“It was a long time ago. An accident.”
His thumb made circles against my skin. “Tell me.”
My eyes blurred, and my lips rolled in on each other. There was a tightness in the back of my throat that kept my voice from reaching anything above a whisper.
“Manny needed a miracle. My mama always said I was supposed to be that miracle, but I wasn’t very good at it.”
“Who’s Manny?”
“My big brother. He had juvenile leukemia. My parents only made me in an effort to save him. I spent my childhood in a hospital. I didn’t have any friends, and the only person who liked me was Manny. They took my blood. My stem cells. Bone marrow.” My voice cracked as I spoke, but I ignored it the way I always did. “I have this memory of being held down by a bunch of doctors in masks while I screamed for them to stop hurting me. After that, Manny told me he didn’t want me to be his miracle anymore. He told me to run away, but where the fuck was I supposed to go, you know?”
I sniffed and wrapped my shaky hand around Ivan’s wrist.
“When I was eight, Manny’s liver started failing, and the doctors wanted to take a piece of mine. He told me not to do it, but it’s not like anybody ever asked me what I wanted. It must have been a really shitty piece of liver because he died a couple of days later.”
“Solnyshko. That doesn’t mean you killed him. Tell me you know that.”
“Yeah, my brain knows it wasn’t technically my fault, but my heart has been a little slow to catch up. I used to sit outside my parent’s bedroom at night and listen to my mama cry. She’d whisper to my father that it was my fault I wasn’t strong enough to save him. I grew up thinking if I’d tried a little harder or stayed a little closer, then he wouldn’t be dead.”
“You know what I think?”
I blinked up at him. A rough knuckle brushed a tear away, and he made a harsh sound before saying, “I think your parents are shitty fucking people. I think Manny is dead because the universe plays bad games with good people.”
His hand moved over the surface of my skin until he gripped my chin in his hand. His eyes were intense as they drilled into me, but I didn’t look away. Not even when he squeezed my cheeks and his nostrils flared.
“You did everything right, understand me? You protected your brother for as long as you could, and then you protected me. You’re a good boy, Marcos.”
My chest filled, and though I wouldn’t believe him tomorrow, I believed him now. I’d believe anything he said when he looked at me like that.
“This place sucks, but I can’t leave until I know you’re okay.”
“You understand this is different, yeah? What happened to Manny and what happened to me are not the same.”
“You ever try to reason with anxiety? It’s like trying to shove a balloon through a keyhole.”
Useless.
“You didn’t read all about me in some sort of best friend background check?”
“We didn’t dive all that deep. Toby wanted to make friends the real way, and Ben…”
“Gives him whatever he wants.”
“Right.” His nose wrinkled. “Toby doesn’t know any of this?”
I lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Nobody does. We moved to Seattle shortly after Manny died, and I just… wanted to be someone different for a while. Someone who wasn’t born for spare parts and broken pieces.”
The pad of his thumb toyed with my bottom lip, and it took all I had in me not to suck it into my mouth. “You told me,” he hummed.
It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him it was because I thought I owed him an explanation for my erratic behavior, but that wasn’t true.
For a kid who spent his life screaming, the truth was simpler than that.
“You make things quiet.”
ChapterFive
Ivan
