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But I suddenly wasn’t finding anything funny with the way Cap described himself.
Cap kept talking.
“Then I wasn’t the runt anymore. He always took care of me, him and Park. But I no longer needed him to take care of me, and the dynamic shift could have come between us. I needed to find my own path, see who I was out of the shadow of Roam. One of the reasons I went into the Army. And Roam needed time to get out of the habit of looking out for me.”
“Who’s Park?” Luna queried.
“Our other brother. He died. Got hold of bad dope. Someone had cut it with something, he injected it, Roam, Jules and me found him dead in an alley.”
My body went solid.
Luna looked at me.
Curled into him on Luna’s loveseat, I pulled myself out of my shock in order to put a soothing hand on his chest.
He turned to me.
“It’s okay,” he murmured.
“It’s not,” I replied.
His smile was small. “You’re right. It’s not. But there’s no changing it. Roam and I have talked about it a lot since then, and we both figure it would have happened one way or another. He was a daredevil. Fearless. He needed constant challenge. If he’d had a different life, maybe being in organized sports or something that would claim his focus would have helped. But I don’t even think that would work. No joke, if he’d lived, he would have become a racecar driver or a paratrooper. He was an adrenaline junkie.”
“Okay,” I said, watching him closely.
“His death led Jules to Vance,” Cap explained. Vance being Jules’s husband, a member of the Nightingale Investigations crew up in Denver, and, from Cap’s accounts, a man who became kind of a big brother mixed with mentor to Cap and Roam. “Vance led to us being a part of the RCHB and Roam and I having Shirleen. So it’s like”—he tilted his head in an odd manner, as if he was trying to stretch some tension out of one side, so I cuddled closer and pressed my hand harder into his chest—“even in death, Park was looking after us.”
The RCHB was the Rock Chick/Hot Bunch, how the Denver gang referred to themselves.
And FYI, “Rock Chick” was part of the title of the book about Kai Mason and Stella Gunn.
“Let’s stop talking about this,” I said.
“Yeah, let’s,” Luna agreed.
“I had him, baby,” Cap said quietly. “I loved him, I lost him. You know something about that.”
It struck me that I did. It was the worst, but we had that in common.
And as much as I hated what happened to Macy, and the aftereffects of that, if it hadn’t happened, I might not ever have moved to Phoenix, met Luna, earned her family, started working at Tito’s, found my place at the Oasis.
So I understood him.
“Time for dessert!” Luna thankfully cried.
She got up, taking Jacques with her, then dumping her pup in my lap before she headed toward the kitchen.
“Dessert?” Cap muttered. “Jesus Christ, I’m gonna need to run for an extra hour to work off all this food.”
“You run?” I asked.
“This body doesn’t maintain itself,” he answered.
“Allow me to congratulate you on the caliber of work you put into it,” I replied.
He started laughing.
Jacques heard his momma doing something in the kitchen, so, naturally, he leapt off my lap and headed that way.
