My brother.
I close my eyes at the sudden rush of emotion. I miss Daniel so badly, it’s physically painful. I have to accept the fact that he’s in good hands now. Legally, once they think I’m dead…
Do they? Do they think I won’t come back?
I swallow hard. Will I?
Still holding me to his chest, he reaches for my hand and entwines my fingers with his. “What’s on your mind, babe? I can feel the shift.”
“You can feel it?” I whisper. “How?”
He shrugs a shoulder. “I don’t know. The same power that makes me want to fuck you day and night makes me understand you better, I guess. I don’t know how to explain it. But I felt you happy and all blissed out, and then the temperature shifted a little. What’s troubling you?”
I sigh. It’s a little odd being so easy to read like that.
“Daniel.”
“Your brother.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about him?”
And so, I do. I tell him everything. How Daniel, my younger brother, looked up to me. How I would take him with me when I went shopping or to the movies, and how we had a standing Friday night tradition of going to see a movie together. Before the accident. When movies could hold his attention.
I tell him about the accident, but I don’t go into details. I don’t like reliving the particulars of the tragedy of losing my parents and losing the brother I knew.
“Brain damage,” I whisper. “He lived, but now he’ll mentally be a child forever. He can’t live on his own, and with my job, the demands and travel, I couldn’t watch him as often as needed. He has a seizure condition and needs constant supervision. So he lives in a state-funded group home. I visit as often as I can.” I smile. “And every day’s his birthday.”
He smiles sadly. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I tell him how Daniel thinks when he wakes up every day that today’s his birthday. How the staff at his residence celebrates in small ways, with balloons or birthday cupcakes or ice cream.
“It must be nice to have a birthday every day,” Cy says, and there’s something about the way he says it that makes me smile. I like that he finds my brother’s quirks cute. I want him to meet him. Daniel would love him, and for some reason this knowledge makes me pull even closer to Cy.
“Eh, I dunno,” I tell him wryly. “A birthday a day and you’d age pretty damn quickly.”
He chuckles. “You haven’t aged a day. How old are you again?”
“Twenty-five.”
“You look like a teen.”
“Does that make you a creeper?”
Our conversation’s cut short with a howling sound outside our walls so loud and insistent we both freeze. There’s a second, then a third. I draw closer to Cy and he holds me tight.
“Wolves,” he whispers.
“There are no wolves in the Caymans.”
“Babe, we aren’t in the Caymans.”
I shiver.
“Then where are we?”
“No fucking idea.”
The howls are so loud and insistent, it seems as if an entire pack is prowling the perimeter of the shelter.
“Don’t be afraid,” he whispers. “They can’t get to us.”
“But where did they come from? How did they get here?”
He shrugs and doesn’t reply.
It goes on for hours, the howling and pacing outside our shelter. We try to sleep, but it’s nearly impossible with the sounds outside. It isn’t until the wee hours of the morning that the noise finally dies down, and I fall into a shallow, restless sleep.
We both wake to the sound of rain pelting down so hard, it sounds as if the ceiling itself will buckle under the weight of it, and the wind outside is coming through the slats in the walls.
Cy sits up and quickly dresses. I do the same.
Just as the sound of wolves fade, a more savage sound rents the air around us. Another howl.
Human? My blood runs cold.
“Wolves are gone, only to bring the storm,” I muse out loud. “It’s weird.”
But Cy only stalks to the door, tight-lipped.
“Don’t do this to me again, Cy. Please,” I beg.
“Do what?” he says, turning to me with his hand on the latch.
“Leave me,” I say in a voice that quavers and doesn’t sound like my own. “Make me wonder if you’ll come back. Make me think about what it would be like to be here, stranded, and all alone. Take me with you.”
His eyes gentle and he comes to me, wrapping me into his arms and pulling me to his chest. “Baby,” he says softly, bending down to kiss my forehead. “I’m not leaving you. Do you understand me? I’m not leaving you here alone.” And right there in that moment, I wonder if I’m falling in love with this wild barbarian of a man. Because who wouldn’t love a man like that?
“No one ever says, ‘today is the day I’ll die,’” I protest.