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I picture her talking to me by the pool, interrogating me. Needing to please, like always, I thought she was like Clay. Just guarded. Unreadable. Maybe slightly bitter due to her hardships. No.
I was wrong.
I touch my lower belly.
I don’t want her anywhere near you, sweet baby.
“I presumed you’d been in fights,” Clay says angrily, his tone laced with confusion and regret. Then he bites out, “Fuck,”to himself.
Bronson nods once as he says, “So did everyone else.”
“And you didn’t fight back,” Clay states to himself more than to his brothers. “You let her hurt you?”
Bronson hums. “What would you have us do, beautiful brother? Hit our pretty mother back?”
“Butch doesn’t know,” Max says curtly. “We keep it that way. No one knows. No one needs to know.”
Clay nods stiffly and reaches for Xander, who is losing his battle to stifle his anguish. The honesty rips through him. The truth bleeds out as they embrace.
Xander buries his head. “I wanted to tell you so many times. I wanted to go to you so many times.”
Clay holds his little brother, and it. All. Comes. Out. A flood of sentiment, the captive feeling he masks so well, the need to remain strong, to make them strong, all flowing from him.
“I wasn’t there for you.” Clay’s voice is strained. “I know. I’ll make it up to you… If you’ll let me.”
Both men shake slightly as the moment passes between them. A significant moment that binds their pasts, the fork that divided them slowly being bridged. I thought they had him on a pedestal, and maybe they did, but more than that, Clay’s brothers thought he was unreachable, unreasonable, uncaring, maybe… Maybe he was… until now.
Bronson moves over to their shoulders. “I’m getting jelly,” he mocks, hiding his raw response within humour, but Clay doesn’t have his armour up anymore. He isn’t suited and smooth. He’s confused, and I bet confusion in a man like Clay Butcher stokes intensity. He cares, showing this by dragging Bronson into the huddle.
“I’m proud of you,” he says to him. “You were the better big brother.” He chokes on the words. “You were the right one.”
Tears fall from my eyes, watching them unleash the decades-old lies. They always loved each other, but they were torn apart by the actions of a woman who didn’t love any of them.
Clay pulls from their huddle and rounds the chair, heading straight for Max.
“Don’t do that,” Max warns.
Clay ignores him, kneeling at his brother’s side. Max stiffens at the closeness, and my breaths become shallow as my lungs war with whether to breathe relief or surge from my body with panic.
So when Clay presses his forehead to Max’s and squeezes his eyes shut with words and pain moving them below his eyelids, I nearly whimper at the rawness.
Max lifts his arms to shove him away—No.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he tenses on the act of defensiveness but…stopshimself.God.My spine steels, and I sense everyone in the alfresco—Bronson, Xander, Cassidy—collectively freeze in case the smallest change in energy, the beat of a butterfly’s wings, jolts Max from accepting this moment.
Max lets Clay stay close. Still stiff and looking like a dog cornered. A pained groan leaves Max’s throat as his big brother holds their foreheads together.
A sob breaks from my lips.
“I understand, brother.” Clay’s strong timbre is guttural and angry and sorrowful—a raw symphony of all those sounds combined. “I understand.”
My heart is exhausted, overthrown by too many emotions, experiencing all of Clay’s as plainly as I feel my own.
I stare at Bronson and Xander, watching them smile at Clay and Max, at Cassidy, who sobs silent tears with her hand over her mouth. There is so much love here. Even when it is stretched thin, under extreme pressure, through tests and betrayals, they never give up on family. I hold my stomach, thinking about never leaving her/him alone in a caravan…
Thinking about the kind of love displayed in front of me between the most powerful men in the city. Thinking about irrefutable loyalties, not giving up on one another—family. And I realise my fairy-tale—an orphan’s fairy-tale—is coming true.
