8. Kieran
Chapter 8
Kieran
I hadn’t seen Clayton since last week when I took him for x-rays. It wasn’t that I’d stopped going to Mom’s. He just hadn’t been around. Every time I went there, he was holed up in his room. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that, except peeved. Mom was worried about him. Apparently his arm wasn’t healing as fast as they wanted, and he’d be in the cast for a few more weeks yet.
The leg cast, however, was coming off today. Mom volunteered to take him for me, but I’d insisted. That earned me a little side-eye from her, but she didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say. I was just helping out Shane. Both Shane and Archer had cooled off in the recent weeks, but there was still a lot of bad blood there where Clayton was concerned.
The youngest Taggart brother, however, found the whole situation entirely amusing.
“It’s almost worth coming home for.” Brodie’s voice filled the room. He’d called just as I was getting out of the shower. I’d put him on speaker phone so I could get dressed.
“What is?” I stepped into a pair of jeans and frowned at the way they bit into my midsection. Clearly I’d be wearing my shirt untucked. Sometimes I envied Brodie. Growing up, he’d sometimes called himself the runt of the litter. But he never had to worry about his weight .
Being overweight all through childhood, right up to college, hadn’t been a walk in the park. For as cruel as other kids could be, adults were just as bad. They might not have called me names, but I had eyes. I saw the way they looked at me with disgust or, pity.
“The Shane versus Kieran show. Both of you are ridiculous.”
“I’m just doing him a favor.”
“So you’ve said.” Brodie grunted on the other end. “Oh shit, oh fuck. Ouch ouch, ouch.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My foot’s asleep. I sat weird.”
“You’re a little attention-seeker.”
“I’m fine with that assessment.” Brodie sounded far too pleased with himself.
“How is Shane’s new project coming?”
Though that’s precisely what I’d said in my head about Clayton a million times over, hearing it out loud from someone else made me bristle.
“It’s hard to say. He’s been healing, so he’s basically been on lockdown. He can’t get around without me or someone else. The cast comes off his leg today.” Buttoning the last button on my shirt, I undid it again and looked at myself in the mirror. I had the vague idea that I was overdressed, so I popped the buttons back open and tossed the shirt aside, switching it out for a sky blue Henley that I pulled over my head as Brodie prattled on almost endlessly.
We used to just let him talk until he exhausted himself, but now he caught on.
“Are you listening to me, Kieran?”
“Honestly, not really.”
He laughed. “Fuck you. You’re an asshole.”
“Come home and say that to my face. ”
“I just might. Don’t think I won’t.”
“Uh-huh. I seem to remember you saying about eight or nine months ago that you’d come home for a visit soon.”
“Soon is relative.”
“What part of the world are you in now anyway?”
“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Brodie snorted at his own lame joke. “I’ve already sent you a postcard.”
“Ah, so I should get that in about nine months.”
“The postal service isn’t that bad.”
“You’re right. It’s worse.” The Henley was an improvement over the button-up except for the fact that I still felt like a marshmallow around the middle. There was nothing I could do about that in the next five minutes, though. Peeling myself away from the mirror, I shoved my wallet in my back pocket and collected my keys off the dresser. “I have to get going, Brodie, but before I do, please consider the fact that Shane and I miss you. And Mom does too. She’s practically adopted that busted-up gambling addict to replace you.”
“Oh, fuck you, Kieran. That’s low. Using Mom to manipulate me into coming home so you and Shane can pick on me.”
“Did it work?” I made my way to the front door and stepped into my well-worn sneakers. They weren’t appropriate shoes if I was going into the office to deal with clients, but they were fine for the day’s errands.
“I do miss Mom’s cooking.”
“Then come for a visit. At least come meet Shane’s boyfriend. He’s over the moon, Brodie. It’s disgusting how happy he is.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But I have to go, my phone is about to die and so am I. I need about twenty-five hours of sleep.”
“Take care.”
“You too.”
Brodie ended the call, or maybe his phone died. Either way it meant that I got to make the drive to Mom’s in blissful silence. I loved Brodie, but he never met a silence he could tolerate.
When I pulled into Mom’s driveway, Clayton was already outside. He didn’t wait for me to come help him into the truck, instead I watched as he set his jaw in that determined way and made his way to the passenger side door. Without assistance, he managed to heft himself into the seat and pull the door shut.
He didn’t seem to be in a talkative mood, which wasn’t unusual. It was hard to know if it was his current circumstances or if something new was weighing on him. I didn’t know much about him. Only what Shane had told me, and that he’d heard from Archer.
I’d spent the past month hovering around, making sure he didn’t step out of line, but I knew nothing about him. It was hardly the time to play icebreaker games, and why the hell should I want to? Why should I want to get to know someone who’d ripped off his best friend?
A traffic detour meant that we drove past the casino. I didn’t miss the way Clayton stared out the window at the building. Did seeing it make his skin itch? Did it call to him even now?
“Do you miss it?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“I miss a lot of things,” was all he said at first. “I miss—never mind. I miss a lot of things.”
I didn’t doubt his sincerity for a second. But I wondered if it was gambling specifically that he missed.
“Are you having a hard time?”
Clayton scoffed. “Gee, what do you think?”
“I meant… do you find it hard to stay away from gambling?”
“I don’t have a choice right now but to stay away. I can’t leave the house alone. I don’t have a phone, and the only time I use the computer is to talk to my therapist.” Clayton’s agitation increased with every word. “I miss my apartment. I miss my best friend. And I realize that I’m the reason I don’t have those things, okay, and yes, I miss gambling. But not the gambling itself. According to my therapist, I miss what it gave me.”
“What did it give you?” I chanced a glance at Clayton, whose scowl cut me down to the bone.
“That’s not your business,” he bit. “I don’t have to tell you shit.”
“Okay.” I turned my attention back to the road and flicked on my turn signal. From the corner of my eye, I watched the way Clayton looked at me, then tore his gaze away in an angry huff. It was like he didn’t want me to ask him things, but also wanted me to. He seemed torn between wanting to talk to someone and that someone being me.
Even though Clayton insisted that he could manage himself, I still helped him inside and I still waited outside the room while they cut the cast from his leg. When Clayton came out, his face was white as a ghost, but he smiled and took his first wobbly steps on both feet. The walking boot looked more comfortable than the cast he’d had on.
The doctor exited the room and saw Clayton hobbling over to me. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Make sure he doesn’t overdo it. He’s going to get tired easy for the first little while. Just because he’s in a walking boot, it doesn’t mean he’s ready for a marathon.” The doctor gave Clayton a friendly smile. “I’ll see you in a few weeks and we’ll get that cast off your arm.”
Clayton nodded and mumbled a thank you, then hobbled slowly past me. “Race you.”
His mood seemed to have improved a little just from getting the leg cast off. I indulged his little challenge and fell into step just behind him. By the time we made it to the entrance of the hospital, though, Clayton wasn’t doing so well. His gait had slowed and his already white complexion had turned almost gray.
“Wait here. I’ll pull the truck around.”
“I can make it.” He started to argue, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction in his words.
“Just sit your ass down and wait, okay? I’ll pull the truck around so you don’t faint and crack your head open and end up in the hospital again.”
My rant seemed to amuse Clayton, and the corner of his mouth lifted into something that was almost a smile.
“Dramatic much?”
“Hardly. You’re swaying on your feet and if you get any paler, your skin will be see-through.” I motioned to an uncomfortable looking cement bench that sat off to the side away from the doors. “Sit.”
Clayton lowered himself onto the bench and looked up at me. Amusement and exhaustion were etched into his features and I wondered if he’d been sleeping well. Or at all.
“If I didn’t know better, I could swear you cared.”
My own thoughts echoed in his voice snapped me out of whatever fog of madness I’d been in. I didn’t care about Clayton. Well, I did in that he was a human being and even shitty people were worthy of a basic amount of human decency. It wasn’t like he was a murderer or a rapist. On the range of the criminal spectrum, his non-violent crime paled in comparison to some of the things I saw on the true crime shows I watched.
My frown deepened when I realized I was making excuses for him. What he did was bad, but sure, compared to other things it wasn’t that heinous. While it didn’t erase the things he had done, it didn’t escape my notice that the whole time he’d been staying with my mom, he hadn’t asked for so much as a single penny.
I pulled up in front of the hospital and leaned across the seat to open the passenger door for him. Clayton stood and, with his good hand, pushed his hair off his face. He all but collapsed into the seat. “That took more out of me than I thought it would.”
“It’s been an emotional day.”
He made a sound in the back of his throat. Acknowledgement? Agreement? I didn’t know. Were it not for Clayton having called me out earlier on the fact that I almost, maybe, might have cared a little, I’d have offered to take him for a drive-thru celebratory burger. I didn’t let myself think about why it bothered me to take him directly back to my mom’s house. Instead I went home, fired up my computer, and buried myself in numbers.
At least math made sense.