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He sighed and painfully got up, slipping on his underwear.
I tossed the baggie on the table and passed Darby in the hallway, heading to the bedroom.
He smacked my ass as we passed.
“Make sure you put on underwear and a bra,” he teased. “My brother may be married, but he’s still a man.”
I rolled my eyes and closed the door behind me.
I did as he asked and put on underwear and a bra, but chose to put his tee back on before finding a pair of his sweatpants.
When I came back out, I looked like a homeless woman wearing borrowed clothes.
But everything I brought wasn’t anywhere near as comfortable.
Sliding open the door, I found Candy standing at the sink with her hips resting against it, Darby on the couch in front of the discarded bag of melted ice and Banks standing next to Candy. None of them talking.
I walked out and moved to the coffee table, my eyes going to Candy for a few seconds with a ‘what the fuck?’ look.
She shrugged and looked away, leaving me with no other option than to address the elephant in the room.
“Banks.” I nodded. “You doing okay?”
He shrugged. “Better than him, I guess.”
Darby snorted, and I turned to grab the baggie with now all water, dumped it down the sink, then refreshed the ice before zipping it back up.
Walking it over to Darby, I said, “Put this on your side.”
He did as I asked, not making a sound when the bag hit his skin.
I sat down and started to clean the abrasions while trying not to squirm as the tension built in the room.
“Banks, don’t you have something to say?” Candy pushed.
Banks cleared his throat.
“Turn over so I can get to your cuts.”
Darby rolled until he was lying on his side, exposing his back to the room.
Banks cursed and stood up from his lean against the counter.
Candy gasped.
“That’s bad,” I murmured. “The swelling is way worse.” I pressed against his back, causing him to groan and bury his face into the pillows of the couch. “Those might be broken. Are you sure you don’t want to go to the medic?”
He snorted. “What, exactly, are they going to do? Tell me not to go back out there? Yeah, right. And there ain’t nothin’ you can do about bruised ribs. I know. Had them plenty of times before.”
Banks came around the coffee table I was sitting on and looked down at the hellacious bruise that the fence had caused when Darby had hit it.
Doing the best I could to clean the scrapes around it so that I wasn’t hurting him anymore than I had to, I chattered away as the two men continued not to talk to each other.
“My dad once had a blown eardrum that he fought through,” I murmured. “I’m not even sure how the hell he did it. He said he heard it pop when a bull head butted him in the side of the face. He was out for weeks after he did that.”
I cleaned off an impressive scrape, then touched his side and said, “Roll to your belly.”
He did, exposing his other cuts and bruises that he’d sustained from his brother’s bull.
“Then there was the one time that the bull gored him in the groin. That was the time that Mom made him choose. Her or the rodeo. He chose the rodeo, so she left, leaving me behind, too.” I reached for another gauze pad that Banks was already holding out to me. “Y’all are lucky, really. To have family. I don’t have any. It was always just me. Sometimes me and my dad. But even when I was here with him, I wasn’t really here with him. I think he was the best dad that he could be under the circumstances, but in the end, I don’t really think he was a ‘dad’ if you know what I mean.”
The silence was heavy as I continued to work.
Finally, I made Darby turn over to expose his front side.
“Lay on mostly your left side, and it’ll keep you from putting too much pressure on your back,” I suggested.
Darby did a pushup into the couch and then sat all the way up, his face sporting a sheen of sweat.
“You didn’t have a mom?” Candy asked.
I shrugged as I cleaned and applied some Arnica gel to the bruises that I could see on Darby’s front.
His nipples pebbled when I got the liquid close to his pecs, and I grinned.
“I had a mom,” I said. “I saw her sometimes when we came to Houston. She would come see me, spend a couple of hours buying me shit at the mall, then return me to my dad. By the time I was around fifteen, though, she stopped doing that because she met a man that came home to her every night. He was an investment banker, and his danger levels are about a negative three. They have four kids now and live in the Highlands.”
