“Chaotic?”
“I guess,” Jed said wryly. “I’ve been putting it off for ages, but I’m a decrepit old man now. I need to get the last of my veterans’ crap in order. Don’t suppose you want to be my next of kin, do you?”
“What about Nick?”
Jed’s silence said it all.
“You’d better write me down, then.” Max didn’t look to see if Jed took him seriously. Instead, he decided to be brave and cut to the chase of something he’d been pondering all the way home. “How oldareyou?”
“How old do I look?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“Your mood, I guess. You look young when you smile, but older when you… um, don’t.”
Jed seemed amused by the awkward observation. “How old do I look today?”
Max considered the question. Jed looked better today than he had since Max met him, and certainly since he’d moved into the cabin. He had color in his cheeks and his eyes were sharp. “Twenty-eight?”
Jed snorted. “Fat chance. I’m thirty-two.”
Of course he was. Max felt like a fool. Nick had told him years ago that his brother was hardly a year older than him. Trouble was, Max’s memory was occasionally unreliable. Put together with Jed’s rakish good looks… after a long day, it was enough to leave him dizzy.
“You know, I can drive you into town anytime you want,” Jed said. “Or to the city. You don’t have to ask Kim.”
Max opened the refrigerator. “I might take you up on that. Carrying grocery bags in the rain is a pain in the neck, and Kim’s not always around.”
“Anytime. Say the word. Was it softball practice today?”
“Nope.” Max shut the uninspiring fridge with a bang. “That’s on Wednesdays. Dan said he was going to ask you to help him sometime. Tess would love that. She gets lairy when I have to stay with Belle, and she takes up a lot of Dan’s time.”
Jed hummed, his gaze on his work. “Lairy, huh? I don’t know that word. Dan mentioned the softball team, but I need to figure my PT schedule out first. Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What’s the deal with you and Tess? I can see you’re close, but you seem to back right off when she’s super crazy.”
Is there anything he doesn’t see?Max pondered his answer. No one, save Kim, had ever noticed the difficulty he had dealing with Tess when she was hypermanic. “It gets under my skin, like I can feel it, like I’m absorbing it, you know? She makes me feel crazy, and she feeds off that, so I guess it feels like I make it worse.”
“You feel guilty because you think she inherited ADHD from you?”
“Sometimes, especially when she’s tearing the place up.”
“Well, you shouldn’t,” Jed said shortly. “Genes are genes. You can’t help the bullshit you got stuck with any more than she can.”
Jed turned his attention back to his work, and Max took the conversation to be over, but with the children on his mind, he remembered something he’d been meaning to ask for days.
Max was confused by the spark in Jed’s eyes when he cautiously broached the idea of Belle and Tess spending the night at the cabin. Despite Jed’s obvious bond with his nieces, Max had worried he wouldn’t go for the idea of his peace and quiet being disrupted.
“I figured I wouldn’t get to see them much,” Jed explained. “I know you see them all the time, but I’m kinda caught up with PT and all this shit during the day.”
His real point was left unsaid but it wasn’t lost on Max. Visiting the Cooper house at night meant dealing with Nick.
Max retrieved a jar of homemade spaghetti sauce and held it up for Jed to approve. Jed nodded, and Max resumed his search for noodles. A book on the countertop caught his eye. He squinted at it, taking in the delicate, foreign script. He was getting used to the random books Jed left around the cabin. For a tough guy, Jed seemed to be a closet nerd, and he owned more books than the rest of his possessions combined, especially now Anna Valesco had given him the two whole boxes she’d rescued from Frank Cooper’s attic when Nick had moved him to a nursing home.
“Max?”