Chapter Fifteen
Micah
I ’m leaning against the kitchen counter, trying to catch my breath and watching Scott wipe the cum off his face when a random, half-dressed girl emerges from my bedroom and makes a beeline for the door.
“Um, hello?” I say, because I’m an idiot.
She freezes and looks at us both. There’s an edge of horror in her expression, and there’s no way she didn’t hear everything that just went down in here. I’m not ashamed, per se, because that was some phenomenally hot sex. But I would like to know who the fuck she is and why she’s in my house.
“Sorry.”
She mumbles the word and rushes past us, discomfort rolling off her in waves as she practically flings the door open and bounds through it. She doesn’t even stop to put her shoes on, she just grabs them.
Now that’s a bad end to a date. Which is what I’m assuming she is. Because my brother is a piece of shit.
“That little fucking brat,” I mutter under my breath, mostly to myself. Scott is busy trying to cover his junk with his hands and also not to combust with self-consciousness, if the color of his face is anything to go by. “Tadhg!”
I don’t get a response, but I’m not sure I was expecting one. Scott looks completely bewildered as I grab my briefs and tug them on, not bothering with anything else before storming toward the bedroom. He can get dressed or not as he pleases, I really don’t care.
“Tadhg Jonah Moynihan, you show your fucking face!”
I’m about to wrench open the door when he does it for me, almost making me fall through the opening. And there he stands—my stepbrother, ladies and gentlemen—bare-ass naked, covered in tattoos from head to toe, and wearing a smug, self-satisfied smirk that I absolutely see right through.
I’ve seen him naked or mostly naked many times since he’s been here because of how injured he’s been, but it’s so different in this context. The smell of sex is lingering in the air, and I swear he’s still half-hard from whatever he just did with that girl. I don’t appreciate the scene he’s trying to make, or the amount of discomfort that grips me because of it.
“Sorry, I was napping,” he says. “Can I help you with something, Bambi?”
The teasing tone to his voice is so artificial and undercut with cruelty. I know he’s trying to make a point here, and I know it’s not a kind one. I just don’t know what it is that he’s getting at.
“Don’t ‘Bambi’ me, and put your penis away, asshole. Why are there random women running out of my apartment half-dressed?”
Tadhg makes a nonchalant face. “I don’t know, Micah , why are you face-fucking dudes in the kitchen when you know I’m home? To prove a point? Some kind of big gay point?”
“The point is that it’s my apartment. It’s my life, my fuckbuddy, my dick, and you have no right to tell me what to do with any of it!”
The temptation to shove him is overwhelming, even though I’m not normally a violent person. But I know it would be like shoving a brick wall.
Instead, he begins to crowd me. The few inches of height he has on me, along with the mountain of muscle, suddenly seem much more apparent as he looms over me. The whole time he’s been here, he’s mostly been lying down and broken. But right now, this is him drawn up to his most intimidating self.
And it’s working, despite the fact that he’s still naked and smells like cum and drug-store perfume.
One of his hands comes to rest on my chest, and he walks me backward until I hit the hallway wall. With his face barely an inch from mine and an intensity simmering between us that I wasn’t expecting, he finally speaks.
“I’m trying to keep you safe. And instead of letting me, you’re shoving your fucked-up sex life in my face.”
The skin of his chest and neck is flushed with anger now. We’re right back to where we started; his obsession with keeping me safe. But there’s nothing to keep me safe from here. I don’t understand what wire is crossed in his brain, but whatever it is, he seems to be latching onto it with his whole heart.
Despite the digs he’s making, this doesn’t feel like homophobia so much as Tadhg just being… off. And as pissed as I am at him for acting like a petulant teenager, my adult-brain is still capable of seeing that this isn’t rational behavior.
Fuck, he isn’t really doing better, is he?
I bring my hand to rest on his, still over my racing heart, and hold it softly. I search his eyes for a hint of what’s going on in his head, but I come up empty. There’s just a storm of emotion there, but nothing I can piece together.
“What do you need to keep me safe from, Tadhg?” I ask softly.
He blinks, his face twitching like the question threw him off. But before he can answer, a voice interrupts us from a few feet away.
“Are you alright, Micah?”
I glance to my right, and see that Scott is now fully dressed and looking at me and Tadhg with the wary incredulity we deserve.
Tadhg, of course, tenses at the interruption. He turns to face Scott, eyeing him up and down and instinctively putting my body a little behind his. It’s clear that he doesn’t like whatever he sees, because he practically bristles with hostility toward Scott. He brings one hand to loosely cover his naked, now-flaccid dick, but still puffs out his chest and stands tall, like Scott needs to go through him to get to me.
“He’s fine. You can go. Your services have been fulfilled, clearly.”
Scott’s eyes nearly pop out of his head, and I don’t blame him. I slap Tadhg on the arm and shove him out of my way.
“Jesus, Tadhg, don’t be fucking rude. Scott’s my friend. You’re the one making a scene. For the love of god, will you go put some pants on.”
Scott is still staring between us, bug-eyed, but Tadhg only stiffens, standing there like he’s some kind of fucking sentry.
Looking up at his stony face, I try very hard not to raise my voice but fail a little.
“Pants! Now!”
With a slow exhale, he finally turns and disappears back into the room, but not without casting one more unnecessarily aggressive glare at Scott.
Scott, bless him, who looks at me and mouths what the fuck? in silence. I know his family is pretty normal; this is probably a lot for him.
“Sorry, he’s having a bad week.” Understatement, but it’s not like I can give him details. Scott points at his own abdomen where Tadhg’s gunshot wound is, because he just saw the whole thing and it’s pretty obvious what it is to anyone who’s seen one before. His eyebrows are raised, but I just shake my head. I need him to take the hint and not ask more questions about this.
“Look, I need to deal with him, can I call you later?”
He looks between me and the wall that Tadhg is standing behind one more time.
“Dude, are you sure you’re going to be okay alone?”
I huff. We’re going around in circles, and I also really fucking hate being treated like I can’t take care of myself. “I told you, it’s fine. He’s my brother. Stepbrother. Whatever, the point is, I’ve got it. I will text you later.”
Scott holds my gaze for a few more beats, but then he finally breaks it. He moves toward me to say goodbye, but of course that’s when Tadhg reappears from the bedroom. He’s in low-slung jeans that make him look even more ripped than he did naked, and of course no shirt, and he immediately places himself between me and Scott with a growl.
A literal growl. I’m surprised he doesn’t snap his teeth at the man.
This is exhausting.
I mime texting and mouth later , before waving Scott away without saying anything. Reluctantly, he turns, but it’s clear he thinks there’s a good chance Tadhg is going to murder me in my sleep or something.
People from normal, happy families will never understand.
As soon as the door clicks behind him, I slap Tadhg on the arm again, making him turn to face me.
“Why are you acting fucking feral?”
“Why are you acting like a little bitch?” he hisses back.
Lord, give me patience.
I reach deep into the wellspring of tolerance that I normally save for patients who are acting out because they’re detoxing or in incredible amounts of pain, and don’t let this escalate into a childish pissing match.
“Just come fucking sit down with me, okay?”
He sulks, still like a teenager, but follows along with heavy movements as I grab him by the arm and drag him to the couch. On the way, I snag my sweater from where I tossed it on the living room floor when I came in—still ignoring that it’s a disaster from Tadhg obviously having a hissy fit at some point, because he’s such an adult—and pull it over my head, because it’s getting cold in nothing but my underwear. I sit at one end, practically throwing him on the other, where he falls like a sack of potatoes. His face looks drawn, but there’s a nervousness to him underneath all the over-the-top give-a-fuck attitude.
I pull my legs up and tuck them into my body, wrapping my arms around myself and sinking into the warmth of the oversized knit sweater.
“I need you to talk to me, Tadhg. What’s going on with you? You’re acting irrational and erratic; you seem really upset and I can’t totally figure out what you’re upset about… Can you just explain it to me? I know you’re a man and men aren’t supposed to use their words or whatever, but it’s just you and me here, and no one else has to know if you emote. Just spill. What’s going on?”
The silence that follows is fucking painful. I’m chatty by nature, and not filling it is almost impossible. But I know I have to let him come to me.
He fidgets, running his fingers over the fabric of his jeans and worrying at his bottom lip in a way that makes him look so much younger than the tattoos and the muscles and the attitude normally do.
Because he is young, really. We both are. But he was never allowed to be, so he never got to learn how to grow up the way I did. That’s the difference.
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Bambi. I’m fine. I was just mad that you weren’t listening to me,” he grumbles without looking at me.
I’m impressed. There are some feeling words in there somewhere.
“But why were you so worried about me in the first place? All I wanted was to go to dinner with my friend. And you were acting like it was super dangerous. What was going on in your head?”
He looks at me then, his brow furrowed, before going back to studying his hands.
“I-I don’t know. It was just wrong. It wasn’t safe. It wasn’t right. My gut was telling me. And you weren’t listening.”
I’m trying to pick apart what he just said, and something about it makes me cock my head.
“Wait, did you feel like it wasn’t safe for me to go, or that it was wrong for me to go? Because those are two different things.”
“I—” He looks at me sharply, and then away. I can see a cavalcade of emotions working their way across his face, and tension quickly sets up shop in his neck and shoulders.
Despite his sudden shift in mood, there’s no warning before he stands. I think he’s about to pace angrily in front of the couch for a minute, so I stay put, but instead, he walks straight to the nearest wall and punches it.
He hits the wall three times with short, sharp jabs, each one hard enough to fill the space with sound and make me jump. Adrenaline is already flooding my bloodstream while my brain is struggling to catch up to what the fuck just happened. But before I can open my mouth to say something, Tadhg follows his initial punches by smacking his fucking forehead against the wall with a dull thud, hard enough that it’s definitely going to have done some damage.
“Jesus, fuck,” I mutter, springing off the couch on instinct and reaching up to grab his face before he can do it again.
I get one hand on his forehead, and it stops him hitting the wall again. As soon as my hands are on him, he seems to go limp. Utterly limp, like a ragdoll. His body is heavy, and his movements are sluggish as he lets me manhandle him back to sit on the couch.
The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than ninety seconds, but it’s taken all the energy out of both of us. Tadhg is staring off into the distance as he sits slumped in his seat, and I’m frantically trying to make sense of what just happened.
I’ve never enjoyed the whole men-punching-walls thing. As a teenager, I saw it a lot, and it normally seemed like guys either acting out because they were wasted, didn’t have a good handle on their anger, or were trying to impress girls with their “manliness”. Mostly the latter.
Every single time, they just looked stupid.
But this didn’t come across as an act of aggression so much as an act of desperation, or self-harm, and it has me just as worried as all of the other self-destructive things Tadhg’s thrown himself into since he got here.
When he doesn’t look at me or make any attempt to speak, I decide to get closer. I need him to snap out of this sudden malaise because it’s freaking me out even more than the anger.
I crawl into his lap, folding myself up small as if I’m still a little kid and inserting myself into the warm space in front of his chest. He still doesn’t move, so I drag his heavy arms until they’re wrapped around me, and then put my face close to his neck. I can feel his pulse racing under his skin, and it’s reassuring that it’s still there, I guess.
“That wasn’t an answer, Tadhg,” I say, once we’ve both had a chance to settle.
He almost laughs. I swear. I can feel it. But it’s like he’s too numb.
“I don’t feel right, Bambi. My head’s fucked up.”
The words are quiet, and they pull out of him like molasses.
“Do you normally feel like this, or is it just since you got shot?”
He tenses under me, and the silence that I get in response makes me feel like he’s hiding something from me. But we are so far past fucking around time. He lost his right to privacy several fucking incidents ago. He’s still shirtless, so it’s not difficult for me to reach out and pinch his nipple—really fucking hard—to try to shock a little sense into him.
“I swear to god, if you lie to me right now, things are about to get so ugly, Tadhg. This is your last chance to tell me what the fuck is going on with you before I lose my shit.”
He takes a deep breath, and my whole body rises and falls from where I’m resting on his broad chest. Eventually, after a few false starts, he speaks.
“Things used to be… bad. But then I went on meds and that helped. But I didn’t have the meds with me when they brought me here and I couldn’t tell them, because Father would fucking kill me if he knew I was seeing a shrink. Ever since I ran out, it’s been like it was before the meds, but worse. Just up and down, with my thoughts all fucking jumbled and everything twisted up.”
He lets out a shaky exhale when he’s finished, and my mind works overtime to process all that information.
Stupid, stupid man.
Depending on what meds he was on, ending them cold like that could have killed him. It basically almost did.
I focus very hard on keeping the anger and resentment out of my voice, because I’m really angry at the fucking universe for doing this to him, not him. Although I’m maybe a little angry at him… I can’t stop the way my fingers dig into his skin wherever I can cling to him.
“Why didn’t you tell me? I could have helped you. Stopping psych meds all of a sudden is dangerous. No wonder it seemed like you were going through some kind of withdrawal.”
I feel him shrug, and turn his face even further away from mine, even though I’m still buried in his neck instead of forcing him to look me in the eye.
“You know I can’t talk about that stuff,” he mumbles.
“Don’t give me that shit. This is me, not your shitty dad. You can talk to me about this stuff. No one else, but me. I could have helped.”
An unexpected wave of emotion hits me while I’m speaking, and my voice actually cracks on the word ‘helped’. I feel Tadhg stiffen underneath me again, before he puts the actual effort into wrapping his arms around me instead of letting them lie on top of me like two pieces of driftwood.
He hugs me into his chest, and we both sit in silence for a few minutes. I sniff, because my throat feels tight and there’s a swirl of guilt and anger and a bunch of other emotions I don’t really want to feel fighting for attention inside me.
“Okay,” I say at last. “New deal. I won’t go out with Scott again. Or anyone else, while you’re still getting straightened out. I’ll be here as much as I can, and we’re going to figure out the best way to get you feeling better. Whether that is—getting meds off books or what.”
He sighs. “You don’t have to do that. I’m sorry I was pissy before. You shouldn’t have to put your life on hold because of my shit. I’m fine. I felt like I was sick for a while, but that’s all over. I’m over the withdrawal or whatever it was. I’m back to normal now, I guess. I think I’d just forgotten how it felt before I was on them.”
I don’t even hesitate before reaching out and pinching his nipple again, even harder than the last time. This time he actually yelps in pain, leaning back and looking me in the eye for the first time since this excruciating conversation started.
“Will you stop that?”
“Not until you stop being ridiculous. You are not fine. It’s been what, a week? Two? People normally take months to taper off psych meds a little bit at a time, because you are trying to literally change the way your brain chemistry functions. And you just fucked around in there, slapped yourself on the hood and said ‘good enough’ before driving off. Absolutely not. Your brain is physiologically a disaster zone, and this will take time to fix. No wonder you’re all over the place.”
I hold his gaze with mine, trying to make him physically feel how serious I am about this. I don’t even know why I’m so serious about this, but it feels more important than anything else I’ve ever done in my life.
“I am going to help you, and you are going to let me. End of discussion.”
Tadhg blinks at me a few times and then his body softens under mine. “Alright, Bambi. Whatever you say.”