Stealing Her (Covet 1)

Her sharp gasp drew my attention. Her face had paled, and her eyes locked with mine. “There’s been an accident.”

Chapter Two

BRIDGE

“Another late night?” Mom asked when I dropped my workout bag on the couch and went in search of a beer.

She knew the answer.

Yet she always had to ask the question, didn’t she?

I smiled a bit as I dipped my head into the small worn fridge and pulled out an IPA. “Not too late.”

Her smile was frail as she got up and tried to stand. I moved so fast the beer almost toppled over the counter. She was only in her late fifties, but you’d think she was in her seventies the way she moved these days.

Gastroparesis did that to a person. She’d gone from being healthy to weighing only ninety-five pounds. Her stomach couldn’t properly digest anything, even water, which forced her to use a tube that fed her through her stomach. When she was diagnosed five years ago, we figured that we would just fight it any way we could. It’s not a well-known condition and it’s super hard to get a proper diagnosis, so when people ask her what’s wrong and hear it’s not cancer, they fucking sigh in relief like she’s not facing a death sentence every single day her feeding tube malfunctions.

Pain lanced my heart, my throat, every cell in my body as I steadied her. “Where you off to so fast?”

She rolled her eyes and patted me on the right shoulder. “If that’s fast . . .”

“So fast I’m gonna start calling you Flash.” I winked.

Water collected in her eyes. Tears meant she was either in pain or she was sad, and I couldn’t handle either of those things.

And I would do anything, cross any ocean, to make sure that the most important light of my life didn’t get snuffed out by something that in my mind should be such an easy thing to fix. But I wasn’t a kid anymore, I couldn’t fix this with my fists and I couldn’t fix it with my intellect. So I loved her as best I could. And prayed it was enough.

Her doctors kept trying new things.

Which meant I kept working more shifts so I could afford all the new treatments they claimed would give me more time with her.

We’d sold the SUV years ago in exchange for a Jeep that broke down more than it worked, and every single time the man who’d fathered me showed up on TV in a new car I wanted to scream.

But after two years of unanswered phone calls, I realized he wasn’t going to come riding in on a white horse and rescue us from medical bills.

And neither was the brother who ended up turning out exactly like the guy everyone called a saint. Edward Tennyson? A saint? My ass. Just because he donated money to foundations that interested him didn’t make him a saint, it made him a shrewd businessman who understood the power of public opinion.

“I was going to make us some dinner.” She always said “us” even though she didn’t eat solid food. She said she lived vicariously through me, so I drank her favorite milkshakes. I spent every damn day of my life dedicated to eating what she wanted to eat, and then punished my physical body afterward so that I could continue to do it.

My mom had a clear sweet tooth, and I’d be twice my size if I didn’t put in two hours a day at the gym after I was done training. The sacrifices we make for those we love.

“Why don’t you sit down?” I finally said, keeping the emotions I was feeling out of my voice. “And I’ll whip up some of your favorite baked chicken while I tell you about my day.”

Something about the way she looked at me made me sad, like she knew one day I would need someone else to talk to, someone else to share my life with, when honestly all I wanted was my mom.

All I needed was my mom.

I let myself believe that lie every single time my chest felt like it was going to crack over the loss of a part of my soul, or at least that’s what it felt like. I remembered a scared Julian, one who confronted me for abandoning him a year after we moved, when in my mind I was just going across town to get us settled before seeing him at school the next day.

How wrong I’d been.

Emails between us were fewer and fewer until one day in college, they stopped altogether. I kept up to date with his escapades by reading the entertainment section of the paper, and then was so disgusted with what I saw, with the man he had become—I just stopped.

I’d like to think a healthy appetite for women helped distract me, but when they saw me, they wrongly assumed I was my estranged brother, which meant they also wrongly assumed I was rolling in it. In reality, I worked part time as a personal trainer and part time as a bartender while I tried to pick up shifts with UPS.