Page 62 of The Heartbreaker Next Door

When Holly poked her head in and announced that doctor from plastics would be in soon, I caught the look on Dean’s face. It wasn’t fear. It was the same look I saw him give when an animal was hurt on the ranch, the steeling of himself to be the anchor, the one who would absorb the blow so the animal—or child, in this case—didn’t have to.

Mav’s eyes filled with tears, and I was about to say something when Dean beat me to it. “Hey, you know, I’ve had stitches a bunch of times.”

Mav’s eyes widened. “You did?”

He nodded. “Not just me either. Damon and Dylan have had at least a hundred between them. Us Lockhart boys are pretty good at getting banged up. My mom, Miss Selma, she used to spend so much time here they said they would give her her own room and parking space.”

Mav smiled at this. “They did?”

“Yep. Wanna see my scars?”

Mav nodded.

Dean rolled up his sleeve and showed him a pale line on his forearm. “That’s from barbed wire. Four stitches.” He pointed to the side of his eyebrow, where there was a faint, silvery mark. “This one? Eight stitches. Got it when I was about your age.”

Maverick touched his own brow, then Dean’s, as if comparing. “Did it hurt?”

Dean shrugged, and his mouth twitched up in the tiniest smile. “A little. But only for a minute. After that, it was just itchy.” He leaned in closer. “You know what my mom told me? The tougher you are, the faster it heals.”

Maverick absorbed this, considering it with the intense seriousness only small children can muster. “I’m tough,” he declared.

“Yes, you are,” Dean agreed.

I watched as Dean’s approval lit up Mav’s face, and something inside me went liquid.

There was no world in which I’d ever be able to explain how much this meant to me, or how grateful I was that he showed up, or how afraid I’d been that I would have to do this alone.

The doctors and nurses filed in, a small army of calm efficiency. They explained every step to Maverick, but he still wanted to sit on my lap as they cleaned the wound and numbed the skin. When the needle appeared, he almost turned around and hugged my neck, but midway he stopped and looked at Dean, who gave him a nod.

“You got this,” Dean assured him. “Squeeze my hand if it hurts.”

Maverick reached for Dean’s hand, and for the next five minutes, every time the suture needle bit into his skin, Mav clamped down with all the power his four-year-old body had. To Dean’s credit, he didn’t flinch. Not even when Maverick’s little fingers left half-moon indentations in his skin, or the tips of his Dean’s fingers went totally white from the circulation being cut off.

Dean just kept talking, telling stories about falling off hay bales and wrestling with his brothers, and Mav listened, wide-eyed, even as tears slid down his cheeks.

When the last stitch was in, and the nurse applied a cartoon bandage and handed over a sticker, Maverick moved over to Dean’s lap and slumped against him, totally spent. Dean didn’t seem to mind. He just held Maverick up, gentle but solid as a fence post.

Holly came back in, checked Mav’s vitals, and told us he would need to stay a bit longer for observation. She looked at Dean, then at me, and the understanding in her gaze made me wonder how many times she’d seen a trio like ours—messy, pieced together, but anchored by something that wasn’t quite blood and wasn’t quite friendship, but something durable and true.

Once Maverick succumbed to exhaustion and drooped bonelessly against Dean’s chest—his hand still anchored in Dean’s massive paw, his lashes spiky with moisture—I realized that Dean wasn’t going to move unless a nurse physically separated them. He simply sat there, all stoic gravity and silent focus, as if the hard plastic hospital chair had always been his natural habitat.

Maverick’s cheek was pressed to Dean’s collarbone, a thin line of drool dampening his t-shirt. Dean didn’t so much as flinch. I wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.

I sat beside them and tried to put words to the tight ache radiating in my chest. If I’d had even a fraction less pride, I would have reached over and clung to Dean myself, just to feel what it was like to lean on someone whose arms could absorb the weight.

Instead, I whispered, as tears of gratitude filled my eyes, “You came.”

Dean blinked. The words seemed to catch him off guard, as if the idea he might not have shown up had never even occurred to him.

“You called,” he answered, low and matter-of-fact, like that explained the laws of physics.

To Dean, that was explanation enough.

To me, it was everything.

21

DEBT, DINNER, AND A DICKHEAD