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“Smartass.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t a ghost. But if I tell you, I’d have to kill you. And as annoying as you can be sometimes, I’m not quite there yet.”
The silence between them resumed, and Gavin was relieved. Finally, though, Troy shook his head, his exasperation clear. “So, you won’t talk about why you’re back. You won’t talk about why you’re staying. Even though it’s obvious that something happened today that left you shaken, you won’t talk about that, either.”
Gavin let the silence stretch again, then said, “Good summary.”
Troy’s voice was gruff when he replied, “Well, I hope to God there’s someone you can talk to. Because if your brother’s not even close enough to know what’s going on with you, I don’t know who the hell might be.”
There was no way for Troy to have known that the comment was a pointed arrow, hitting a bulls-eye straight into his heart. But it was.
Genevieve should’ve been that close to him. She was that person that Troy was referring to, without even knowing it. She was the one he wanted to talk things out with, confide in, as foreign as both of those concepts felt to him.
But, the truth was, he was the holdout in the situation. She wanted him to talk, he remained buttoned up. Just like Troy wanted him to talk, and he kept everything inside.
Gavin thought he might sense a pattern emerging.
That wasn’t something he wanted to think about at the moment, though.
Actually, he thought, you could end that sentence right after the word “about” and it would still be true.
He knew that if it were just him and Troy sitting on the back deck all night, there’d be no way of escaping the conversation, though. When Troy got a hold of something he didn’t want to let it go, he was like a dog with a bone. He would gnaw at it and gnaw at it until there was nothing left.
The only way to keep himself from being that bone, Gavin figured, was to change the dynamic a little bit. Give himself a buffer.
Turning to Troy and speaking casually, as if the idea had just occurred to him for no particular reason, he said, “Hey, why don’t we call Donovan? Make it a brothers’ night.”
