Chapter 21 Lee
Lee
I didn’t even know how I ended up dressed, but before I knew it, I was pulling the Jeep onto the highway, my soul sick from the look on Mason’s face.
He’d known. He knew who I was. He knew what I’d done. And he hated me for it.
I felt the tears running down my face, but I didn’t care.
I deserved his hatred, deserved his contempt.
Fuck. Well, what had I thought was going to happen?
I knew this would happen eventually, but to figure it out on his own, without me acknowledging what happened, had to be the worst sort of way for the truth to come out.
I swiped my eyes with the back of my hand and struggled to focus on the road.
There wasn’t much traffic at this time of day, but one thing I’d learned as a driver was never to underestimate the stupidity of other people.
I’d seen way too many close calls or outright accidents just because people drove distracted.
Food, phones, kids, fucking laptops. I’d seen a lot of distracted drivers, and that wasn’t even counting the ones I was pretty sure were drunk or high.
I managed to focus on the road long enough to get where I was going. Without even realizing, I’d headed for the one place I’d always found comfort – my parents’ home.
I pulled into the driveway, but I didn’t see any cars. Both moms would be at work this time of day, but I’d been hoping maybe Kaine would be here. Shit.
After I parked the car, I noticed I’d received a notification from Uber. I'd received a drive request and hadn’t even noticed. I pulled up the app automatically, only to be staggered by the address for the pickup. It was my house. With a drop off at the airport, twenty minutes ago.
Of course. It figured he wouldn’t want to stay with me any longer. Not after… everything. Fuck. I stared at the screen, frozen, unsure what to do.
A loud knock on the car window made me jump. “Fuck!” I barked, about jumping out of my skin. I looked up to see my brother, Bishop looking at me curiously through the window. His head was cocked sideways, like a bird eyeing a tasty worm.
“You staying in there all day?” he asked, one eyebrow raised at me.
Bishop was about as different as you could get in the looks department from most of the family.
He was a little shorter than me, his hair was a long shaggy dark brown, pulled back from his face in a messy tail.
I might have called it black once, but after seeing Mason’s true black curls, I didn’t think it could compare.
He was standing in the mid-morning sun in a pair of track pants and a white t-shirt.
I opened the car door and stepped out. “It’s bad manners to sneak up on someone like that,” I groused and sniffed. Maybe he’d think it was just allergies… Yep, because that particular deception always worked.
“Um, dude, you’ve been sitting in your car staring at your phone for like, ten minutes,” he said, looking at me strangely.
“I walked up and stood here for a couple of minutes waiting for you to realize I was here. You didn’t, so I knocked,” he shrugged, looking around the car as if he was expecting someone else. Of course. He was looking for Mason.
“I… I was just…” Bishop’s eyes locked back on mine, no doubt taking in my red and teary eyes, rumpled clothes, and shattered look.
Finally, he spoke.
“You, my brother, are in desperate need of caffeine. Come with me.”
I followed him into the house, mind too numb to do much of anything else. I sat at the table without direction and watched Bishop walk into the kitchen and start making coffee.
Bishop took his coffee seriously. No instant or Keurig coffee for him.
He bought his coffee from some specialty store downtown, ground the beans himself, and only added flavorings to it if he was in a major mood.
I watched him move around the kitchen with grace and remembered with a pang how well he and Mason had gotten along at the house the other night. They both had artistic souls.
Bishop was an artist masquerading as a computer programmer.
He loved doing pen and ink drawings, which were pretty amazing, but he was going to be starting a new job in a few weeks as a computer program developer with a firm in Cleveland.
The moms had really hoped that Bishop would decide to do something with his art.
He had a real talent for conveying mood with just black and white, but he had insisted to everyone that he wanted a stable career, a job he could rely on and income to support himself, and art wasn’t stable.
Stability had always been important to Bishop.
Ever since his parents had disappeared on him, he’d experienced an almost pathological need to plan for the worst. For months after he came to live with us, he had hoarded food in his room, hidden stacks of warm clothes in hidey holes around the house and yard and squirreled money away anyplace he could find to hide it.
I guessed having your parents vanish overnight would do that to you.
He had insisted on keeping his belongings in a trash bag for the first few weeks he was here, saying almost every day that he didn’t want to unpack, because his parents would be back for him any time now.
Even after he’d finally unpacked, he’d driven the moms to distraction with his panic attacks whenever there was an unexpected change to someone’s schedule.
Reliability and predictability were of paramount importance in Bishop’s life.
When the courts finally terminated his parents’ rights in absentia, he was devastated, but his nightmares had finally eased.
Lots of counseling later and Bishop had become an integral member of our family, his quiet good humor hiding an anxious soul, fearful of loss.
Bishop had come out to the family when he was sixteen, almost as an afterthought.
He brought a boy home from school one night to study, introduced him to everyone as his boyfriend, then proceeded to kiss the dickens out of him in front of the family.
The moms had to have a talk with him about public displays of affection and what was and was not allowed at the dinner table.
I chuckled when I remembered the look on his boyfriend’s face when Bishop had kissed him in front of both moms. Bishop looked up at me from the coffee maker where he was pouring freshly brewed hot coffee into a mug.
He put the creamer away, and I couldn’t help but stop him before he went any further.
“Bishop, I’m sorry, buddy, I know it smells wonderful, but I kinda hate coffee…” I began as he set the coffee mug down on the table.
“No shit,” he said wryly, grabbing a glass from the cabinet and filling it with ice. “That must be why I was getting you this,” he said, setting a cold soda on the table in front of me. “The coffee is mine.”
I sighed, cracked the soda can open and poured it over the ice. Bishop sat down across from me, blowing gently on his coffee to cool it. He took a sip, closed his eyes, and a look of utter bliss flashed over his face as the coffee hit his system.
“So, what happened?” He asked as I took a sip of the soda. He pushed a box toward me, which I couldn’t resist opening, only to find cream sticks from Jubilee Donuts inside. Now this was heaven.
I took a bite of one of the pastries, pausing to let the sugary goodness seep into me. Bishop grabbed the other one, making short work of it.
“Where is everybody?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Moms are at the dojo. Twins had to go in early to get their order in for next month’s pulls and Kaine stayed over with someone,” he answered.
“Who?” I asked, concern creeping in as I thought of my younger brother.
“You know who,” he said, rolling his eyes at me as if I was simpleminded. “Nicki. If his parents hadn’t moved, I swear to god he and Kaine would have been married already.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea…” I said, my hand reaching for my phone.
Bishop’s hand came down on mine as I started to swipe my phone.
“Lee…” his voice came out, a tinge of warning to it. I looked over at him, surprised by the strength in his grip. Bishop had always been the smallest of us, physically, but that just meant he worked twice as hard as the rest of us to be number one - in or out of the dojo.
“He’s a grown man. He can make his own decisions,” he said. His gray eyes were dark and serious, a contrast to his tanned skin tone.
“I know, Bishop. I just can’t let him—”
“What? Sleep with the person he’s been in love with for ten years?” he asked, his lips thinning as he looked at me in disapproval.
“I need to warn him—”
“No, you don’t,” Bishop cut me off. “This is between him and Nicki. The rest of us don’t get a say,” he continued.
“But—”
“No ‘buts’,” Bishop continued, his eyes flashing. “Kaine is a grown ass man. He is an informed adult and he can make adult decisions without everyone else in the family weighing in on them.”
Bishop released my hand, but I let the phone remain on the table where it had started.
“But is he?” I asked. “Informed, I mean?”
Bishop’s gaze held mine for a moment, the unspoken question heavy between us, but then he nodded.
“He is.”
I sighed and looked down at the table. I didn’t know if I could ever stand to have kids. It was hard enough letting my younger siblings grow up.
“Okay,” I said, taking another sip of my soda. “That’s that, then.”
“So?” He asked, as I used a paper towel to wipe a last smear of sugary goodness from my mouth. “What happened?”
“Who said something had to have happened?” I demanded defensively. Suddenly the pastry and soda combination didn’t feel like it was sitting so well in my stomach.
“Well, you and Mason have been joined at the hip ever since he got here,” he said. “Then you show up at the ‘rents, on a weekday, I might add, and look like someone just hit your favorite puppy. So. What. Happened?” He asked, punctuating his words with silence.
I sighed. Bishop was the quiet observer in the family, not that I’d been exactly subtle about how I felt about Mason. He always knew when someone was bullshitting.
So, I told him, at least the parts that were mine to tell. His eyes got a little bigger when I told him about my trip to Milwaukee and shooting Ricky.
“I remember that week,” he said, drinking the last of his coffee.
“I remember you being gone for, like, ever. The moms were really worried about you, but they were trying to hide it,” he said, grinning at me.
“Unsuccessfully. When you showed back up, you were—different.” He cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Lighter, somehow. Better. It was the first time since Mack died that I started to see the old Lee again.”
I sighed.
“Well, who knew? All it took was a little murder to get him back,” I said, digging my fingers into my head, trying to get rid of the headache that was starting.
“It wasn’t murder, Lee,” Bishop insisted, his voice brooking no argument. “And you know it. You were saving that boy. That’s what you do, defend the helpless, protect the innocent, just like you always swore to do. Like you always did for me.”
I looked up at him and shook my head, even if he wouldn’t acknowledge it, I knew it was different.
“It wasn’t the same, Bish. There was no ‘brotherly’ love involved,” I said wryly. “Just lust. I went there to use him, just like all the other men had.”
“But you didn’t. You thought he was a consenting adult. When you found out differently, you could have walked away,” he said implacably. “You could have stayed out of it. Pretended not to see. You could have left him there. Then what would have happened?”
“Fuck that! You know I couldn’t have, Bishop! They would have killed him!” I said, my voice getting louder as anger starting to replace my guilt. How could he not understand?
“God, I’ll never forget the smell of his burned skin…” I shuddered. “I lived through Afghanistan, but it wasn’t until I came back here that I found something that made me physically ill to think about.”
“So, again,” he continued, “You could have walked away, right? You called the police. They would have saved him, right?” he demanded.
“I couldn’t leave him,” I whispered. “I promised him I would save him. I had to.”
“So, you saved him. Saved him from the man assaulting him. Saved him from a life that was pure hell. How, exactly, is that a bad thing?” he asked, his eyes piercing.
“I didn’t go there to save him, Bishop. I went there to use him, just like all the other men did,” my voice broke as I yelled at him. “He fears becoming the same monster his tormentors were to him, but I already am.”
I realized suddenly that I was yelling, on my feet, my chair pushed back, hands balled into fists on the table as I leaned on them.
“Really? So why didn’t you?” Bishop asked, still seated, his face blank, his eyes quiet as he spoke.
“You’d gone hundreds of miles for him, killed this bastard, Ricky, for him.
You could have fucked him then. No one would have known.
He certainly couldn’t have stopped you. After all, you spent your hard-earned cash to fuck him, right?
But you didn’t do it. Why not?” Bishop stood now, also leaning forward on the table, his face tipped up toward mine in challenge, his eyes flashing like lightning.
I looked at my brother in disbelief. How could he even think of such a thing?
Rape Mason? The mere thought of it had me diving for the trash can as the pastry and soda came back up.
I coughed and spat, eyes streaming as another wave of nausea hit me.
After a moment, a wet washcloth was laid gently across the back of my neck, and I looked up to see Bishop staring down at me, a soft smile on his lips.
“That’s what makes you different,” he said quietly, pointing to the mess in the trash can and I raised an eyebrow at him.
“The mere thought of forcing another human being to have sex makes you vomit. Those men who hurt Mason had long ago lost whatever reflex it is that lets us keep evil out of our souls.”
He held out a clean glass of water and I gratefully used it to rinse my mouth out, then took a sip. I sat back down as he pulled a fresh trash bag out from under the sink and changed the bag, then sat back down across from me.
“So,” he said, “The next question is, how are you going to get him back?”