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Killian: Please call me when you get this.
I don’t answer. Instead, I lay my phone face down on the nightstand and stare at the ceiling. Last night was a cluster fuck. I don’t want to talk to them at the moment.
“Do you want breakfast? Because I’m starving.”
I shake my head, my stomach churning at the thought. “I’ll be right back,” she says. I nod again, still speechless.
She chuckles getting up from the bed. She’s almost to the door when she turns.
“Hey Carson?” I look up.
“Breathe. Your heart is racing.” My mouth drops open, the tips of my ears turn red. God, what is this woman doing to me?
I take a quick sip of my water to cool my body down. “You look cute when you blush.” I spit my water out it splashes on the floor. She smirks, biting her lip, then turns on her feet walking down the stairs. I stare at the empty spot, my mouth opening and closing in shock. God, I’m fucked.
“What are you gonna do about tonight?” I shift my eyes from the TV to Alexis she’s sitting at her dinner table working while I’m watching a documentary about clowns.
“I don’t know."
I have a shift in a few hours. I’ve always felt blessed that I was working with my best friend, but tonight I’m dreading it, I need to talk to him. I have never liked it when we argued, and I definitely don’t like it now.
“Do you think I’m being petty?”
She looks up from her notepad, her eyes meeting mine. “Petty?”
“Yeah, that I’m making a bigger deal out of this than it actually is.”
“No, I think you have every right to be angry. They hid something from you, you can be mad about that.”
“It’s not even the fact that they hid it, but it’s why they did it.”
“They were being idiots. I know it doesn’t make it better, but they really regret it.”
She cocks her head. “I may have been angry last night,” she mutters sheepishly.
“Angry?” I repeat, “At them?”
She nods, placing her notepad on the table, angling her body towards me, her eyes on the TV. “When you fell asleep last night. I may have scolded them a bit.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Scolded them?”
“Yes, for hurting you.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ears. “They were acting like little kids. I told them to sort their stuff out. They were hurting you, and I wasn’t going to let them do that.” She rambles, but I’m frozen.
She stood up for me?
“You stood up for me?”
“Carson…” She drawls. “That’s the least I could do.”
The least she could do? It isn’t the first time people stood up for me, my family did it plenty of times growing up. But Alexis standing up for me while I’m drunk as fuck, using her lap as a pillow. That’s new, very new, and I like it. A whole lot.
“What? Has no one stood up for you before?”
“No they have—but, not for a long time. And definitely not against my brother and best friend.”
“They don’t scare me. I grew up with rapists and murderers, if I didn’t stand up to them.” She cocks her head “I would probably be dead right now.” She says it so nonchalantly, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, but the words make my blood boil it reminds me of Kane who visited yesterday. She didn’t want to talk about it then, but I’m hoping she will now.
“How do you feel about your brother’s case opening again?”
