Uncommon Passion (36 page)

“Hey,” Sam said when he opened the door. He nodded at the now-finished garage walls. “Thanks.”

“I wasn’t taking any chances you’d come back and try to finish the job,” Ben said pointedly. He’d called

in a favor from a contractor friend. She’d finished the job while Sam and Chris were living at the hospital.

“How’re you feeling?”

“No headaches for the last couple of days. You coming over tomorrow?” Sam asked.

“Probably not.”

“Still got the thing with the virgin?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“She ended it a couple of weeks ago.”

“She did or you did?”

He flashed Sam his battle-tested smile, the one that was all teeth and no eyes, then looked down at his

phone. “She did. It was getting boring anyway.”

Even as the lie left his mouth a fist came out of nowhere, landing hard enough against Ben’s cheekbone

to explode a supernova behind his eye and rock him off balance. He stumbled backward into the

workbench, then scrabbled at the edge of the shelving unit, automatically trying to right himself when Sam

slammed into him full bore. The air knocked from his lungs, Ben grappled with him, pushing his forearms

in his face, just trying to keep Sam from hurting himself. Glass jars of screws and nails tipped over. One

spun to the edge of the bench, rolled to the ground, and shattered, sending sharp metal and glass all over

the floor.

“Jesus, Sam,” he gasped. His brother landed an elbow to Ben’s gut, another to the side of his head

before driving Ben back into the cement. He twisted, taking the brunt of impact from both their bodies into

his shoulder and head, which knocked against the floor, then wrapped one arm around Sam’s torso,

locking his arm at his side as he tried to contain the other.

“Knock it—stop—goddammit!” he roared as they grappled on the floor. “You’re going to hurt

yourself!”

The garage door flung open. “What the fuck is going on out here!” Chris demanded. “Jesus fucking

Christ, Ben! You hit him? He just got out of the fucking hospital!”

“I didn’t—” Ben huffed out from flat on his back, then ducked an elbow. “I didn’t hit him!”

Chris bear-hugged Sam’s waist and hoisted him right off the floor, then carried him a few feet back

from Ben, but not before Sam’s foot landed in Ben’s diaphragm as he straightened. The kick knocked the

wind entirely out of him. He went to his knees on the floor, trying to wait out the panic until his breath

came back in one heaving gasp.

Inhale felt like prayer.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he shouted at Sam.

“Do I have your attention?” his brother demanded as he shook free of Chris’s arms.

Ben fingered his temple, pulsing with his rapid heartbeat and already swelling. “Yeah.”

“How long are you going to punish everyone else for what I did?”

He looked up at Sam. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Hands raised, Chris stepped between them, then he pointed into the identical faces. “It’s about fucking

time you had this conversation, but keep your goddamn voices down,” he said, his tone as smooth and

quiet as a blade. “I just, and I mean
just
got Jonathan back to sleep. You wake that boy up and I will put

both your asses back in the hospital.”

What conversation? Ben swiped blood from his mouth and glared at his brother. With his brows

lowered and furious intent in his eyes, Sam looked like a Neanderthal, which meant Ben did, too.

“Have you lost your mind?” Ben hissed. His head throbbed like he’d taken a hit from a sledgehammer.

Sam didn’t need hand-to-hand training. His brother learned to fight on the streets, and he fought dirty.

With Chris back in the house, Sam strolled up to Ben and gave him a taunting little shove. “G’on. Get

mad at me.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Ben growled, refusing to get drawn into a fight with his brother.

“Why not? You should be. Going easy on me because I’m a faggot?” Sam punctuated the question with

a not-so-gentle push. “Or because it’s easier to be mad at Dad than me?”

Ben stared at his normally rational, thoughtful brother while fear sucked his stomach through the

cement floor. Concussions and other brain injuries could bring on changes in personality, and Sam had

been out for the count for days.

“Or is it because you’re a fucked-up pussy?”

He’d let his brother get away with a lot, but that accusation hit too close to home. “Watch it,” he warned

Sam, bringing his arms out sharp and hard to knock Sam’s next shove away.

“Bring it,” Sam shot back, yelling in a whisper. “I’m not afraid to take risks.”

“I take risks.”

Another shove slammed Ben against the newly installed drywall at the back of the garage. “In situations

where you end up in the hospital, sure. Get shot, get a pipe taken to your thick, stupid head, that’s Ben

Harris, tough man. When the consequences are adrenaline rush or death you’ll risk everything we love to

prove you don’t give a shit about us or how we feel. But you won’t risk loving someone.”

The words landed with the same brain-stunning power as Sam’s first punch. Wounded, shredded, his

soul battered, he shoved Sam, putting his full weight into the move. His brother stumbled back. “I’ve

already lost my heart, Sam. Someone I loved more than I will ever love another human being again walked

out of my life without a word, and that someone was
you
. So don’t you fucking talk to me about taking

risks. Some of us don’t have anything left to risk.”

As soon as the words left his mouth he would have given his life to take them back because he knew it

was a lie. He’d left Sam for football and girls and the safety of popularity long before Sam left home. He’d

abandoned the brother who talked for him, taken for granted that the person who knew him best, who was

him, would always be there for him.

Don’t go. Stick it out until we’re eighteen. Tone it down a little. It’s not much longer. Two years. We

can make it, then we’ll be out of here.

But Sam had to be Sam, had every right to be Sam. Ben was the one who’d failed him, and therefore

failed both of them. He couldn’t take care of his own brother. How could he take care of anyone else?

Sam straightened, then folded his arms across his chest. Ben blinked, looked away, covering the flinch

with another swipe across his swelling mouth and fingers testing his bruised eye. The bare bulb overhead

hummed in the silence stretching taut between them. He was the one trained to wait out a suspect’s silence,

but faced with Sam and what happened all those years ago, he broke first.

“It’s not your fault,” Ben said. “I wasn’t there for you.”

“What?” Sam blinked. Shook his head like he hadn’t heard him right. “What?”

Sam looked at him like he dropped out of the sky, his face in an expression Ben didn’t recognize in

himself, or in Sam. He shrugged to cover his reluctance to say this out loud, to confess his shame and

failure. But in the end, he’d do more than that to keep Sam now. “I didn’t listen. I kept telling you to just

hold on until we graduated, to just tough it out. Stay safe. Don’t take any risks. But it was the wrong thing

to do. You had to go. I know that now. It just . . . hurt.”

“Jesus God, Ben,” Sam said, then swallowed hard. “Is that why you do this? Make it easy for people to

leave?”

“Sam, don’t ask me why,” he said. “Do I strike you as even remotely self-aware?”

His brother rubbed his palm slowly over his jaw. A light dawned in his eyes, and the similarity to

Rachel’s clear, golden gaze made Ben’s heart clench tight. “You didn’t fail me. If you hadn’t loved me so

much, I wouldn’t have had the strength to go. Knowing you loved me even though I was gay meant I was

never alone. You were the only good thing. I was the selfish one. I couldn’t take it anymore, and I left. I

didn’t email or call, because if I did you’d track me down. I knew you’d leave what you had for me. After a

while I figured you’d hate me for what I’d done. I hated me. For leaving.” He nailed Ben to the wall with

clear blue eyes. “For everything I did after.”

Ben didn’t look away. It took all his strength to not look away from his brother when he finally alluded

to what runaways did to stay alive on the streets, to numb the pain of the streets.

“And then I showed up outside your dorm and you got your football friends to let me crash with them

off campus and you never asked—”

“I wasn’t going to put you through it again.” He swallowed hard, but even so, tears trickled down his

face, into the cut on his mouth. “You were back. Where you were or what you did was completely

irrelevant. All I cared about was putting you back together so you wouldn’t leave again. I didn’t know how

to be without you, Sam. I still don’t.”

“Me, either.” His brother swiped a hand over his eyes, then put his hands on his hips and met Ben’s

gaze. “You were there when I began. You weren’t my other half. You were me. But I had to know who I

was without you. As hard as those years were, my only regret was leaving you. Every time you come over

I’m so happy to see you, and it kills me because I’m afraid, fucking scared to death, that you’ll never

forgive me for what I did. I left, but you never came back.”

Ben eased to the floor, his back to the drywall. Sam sat down opposite him, mirroring his position.

Knees up. Forearms dangling. They sat in the silence that was never really silence, instead a charged

communication happening on the cellular level. “I’m okay,” Sam said finally. “I am okay, Ben. I won’t lie

to you. I wasn’t, for a long time, but you hear me? I am okay. Come home. Please.”

Ben cut him a glance. “You’d think you were a psychologist or something.”

“Apparently I suck at it. I didn’t know you were blaming yourself.”

“I thought I was blaming Dad,” Ben said.

“Close enough. You’re just like him,” Sam said ruefully.

Ouch. “Katy says the same thing.”

Sam blew out his breath. “I know it wasn’t easy. Dad’s said as much. But he’s different now.”

Ben rubbed his forehead. “I don’t know, Sam. Do people really change?”

“Yes,” he said with a quirky grin. “Let Dad off that hook. The only thing he wants, the only thing he

prays for, is that you’ll start talking to him again. He remembers when we used to walk the fence line

together, back before all this started.”

The thought brought fresh tears to Ben’s eyes. He wiped his face on his shoulder to cover them.

“All anyone wants is someone to walk with them,” Sam said quietly.

Rachel. So strong, and so alone. And he’d been teaching her to walk alone. He wanted to watch her do

everything. Come apart under him, discover who she was now, who she’d be in a month, a year, a decade.

He wanted to watch her live. Rachel was the kind of woman who’d be different every time he came home

after a shift, and there was another thought he couldn’t shake—Rachel in his apartment when he came

home, or maybe in a house they bought together.

He’d tried to force her to disconnect, to treat life like he did, as a dip in the shallow end of pleasure.

Meaningless. Empty. He’d done what he did with every other woman, made it hot and fast and rough, and

she’d called him on it. His apartment was empty, missing even the promise of Rachel. His life was empty of

that as well, and of Sam, even though Sam had been back for a decade. That’s what was inside him.

Emptiness.

“I made her leave,” he said. “I really did.”

“How?”

“I was me.”

Sam, his brother, his twin, his heart and soul, knew what he meant. “So be someone better.”

“I don’t think I can make up for this.” The cuffs. Shit. Fuck. The way her hands jerked at the end. Like

she wanted to hold him.
Fuck.

“Be romantic,” Sam said dryly. “Be thoughtful. Jesus. As many girls as you’ve been with, you must

know something about romance.”

“Romance wasn’t what got me girls.” The uniform and an empty smile got him girls. Before that, it was

football. The night after the conference championship game was an alcohol-soaked blur, but he was pretty

sure there was a blonde, a brunette, and a raven-haired girl all on their knees at one point.

Was that who he was?

Christ. This was hopeless. He bent his head and ran his hands over his hair before linking his fingers at

the base of his neck.

“You know the story behind her name, right?”

Without looking up, Ben shook his head.

“Heathen,” Sam accused without heat. “In the Bible, Jacob loved Rachel and promised to work seven

years to earn her. On the wedding night, Laban swapped Leah for Rachel. Jacob didn’t notice, did the dirty

deed, and was married to Leah. Laban said he’d have to work another seven years to earn Rachel. Jacob

loved Rachel, so he did.”

“I’d notice,” Ben said, all the while thinking about Rachel’s father naming his baby girl something that

would remind him of how precious she was, how special, how no man would deserve her. “I’m not that far

gone. Fourteen years?”