” Shane demanded, pacing again. “Garrett was depressed. For a long time.”

“Because of me,” I argued feebly, but the argument was getting old, even to me.

“He knew you didn’t mean that shit, same as I did. You were our fucking brother. We knew you loved us.”

“But I—”

“You said a bunch of stupid things. I’m not going to deny that.” He plopped down next to me on the sofa. “Hell, I called him a pussy, too, and a lot more than that. We were kids. We were trying to be tough and cool, we acted like idiots, and we hurt each other. That’s what brothers do. Don’t you think it’s time we grew up and stopped, though?”

He really meant it. Shane wasn’t trying to throw punches. He wasn’t here to get back at me. His face was all screwed up, as though he was fighting to hold back his emotion. The same as I was.

“Why don’t you hate me?”

“Why don’t
you
hate
me
?” he said in response.

I could never hate him. He was my brother. “Because I love you.”

He gave me a
well, duh
sort of look. “Well, I love you, too, you fucking asswipe.”

“You really think Garrett…that it wasn’t because of me?”

“He always gave you back as good as he got. Me too. We all went at each other like boys do. He didn’t kill himself because of you.” Shane reached down to scratch Pepper’s ears since she’d come back after all the shouting had stopped. “Look, you weren’t around much the last few years before that. You’d gone off to play in college and then you were here. You didn’t see what he was like. I did. He was pretty fucked up. I think dancing was the only thing keeping him even a little bit okay.”

And that hadn’t been going as well as he would have liked, according to Brie.

“Damn.”

“
Damn
doesn’t even begin to cover it. Can you let yourself off the hook already?” Shane asked. “It’s been way too long.”

Just like last night, tears stung the backs of my eyes and threatened to press through to the front. At first, I tried to fight it down, but if I couldn’t cry in front of my brother, who the hell could I cry in front of? I stopped trying to fight it off, letting the damned wetness fall.

I wasn’t the only one crying, either. Shane was as much of a mess as I was when he reached across the space between us and pulled me in for a hug. It was a real hug, not a guy hug. It had been so long since I’d hugged anyone in my family but Gran that I didn’t want it to end. I held on longer than he might have been prepared for, but he initiated the whole damn thing so he was going to have to deal with it.

I wasn’t sure how long we held on to each other, crying like that. It was only when all three of my dogs tried to get in on the act, three huge animals trying to smother us and join in the hug fest, that we separated, laughing.