Chapter 3 Anna
ANNA
I didn’t take kindly to being ignored.
I knew that Brutus was hurt. Over the time that I got to know him, I found that he really was the squishiest of all the guys here. A kind heart. A gentle soul. At least, he was to me.
Sometimes.
When I wasn’t tormenting him.
Though that was fun.
But tonight, there was something different about him.
While I usually didn’t mind the one-sided conversations between the two of us—since I was more than capable of talking enough for the both of us—I saw him staring at my brother.
I saw him watching that woman. I saw something flit behind his eyes that I hadn’t seen before.
Brutus was easy to read, and I wondered if that’s why he kept to the darkness.
Sure, his face didn’t move much, but his eyes told everything.
I could read him like a book when I could get him to look at me.
Like right now.
He was hurt.
I leaned against the doorframe of his room. “You good?”
He grunted and nodded before he eased himself into the bed. The frame creaked and he groaned like an old man, like the creak was his fucking back or something.
Then I heard something pop.
My eyebrows rose. “Don’t tell me that was your knee, old man.”
He shot me a look before he reached for his bowl.
I grinned as I pushed off the doorframe and walked over to the foot of the bed that certainly wasn’t big enough to hold him.
“That was your knee, wasn’t it?” I asked.
He clicked his tongue and let out a soft grunt as he plopped the pathetically small bowl in his lap.
I crooked my eyebrow. “That looks like one whole bite of food for you.”
“I get it, I’m big,” he snapped.
Snapped.
At me.
My eyebrows slowly rose, and my head cocked to the side. “Okay, so I’ll ask again. You good?”
He sighed heavily and scrubbed his hand down his face. “Sorry.”
Now I knew something was wrong. “Did you just apologize?”
“Anna, I’m sorry, but what is the magic combination of words to get you to go away right now? I can’t have a conversation right now.”
I stood there for a moment and watched him take his first bite of food. “I’m worried about you.”
He paused his fork halfway to his mouth before his gaze slowly slid to mine. “What?”
I sighed as I stood there at the foot of his bed. “I saw the way you looked at my brother. I saw the way that woman kept reacting to your presence. It’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
He just shrugged and took a swig of his drink, his hand dwarfing the glass and making it look like some sort of child-sized Capri-Sun bullshit.
“She’s fine,” is all he said.
“Bullshit,” I said as I walked over and perched on the edge of the bed. “It bothers you, and you know it.”
“Anna,” he warned.
“Don’t ‘Anna’ me,” I said as I wrinkled my nose. “I’ll fucking put pickle juice in your coffee in the fucking morning. Talk to me, Bee. Tell me what’s running through your mind.”
He just stabbed his food, though.
I swear, getting him to have a decent conversation was like pulling teeth from a goddamn pitbull.
“Brutus.”
“No,” he said in a curt voice when his gaze whipped back up. “I don’t know what’s happening right now, but no. I’m hungry, and then I need to do another patrol, and then I have to try and sleep in this godforsaken bed. So, right now? No.”
And then, he went back to eating.
I just watched him for a while. Usually I loved the one-sided conversations he and I had.
No one ever lets me talk the way he lets me talk.
I could fire off about anything, and it never phased him.
I could tell him anything on my mind, even the wildest shit, and he’d just shrug it off like it was nothing.
Like the other day, I told him about the first prank I ever pulled on my parents.
I stretched tape over their doorframe so that when they got up in the morning to head to get coffee, they’d run right into it.
Had Dad cussing at me for fucking days over it.
Every once in a while, I could even get him to chuckle with some of my stories.
Like the time I told him about the senior prank I helped my senior class in high school pull off.
The principal’s kid was in our graduating class, and one day she snuck the keys to her father’s classic vehicle.
We were just supposed to take it out on a joyride with the rest of the class so that we could take pictures and cover his office with them.
But what we ended up doing was covering the entire damn thing in aluminum foil for him to find and unwrap the next morning.
That was the first time I ever heard Brutus’s laugh.
That big, bombastic, brutal laugh. It barked out of his throat with a raspiness that rushed against my ears not like sandpaper, but like tires on gravel.
I made it my mission to get him to laugh some.
To get that stern, brutal face of his to light up every once in a while.
It was hard, though.
And I had a feeling it would be impossible tonight.
“Gotta go,” I heard him say.
It pulled me out of the recesses of my mind and I saw him already lumbering out of the bed.
He grunted as he turned and contorted, setting the bowl and glass down on the bedside table before he shoved himself upright.
I watched him stretch his hands up toward the ceiling, and I realized that he couldn’t even stretch out all the way without his knuckles raking against the popcorn texture.
“Need to pop that space between your shoulders?” I asked as I got up. “Here, if you pull your arms behind your back, I can—”
His arms immediately dropped, and he spun to face me. “I’m fine, Anna. Stop fussing over me.”
I went to fire back at him, but I heard a vibration. My hand immediately rushed to my boobs where I kept my cell phone.
Yes, I kept my cell phone in my bra.
I dipped my hand in to fish it out just as Brutus pulled out his phone. The screen lit up his face, and for a moment, I stared at the scar that cut through his right eyebrow. I never noticed it before, and it made me wonder how he got it.
“Gotta go,” he muttered as he slid the phone back into his pocket.
I checked my phone just to make sure I didn’t have a notification, but I didn’t. I never did. Who the fuck was gonna contact me, anyway? The only people I hung out with were either under this roof already or coming to and from the safehouse.
It’s not like I had friends or shit.
“Where are we headed?” I asked as I fell in line beside him. “Another patrol? We could take the—”
“No,” he said as he turned to face me as we stood in the hallway just beyond his bedroom door.
I scoffed and crossed my arms over my chest. “You know, Bee, if you keep telling me ‘no’, I may actually start to take it personally.”
“Not like you’re good with the word, anyway,” he mumbled as he began walking away from me again.
“Hey!” I exclaimed as I reached out for his wrist.
I tugged at him, and he yanked his arm out of my grasp. “What, Anna?”
I was over the attitude. “The hell do you mean, what? I try and give a damn about how you’re feeling, and suddenly, I’m public enemy number one? The fuck is that shit?”
I watched him grind his teeth together as he stared off down the hallway. “Cap’s calling church. You know you can’t come.”
I scoffed. “Then why the hell didn’t you just say that? Why am I all of a sudden being treated like some sort of pariah in your life?”
He rolled his shoulders back and tilted his head side to side until there was a crack that ricocheted between us.
He groaned with relief. “I’ll be back soon, Anna. We’ll do another patrol after the meeting is done.”
I watched him walk off for a bit before I cupped my hands over my mouth. “You guys are no fun with your secrets, you know!”
His snicker was the only sound he left me with before he rounded the corner out of sight.
“Well fuck me then,” I muttered as I turned back around.
I saw Jasmine staring at me with her eyebrows sliding slowly up her forehead. Her hair, disheveled. The hickeys on her neck, glaring in the harsh hallway lighting.
“What?” I asked as I held my arms out.
She giggled as she quickly dipped back into her room and closed the door.
I shook my head as I turned and stared into Brutus’s room again. My God, that twin size bed was pathetic for him. But then again, I wasn’t sure there was a standard bed around that fit all of Brutus. He’d probably need one crafted for him, like my brother needed.
King always had to have his shit specialty made.
You should leave.
I took a step closer to Brutus’s room.
Now isn’t the time for snooping.
I reached out and eased the bedroom door all the way open.
He didn’t give you permission to be in here.
“He didn’t tell me to leave, though,” I muttered to myself.
I was always a snooper. Yes, I was one of those people that always looked through other people’s cabinets and shit whenever I visited their house.
King taught me that, actually. Said that I could learn a lot about someone by the shit they kept behind the mirror in their bathroom and the shit they kept in their closets.
I didn’t snoop much, though. I ended up just sitting on the edge of that ridiculous twin bed, staring at nothing.
I could hear some of the women down the hall, talking softly to each other.
A few laughs, even. Small ones. The kind that sounded like they surprised themselves.
I’d noticed that about them, the way they startled at their own laughter, like they’d forgotten they were allowed to have it.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I never knew what to do with things I couldn’t fix.
So I just sat there and listened, and told myself it didn’t mean anything that it bothered me this much.
And I had access to both with Brutus in that fucking church meeting.