“Greer’s orders.” He shut off the light and waited for her to join him in the hallway again. “After we lost our parents, the military was the only way we were all going to college. Jude and I both chose college first and enrolled in ROTC—NROTC for Jude since he chose the marines. Greer and the twins went directly into the military and studied for their degrees while serving.”
The next door he opened led to Jude’s old room. Typical teenage boy, the walls lined with late 90s pop culture and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition covers, but there was color here, a playfulness that was lacking from his brothers’ spaces. A handful of old board games sat on a bookshelf, along with some comics and video games. He had a few trophies as well, appeared to have played football and baseball, like his oldest brother had. There were also pictures of him hiking, rock climbing, kayaking, surfing—he’d been more outdoorsy than the rest of his brothers.
“It looks like Jude,” she said and backed out of the room. “But I don’t get why you’re showing me all this.”
He motioned to the final room at the end of the hall. “My old room.” She waited for a moment, but he didn’t move, so she walked over and opened the door herself, surprised to find a set of stairs leading up to the attic.
“They kept you in the attic?” She meant it as a joke, but couldn’t quite hide the sudden horror that gripped her by the throat. Had their family not been as picture-perfect as it first appeared? Oh God. For his sake, she hoped they had been.
He gave a small snort of laughter and shook his head. “Relax. They didn’t lock me away. I chose it. More room up there.”
Curious now, she climbed the stairs. His room took up the entire attic, and he had computers everywhere, in all states of disassembly. Instead of posters of a favorite band, he had one featuring the cast of Stargate and pencil drawings of fantastical creatures. His shelves were stacked with books and comics. All neat and categorized, demonstrating his OCD.
It was all so different from his brothers’ rooms, she stopped short and blinked in stunned surprised.
This was what his apartment should look like.
This was Reece.
He had a bunch of gaming systems pulled apart, including some newer ones. While his brothers’ rooms had been frozen in time the year they each left for college or the military, Reece’s room had life.
She turned to him. “You still come here.”
“Sometimes. I do my best thinking here. It’s where I came up with the military simulations that started DMW Systems.” He walked out in front of her toward the desk, pushed aside a plastic crate of computer parts, and gathered up several of the notebooks stacked there.
“What are those?”
He rubbed at the back of his neck. “Just…something I’ve been meaning to pick up.”
Okay, he didn’t want her to know. She could live with that. He was already sharing so much more with her than she ever thought he would.
She turned in a slow circle, then walked to the other side of the attic, where his bed sat between two dormer windows.
“So this is it,” she said and sat down on the bed. He should have looked silly standing there in his expensive suit, but he appeared more at home here than he ever had in his upscale apartment. She patted the mattress next to her. “This is what you wanted to show me?”
He set his notebooks by the staircase and crossed to her in several long strides. The mattress sank with his weight, and she slid toward him. Their thighs touched, but he didn’t draw away from her, and she wasn’t about to draw his attention to it.
“I’ve always been different from my brothers,” he said. “They’ve never understood me. Dad…” He sighed heavily. “He didn’t understand me, either. He tried, but we had nothing in common, and he didn’t know what to make of me. I can’t throw a ball to save my life, and even though I’m great on ice skates, I hurt myself every time I pick up a hockey stick.”
She smiled at the mental image—could totally picture that—and leaned her head on his shoulder, lacing their fingers together. “Did your dad ostracize you for it?”
“No. Not on purpose at least. He’d take my brothers out to hockey games, football, baseball. I just wasn’t ever interested, so I never went. He tried taking me to science fairs and things like that, but he was always bored out of his mind. Finally, when I was about ten, Mom was exasperated enough with the two of us circling each other that she signed us both up for karate lessons. And that was it. Our common ground. It was the perfect blend of physical for him and mental for me. I even continued studying after he died. I wanted to make at least second level black belt, so it’d kind of be like getting two. One for me and one for him.” His voice cracked a little on the last word, and he glanced away.
God, what would it feel like to love a parent so much that twenty years after they were gone, you still grieved?