“Cash?” I asked, and Cash dipped his chin in a nod. “What are you doing here?”
His gaze met mine for a millisecond, then he looked down at his feet, and I remembered that he didn’t talk.
It didn’t stop me from asking, “Is Chase okay?”
He gave a tiny shake of his head, and his gaze darted over to the porch swing and back to me.
“Mom, can you give us a second?” I asked. “We’re gonna talk out here.”
Or play the world’s most awkward game of charades, I guessed. But Cash was here, and something was wrong with Chase, and I wasn’t going to let him leave before I figured out what the hell was going on.
“Sure, hon,” Mom said and closed the door.
Cash went and sat on the swing. I leaned on the front wall beside him, since I already knew how badly things went for me ifI got in his personal space. The silence dragged on, punctuated only by an insect pinging against the porch light.
“Um,” I said at last. “Do you want me to text you?”
Cash gave me such a narrow-eyed look that for a second I thought he was Chase after all. Then he squared his shoulders and drew a breath. “I can talk.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“He broke up with you.”
His voice was like Chase’s, but softer. It didn’t have the hard edge to it that Chase’s so often did, honed by sarcasm, hostility, or a combination of both.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, kind of.”
Cash glanced at me questioningly, then looked at his feet again.
“He wanted to go back to being casual,” I said. “And I didn’t. So we broke up.”
Cash was already shaking his head. “Chase likes you. You broke up because of me.”
“What do you mean?”
He took another deep breath and said softly, “He feels guilty because he wasn’t home the other night, when…” The words trailed off.
When Cash had been rocking back and forth in the back of the closet.
It wasn’t much of a revelation. I wasn’t so stupid that I hadn’t been able to draw that very obvious conclusion, but it wasn’t as though I could make Chase see he was wrong. If he evenwaswrong. I didn’t know the first damned thing about Chase or his brother. But Cash hadn’t come all this way to tell me what I already knew.
I took a chance and sat down next to him on the swing.
“Why did he feel guilty, Cash?” I asked, keeping my voice soft.
A long breath shuddered out of him, and I waited. If Chase was a feral cat, all teeth and claws, Cash was a scared little mouse. One sudden move and he’d disappear.
“Because when we were growing up, he took every hit for me,” he finally said. “And he thinks he still has to, for the rest of our lives.”
I wished I could say I was surprised, but it all fit. “That’s more than he’s ever told me.”
Cash snorted. “He always says I don’t talk, but he doesn’t talk either. He just does it more loudly than I do.”
For someone who didn’t talk much, Cash sure as hell had a way of getting to the heart of things. Or maybe it was because he didn’t talk. Straight to the point, and then he could climb back in his shell. Either way, he was here now—and the fact he was willing to talk to me, a guy he barely knew, spoke volumes.
“I really like Chase,” I said. “But he doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
Cash snorted again. “Optimus Prime.”
