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I try not to picture Beckett in distress. “I can’t believe he saw his bodyguard get beat up right in front of him.” I imagine that happening to me…with Frog…and nausea rises and unsettles my stomach. More nausea rises when I picture O’Malley. Back when I was sixteen, he’d been my bodyguard for eight months. He wasn’t my favorite. He’d run to my parents and tattle on me anytime I vaped. But I would never wish this on him.
“I know,” Tom sighs, his voice strained, more upset imagining it all too. “I’ve always thought Beckett is a contradiction—”
“We all can be, dear brother,” Eliot interjects with a quietness to his voice. He’s been unusually untalkative tonight.
“But not like Beckett,” Tom rebuts. “He’s outwardly so soft, but inside, he’s like steel. It’s almost like someone melted him down tonight, and it’s strange. And everyone feels terrible for O’Malley. I get it’s his job, but it sucks knowing that the people protecting us could get that seriously hurt.”
“Like Thatcher,” I whisper. He took a bullet at the Summer Fest when Tom had been performing. It’s becoming harder not to keep picturing Frog or Donnelly in the line of fire. I feel queasier.
“Yeah, like Thatcher,” Tom whispers back, then lets out a heavier sigh. “He seemed physically slower at the last Wednesday Night Dinner.”
“I think he’s hiding how much the surgery took a toll on him,” I mention quietly.
“I hope Jane Eleanor is on his ass about it,” Tom mutters.
“I can’t lose a brother-in-law,” Eliot murmurs. “…I don’t want to lose anyone.” He intakes a tight breath. “I swear, if the Rochesters are behind this attack, they’re going to pay for eternity.”
I stiffen. Withholding the truth from my best friends is never fun, but I can’t put Donnelly in jeopardy or break his trust in me, and I know, in the end, Eliot at least will understand.
“What do the Rochesters have to gain by attacking our brother?” Tom says. “Nothing.”
“Revenge,” Eliot theorizes. “Against us.”
“I’d agree, but we’ve barely done shit to them, brother,” Tom replies with another sigh. “It doesn’t add up.” I hear the soft strum of Tom’s guitar before the sound dies abruptly. He must set the instrument aside. “How’s your ankle, Luna?”
I peek down at my bandaged shin. “It throbs a little bit, but other than that, it’s fine.”
“You know what I can’t believe? You fell through a ceiling and we missed it.”
“Not just that we missed it,” Eliot chimes in, “that we weren’t the ones who fell with you.”
“Yeah, how’d you end up with Donnelly?” Tom wonders. “We never heard the full story.”
I pull the string to my hoodie. And this is where I should gush out my feelings to my best friends. This is the next step in human friendship evolution, unearthly reader.
You’re supposed to share. You’re supposed to seek advice and comfort during the hard times, but I can’t.
I can’t.
The words lodge inside my throat, and I know I’m scared.
After my first kiss with Donnelly tonight, my feelings have flourished and thrived into something overgrown and so, so delicate. I’m more afraid of sharing something so precious to me and then have it obliterated into pieces that I can never knit together again.
“We ran into each other,” I say vaguely. “He was helping me find Kinney. It was serendipitous, I guess.” That feels honest and true. “But then my foot got stuck, and we fell and landed on a bed together—”
“Like on top of each other?” Tom cuts in, shocked.
“Kinda, yeah.”
Eliot lets out a soft laugh and I picture his burgeoning grin. “The carnal amusement of it all.”
“Uh-uh, not so amusing—not when my dad walked in and pretty much thought we’d been hooking up in the attic.”
Tom audibly winces. “Is Donnelly still alive?”
I remember Donnelly’s whole speech to my dad, and tears prick my eyes, ones made of pride. I wonder if I have that in me, too. The power to speak up when I need to. I want to believe it’s in there, brimming. I want to believe it always has been inside me, but I didn’t have much of a chance to say anything more to my parents tonight. Not when the news dropped about the attack in New York so soon after Donnelly left.
“Yep, he’s still alive,” I murmur. “He’s a hardy bean.”
“Can you imagine you and Donnelly like actually hooking up?” Tom says with a laugh of disbelief. “You’d be the fourth person in our families to get with a bodyguard. That’d be unreal.”
Why does this hurt so much? I feel my eyes involuntarily leaking out the creases. I’m protective about my feelings for Donnelly, and they feel genuine and real and true to me. Not piggybacked off Moffy or Jane or Sulli. Not copied.
Not reproduced.
Original to me and him.
“Everyone would lose their minds,” Eliot chimes in with a hint of mischief. “Now that’s an idea.”
