Page 11 of Lifeline

“Mom,” Reno said lightly. We’d been gone from home for just shy of a year before the accident took away the chance for us to have a relationship with her as adults, to make things work. He had been hit the hardest, and I wondered how much still lingered in his head. “Just…all Mom.”

“Yeah,” I said, because as much as he hated leaving her behind, still feeling the strong tugs of obligation I had vehemently fought against, he too had left. He understood that our childhood had been nowhere near normal. That for all the love she had, there had been too many times that her demons had proven stronger. “I didn’t want to be that kid anymore. I didn’t want to be her son. And I guess…I dunno. It’s easier to explain why you’re on the other side of the country from your brother than it is to explain why when it’s your twin brother.”

He chewed on that for a moment before nodding. “That…makes sense. At least, how it was back then. Easier to cut off everything from your past and start over as someone else, someone you can control how people see you, what you look like to people, than it is to start over with one foot lodged in the past.”

I glanced at him. “You didn’t do that. You were ready to be you all the way through.”

“Yeah, well,” he grunted as he took a spot next to me without crowding, as I continued to fiddle. “That came with its own problems. I’m trying to tell myself you weren’t trying to distance yourself from me…or at least, not me me, but I was kind of…accidental collateral damage.”

“That sounds so much worse than if it was personal,” I said with a frown. “I wasn’t trying to⁠—”

“You weren’t pretending you didn’t have me, you just…downplayed everything because if you didn’t, people would start digging. Because that’s what people do when they do something stupid like care about you: they dig, asking questions, wanting to know more. And you didn’t want that part of your life to be known, and that meant me. If they knew too much about me, or me and you, then they’d start sniffing around. Easier to be vague but not obvious about it, and let people accept what you gave them,” he said, and I stared at him. “What?”

“Some of that is how I explained it to you back then, and some of it is not something I’ve said to you,” I said, looking him over. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“Eh, when you stop being so focused on yourself, you pay attention to other people. You figure some shit out that once upon a time, you would have needed a PowerPoint presentation and an itemized list to understand,” he chuckled.

“I’m sorry, for what it’s worth,” I told him. “I’m sorry you took a hit from me trying to just…not be a fuckup and fucking it up.”

He chuckled. “It’s worth plenty, but you don’t have to apologize. I forgave you a long ass time ago. Hell, I forgave you within a month of you admitting that to me, you know that.”

“It still hurts you.”

“Well, yeah, Mom’s been gone for years now, and it still hurts to think about her sometimes. Dad is still Dad, and that hurts sometimes, too. What’s your point?”

“Uh, not sure those three things share much in common.”

“Sure they do,” he said lightly. “I forgave you because I love you, because I know you didn’t mean harm, and I knew even back then that you wouldn’t do something like that to me again. Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, and it doesn’t mean that sometimes I remember that and I feel some sort of way about it. I mean, hell, I broke my arm snowboarding when I was eleven, and yet every winter I still take time to go on a mountain and snowboard down it.”

“I bet you still think about that broken arm every time you go, or at least the first time each season,” I pointed out.

“So fucking what? I still get on that damn board and go down, don’t I? And then I do it again the next time I can spare the time to travel. And then the next year, I do it again,” he said, looking at me like I was the densest creature. “That’s how it works; that’s how forgiveness works. Sometimes you forgive and never think of it again, and sometimes you forgive and you still think about it and feel about it. So yeah, sometimes I remember you hurt me pretty bad and it hurts a little, but you’re not that person anymore, and…I don’t know. I’m rambling, and if I keep going, it’s going to stop making sense, or I’ll completely lose the plot.”

I stared at him and let out a little laugh. “And since when has that ever stopped you?”

Snorting, he leaned his chin on my shoulder. “I love you, Mika, you know that. Everyone knows that. And honestly? It’s not like I was doing much better back then. I was…a hot ass mess, just like you. I was just…more obvious about it. We’re different people than we were back then, and you know what?”

“This is where you’re going to get on my nerves and tell me you bet Aidan has changed too,” I said dryly.

His arm came around my chest, and I could hear the grin in his voice. “Exactly. And I bet you’ve already come to that conclusion, and that’s why you’re so irritated.”

“Now you’re just being annoying,” I told him, and his laugh told me I had just confirmed his theory. “Quit hanging on me, this is exceptionally gay.”

“Ew, it can’t be gay.”

“Don’t think we all haven’t seen the bromance between you and Jake and wondered.”

“What? No,” he said in an irritated huff. “I meant because we’re brothers. You can’t say something two brothers are doing is gay because that makes it weird.”

“Fine, then the way you are with Jake is really gay.”

“I mean…it’s not, but I can see what you mean. If it were two other people, I’d make the same jokes.”

The ‘jokes’ sometimes felt less like jokes. The two were…well, it was hard to explain. There was absolutely no problem with two men being close without sex or romance involved; I was the first person to champion that. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t seen intense closeness between the guys in the past, that was just the nature of things when you were crammed together in a small area, and frequently thrown into dangerous situations where you had to rely on the others.

Yet there were just…times when I saw the two of them and I felt something pull at the back of my thoughts. It was a vague feeling, but it was persistent. I could never decide what it was exactly, but what I was teasing him about felt right. And yet there had never been any proof of anything other than close friends. And so I was left to just make comments, tease him a little, and tell myself I was being weird.

“I’m just saying,” I said, because I knew teasing him about their friendship always got a reaction. Which, of course, was suspect on its own, but hell, I wasn’t going to assume anything either.