Sloe Ride (27 page)

“Do you really want a piece of this?” Rafe opened the front door, smiling broadly at Brigid. “Come on in. How’d you get up here? Don’t tell me you flashed a badge too?”

“A badge?” She frilled, a red-haired dilophosaurus coming in for the kill. “I don’t be needing any stinking badges. Now where’s Quinn—ah, there ye be.”

She was short, shorter than most women, but standing firm in the middle of Rafe’s living room, Quinn felt himself cower beneath her height. She’d donned heels and dressed for battle in jeans and a UCB sweatshirt, yet unlike Kane, Brigid Morgan came armed with nothing but her Irish temper and a concerned maternal look on her face that could wither up any objections her children might make against her pushing into their lives.

Kane took one look at his younger brother, then nodded at Rafe. Standing, he patted Quinn on the shoulder, then slid past him. “Beer sounds like a great idea, Rafe. Let’s go.”

“Coward,” Quinn slandered Kane before he got out of earshot.

“Yep,” Kane agreed cheerfully, giving his brother another pat. “He’s all yours, Mum. All yours.”

H
IS
BROTHER
and lover were faithless cowards. Sniveling, soft-boned assholes who’d sooner crawl off into the safety of a well-poured Guinness than help him stave off his mother’s coddling. Even Harley’d abandoned him, fleeing as soon as she heard the tick-tick of Brigid’s heels across the penthouse’s wooden floor. Once more Quinn couldn’t help but sympathize with Miki. His mother was a menace, and there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could do about it.

Then she sat down next to him and burst into tears, sending Quinn down into a spiral of thick guilt and sticky remorse.

She was so frail in his arms, a bird of a woman made large by personality and a whirlwind determination, but Quinn panicked when he felt his mother’s heart skip and stutter in her chest as he held her tightly. They sat together, unmoving while being serenaded by the storm outside. A crack of lightning bleached the sky. Then a rumble of thunder shook the windowpanes, rattling the glass under its shocking boom.

Brigid’s penny-bright hair tickled Quinn’s nose, and he patted down the errant curls, hoping to give himself a bit of breathing room. There was so much to say to his mother, but he didn’t know where to start. Going through everything weighing on his soul, he chose the most important slice of his life to bare himself with.

She cried herself out, leaning back so she could dig in her pockets. After coming up with a handkerchief, she wiped at her eyes, laughing when she showed Quinn the smeared eyeliner left on the fabric. “Can’t even keep my face on. How am I going to keep
you
safe?”

“I don’t need keeping, Mum,” Quinn objected.

“Of course ye do, love. Ye all do.” Brigid patted his leg, then picked up his cold coffee, sniffing at it. “How are ye doing? And here? Not at Kane’s, then? I got yer message, but there was no understanding the why of it.”

“Mum, I need to talk to you about….” His Gaelic scrambled his brains, floating toward words like lover, mate, and a piece of his whole, but nothing
right
seemed to come to mind. He didn’t know how to tell her how he felt or the fears he had of Rafe coming to his senses and walking away. “God, this is shitty hard.”

The tears in her eyes—his eyes—were gone, replaced by a sharpness Quinn’d felt pare him bare to the bone in the past. Her gaze flitted across his throat, then back to his face, digging into him until Quinn shifted uncomfortably on the couch. He reached for his cup for something to do, then remembered it was in his mother’s hands, so he abandoned it, waiting for her reaction.

“I worry for ye, my Quinn.” She answered in the same rolling tongue of her homeland, a misty, poignant burr under a sweet honey. “With everything going on with ye right now, I worry. And ye’re here, Quinnigan. With Rafe.”

It’d been forever and a day since she’d called him that, the teasing bastardization of Quinn and her maiden name. Quinn’d been a compromise of sorts. Donal hadn’t wanted a son named Finn Morgan dogging his bloodline. There’d already been one, and he’d gone off to be a bloodthirsty pirate when trim frigates sailed the seas. If there was one thing longer than an elephant’s memory, it was one belonging to an Irish clan.

First time he’d heard the story, Quinn wished his father had relented. It would have given him something to connect him to the perplexing fey creature who’d given birth to him.

“Ye’ve always been yer father’s boy.” Her gaze drifted from him to the storm churning black across the Bay. “I’ve understood that. And no matter what I’ve done or said, I know we’ve never been…. Ye’ve always been the one furthest from me, and I regret that above all other things. All other.”

“I’ve never felt—” Quinn paused when his mother held up her hand to stop him.

“Ye step carefully. Around me. Around everyone. Ye’re honest with yer father. I watched ye grow and mourned that I could never reach you. Aloof, yer grandmother once called ye, and I about scratched her eyes out for it. I didn’t know—none of us knew—the differences ye had.” Brigid took a deep breath, her body quivering with held-in emotion. “I’m asking ye to be honest with me, my Quinn. To toss aside the masks ye wear and the words ye queue up to smooth out my ego and just
be
honest about how ye are.”

Brigid was a storm unto herself. It was easy to see her in his brothers and sisters, intensity layered in with their father’s pragmatism. He had very little of her in him, save her eyes, and he’d spent his childhood shoring himself up against her sallies of affection. She’d been too much, too loud—too Brigid—for his fragile, miswired brain to handle, and he hid himself from her, cloaking himself behind behaviors and calm words.

“Answer me this, Quinn. Why Rafe? Why now? After everything… with what is happening now… ye turn to Rafe instead of….”

She almost said me. Quinn was sure of it, but she stopped, shifting her words as he always did.

“Ye and I might have a valley between us at times, but ye’ll always be my son.
Always
.”

“You want me to be honest?”

She nodded, but Quinn only saw the motion out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t look at her—his mother—couldn’t force himself to see the glimmer of pain on her face and the tears falling uncontrolled from her drenched lashes. Sighing, he tried to find the words he didn’t have to explain
why Rafe
.

“I’ve spent my whole life living in a world where I don’t speak the language everyone does.” It was difficult, digging into wounds he’d let heal over, hoping they wouldn’t fester into poison beneath the surface of his heart. “I understand what you’re saying, but everyone moves and acts so oddly. Like I’m living in a world made up out of broken mirrors, and every time I try to reach for one of you, I cut myself on the edge of the glass.

“And this world, Mum.” He sighed as she took his hand, squeezing back when Brigid laid her head on his shoulder. “This world… it’s all grayish. Monotones of muted hues where sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a door and a window, but everything’s sharp and everyone hurts. And there’s so much noise. Everything chattering and demanding, pushing into me.”

“We love ye. Ye know that, right?”

It was a mother’s anguish roughening her voice, so Quinn bent his head and kissed her temple.

“I know I’ve ground some of that pain into ye, and I’m sorry for that.”

“You’re… loud. See, some people are like splashes of color against the gray. Sometimes it’s too bright, and my eyes bleed from it… from them. That’s when I have to pull back. I have to fold in on myself.”

“And Rafe, he brings ye… color?”

“Mum, Rafe’s a fucking spectral smear.” Quinn chuckled. “He doesn’t just bring color to my world. He peels back the gray and
shows
me the world as it is. Rafe takes the silver off of the backs of the mirrors and lets me see through the glass. He wraps the edges so it doesn’t cut me, but he doesn’t try to bind me as well. I’m not breathing in pain when I’m with Rafe. I understand how he works, and I don’t have to worry about saying the wrong thing or not doing the right thing when I’m with him.

“He knows I don’t like my food to touch and that I want to eat things one at a time. Rafe doesn’t mind me getting excited over the smell of old books.” He caught a breath, recalling Rafe’s mouth on his heated skin and purring with pleasure when Rafe murmured Keats in his ear. “He listens to me when I unhinge and my thoughts bubble out… not only listens but enjoys it… enjoys me.”

Brigid’s murmuring dissent slithered free from her parted lips, and Quinn braced himself for what he knew was coming.

“He’s one of the reasons ye tried to kill yerself,
breac
. Have ye forgotten that?”

“I was the reason I tried to kill myself, Mum. Because I was living in a minefield I’d laid down for myself, and no matter where I stepped, I ended up bleeding a little bit inside. I couldn’t take being different… having to
think
about everything I did and said.” He choked, forcing himself to stay at her side. Every nerve in his body told him to run, to hide from himself, but his mother asked him to be honest. And Quinn was tired of running. “I was
tired
and fifteen, with no end in sight for the misery I was steeped in. I’d spent my every waking moment trying to be
normal
. I hated taking medication to make me appear human. I still hate it, but I understand it now. But then? Back then? I broke, Mum. I broke
myself
. Putting my blood on Rafe? You might as well put it on the sun because it burned too bright for me to see.”

“Where will he be in this, then? Our Rafe?” Brigid whispered, her hands warm in his. “Will he be here by yer side?”

“Yeah, he will. Because I think he loves me—he told me he loves me. And damn it, I
feel
him love me. I
feel
me loving him.” He finally broke, caught on the swell rising from his heart. “And best of all, Mum, he likes my cat.”

Three a.m. On the phone.

Rafe: You ‘wake, magpie?

Quinn, bleary-eyed: No. Yes. And I have school tomorrow. Didn’t we say good night two hours ago?

R: Yeah, but I missed you. Lying here in the dark, I thought: you know, I miss my magpie.

Q: Why do you call me that? My da calls me that. It’s kind of weird.

R: Because you like things that are bright and shiny. Aren’t I bright and shiny?

Q: Shiny, yes. But calling a teacher who’s got a 7 a.m. class in a few hours before he’s got to get up? Not so bright.

T
HE
BAR
was a no-name hole-in-the-wall tucked into a shadow. If Rafe hadn’t led Kane down an alley, past a wrought-iron staircase, and through a partially open red door, he never would have found it. A long old bar stretched across one wall, neon signs reflected back at them in a clouded, browning mirror behind rows of half-filled liquor bottles. A rotund older man stood behind the bar, a faded red T-shirt celebrating the Year of the Dragon stretched over the breadth of his gut. He looked up from his pour, nodding at Rafe once. His bald pate shone, nearly as ruddy teak as the bar, glistening under the pink tinge of a flickering old advert for a vintage rum.

Despite the early morning, the bar was already a quarter full, mostly men in various stages of alcoholism, while a pair of hard-lived older women were running a quick low banter over a game of pool on the bar’s lone table.

Rafe flashed the bartender a peace sign, then pointed to a table in the corner. Kane looked around, chuckling under his breath as he followed Rafe through the murky belly of the bar. Rafe glanced back over his shoulder, curious for a moment. Then he caught the hunched-over, do-not-see-me body language of the men sitting along the bar’s expanse.

“Well, you do fucking scream cop,” Rafe muttered, sitting down on one of the table’s cracked red vinyl and wood chairs. “Hell, Miki probably screams
cop
when you guys are having sex ’cause you stink that much.”

“Any reason I’ve never punched you in that pretty face of yours and broken it?” Kane growled, his eyes roaming over the room. “’Cause it’s not too late, you know.”

“Hey, I’d let you do it just so I could watch Quinn take you apart.” He laughed, leaning out of the bartender’s way when the man ambled in close to drop off a pair of enormous coffee mugs. Plopping down tubs of creamer and a handful of sugar packets, he grunted a hello as Rafe handed him a ten. “Thanks.”

Kane waited until the man was halfway across the bar floor before he scooted his chair forward. “You really think Q-b—Quinn could take me down?”

“Yeah, I think Q’s got a lot more incentive and inner rage than you give him credit for. Don’t think you’re his favorite person right now.” The coffee was strong, nearly acrid enough to burn his nostril hairs, but Rafe sipped it anyway, hoping the pitch-black brew could chase away some of the anxiety bubbling in his belly. He didn’t know what he liked less, the idea of leaving Quinn at Brigid’s mercy or that he’d fled the scene with Kane. “You come over to ream Quinn a new asshole over leaving the crime scene? Or just leaving with me?”