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Aaron’s first thought when he saw the glass sticking out of his arm was, I am so fucking stupid. Why did I use my arms to block? Classic abuse survivor mentality. Bee would have a field day. So tell me, Aaron, why did you immediately resort to blaming yourself? He should have been blaming Neil, because everything bad that had happened since Neil came into their lives, had been Neil’s fault. The idiot couldn’t shut the hell up, couldn’t stop causing problems that Andrew had to take the fall for. Aaron loathed him. Neil’s fault.
Except—this time, it wasn’t.
Those assholes from the football team picked a fight with them. They didn’t see Aaron and Neil, sniping at each other on the sidewalk at 6pm on a Wednesday night. They saw only deadbeats, criminals, Foxes. And they’d been drinking.
And one of them had smashed his beer bottle against a light pole to create a weapon, and had glassed Aaron in the face.
Well, he’d tried. Aaron had raised his arms to protect himself, so the glass sank into the flesh of his forearms and broke, and deep red arterial blood exploded out of the cuts with a stunning force.
“Aaron,” Neil said, a bruise forming on his jaw.
Aaron dropped his hands. The drunk footballers seemed to realise just how badly they’d fucked up. A fight between college athletes was one thing. A fight with broken glass and arterial blood, a felony.
Aaron and Neil reacted simultaneously. Both of them knew how to fight dirty. Both of them knew how to get out of a scrape through their teeth. And Aaron, in particular, was a backliner. He was no stranger to fighting opponents twice his size and strength. And when the dust cleared, when the footballers had scrambled away with a broken wrist and a black eye, Neil whipped around to Aaron and said, “Okay, fuck.”
The adrenaline was clearing. Aaron blinked at Neil and then down at his arms. His fists had become slippery from the blood. The tang of iron and sweat made his stomach lurch. There was so much of it. It was staining his shirt and trousers, dripping onto the cobblestones, and he couldn’t stop trembling.
“Oh,” said Aaron, blinking, and it took a second longer for him to open his eyes. Neil had him by the shoulder.
“All right, sit.” He shoved Aaron down, roughly but firmly, onto the edge of the sidewalk. Aaron pulled his knees close and looked at his arms. Pieces of glass were stuck firmly in there, but he didn’t pull them out. It would just make the bleeding worse.
What did he need? What did he need when he was a kid and alone and hurt?
Aaron reached for his belt. Neil was on the phone, probably calling Andrew. Aaron’s head was ringing. A staticky buzzing sensation was making its way through his ears, and every time he blinked, his vision fractured into tiny grey pixels.
Not good. He bit back a groan of pain as he yanked on his belt. It came through the loop in a jerking motion. Neil paused his conversation.
“What are you doing?” he barked.
“First aid. Give me your belt, too.”
“Yeah—Andrew, hold on.” Neil undid his belt, pulled it out, and dropped it beside Aaron.
With shaking, slipping fingers, Aaron took one of the belts and made a loop, and then forced the loop through the buckle. The belt, now looped over itself, was the perfect tourniquet. He shoved his right arm through it, the buckle facing outwards, and pulled.
“Oh, FUCK,” he cried, the pain unhinging his jaw. The belt fell loose and sank to his blood-soaked wrist. Neil jumped in front of Aaron and knelt, the phone balanced precariously between his ear and his shoulder.
“Stop moving,” Neil snapped as Aaron tried to shove him off. He grabbed a hold of the belt, moved it up Aaron’s shoulder, and mercilessly tightened the loop, ignoring Aaron’s shriek of pain and ducking away from his desperate, haphazard punch. Fire raced through Aaron’s nerves. He’d used tourniquets on himself before, of course. With Tilda, it was a survival strategy. But he’d forgotten how agonising they were, how much he’d had to force himself—drug himself, at times—to numb the pain.
Neil was quick and ruthless with the second belt, too, making a passable tourniquet to bind Aaron’s other arm. Aaron tried and failed to pull away, working more on impulse than logic.
“Listen to me,” Neil snapped, patting Aaron’s cheek. “I know it hurts. I know. I get it. But you have to keep breathing. Aaron. You’re losing a lot of fucking blood right now, so I need you to shut the fuck up and just focus on breathing. All right?”
“Yeah,” Aaron rasped, because he knew Neil was right. “Yeah, I know.”
Neil shot him a long, significant look. Neither of them were strangers to pain. He lowered the phone, his own hands stained with Aaron’s blood, and put it on speaker.
“Andrew,” he said, “talk to him.”
“Hey,” Aaron murmured faintly. A headache was forming at his temples and the rest of his brain felt cottony numb.
“Aaron.” Andrew was always so firm, so fierce, a great big mountain looming over them all. “What happened?”
“Didn’t Neil tell you? I got glassed. No big deal.” Not the first time, he nearly added.
“I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Don’t drive like a maniac.” He worried, sometimes, that Andrew’s crazy driving would get him killed. He’d survived one crash, but Aaron didn’t want his brother to keep tempting fate. Fate seemed to have it out for Minyard twins, anyway.
Andrew let out a short scoff. “Don’t pass out.”
Two minutes could have been two hours because Aaron was getting shaky and sleepy, and the vague nausea from before had only intensified. Neil was, for once, quiet, though he roughly grabbed Aaron’s shoulders when he began to slump sideways.
“Can’t you even do one thing right?” he sniped. “Stay awake, it’s not that difficult.”
“Go fuck yourself, Josten.” Aaron knew, somewhere in the fraying consciousness of his body, that Neil was deliberately trying to start a fight. To stop Aaron from ceding to the darkness that was starting to bloom at the corners of his vision. Aaron took a trembling breath and exhaled the words: “What a pair of fucking losers.”
“Who, the football guys?”
“Yeah.”
Neil smirked at him. “They weren’t much trouble once we fought back.”
“Beat them up…even while bleeding,” Aaron agreed, forcing a smile. A black shadow was approaching from the corner of his eyes. The spectre of death? No—just the Mas. Just Andrew. Neil turned and stood, flagging him down. The Mas screeched to a halt in front of Aaron, and when he blinked next, a mirror image stared back at him. Andrew, his fingers tightening in Aaron’s hair.
“Look at me.”
Aaron forced his eyes open a little wider. “Heey…” he drawled. He felt drunk. Dizzy and stupid and delightfully floaty. “Didn’t…pass out,” he added, slurring, and Andrew’s grip shifted to his shoulder. Aaron took that as his cue to stand.
Too quickly.
His vision blinked out.
“Fuck—”
“Got him—”
Two pairs of hands latched onto either side. The asphalt spun, revolved, twirled, and Aaron careened forward again before Andrew and Neil tightened their grip on him. He was vaguely aware of being hauled into the back seat of the Mas, Neil steadying him so he didn’t collapse onto the seat.
“Keep him awake,” Andrew barked, followed by the thud of the car door and the whir of the engine.
“‘M awake,” Aaron insisted, though he was so, so sleepy. He took a heavy breath, and then another, and another, and god, was it getting harder to breathe?
“Recite the bones for me,” Andrew demanded.
“Bones?” He was dying, like actually dying, huh? Crazy that a murderer gets murdered. Or was it that crazy? Was it ironic? Or was it like a full-circle thing? He started this morning worried about his organic chem test on Friday. Now he was dying. One less problem to worry about.
Neil slapped him. Clean across the face. “Aaron, I swear on my father’s left testicle if you die I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”
“Your father’s left—” Aaron let out a crazed wheeze of laughter. It was the last thing he could do before blacking out.
He woke up in a hospital bed, so tired that he wasn’t sure he was meant to wake up at all. Andrew was sitting next to him. Neil was on the other chair, drinking a Pepsi. Was he allowed to bring that in here? Aaron blinked, turning his head to the blood bag hooked to his inner elbow. Oh, a transfusion. Huh.
Andrew snapped his fingers to get Aaron’s attention.
“Good morning.”
“It’s—” Aaron swallowed. His throat was so dry. “Morning?”
“Nah,” said Neil. “9 pm.”
Andrew poured him a glass of water and raised the bed so Aaron could sit up. When he tried to raise his arm, a fierce pain lanced across his skin. Andrew just gave him an exasperated look and held the water glass to Aaron’s mouth.
“Congratulations,” he said as Aaron drank. “You nearly died.”
Aaron wet his lips and stared blankly back at Andrew. “Thank you, I worked hard to accomplish this.”
“Shut up.”
Neil stood and approached the bed. His fingernails were still stained red with Aaron’s blood. “Those footballers won’t bother us anymore.”
“Why? You put out a hit on them?”
Neil shrugged. Aaron just sighed.
“Can you not? They have families.”
“So?”
“Bring it down to a maiming. It’s only fair. We didn’t die, why should they?”
“Huh,” said Neil, reaching for the phone in his pocket. “Mercy from a murderer. Interesting.”
“Fuck you.” Aaron lay back against his pillows. “It’s Godfather rules.”
“Never saw that movie.”
“You’re so pathetic.”
Neil smirked at him again, and Aaron wasn’t sure how to read that. But the next second, he’d left the room, holding his phone to his ear. That left Aaron and his brother, and an awkward silence that was unwelcome but familiar.
“So…” Aaron started.
Andrew, bizarrely, reached out and covered Aaron’s mouth with his hand. “I told you to shut up.”
Aaron licked him. He didn’t know what came over him, why he’d do something so stupid, so potentially dangerous. But Andrew just shot him a flat look, pulled his hand back, and wiped Aaron’s saliva on his cheek.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Andrew muttered.
“What, lick you? You don’t taste that good anyway.”
“Shut up.”
“I won’t,” Aaron promised. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
“I wasn’t scared.”
“Whatever you say.” Aaron closed his eyes. Andrew stood, crossed the room, and dimmed the lights.