I was grateful he at least had boxer shorts on when the bed sheet fell from his body, exposing him completely before his eyes focused on mine.
“Drew?” He squinted.
“Yeah.” I sighed. Slater was another person I’d been avoiding. Along with Jedd, Deeks, Kenny, Tate, the whole damn family. “It’s me.”
He rubbed his eye like he was a giant of a kid, trying to clear his vision to see if I was really there.
“What’s wrong?” he asked me, calm yet urgent.
“I need you, brother.”
“Who are we killing?’
I huffed out a barely-there laugh. “No one.”
“Okay.” He moved to the end of the bed, letting his legs fall to the floor as his fists pushed into his mattress. “Then why the fuck are you waking me up at…” He glanced at his bedside clock. “Five in the fucking morning? Seriously?”
“Because I’m a bit of a fucking mess right now, and I need to talk to you.”
He gave me a small nod of understanding. “Give me two minutes to get dressed.”
“I’ll wait in the bar.”
I left him alone and moved out into the center of The Hut. I expected it to be empty. There was only one five o’clock in The Hounds’ day, after all, so when I saw Jedd sitting on a solitary stool, propping up the bar with a bottle of Jack Daniels and an almost empty tumbler in his hand, my footsteps faltered.
“Tucker,” he said without even glancing my way. His eyes were fixed firmly on the small remnants of liquid he was circling around his glass.
“The fuck are you doing awake?” I asked him, moving forward.
“Reminding myself I’m still alive.”
Five words shouldn’t have affected me so much. Harry’s absence wasn’t just something I noticed. It was all around us. There was a piece of the club missing, and I guessed none of us knew how to move on from that. I hadn’t been around long after Pete died. I took the coward’s way out, choosing to spend half a decade in solitude, selfishly healing from grief by takingrandom beatings, and randomly beating others, too. I had no idea how my brothers operated after death.
“How do you do that?” I asked him quietly as I moved to the other side of the bar—the place Harry loved to stand with a towel over his shoulder, sliding shot glasses up and down the overused mahogany counter.
“What?” Jedd asked, looking up at me through his thick, dark brows with his heavy, burdened eyes.
“How do you remind yourself you’re still alive?”
“I start by inhaling and exhaling.”
“Sounds easy.”
“Does it?” He arched a brow. “Feels like torture.”
“That I understand.”
Jedd blew out a breath through his nostrils, never taking his eyes away from mine. “Why are you up at this time?”
Right on cue, Slater walked into the bar, rubbing his bed hair and sliding his heavy, boot-laden feet across the wooden floor to meet us.
“We having a party?” he asked, sleep tainting his voice.
I reached behind me for two more tumblers and set them down in between my VP and me as Slater pulled up on a stool next to Jedd.
“This is more like rehab,” I told him dryly.
“Even more reason to hit the hard stuff,” Slater said through a sigh, resting his cheek on his fist and turning to look between Jedd and me. “Get ready, Jedd. Tucker woke me up and said he needed help.”