“I heard music when I pulled into the driveway and thought I had the wrong house,” Luke said, looking around at the controlled chaos spread over the living and dining rooms. “Damn, Matt. I haven’t seen you like this since you were in high school and Dad was riding your ass, and you’d shut yourself in your room for hours. Remember?”
One corner of his mouth lifted in a smile. Luke had been a scrawny little squirt, eight, maybe nine years old, completely unable to sit still for more than fifteen seconds at a stretch. He’d try to play it cool, study the album artwork or read the lyrics like Matt did, but after a while he’d just wriggle under Matt’s arm and listen. There was no physical affection in the house; his father said it would weaken the boys, and his mother never disobeyed his father. Matt learned not to care, but Luke was wired differently. He’d been starving for cuddles, hugs, anything. Luke soaked up the simple comfort of sitting on the floor together as much as he’d soaked up Matt’s taste in music.
“Yeah,” Matt said. “You’d come in and we’d share the headphones. You’d pick a song, then I’d pick a song.” Luke always picked songs he knew Matt liked.
“You always picked songs you knew I liked,” Luke said, echoing Matt’s thoughts. They’d been so close as kids, despite their age difference. “Those were my best memories from childhood. I’ve missed that, you know. You’ve been here every day, doing the right thing, but I’ve missed my brother.”
At Luke’s words, a boulder swelled in his rib cage, crushing heart, lungs, forcing rock into his throat. He breathed against it, waited it out, and slowly the weight rolled back.
Jesus. He’d survived eighteen months in a war zone and two shootouts in two weeks, and the intensity of the emotion swamping him might kill him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I can see how you’d feel that way.” He’d been so focused on being strong for everyone around him he’d never given people what they needed most. Emotion. Affection. Love.
“What brought this on?” Luke said, idly rubbing his shoulder.
“After what happened, I thought it would help,” he said. This was true. Music was a way to express emotion, desire, and maybe if he let the music do his feeling for him, he’d find a way through the persistent, unrelenting ache in his heart.
The process was still somewhat automatic, his hands pulling out a CD he hadn’t listened to in years, only to find that some song, even a phrase in a song, a guitar riff, something about the singer’s breathing on a live recording, even, would ease some of the tightness in his chest.
He missed Eve. He’d counted on the memories associated with her receding by now, but instead he saw her everywhere, in the kitchen, on the sofa, at the dining room table.
In his bed.
“You mean the shootout?” Luke asked. His voice was tentative, flashing Matt back to childhood. Luke was using the same tone of voice they used with their father, hesitant, probing for the signs of a good day, a good conversation, a chance to be a normal family. Luke was using that voice on him.
“Among other things,” Matt hedged. Early morning shadows on the pillows became a black spill of hair. The breeze in the trees in his peripheral vision transformed shifting contours into a soft, slender body, tantalizingly just out of sight. He no longer had to layer identities when he woke up, but now he would swear he felt her right beside him, heat and softness, breathing deep.
The music helped deal with the day-to-day strain of the job, but the wild creature still lurked inside the prison of his rib cage. Sometimes he put in a two-hour workout to wear out the frantic thing, but at least now he knew what he was fighting.
He was fighting loneliness. But the weakness of feeling lonely only jeopardized him. All the risk was his. No one else got hurt.
“Just get off work?” Matt asked absently, ejecting Paul Simon’s Graceland and sliding in They Might Be Giants. The disc spun, giving off a high-pitched whir as the tracks began to import.
“Yeah. My last day. I gave them my notice and told them to give my scheduled hours to the other tech.” Matt must have looked completely sandbagged because Luke couldn’t keep a smile from spreading across his face. “My chemistry professor left teaching at the end of the year for fulltime research with Genedac Pharmaceuticals. He needed a research assistant and asked me if I wanted the job. I did.”
“In Chicago?” Matt asked.
“Their R&D facility in Austin. The pay’s good. Really good. Good benefits and the temperature rarely drops below forty in Austin. After I get settled I’m going to help pay off the medical bills.”
“No, you’re not,” Matt said automatically. “The accident wasn’t your fault. There’s no reason for you to pay off those bills.”
“It wasn’t your fault either, but you’re paying them.”