Don’t ask.
My brother’s always seemed bigger than life to me. I forget sometimes I’m now a couple of inches taller and slightly wider at the shoulders. He’s always been my older brother, the one with all the answers, but I want to protect him.
I wonder if that’s how he feels about me all the time, this crushing weight of responsibility, this fear that he’s failing me—like I’m feeling now.
“Just…” Ocean puts the mug down on the coffee table and gestures at me, frowning. “Tell me what happened.”
So I tell him, starting from Dad’s phone calls and his increasing demands and threats, culminating in his threat against the families of everyone we know.
“That fucking bastard.” My brother’s hands have tightened into white-knuckled fists on his thighs, and there’s a vein throbbing in his forehead. Good thing he put the mug down when he did, or it might’ve ended up thrown against the wall.
Ocean keeps a lot of his anger and frustration locked up inside, unlike me. I fire off my stupid mouth whenever I’m upset and overwhelmed, but he keeps quiet, letting that anger boil over. But he’s quite good at controlling it.
Again, unlike me.
“You met him,” he finally says, his voice low. “Last night.”
“He had me meet him at this small park near the big Starbucks. Baited me into an alley, and had a bunch of thugs jump me.”
“A bunch of thugs. You fucking kidding me?” He gets up, his face dark with fury, then starts pacing behind the couch. “How did you get away?”
“I used some of the moves you and Rafe taught me at the gym. And…” I open my mouth to tell him about Jason, and nothing comes out. “And I ran,” I finish lamely.
Better keep him out of this for now, or else Ocean will start asking more questions—why Jason showed up, why he’d care. A question I don’t know the answer to myself.
“And this Simon? Was he there?”
“No.” Jason mentioned him. “His name came up.”
“Jesse had a run in with a Simon once, long ago. Nasty guy. Jesse put him in prison, around the time you came to town.”
Could it be the same one?
“You sure our father was behind that?” Ocean asks.
I manage not to roll my eyes. My brother believes in me, but sometimes he also believes I’m an idiot. “He was there, Shun. He talked to them. Told them to get me. And he said that this is a taste of what will happen if I don’t pay up.”
“We.”
“Huh?” I lift my head. Didn’t realize I’d dropped it in my hands.
“If we don’t pay up.” He’s stopped pacing and is staring hard at me. “This isn’t on your shoulders only, R.”
I stare back at him, unblinking. It strikes me that in the past he would have taken the responsibility on his own shoulders, no questions asked, and although the thought of dealing again with my dad leaves me feel slightly queasy, I’m also glad.
That Ocean sees me as an equal now, that he trusts me to pull my weight.
“Okay, we,” I agree and hide a small smile. It fades quickly, though. “He wants fuckloads of money. What are we gonna do? Neither of us has that money, plus… This has to stop. He can’t show up whenever his funds run low and suck us dry.”
Ocean nods. “We will put a stop to it.”
“How?”
He folds his arms over his chest. “When I said we, I didn’t just mean the two of us.”
He lets this sink in. “But…”
“We’ll figure it out, together with the other guys, okay?”