Tall, Tatted and Tempting (The Reed Brothers 1)

“He just fell down in the hallway and started to shake,” I try to explain. But I’m trying to be strong since I’m holding Hayley.

“Can we see him?” he asks.

I shake my head. “Not yet. They took him back and they’re working on him.”

Paul goes to the payphone and drops in some change. He turns his back to me and talks for a minute. Then he comes and takes Hayley back from my arms. “Now we wait,” he says.

Hayley pats his cheek, and I see tears well up in his eyes. “Where’s Matt?” Hayley asks.

“Matt’s with the doctors,” he explains, blinking hard.

“Dey gonna make him all betta?” she asks. She’s following his gaze with hers, not letting him off the hook. She frowns when he doesn’t answer.

“They’re going to work hard to make him better,” I tell her.

“Thank you,” Paul chokes out. I nod. I can’t say more than that. Hayley holds out her arms to me again, and I take her to sit down. We read upside down books until a woman comes rushing through the doors. She runs to Paul. Her hair is up in a ponytail and she’s almost as tall as he is. But she’s stunning. Hayley has Paul’s hair color and eyes, but everything else about her is her mother.

She leans into Paul to her and he hugs her tightly. I hear them murmuring to one another but I can’t hear what they’re saying. She comes to me and takes Hayley in her arms. “Thank you,” she says.

I look into her eyes. She’s kind. I can tell. And I can also see that she’s head over heels in love with Paul. She walks over to him, whispers something in his ear, and he nods. She kisses him on the lips, and he kisses her back. “I’ll call you when I find out what’s going on,” he says.

She leaves with Hayley. Paul takes a deep breath and sits down beside me, his elbows on his knees. “He wasn’t in a lot of pain, was he?” he asks.

“Not that I could tell.” He was convulsing. But not in pain. I doubt he was feeling much.

“That’s my biggest fear. That he’ll be in a lot of pain when it happens. It scares me to death.”

“So you’ve thought about it,” I blurt out. I want to take it back immediately. But it’s too late.

“Thought about it.” He snorts. “It’s all I ever f**king think about. Ever.” His voice cracks on the last word. “I’m his big brother. I’m supposed to be able to save him from anything that could hurt him. But I can’t save him from this.”

I just listen, because there’s nothing I can say to comfort him.

A tear drop rolls down his cheek and he brushes it away with a hurried swipe. “He knows how much you care,” I say. It’s probably the wrong thing to tell him.

“The f**ker better know how I feel about him. I’d die for every last one of them. I wish it was me instead of him. I’d trade places with him in a heartbeat.”

“He wouldn’t let you.” It’s the truth.

Paul chuckles. But it’s a sound without any merriment.

The doors of the hospital slide open and Logan, Pete and Sam run in. I hop out of my chair fall into Logan’s arms, because I know he’ll catch me. He squeezes me to him and rubs my hair for a second. Paul walks over and starts to speak to him. They’re all signing, but I can follow it. He explains.

Can we see him? Logan asks.

Paul shakes his head. “Not yet. They’ll let us know when we can.”

If we can. But no one says that out loud.

Logan drops his arm around me and pulls me into him. His face is in my hair and I can feel the warm caress of his breath against my neck. I lift my head and look up at him. “It’s bad,” I say.

He closes his eyes and lays the tips of his fingers against his temple. He knows.

Now we wait.

They’re all draped over the furniture in the waiting room, taking up a ton of space. But no one else is there, so it hasn’t mattered. Any one of these boys would give their seat up for someone else. Pete took Sam’s socks about an hour ago, and Sam put his shoes back on with none. Pete was barefoot. I somehow knew he wouldn’t go back inside. He went for his brothers instead.

It seems like days later when a doctor comes to talk to the family. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. It feels like days.

The doctor sighs heavily and starts to talk. I hear snippets of it over the pulse that’s pounding in my head.

The chemo didn’t work.

He’s worse than he was.

They can call hospice.

“There’s nothing else you can do?” Paul asks.

The doctor sits down with them. “We’ve exhausted every opportunity. There are some trials that he could get into, but the chances are small. And the one that would most benefit him is very expensive.”

He waits. A pregnant silence falls over the room. “How expensive?” Paul asks.

“Hundreds of thousands,” the doctor says. “He doesn’t even have medical insurance.”

So that’s it. They don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars so their brother dies.

I wipe a tear from my cheek. “This treatment, it could save him?” I ask. “Or would it just prolong the inevitable?”

He looks at me like I’m the most ridiculous person he’s ever met. “They’re having good success with it. There are no guarantees, however.”

“But it would give him a chance?”