“I texted you on the way here, but I figured your phone was off when you didn’t write me back,” I said as he lowered me. I grinned at him, putting my hands on each side of his face to squish his cheeks together. We weren’t super close anymore, but I loved the hell out of him. He’d been the only one in my family to never disappoint me.
He stuck his tongue out and tried to lick my hand.
I gave his cheek a pinch before I dropped my hands and took a step back so that my shoulder brushed the side of Aiden’s arm. “Oscar, Aiden. Aiden, Oscar.”
It was Aiden who extended his hand first.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Oscar said, his tone a little surprised as he shook Aiden’s hand.
“Same.” The big guy pulled back. “You played a good game.”
I eyed him a little out of the corner of my eye. Had he just paid him a compliment?
My brother’s face turned a little pink as he nodded. The big idiot was like a younger version of me—words weren’t our strength in life. “Oh, ah, thanks. Everybody’s been talking about how you were at our game,” he stammered before his gaze swung over to me as his face kept that nice rosy shade. “I didn’t think you’d be here together.”
I shrugged, not knowing how to respond. “How was your Thanksgiving?”
Oscar shot me that face that said it meant about as much to him as it meant to me. “We had practice, most of us went to the coach’s house for dinner. You?”
“I worked and then went to his game afterward.” I elbowed Aiden’s forearm.
“Hey…” His eyes darted behind me for a second; an uncomfortable look crawled over his long face. Oscar blew out a long, shaky breath. “Damn it, Vanny. I’m sorry, okay? You caught me off guard and I forgot…”
I didn’t like where this was going. We never apologized to each other. If anything, Oscar and I had always understood what we needed to do to survive. He’d given me his blessing to go to school far away from him, and I never gave him shit for going weeks between contacting me.
But I had this terrible feeling…
“Susie is here. At least, she said she was going to be here.”
Motherfucker. Motherfucking fucker. My teeth clenched down, one row aligned on top of the other, and I had to will my face from reacting. It took nearly everything in me to play off the anger filling me up. Of all the times to come see Oscar, Susie had to come now? Since when had she given a shit about him? While they’d always been nicer to him than they’d been to me, none of my sisters had ever really paid that much attention to him.
“I came to see you. It’s fine,” I lied. It wasn’t fine. I didn’t want to see my sister, and I didn’t want him to feel bad either. As if I wasn’t about three seconds away from screaming, I asked, “Are you heading back to Shreveport now?”
He nodded, the discomfort brutally apparent on his face. I guess he did know me well enough to not be fooled. “Yeah.” Oscar stopped talking, his eyes going pained in a way that said ‘I’m so sorry’ and raised his hand up to wave at someone behind me. “Vanny, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. If I knew you were coming, I would have told her…”
Not to come? I could be a better person for Oscar. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not going to make you choose between us.” That had him making a croaking noise that I waved off. “Don’t be dumb. Give me a hug.”
The clean, young lines of his face twisted and strained, but he nodded and quickly wrapped his arms around me. He whispered into my ear, “We have a game against San Antonio in a couple weeks. Come please. Both of you.”
I pulled back and nodded a little more tightly than I would have liked. I really didn’t want to make him feel bad, but just knowing Susie was in my general vicinity made me go to ten. Having Susie around when I’d driven an hour to come see Oscar pissed me off that much more. “I will. I’m not sure about the Hulk here with his schedule, but I’ll go.” I smiled at him. “I’ll see you soon then. Love you.”
“Love you, too, Vanny.” Teeth locked, he glanced at Aiden and extended his hand again. “It was nice meeting you. Good luck the rest of your season.”
The big guy nodded and shook his hand. “Thanks. You too.”
I sensed the evil almost immediately. I spotted my sister and her idiot husband within seconds of turning around. It was like my body was tuned in to know where she was at; it always had been. It was a protective instinct, it had to be.
Apparently, she found me in the crowd immediately too. She was glowering, her mouth twisting as her gaze bounced from me to Aiden and back again. Almost four inches shorter than me and only two years older, Susie looked so much older than her actual age, but that was the consequences of drugs, heavy drinking, and just being a miserable bitch in general. Unhappiness prematurely aged a person, my foster mom had told me once. She was right.
But I still couldn’t summon up any sympathy for my older sister. I believed in choices. We’d grown up in the same environment, went to the same schools, and had about the same intelligence, I figured. She’d always been a ruthless, angry, mean person, but at thirteen, she’d started doing stupid crap that led to more stupid crap and more stupid crap and more stupid crap until she was buried under so much crap, she could never find her way out of it.
You couldn’t expect anyone to take care of you better than you could take care of you.
Summoning up every inch of adult in me, I told myself not to be petty. I wouldn’t be petty no matter how much I wanted to. So I forced out a “Hi, Susie. Hi, Ricky,” at both her and her crackhead significant other, the same one who had given me a bruise and had gotten damn near kicked in the balls for it.
Just as suddenly as the thought entered my head, the big body next to me suddenly froze in place. I didn’t need to look at him to know his entire frame went rigid; I could feel it. Feel him. “Is that him?” he asked in a low voice that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise.
“Who?” I was dumb enough to ask.
“The guy who gave you the bruise on your arm.”
The ‘oh shit’ on my face must have been enough for him, because the instant I thought the answer—the ‘yes it’s that bastard’—a muscle in Aiden’s cheek popped. And he was gone. Those long legs ate up the few feet of concrete between us and Susie. Before I could say a word, stop him, tell him that guy wasn’t worth the energy it took Aiden to get riled up, The Wall of Winnipeg had walked directly into my sister’s husband’s path, effectively stopping the five-foot-ten-ish man in place. Considering he was never close enough to most human beings to really illustrate how large he really was, in that moment, with the two of them mere feet apart from each other, the difference was striking. Aiden dwarfed him in every way.
But it wasn’t the obvious size difference that shocked me. It was the way Aiden, a professional athlete at the peak of his career, was reacting. I had never seen him so still. He was breathing out of his nose like a goddamn dragon. His biceps were so bunched and strained, I could tell from even under his hoodie, and he had the single cockiest expression on his face that I had ever seen, and that was saying something because I thought I’d witnessed the most annoying of all his expressions. But the one he had on right then, put all the rest to shame.