“Does he hit them?”
“No! God, no. The worst he does to the kids is ignore them, and he’s never hit Kim. I don’t think he’d dare, and believe it or not, he’s not always like this. Kim says he’s been worse since….”
Jed rolled his eyes, his disgust clear. “He’s not putting this shit on me.”
Jed’s tone was even, but Max sensed the anger and resentment simmering beneath it. “I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault,” Max said. “It is what it is. The girls have learned to live with it, and he’s not so bad sometimes.”
“What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
Jed shrugged. “It can’t be easy watching him treat your sister like crap.”
“It’s not, but she’s an adult, and she makes her own choices. No one forces her to stay with him.” Max felt a bump on his legs and bent down to retrieve Flo’s ball. “It helps that I never really see him. He works a lot, and he tends to give me a wide berth. Doesn’t want to catch my gay-boy cooties.”
“Don’t let that bother you. He’s been hiding from mine for years.”
Max came upright slowly. He’d misunderstood. There was no wayJedwas gay. It would explain some of the excruciating tension between the two brothers, but Kim would have told Max something like that.
Her knowing smirk flashed unbidden into his mind. Surely not…. “You’re gay?”
Jed tilted his head to one side. “You didn’t know?”
Max’s world seemed to spin on its axis. “I had no idea. Nick, uh, never said, and my gaydar’s pretty shitty. Must have something to do with my brain’s funky frequency.”
Jed nodded. Suddenly, he seemed completely exhausted. He turned his face to the sky and closed his eyes. “He told me about you. I guess I figured it worked both ways.”
Max couldn’t picture the words “my brother’s gay” ever leaving Nick’s mouth, but he kept the thought to himself. He was pondering what to do next when a noise from an open upstairs window set his teeth on edge.
Oh yeah. It wasn’t enough that he had to watch Kim let her husband treat her like shit, he also had to listen to them make it up. He pushed off the wall and whistled for Flo, intending to bid Jed a hasty good-bye.
Something stopped him. Maybe it was Jed’s unreadable eyes or defeated posture, but instead of walking away, Max reached out and touched his shoulder.
“Go get your stuff. Let’s go home.”
Chapter Six
JEDBRACEDhis weight on the sink and pulled himself upright. He hovered a moment halfway, with his hand over his mouth, sure he would puke for the hundredth time that morning. He didn’t, but the sharp pain in his stomach sent him back to the floor.
It was past noon by the time he dragged himself into the kitchen in search of something to soak up the reluctant, solitary tramadol in his delinquent stomach. He put the kettle on the stove and slumped into a chair at the battered old table, dozing with his head in his arms in a drug-induced stupor while he waited for it to boil.
Sometime later, Max placed a steaming mug of tea in front of him, rousing him with a gentle nudge. “Still feel bad?”
Jed put his hands around the mug, absorbing the heat. The cold had never bothered him much, but recently he’d found he couldn’t get warm. “What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been pretty green since yesterday, and Flo has her eye on you. What’s up? Are you sick or something?”
Jed shook his head. He’d been sick every day of the week since Thanksgiving, but to answer “Or something” sounded lame, and he wasn’t about to explain the state of his faulty stomach. Screw that. He’d spent enough time talking about it, and where had it gotten him? Curled up on the bathroom floor of a cabin in the ass end of nowhere.
Max tipped some food into Flo’s bowl and slid into the seat opposite. “It’s quiet up here, isn’t it? It can get a bit oppressive sometimes.”
“It’s not that.”
And it wasn’t. Jed hadn’t been at the cabin long enough to figure out if he liked it or not, and he was still suppressing the urge to crawl back into town and throttle his brother.
Nick. Jed closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about him. Instead, he let his mind drift to another kitchen he’d found himself in on Thanksgiving night. He’d been so eager to leave the Cooper house he hadn’t considered the three-mile hike to the cabin, but Max had. He’d led Jed to a beat-up old house on the wrong side of town, and Jed was halfway up the driveway before he recognized the Valesco family home.
The belated realization had thrown him. Until that moment, he’d found himself indifferent toward his hometown, but this warm, ramshackle house was different. It was the first time Jed truly felt like he was somewhere he’d been before.