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"And when they don't have a car in eight inches of snow with a dying kitten in her arms."
"You walked a dog with her."
"She asked me to."
Cy sighed out his air, shaking his head.
"It's okay to want to let yourself like someone, Reeve. It's been, what, eight years. You're allowed to move on. You're allowed to be happy."
There it was.
I had heard that phrase a lot.
I had heard it from hoards of therapists.
I had heard it from Wasp.
And now I was hearing it from Cy.
You're allowed to be happy.
The problem was, it just wasn't possible. It wasn't something I could have. Not really. Not fully. There was no way to be happy, genuinely happy, with the shit I still had in my head to haunt me in quiet moments when my guards were down, and they could slip back in.
There wasn't enough good in life to balance out that kind of bad.
"I'm fine, Cy," I assured him.
"Fine isn't how you want to live your life," he shot back, looking disgusted at settling for anything being as banal as 'fine.'
Cy was not the settling kind. He believed in living deep, enjoying the fuck out of life. He spent his late teens and early twenties barely sleeping, doing too much drinking, too much fucking, and a shitton of partying up and down the east coast. He might have technically lived with me - and then Wasp when she aged up - but he had never been around. One day I would see him chugging some Gatorade to fend off a hangover in the kitchen at four a.m. The next day, I would hear he was in fucking Disneyland of all places. He played his guitar, and he chased his skirts, and he loved every minute of it.
Then, he met Reese.
She was just more proof that Cy didn't settle. She was the whole fucking package. Sweet, smart, a little unintentionally funny, dedicated, loyal. And fuck did he love that woman. With his every breath. It was a thing to see. To watch such a manwhore become so devoted.
I was happy for him.
I was glad he found everything he wanted in life.
But fine, yeah, I was pretty sure fine was as good as it was going to get with me. That was okay. Because fine was leaps and fucking bounds better than I had been.
In a fucking hole.
That was where I lived my life for years.
Just getting by.
Hell, not really even that.
A dead man walking was more like it.
What I had now, well, this was a hell of a lot more than I thought I could ever have.
It meant a lot to me, this brotherhood. It meant more than I knew it could have. I had gone along with it because Cyrus was so jazzed at the idea, because, well, the fuck did I even have to lose at that point?
I never expected to find a sort of comfort here. Maybe a lot of that had to do with the fact that I didn't have to pretend with The Henchmen. Because, well, a lot of the guys were all sorts of fucked up. Cy was the anomaly here. The guys like me were everywhere. Renny with his fucked up upbringing that made him flip a switch and become an obsessive prick. Duke with his self-hatred for things that weren't even his fault. Wolf with his trigger switch that led to literally ripping people open with his bare hands on occasion. Repo with the betrayal that shook his world, leading to blood on his hands and an absolute sense of loyalty. Edison with his trail of vengeance. Roan with, well, whatever haunted him.
I could fit in with these levels of damage.
Hell, mine maybe didn't even stick out as much as the more volatile ones around me.
There was a certain comfort in that.
No one expected me to be someone I wasn't.
To be fair, Cyrus wasn't expecting that either. Not after all this time anyway. He was just my brother. He wanted to know I was okay. He wanted to know I wasn't denying myself things just to keep myself miserable.
"Fine is better than I've been," I reminded him.
His eyes darkened at that, something I hated to see from someone as bright as he was. But there was no way to look back on those days and find the bright side. There wasn't one. It was a black hole of a few years. He had been there with me through most of it too. He had given up his tendency to travel at the drop of the dime, be gone for days on end chasing skirts. He had gotten a somewhat steady job in town and had been with me most days and nights.
I had a feeling Cy and Wasp were on suicide watch those days. I guess it didn't make sense that someone could be so low for so long without wanting to off themselves.
