Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73240 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
He brushed past his mother, out into the hall—but stopped when she followed him, her soft hand falling gently between his shoulder blades. Hers was a touch that was more the echo of a memory than anything he knew, but it was enough to stop him in his tracks.
“So I’m your awkward aunt, am I?” she teased sadly.
“Yeah,” he choked out, staring straight forward. “Kinda.”
“Ash.” She pressed against his back, soft and gentle, and slipped her arms around him. He wasn’t particularly tall, but she barely came up to his shoulders, her cheek laid against the nape of his neck. “You know I miss you, don’t you?”
“I know.”
“Honestly…I don’t understand how you don’t hate both me and your father.”
“I guess when I’m right in the middle of my own young fuckups, I can’t hate you for yours.”
“You were never a fuckup.” She tightened her hold, then gripped at him lightly, urging him with her touch around to face her, to look down into her smiling face and sad eyes. “How we handled what to do with you after our own mistakes? Hai. That was a mistake.” She curled her knuckles to his cheek. “And then there came a point when…” She shook her head. “It seemed like you didn’t even need us. And we didn’t know how to fix that.”
He looked down at her in silence. It was strange to see someone who looked so much like him, and yet her expressions were so different, her body language, like watching a stranger wear his face.
“Did you want me to need you?” he asked.
Her brows drew together. “I’m your mother, Ash.”
“…yeah.” He caught her hand, held it against his cheek…then drew it away, letting go, retreating out of her reach. “I love you,” he said. “I just…got used to not having you.”
To not having anyone, he thought, as he walked away from her. And right back to…
Right back to Brand.
It was only natural, he told himself. Brand was waiting for him at the car anyway, and he had to drag himself back to Harrington Steel and fit himself into his father’s place and try to make it fit around him somehow, someway, to make this last. Yet he couldn’t stop the feeling of relief that bloomed in his chest, as he stepped out the front door of the house and found Brand waiting, leaning against the car, idly toying with his cufflinks. He’d found the time to change into a fresh suit, but he wasn’t quite as crisp as normal, his hair a touch mussed, his buttons not quite perfect, his eyelids heavy with an exhaustion Ash understood when he felt it mirrored in his bones.
He liked Brand like this, he thought. It made him look more human.
Brand looked up as Ash approached, and straightened to reach for the passenger’s side door—but subsided when Ash shifted to lean against the car next to him.
Silence held between them for long moments. Ash stared at the house. It looked like a show home to him, something people looked at but didn’t live in. He wanted to change that, he thought. He wanted to…to not be his parents. These people who made a life and didn’t live in it. He might not ever have kids of his own, but he just…
He wanted more than this, he realized.
This cardboard cutout of a life with no real connections. No real warmth. No real bonds that held humans together, instead of just occasionally crashing into each other when their orbits intersected.
He wanted the kind of gravity that pulled people together so hard they couldn’t drift apart. Not the way his mother and father had.
And not with anyone caught as collateral damage in between.
He glanced at Brand; the man’s eyes were impossible to read behind the glint of his glasses, but Ash thought for a moment Brand had been watching him, too. He traced the gilding of sunlight over the man’s aquiline, elegant profile, then glanced away again.
“They let him come home, but it’s only a temporary reprieve, isn’t it,” he murmured. “He still has bone cancer. He’s still dying. And it won’t be long. All this means is he’ll die here instead of in hospice. With his eyes open, instead of slipping away without even knowing what’s happening.”
Brand bowed his head, looking down, his lips set pensively. “Young Master…do you wish for a comforting answer, or an honest one?”
“I don’t even know.” Ash laughed humorlessly. “Say whatever you feel like saying.”
“It is his choice,” Brand replied. “Everything up to this point has been his choice. There is little to do to change the consequences, now. There is only honoring his wishes, and making him comfortable.”
The breath knocked from Ash’s lungs. Whatever he’d thought Brand would say in that rolling, deeply inflected voice…it wasn’t that. He’d…he’d wanted Brand to fix it, he realized. Wanted him to have some sort of practical solution like he always did, some perfect right answer.