Chapter 27 Wes #2
Hayes shook his head, the weight of big-brother worry sitting on his shoulders in a way I recognized too well.
“She needs somebody solid right now,” he finished.
A laugh tried to claw its way out of my chest and die at the same time. Solid was not the word I would have picked for a guy who had come in his own pants watching that same sister touch herself the night before.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I got her.”
He nodded once, satisfied. “See you over there.”
He headed for his truck, beer knocking against his leg. I stood there, bag hanging from my hand, guilt and something hotter tangling under my sternum.
Brody’s dining room table looked like a small war had broken out on it.
Dice everywhere. Graph paper. A map in dry-erase marker that made absolutely no sense to anyone but Austin, with arrows and little X’s and skulls scattered around a hand-drawn keep. Empty beer bottles, a bowl of pretzels, somebody’s abandoned sweatshirt slung over the back of a chair.
“Still can’t believe you almost ate it on the driveway,” Cal was saying, shuffling a deck of spell cards and teasing Hayes. “It wasn’t even a real hill, man.”
Hayes flipped him off and reached for the pretzels. “Black ice is an equal-opportunity assassin.”
“Sure,” Brody said, lining up minis. “But only you would manage to almost concuss yourself.” Brody pointed at Hayes. “Besides, I salted the sidewalk, so don’t come for me.”
My mouth twitched.
It hit me a second later that I was actually glad to be here.
The noise didn’t feel like sandpaper on my nerves tonight.
The scrape of chairs, the clatter of dice in the tray, the argument about whether our half-elf ranger could seduce the NPC stablehand again—it all landed like background music instead of overload.
My leg was stretched out under the table, prosthetic braced, and I shifted without thinking about who was watching.
“You’re up, Vaughn,” Austin said, tapping the map where my character’s mini figurine stood at the mouth of a cave. “Horse of the Damned or whatever you named him needs to pick a direction.”
“Midnight,” I corrected, because some things mattered. “And he’s not damned. He’s misunderstood.”
“Just roll.” Brody chuckled.
I shook the dice in my hand. The plastic clicked together in a familiar rhythm, grounding me in a way nothing else did.
Halfway through the roll, my phone buzzed in my pocket.
I caught it with my other hand, thumb flicking the screen under the edge of the table.
Clara
Why did my brother text me that I can thank him for the “perfect tampons”?
Heat crawled up my neck. A laugh tried to sneak out of my chest.
My thumbs moved before my brain could overthink it.
Me
I’ll explain later, but basically I panicked and had to roll with it.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
Clara
You’re ridiculous. Thank you for the right kind anyway.
The little knot inside my chest loosened. I stuffed the phone back in my pocket, mouth fighting a smile.
“Text from work?” Hayes asked, tone casual as he reached for his d20 dice.
My face stayed neutral, but I could feel the amusement tugging at the edges. “Just Clara checking I didn’t die on the stairs,” I said.
“See?” Austin said. “Full-time live-in nurse. You’re basically a Hallmark movie.”
“Pretty sure Hallmark skips the part where she rolls her eyes and tells me to stop being such a baby,” I said.
The table laughed. Hayes shook his head, but there was something thoughtful in his eyes, like he was turning the words over.
Game night rolled on.
We argued about spell slots and rations.
Brody cursed when we walked right into a trap he’d been telegraphing for three sessions.
Hayes’s character did something spectacularly stupid that somehow worked out for everyone.
It felt like old times in a way that made my soul ache a little—same guys, same table, same noise, except my leg didn’t feel like a spotlight and my brain wasn’t trying to drag me out of my own skin.
Underneath all of it, a thin thread tugged—a steady awareness that I was living two lives now. One at this table, rolling dice and talking shit. One back at the house, teaching my hands to stay off my roommate while my mouth did everything else.
Eventually the pizza boxes were empty, the beer was gone, and people started peeling off with clapped shoulders and shouted promises to “definitely read my spells before next time.”
I shrugged on my jacket.
“You heading out too?” Hayes asked, grabbing his keys from the hook by the door.
“Yeah.” I stretched, feeling the tug in my thigh in a way that was more information than pain. “Early PT tomorrow. My therapist will have my ass if I show up half asleep.”
We stepped out onto the porch together. The night air was sharp and cold, breath coming out in white puffs. Across the street, somebody’s porch light buzzed, haloed in a cloud of fine winter air.
For a second it was easy. Just me and my best friend, standing side by side like we had a hundred times before everything changed.
“You seem . . . better,” Hayes said.
The way he said it wasn’t casual. It was careful.
I forced a shrug. “Good hair day.”
He snorted. “Yeah, that must be it.”
His hand slid into his jacket pocket. The other fiddled with his keys, metal chiming softly.
“I mean it,” he added, eyes on the dark street instead of my face.
“It’s been a long time. Tonight you actually yelled at Cal for trying to seduce an innkeeper with his charisma score again. That felt like the old you.”
A huff of a laugh slipped out. “He deserved it,” I said. “Guy keeps thinking he’s the main character just because he’s young and cocky.”
Something eased in his shoulders, but I knew that look. The one that meant he was lining up a question and trying to figure out how to ask it without stepping on a land mine.
Hayes huffed a laugh, then sobered. He turned his head, studying me for a long beat, the way he used to when we were kids and he was trying to see if I was really okay after some dumb stunt.
“I really am glad she’s staying with you,” he said.
Something in my throat locked.
He rolled the keys between his fingers. “I’m not going to do the whole ‘hurt my sister and I bury you under the barn’ speech,” he went on.
“You know who she is. Just know that Clara feels everything big.” His jaw tightened, the muscle jumping once.
“So if things ever get . . . complicated . . . just don’t forget she’s Clara. Be kind.”
The words rang like a struck bell between us.
My brain threw up every image it had stored in the last twenty-four hours—her naked in front of me, the tremor in her thighs as she came on my face, the way she had looked at me afterward like I was something more than a broken man getting some practice in.
There was no version of this where I could look him in the eye and promise nothing would ever happen. Not only had that ship sailed, but it had set fire to the dock behind it.
“I’d never hurt her on purpose,” I said.
It was the only honest thing I could offer. My voice came out quiet and sincere. “Not in a way I can help.”
Hayes’s shoulders dropped. He nodded once, like that was the answer he’d been sifting for.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I trust you.”
He stepped off the porch toward his truck, then immediately caught the corner of his hoodie on Brody’s side mirror. The fabric snagged with a sharp rip.
“Motherfucker,” he muttered, yanking it free to reveal a fresh tear along the hem.
I shook my head, half exasperated, half fond, watching him stalk around the hood like the mirror had personally insulted him. Hayes Darling—cursed by ghosts, gravity, and the entire concept of inanimate objects.
My chest felt heavier as I walked to my own truck. Hayes’s words rode shotgun all the way home, a low, steady weight I couldn’t shake.
The house was dark when I stepped inside. My keys hit the bowl by the door with a clatter that echoed. My leg ached in that dull, familiar way from too much sitting and not enough stretching, so I rolled my shoulders, flexed my knee, and headed for the kitchen.
Cold light spilled over the floor when I opened the fridge. I reached for a bottle of water, hand landing on the shelf, then froze.
The list on the door had grown again.
Clara’s handwriting wove through mine in different colors of marker, looping and crowded, like we’d both kept reaching for rules because it felt easier than admitting how many we’d already broken. I let my gaze drag down the page.
Rule #1: No pity parties.
Rule #2: No sponge baths.
Rule #3: No random guys in the house (per the landlord).
Rule #4: Landlord must attend his own PT.
Rule #5: Tenant reserves the right to eat ice cream for dinner without judgment.
Rule #6: Knock like you mean it.
Rule #7: No hostile workplace signage.
Rule #8: The one who cooks doesn’t do the dishes.
My mouth twitched when I hit Rule #9.
Rule #9: No making out in the snow.
She’d drawn a thick, black X through the No, the word obliterated under the ink. Making out in the snow stared back at me like a confession.
Lower down, fresh additions:
Rule #10: Lessons stay behind closed doors.
Rule #11: Either one of us can call a halt. No guilt. No apologies.
My throat went tight.
We’d joked, that first night, about the big one. The catchall. No falling in love. She’d tossed it out like a joke, and I’d laughed like it was obvious. Like it was something you could just stick on a fridge and brute-force into existence with sheer will and permanent marker.
It wasn’t there.
Not crossed out. Not squeezed in at the bottom. Just . . . nonexistent.
The bottle of water sweated under my hand. The fridge hummed quietly, stubbornly doing its job while my stomach dropped for a reason that had nothing to do with hunger.
I told myself she’d forgotten to write it this time. That she’d been in a hurry, that she’d run out of room, that it was still understood even if it wasn’t spelled out in black ink.
I let my forehead rest against the cool metal, eyes closed, the chill seeping into my skin. The list blurred in my mind, a mess of lines and promises we kept pretending would keep us safe.
We had rules for everything except the one thing I seemed completely incapable of stopping.
The truth slipped in anyway, slow and inevitable.
That rule didn’t belong on the fridge because, for me, it was already broken.