Page 52 of When We Had Forever
“Sorry to disturb you, but...” Feet shuffle. “Your brother’s in the lobby. I knew you were already up here, so I stopped him from getting into the elevator, but he’s getting loud down there. Says he won’t leave until he sees you. The manager wants to call the police, but I figured you should have the chance to deal with it first, if you want to.”
A curse slips past Michael’s lips. “Yeah. Give me a minute to get dressed, will you?”
Juan rumbles an affirmative. Michael closes the door and tosses the pillow aside. He strides to the bedroom, his bare soles slapping against the concrete.
I get up and follow.
By the dresser, he stabs one leg into a pair of jeans, then the other. With his tousled hair and swollen lips, he’s clearly spent the day in the throes of passion, but he doesn’t bother to hide it. “God, the last thing I need is for him to make a scene.”
“What does he want?”
Michael drags a hand through his tangled hair and sighs. “It’s... He sort of...asked me for a favor, yesterday.”
I frown. “Favor? What favor?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “It’s not something I can do.”
Something to do with Lily, I suspect, based on his evasiveness. “Would it help if I went down with you? For moral support?”
He shoots me a startled look while buttoning his jeans. “No. I don’t want you getting dragged into my family drama.”
“It’s not dragging if I’m volunteering.”
He shakes his head, then pulls on a T-shirt and angles past me. “No. Stay here. I’ll only be a minute.”
His parting words come so close to matching yesterday’s that my heartbeat thickens, but I assure myself he won’t disappear this time. While I wait, I don jeans and a vibrant yellow-and-purple top, then take up a post at the kitchen island.
Twenty minutes later, the condo door opens again.
I cry out. “Oh my god, what happened? Are you okay?”
Michael stalks in. One eye is swollen shut, his bottom lip split and bleeding. Red splatter-marks stain his white T-shirt. He prowls past me, clearly on some kind of mission.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s aiming for the tornado picture.
He lifts the photograph off the wall, his movements so measured that I can only compare to that day outside Patrick’s house. Then, he was angry. Gloriously so. Now, he’s something worse. Eerily, perilously calm, so much so that I shiver.
“What’re you doing?”
“Taking this down,” he says, his voice perfectly even. “And throwing it away.”
I press a hand to my chest. Something inside fractures at seeing him toss out the photograph I’ve spent the past month bonding with. “Butwhy?”
Michael swings to look at me. A savage fire burns behind his eyes, as if his calm is just a facade. “Because Grayson took this, and he just punched me in the face. Repeatedly. At which point I told him I don’t want to see him again. I don’t want to see this picture, either. It was idiotic of me to put it up in the first place. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
I stare open-mouthed as the door clicks shut behind him. I swear I can feel the photograph careening down the trash chute at the end of the hall.
When Michael returns, he comes close. Air saws in and out of him, like he ran up to the nineteenth floor instead of taking the elevator. Except he stands so terribly, horribly still.
I lay a hand against his bloodied shirtfront, reassuring myself that he’s in one piece, at least. “Let’s get you cleaned up. In the shower?”
My offer takes the edge off the blaze in his eyes. Or eye, singular. One’s swollen to a slit. “Fine.”
I lead him to the bathroom. In the glass-walled shower, I sit him on the tiled bench and gingerly wipe away blood with a washcloth. He gazes up as the hot water works its way into him.
“What happened down there?” I say.
He snorts. “Hehitme.”
