“Thanks.”
I hauled myself off the couch in time for dinner and made sure that I put a plate in the refrigerator for Cash to reheat once he got home from work. We ate, and I helped with the dishes while Wilder got Gracie ready for bed. He added a sticker to her chart for putting her pajamas on, and then he added one next tomy name for drying the dishes, because he was an asshole like that. Joke was on him. I fucking loved collecting those stickers.
We were watching TV when I heard the familiar roar of Cash’s dirt bike coming down the street. It grew steadily louder and louder—right until it didn’t. Instead, the sound turned high-pitched, like Cash was revving the engine, and fell suddenly silent.
I was on my feet in a second, and Danny and Wilder followed me as I ran out the front door.
“Daddy?” Gracie yelled. “Daddy?”
“Stay on the porch!” Wilder shouted back.
It was dark in the street, and I couldn’t see shit for the longest time while my eyes adjusted. My heart was racing, and I felt dizzy and sick. The gravel at the edge of the road dug into my bare feet, but I didn’t give a fuck. I hardly felt it.
“Cash?” I shouted down the street. In the distance, a block away or so, headlights shone, but there was nothing in our street.
Danny yelled out for him too, and a moment later a figure appeared out of the gloom: Cash, limping toward us and wheeling his dirt bike.
The three of us hurried to meet him.
“You okay?” Danny asked. “You bleeding?”
“Okay,” Cash whispered, but his voice shook, so I knew he was lying.
Wilder got the flashlight on his phone working and sucked in a breath through his teeth when he illuminated Cash’s jeans. The knees were shredded and bloody, and Wilder hissed. “Give me the bike. You guys help him.”
“What happened?” Danny asked as we supported Cash between us and headed back toward the house.
“Pothole,” Cash whispered in my ear.
“Pothole,” I repeated.
Sometimes Cash wasn’t great at saying stuff aloud to people, even Danny and Wilder, so I did it for him. Always had, since the time we both could talk and Cash just hadn’t. Only one of us had been smart enough to shut the fuck up when we were kids, and it hadn’t been me.
Gracie was waiting on the porch, jumping from foot to foot like she needed the bathroom. She looked like she was about to cry. “Daddy? Cash?”
“He’s okay, Gracie,” Wilder said. “Everyone’s okay.”
Cash tipped his chin up at Gracie and forced a smile to prove Wilder right.
Danny and I got Cash into the bathroom and sat him on the edge of the tub. Then Danny got to work, cutting away Cash’s jeans and using tweezers to pull pieces of gravel out of his knees. Even though he wasn’t far into his training yet, it was clear he knew what he was doing.
“Frankly, I think that if any one of us can rock a pair of Daisy Dukes, it’s you,” he told Cash, and Cash responded with a wet-sounding sniffle that was almost a laugh. “Okay, so this is the part where I tell you it’s gonna hurt.”
Cash nodded grimly as Danny opened the iodine.
So yeah, it was just some gravel rash on his knees and one arm in the end. We’d had worse. And once Cash was wrapped up in his favorite blanket in his favorite chair, eating a bowl of ice cream, he seemed fine.
But all I could think about was what if he’d hit a pothole on the highway instead, going seventy? And how the hell had he hit a pothole in our street anyway? He knew it like the back of his hand.
I looked over at him from where I was wedged on the couch between Wilder and Danny and saw his eyelashes dip. Saw the shadows underneath them too and remembered I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep without my brother beside me.
I wasn’t sleeping days, and Cash wasn’t sleeping nights.
And tonight that had almost caught up to him in the worst possible way.
Fuck this shit.
I needed to get off night work before it ended up killing one or both of us.
