“Whatcha reading now?” Damien’s voice was rough, clotted with sleep and fatigue.
“About you and Miki St. John.” Most of what he’d found on the Internet hinted at a deep relationship between the men, and Sionn wondered if he was going to have to hand Damien over to a lover.
His heart tore a little at the thought. There was something endearing about the pain-in-the-ass guitarist. Since he’d laid all his cards out on the metaphorical table, Damien seemed lighter, bantering back at Sionn’s comments with a sly teasing.
“Were the two of you—” Sionn struggled to find a word that didn’t sound like he was a jealous middle school boy. “—together?”
“What? Like did we fuck each other?” The look of horror on Damien’s face was priceless and went a long way toward quelling the whispering jealousy brewing in Sionn’s belly. “Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, he’s my brother.”
“You sure?” Sionn tapped his temple.
“Yeah.” Disgust roiled through Damien’s expression, and he burrowed under the blanket, leaving only his face showing. “Seriously. No. He’s like….”
Damien’s face softened, his eyes unfocused as he spoke.
“Miki’s… he’s someone I knew before I even met him. And this crap with my brain, it’s like I’m meeting him all over again. There’s something between us, you know? Something we are together.” Damien sat up slightly, a tug of a smile on his mouth. “He’s a bit fucked in the head, but we… match, you know? He needs taking care of, and fuck, he hates that. And we fight. God, I can remember some really good fights about stupid shit, but it’s okay. Because when we’re done with the mad, he laughs at me. No matter what shit I pull, he’s there, backing me up.”
“He sounds like a good friend,” Sionn murmured.
“He’s… Miki.” Damien shrugged off the sentiment, but Sionn could see the emotions rising up from somewhere deep inside the other man’s soul. “Miki finds the words inside of me. Everything I can’t find… he does. He makes me… better than who I am. He made me think of someone other than myself.”
“You can say that? Even not knowing everything about your life?”
“Yeah, I can.” Damien’s devotion was clear, a path he’d set down in immovable stones, and Sionn felt a wave of envy. “Sinjun’s the first person I’ve ever cared about… other than myself. Without him, I’m shit, Irish. He’s my little brother. I’d die for him. Again. Hell, I’d stay dead for him if it meant he’d have a good life. Anything for Miki. Anything.”
“Then we’d best get you straightened out there, boyo.” Sionn nudged the man’s leg with his bare foot. “I read up a little bit on memory loss. Guessing by the scars on your noggin there, you had a rough time of it after the accident. Did they tell you anything about it?”
“I’ve got all my brain. And I can remember stupid things like how to read or use chopsticks. But people? Yeah, not so much.” The guitarist leaned back and yawned, his teeth a white U in the dark of his mouth. Sionn spotted a divot on his tongue, either from an injury or a piercing. It was gone in a flash when Damien stretched his arms out and buried back under the blanket, warding off the cold. “The doc at the nuthouse said I’d probably regain a lot of my memories if I worked at it. Fuck if I know how you’re supposed to work at remembering shit. I thought maybe if I headed down here and found Miki, he could… you know, jump-start me.”
“Good way to put it.” He cocked his head, studying the man next to him. “So what’s got you worried?”
“Suppose I’m a lie, Irish. I can’t put that out of my head. That… maybe… everything is a lie. What then?”
“No matter who you are, we’ll deal with it.” Sionn reached across the couch and cupped the other man’s face. Brushing a light kiss over Damien’s mouth, he caught the sigh poised on the man’s lips on his tongue. “You and I together… we’ll deal with it. I promise you, a rún. I won’t let you go into this alone. I won’t let you fall.”
“WHERE have you been?” The man on the other side of the phone pulled on the leash he thought he’d attached to Parker’s neck. “Is it done?”
The asshole sounded smug, and if Parker closed his eyes, he could almost see the man’s beefy face redden as Parker’s fingers tightened around his throat.
“Not yet.” He drawled the words out, sipping at the espresso a vivacious waitress had placed in front of him not more than a minute before his phone rang.