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DYLAN
k.
A smile Derek hadn’t realized was on his face faltered at the response. Lowercase K with a period. Yikes. Had a small part of him been hoping for another snarky clapback? That was stupid and made no logical sense.
Both Gallagher’s ass and his clapbacks should be nothing but an annoyance. All of Dylan Gallagher was an annoyance to Derek. Where had that smile even come from?
When he lifted his face from the screen, Olive’s attention was back on him. Gray eyes doing a full-on X-ray of his brain. “Order enough pizza for five because if you don’t invite Dylan down, I’m going to go upstairs and introduce myself on my own terms.”
Derek growled.
God, he was going to miss her.
Chapter 7
Dylan hadn’t been lying about his ass. His first attempt at standing ended in keeling over and banging his head on the closet door because his right leg was completely numb. The creature shook his head as if displeased his pillow moved.
How the hell did he end up in a cramped closet with a massive dog napping on top of him? Dylan was still groggy from having slept much longer than he meant to after Derek grumpily kicked him out of his apartment this morning. All of Dylan’s phone alarms were useless given that he’d left his phone charging in Derek’s apartment after the awkward exchange about the DVDs and books. Luckily, he had also forgotten to return Derek’s key. With Derek’s warnings about not touching his stuff without permission a persistent echo in Dylan’s aching head, he went down to slip inside and grab the phone. But the dog sprawled in the entryway startled awake just as Dylan tried to step over him.
Avoiding accidentally stomping on tail or paw, Dylan crashed into the tower of trash bags while the dog yelped so loudly that anyone within a two-mile radius could have heard. After grabbing his phone, he heard Carol’s clacking footsteps outside and the jangle of her own extensive set of keys. Dylan coaxed the dog inside the closet with peanut butter cookies from his pocket, and once the snack—the snack that was supposed to be Dylan’s—was gone, the dog spent the first five minutes of hiding oozing foul mouth slime onto Dylan’s shoulder until he was convinced that there were no more available snacks. Then, he nestled onto Dylan and went limply into doggie dreamland. All one hundred and thirty pounds rested on Dylan’s right hip.
Thus the ass pain.
The blood flow returned like an attack of thumbtacks. He squinted at his phone, checking if there were any more messages from the other major pain in his ass.
The blurry words reminded him that ordering glasses needed to be priority one, since he couldn’t drive without them. Knowing his brain, he stopped everything else and pulled up the webpage. Priority-one things had to be handled the moment he thought of them. With the thousand trips to the hardware store ahead of him, clear vision was essential.
The main issue outside of Dylan’s scope of experience was the complex plumbing. He had found one source of a leak along the plumbing supplying Derek’s unit. Derek’s unit was technically a garden-style basement, which meant the water entered from the main supply between Uncle Sean’s apartment and Derek’s. As he suspected, a former owner had done a cosmetic repair to hide the problem. Since Derek had only lived there a couple of years, it must have been done by the person who had flipped the apartment at some point in the years before. Dylan’s dad could rant for hours about amateur house flippers who prioritized cosmetics over workmanship. Which was why Derek’s jab about flippers had hit a nerve.
“Band-Aid solutions lead to big-scale disasters.” The unofficial Gallagher family business motto, and Dylan had enough experience to know exactly what he could and could not do himself at a professional level. Dylan shuddered to think what he could not see behind that far wall beneath the bubbling drywall. But if a Gallagher called an outside-the-family plumbing company there was at least an 80 percent chance of it getting back to his dad and brothers.
His phone was in his hand like he was supposed to be doing something…
He pushed a finger toward his face as a reflex and nearly poked himself in the eye.
Ack. Right. Glasses.
Priority one. He didn’t look up from his phone until the rush order confirmation email notification came through.
Dylan had done so many things to help himself function, but after last night, his mind was loud again. He’d forgotten to take his ADHD meds at the right time, so now he had the choice between taking them and enduring a potentially sleepless night or not taking them at all and feeling like everything was chaos again. He’d spent thirty-two years with his mind roaring like a freight train. He’d managed to make it through, even excelling in certain areas. But the last few years since his diagnosis showed him how it felt to have his thoughts quiet… It was hard to go back. He was about to head upstairs when he saw the mess created by the door when he’d tripped over Gus. One of the trash bags must have ripped open.
He’d almost gotten everything cleaned up again when one of his many typical alarm reminders went off on his phone, signaling that it was his usual dinner time. This meant he’d spent over an hour down here after being held hostage in the closet.
A cold and damp thing nudged his hand. “Gahhh…” Gus’s nose. As he wiped at the nose mark, a streak of blood along the bandage caught his eye. The cut had opened again. Trying to follow Derek’s command that Dylan “not bleed on any of his shit,” Dylan went to the bathroom sink again. He swallowed once, trying to get rid of that imagined metallic taste in his mouth, and then splashed cold water on his face with his uninjured hand. When he was sure he wasn’t going to throw up or faint again, he left the bathroom with Derek’s small first aid kit.
Why was blood so hard for him?
Well, he knew why, but it still made him feel like a wimp.
Dylan was raised in an above-ground swimming pool’s worth of toxic hetero masculinity. Self-disgust was baseline even without his squeamishness. His brothers tormented him when they came home with injuries, and Dad only halfheartedly discouraged it. “Harmless teasing,” Dad would say to Mom when she worried. Mom was a cafeteria lady, so she saw bullying on a regular basis.
Yeah. Harmless.
Ears ringing, Dylan grabbed a weird, cactus-flavored (seriously?) electrolyte drink from Derek’s fridge and a bag of froufrou pea crackers from the cabinet along with the pack of bandages and walked into Derek’s living room. He sat down on the carpet. The bruised areas on his ribs demanded a pound of ibuprofen, but the blood had to be handled first. He gulped the drink and crunched a few crackers, blinking away spots in his vision. When his head cleared, he risked looking at his hand. Sitting was better in case he got woozy again. The dog trotted over beside him and whined. Feeling the creature deserved a reward for being so well-behaved in the closet, Dylan tossed him a cracker. Pea was listed as an ingredient in the dog food in the pantry, so it couldn’t be toxic.
As Dylan peeled the gauze off his hand, the door opened. Derek was flanked by two women. All three wore scrubs, and all three immediately honed in on the open wound.
Gus broke the tension by ferociously attacking the woman with the slightly fuzzy brownish-gold hair. Derek’s best friend probably?