“Is she going to be okay?” Liza’s brows were still drawn. A deep V was carved right at the center of them.
“I really don’t know.” His words came out along with a crack in his voice, and he lifted his glass to swallow more scotch.
Their eyes held over the rim of his glass; hers now red-rimmed and spilling. She flattened her palms on his knee and then laid her chin on the back of her hand. “I’m so sorry, B. I’m just so, so sorry.”
“L.” His voice caught again, and he set down the scotch on the floor next to the chair so he could hold her forearms. “I hate the idea of you on the goddamned floor while you’re in a delicate condition.”
“You know she does what she wants, Riley,” Connor mumbled with just a hint of amusement in his otherwise somber voice.
“Girl, you know it’s true,” Liza sing-songed, mimicking a truly terrible song from the eighties. She was obviously trying to lighten things up with both that and her forced, misty-eyed smile. “I’m not too pregnant to sit on the floor yet.” She hitched one shoulder. “I still have some time before I’m too fat to pick my ass back up.”
A half-hearted half-laugh left his lips. “I’ve got a feeling you won’t have to worry about that.”
Her misty smile persisted as she held his gaze. The room descended into a brief, but thick silence. Liza folded her forearms across his lap and slowly, rhythmically patted the side of his thigh. The steady thump…thump…thump of her hand produced a picture in his mind of her standing in a nursery that didn’t exist yet, cradling a sleeping baby that was still only the size of an olive, while she swayed and hummed and did that same rhythmic, steady pat against the baby’s diaper-clad bottom.
The mental picture only added to the storm of stress and sadness and desperation roiling in Brennan’s heart and mind, and he clutched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes. “I tried to do exactly what you said, L. And just a few hours later these mother fuckers tried to kill both of us.” He lifted his head again, turning his face away to rest his chin in his palm. “This is all one big, fucking calamity, and it’s all my fault, and it’s not going to be okay.”
“It will though,” she quietly, gently countered. “It’ll be okay eventually.”
Liza was hands-down the smartest person he knew, but the platitudes struck him as naïve and hollow. Surely she knew better than that.
“Will it,Liza?” Brennan clipped, picking his head up out of his palm and leaning toward her face, eyebrows high. “You think this is just going to be okay?” He leaned even closer to her face, jaw clenched, but she didn’t flinch while staring back at him. “If shedies, do you think that’s going to somehow be okay, too?”
“No, that wouldn’t be okay, but you will be. We’re going to make sure of that.” She reached to grasp his biceps. “She’s not going to die, B., not from this. She’s going to recover, and then we’re going to take care of her. While we wait for that, we’re going to take care of you.” She nodded sideways. “You’re going to move into the guest room for a bit.”
He offered her a totally sarcastic eyebrow arch. “Oh, am I?”
She returned his look with a perfected, passive aggressive Daenerys Targaryen squint. “Yeah, hon. You are.” She patted his thigh one more time before clasping his knees and pushing herself up off the floor. Crossing around to the back of his chair, she leaned down and wrapped her arms around his neck in a hug, then pressed a firm kiss to his temple. “I’m going to make you cookies, too, so suck it up and deal.”
She gave his chest a quick rub and stepped away. He followed her with his eyes as she stepped back into the kitchen, and then he drifted his gaze to Connor.
“Just saying, Riley.” Connor lifted his beer bottle in a salute at Brennan. “Dead fuckin’ meat.”
“You’re not going to do anything like that, Sarge.” Brennan picked up his glass off the floor and slumped deeper into the chair. “Especially not now that you’re going to be someone’s daddy. Especially not with your wife in a delicate condition.” He took a quick, but large sip of the scotch. “In fact, I really don’t want to stay here while this shit—”
“Like she said,” Connor inserted, tilting his bottle toward Brennan again. “Suck it up and deal. This is what you signed up for getting all tangled up with us Westbank plebes.”
“And if you try to leave,” Liza called from the kitchen, “we will not only drag you back here, but I will also put raisins in your cookies as a consequence.” She poked her head around the corner of the wall separating the kitchen and the living room, offering another sassy squint. “And I know you hate that.”
Brennan alternated eyeing both of his friends, rolling his lips between his teeth. It actually was exactly what he’d signed up for. He was currently sitting in their living room because he’d inserted himself in both of their lives because they had something precious that needed saving, and now it was his turn to slip into that shitty role. The one where it was him who had something precious that needed saving.
Except that Skye wasn’t actually his. Even if she survived this, she still wouldn’t be his. That was never the intention of their fling, it wouldn’t change just because of this calamity, and he didn’t expect it to. Things like that just never worked out for Brennan.
For the rest of his life, it would be nothing but him, his endless string of one-night stands, and him watching his two best friends live a life he could only secretly wish for.
Brennan rubbed his forehead. “Yeah, I don’t particularly care for raisins, L.”
She offered him a warm smile. “Raisins really are the worst.”
Connor nodded sagely. “They really are.”
“Yeah,” Brennan agreed, numbness infusing his bones and muscles.
Raisins were the worst. So was his entire fucking life.
* * *
“Up and at ‘em, Riley!”Connor’s loud, exuberant voice shattered the silent stillness of Brennan’s sleep, and the darkness flooded with blinding light.
