“I love you, too, Trinket,” she whispered.
Trinket.
God, when she’d originally dubbed me with that name, I’d hated it.
It was weird, and hard to pronounce. And embarrassing when your little sister said it in front of people that were your friends. Ones that gave you a hard time for how much your little sister loved you.
Yet, that year that she was gone, I longed to hear her say it again.
Now, I cherished when she called me that.
“I gotta go.” She sighed. “And the only reason I let you hug me was because I’m wearing black, and I’m in a rental car, and I’m going straight home.”
I laughed and eventually let her go.
Five minutes after she was gone, I started packing up my tools.
I owned a restoration business. But in my spare time, I worked on my cars at a buddy’s shop.
My restoration business was doing well. During natural disasters, or hell, even disasters of the human variety—i.e., people getting dead—I was called to clean up afterward.
Or, in the case of a natural disaster, I was called and I made it go back to how it was previously if I was able.
Floods, tornadoes, ice storms, murders, dead body on the wooden floor upstairs that leaked to the downstairs. I literally did it all.
You name the fuckup, I fixed it.
But there was only so much of my own business I could handle, and since it now pretty much ran itself, I had more free time to do what I loved. I.e., working on my old cars and restoring them.
My current project was a 1963 GTO that was going to take a lot more work than I originally expected.
“You out?”
I looked over to my buddy, Mini.
Mini was a six-foot-four beast of a man that trumped me by three inches and a hundred pounds.
The irony of his name was not lost on me.
“I’m out,” I said. “I won’t be here next week. My sister wants to go to the beach.”
“I heard,” Mini said. “Your sister loves the shit out of you. I wouldn’t want to spend a week with you.”
After a few back-and-forth jabs at each other, I was out the door and heading back to my shop.
Once informing everyone I’d be out for the week, and to do their jobs, I then headed to see my brother at his work.
He’d asked me to bring him a set of my spare clothes because someone had ruined his other set.
Which was how I ended up heading to the ER in dirty clothes myself, to bring him clean clothes.
“What’s with that fuckin’ look on your face?”
I turned at the sound of Tide’s voice.
“It stinks in here,” I told him.
Tide refused to take the clothes from my hands. “Follow me to the staff bathrooms. I don’t want to touch the clean clothes. That smell is the reason I need the clothes.”
I followed behind him through the maze of hallways, coming to a staff door that was marked Doctors’ Lounge.
Once inside, Tide immediately started to strip out of his clothes.
I rolled my eyes at his nudity and sat down at the table with my feet stretched out in front of me as Tide showered in the other room.
He came out with a towel around his hips and, unsurprisingly, smelling a lot better.
“Gonna have to throw those clothes away,” he grumbled as he glared at the offending pile.
“Yep,” I confirmed. “What happened?”
“Guy projectile shat everywhere,” he cursed under his breath. “Luckily, it mostly got the nurse.”
I snorted out a laugh. “That’s probably not luckily in the nurse’s book.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t me who thought it would be a good idea to turn him over.”
My brother was rather rude.
Most doctors his age were nice and personable. Tide was not.
He was a straight-up asshole who had no bedside manner whatsoever.
Not that I cared. I was much the same way.
To be truthful, all of the Crow brothers weren’t what you would call friendly or outgoing. The only outgoing and nice one out of us all was Cannel. And even she came back changed, and not quite so outgoing or nice.
But I also didn’t work in a profession where I was forced to work with people day in and day out.
“Ahh, it’s so nice to have a brother that’s the same size as me that’ll bring me clothes.” He sat down and shoved his feet into Crocs.
My brow rose. “Where did you get those flashy things?”
“I found them in the lost and found,” he said. “They’re pretty cool, right?”
Actually, they were.
One shoe had blue and white stars, while the other had red and white stripes. Anything patriotic was badass in my book.
“Actually,” I repeated my thoughts. “Yeah. They are. You can give them to me when you’re done.”
“No,” he denied almost before I could finish my sentence. “I like them.”
“Yeah, but what if someone says those are theirs after seeing you wearing them?” I challenged. “Then you’ll have to give them back.”