Chapter 18 #2
Bricks enters five minutes later with Moth behind him, and I know by the look on his face that he’s already decided to enjoy whatever he thinks happened in my office.
Moth closes the door, bends to retrieve a sheet near the chair, and sets it on the desk without comment, which is worse than if he’d said something immediately.
“Oisín said you were reading the updated pressure map,” Moth says.
“Oisín came in here and assaulted my workflow.”
Bricks looks at the papers scattered across the desk, then at my face, and his grin spreads. “Is that what the kids are calling it?”
I give him a look that should make a smarter man reconsider. Bricks only laughs because he’s survived too many bad decisions to respect a good one.
Moth glances at the desk. “Your workflow appears flushed.”
“Keep talking, Moth.”
“I’m merely observing that your broker report is upside down.”
I look down and find the report turned the wrong way. Bricks laughs hard enough to brace one hand on the doorframe, while Moth watches with the faint, clinical satisfaction of a man who has discovered a pattern he intends to document.
I turn the report around. “I have actual problems to solve.”
“One of them just walked out of here with your tongue in his mouth and your brain in his pocket,” Bricks says.
Moth adjusts the recovered page. “That is not where the brain is stored.”
“Metaphor, Moth.”
“It was anatomically imprecise.”
“It was funny.”
“It was crude.”
“It can be both.”
I lean back in my chair and stare at them until Bricks drops into the chair opposite the desk like he owns the place. Moth sits beside him because apparently my office has become a clubhouse confessional for emotionally constipated men with guns.
“Why are either of you here?” I ask.
“The Reaper angle is confirmed enough to justify containment, but not retaliation,” Moth says, folding his hands around the tablet in his lap. “Oisín’s map suggests holding the visible routes steady while shifting internal response windows. I agree with him.”
“Good. Do that.”
Bricks points at me. “See, that right there is new.”
“What?”
“You didn’t argue.”
“Because he’s right.” I pinch the bridge of my nose, not exactly wanting to continue this back and forth.
“Oisín or Moth?”
“Yes.”
Bricks gives Moth a look. “He’s getting worse.”
Moth studies me as if I’m one of his boards and someone has moved a pin without permission. “He is not worse. He is destabilized.”
“I’m in the room,” I throw out.
“We know,” Moth replies. “That’s why the discussion is useful.”
Bricks leans forward, forearms braced on his knees, the humor in his face staying just long enough to make the bluntness easier to swallow. “All right, since nobody else is brave enough, I’ll say it simple. You like him.”
I rub a hand over my face. “No shit.”
Bricks pauses, thrown off by the lack of resistance. “Well, that went easier than expected.”
“I like fucking him. I like that he’s useful. I like that he doesn’t fold unless he decides to, and I like that he pisses off everyone who thought he’d be easy to ignore. Pick one and stop looking at me like you discovered fire.”
Moth tilts his head. “That is an inventory, not an answer.”
I point at him. “Do not start using Bricks’ lines.”
Bricks looks offended. “My lines are good!”
“Your lines are obvious.”
“Obvious doesn’t mean wrong.” Bricks’ grin fades as he settles deeper into the chair.
“You like fucking him. Fine. That’s not news to anyone with working ears.
You also like when he talks back, which is new.
You like him sitting with Moth. You like watching Tally feed him.
You like that Demo follows him around like a nervous duckling.
You like that he kissed you and walked out before you could make it an order. ”
I don’t answer, and Bricks takes the silence for the permission it isn’t.
“That’s what’s bothering you,” he says. “He wanted you. He didn’t obey you, didn’t ask permission, didn’t let you turn it into one of your little power games. He wanted you, and then he left you sitting in it.”
Moth crosses one leg over the other with the grave seriousness of a man about to make everything worse. “Being wanted may be outside Saint’s normal relational framework.”
Bricks looks at him. “Relational framework?”
“I am trying to avoid saying he has the emotional vocabulary of a locked garage.”
“You failed. That was meaner.”
“It was accurate.”
I look between them. “Neither of you has been in a relationship long enough to be this smug.”
Bricks lifts a finger. “I had a boyfriend for six months.”
“He stabbed you.”
“That was after the six months.”
Moth says, “I have maintained several functional arrangements.”
Bricks turns to him slowly. “Arrangements?”
“They were efficient.”
Bricks snorts. “That sounds romantic as hell. Did you schedule feelings on alternating Thursdays?”
“Feelings were not the purpose.”
“Tragic, but unsurprising,” I mutter.
The impulse to throw them both out comes quickly, but it dies before it reaches my mouth because under Bricks’ crude grin and Moth’s clinical dissection is the thing I haven’t been able to cut out since Oisín left the room.
He wanted me. Not because I ordered it. Not because I gave him a place to kneel.
Not because my hand at his throat made the world simple enough for him to breathe.
He walked in while I was buried in business, turned my face away from the report, and kissed me like wanting me belonged to him first.
I don’t know what to do with that.
Bricks’ voice lowers. “It’s okay to need someone, Saint.”
Need has always been a bad word. Sol taught me that before I had language for it, before I understood that lessons could be cruel without anyone raising a hand.
I remember my mother in his office when I was nine or maybe ten, old enough to know I shouldn’t stand in the doorway and young enough to do it anyway.
She asked him to come home earlier, to look at me when I spoke, to stop turning every mistake into training.
She didn’t say she needed him, but the need was there in the way she kept her hands still by force, in the hurt she tried to make dignified, in the careful way she made a request that should have been safe inside a marriage.
Sol shut her down gently, which took me years to understand was the cruelest part.
He told her softness made boys weak. He told her she knew what he was when she married him.
He told her the club didn’t bend because she was lonely.
Then he kissed her forehead like he had forgiven her for wanting too much and went back to his papers while she stood there with the hope emptied out of her face.
A few months later, she left. Sol never said her name unless he had to, and when I cried for her, he taught me to stop giving people handles they could use to drag me.
It makes a person stand in a room and ask to matter, then teaches them what they cost when the answer is no.
I look at Bricks. “Need gets people left.”
Neither of them jokes.
Moth speaks first, quieter than usual. “Maybe Sol was wrong.”
If Bricks had said it, I could dismiss him as sentimental or loyal past the point of usefulness.
Moth is different. Moth doesn’t offer comfort.
He offers conclusions after examining structure, data, and failure points.
If Moth says maybe Sol was wrong, he means the framework has been tested and found unstable.
I don’t know what to do with that information either.
Bricks leans back and watches me with less humor than before. “Nobody’s saying you need to start writing poetry and making breakfast.”
“I’d shoot myself first,” I tease, though there’s no humor in my words.
“Oisín would probably correct the rhythm anyway.”
Moth adds, “Tally would object to you using her kitchen.”
Against my will, my mouth almost curves, and Bricks points at me like he just won money off a bet.
“See? Progress.”
“Don’t make me regret not throwing you out, Bricks.”
“You already regret everything. That’s your whole personality.”
Moth looks toward the door Oisín walked out of earlier. “He’s not asking for softness as performance. He’s asking whether what you do has meaning beyond possession.”
I hate that the whole clubhouse has eyes and ears. Even the private conversations are rarely private, someone always listening just beyond a door.
Bricks sighs. “Moth, buddy, I love when you translate human emotion into a crime report, but sometimes a man just needs to say, ‘Yeah, I want you.’”
“I am not your buddy.”
“You are in my heart.”
I close the folder in front of me because the words on the page have become useless.
Oisín asked whether I wanted him, and I didn’t answer because the answer felt like a trap.
If I said yes, the next question would be what the wanting meant, and I didn’t have a weapon ready for that.
Then he kissed me anyway. He gave me a chance to understand without forcing the words from my mouth, then left before I could hide behind my hands.
Bricks stands and slaps one hand on the back of the chair. “All right. That’s enough emotional growth for one afternoon. I’m sweating.”
“You didn’t grow,” Moth pushes out, looking up at the big guy.
“I was nearby. Counts.”
Moth rises too, gathering the pressure map from the desk. “Read Oisín’s notes before you call Harlan. He’s correct about containment.” Moth chucks another folder onto my desk, supposedly what he had needed the other twenty minutes for.
I look at the folder, then at him. “And about the other thing?”
Moth pauses at the door. “Which other thing?”
I give him a flat look, and Bricks grins like the bastard he is.
“The wanting, Moth. Try to keep up.”
Moth considers that. “Yes. He’s likely correct about that as well.”
Then he leaves, Bricks lingering a second longer, hand on the doorframe, his expression more serious than I want it to be. “You don’t have to become Sol just because he taught you the rules.”