Page 200

I climb off my bike deciding how I’m going to go about this, my steps heavy, stride quick as I walk up to the house and let myself in.
Running up the stairs, I glance in Damon’s room to see if he’s still sleeping, but his bed is empty.
We haven’t spoken since he attacked me at Tanner’s, an entire week of angry glares and shoulders slamming together when we passed each other.
It’s a non-verbal language basically meaning we have to work this crap out one way or another, but it won’t be a heart to heart conversation.
That’s why when I find him in the kitchen, I storm his direction, knock the bottle of water out of his hand, and wrap my fingers into his shirt as I slam him up against a wall.
The asshole bares his teeth immediately, using his weight to shove me forward, something falling to shatter against the floor when my back hits a rack.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
Twisting so that I can break away, my head spins right as his fist cracks my jaw, pain shooting through my skull like an explosion.
I throw a punch back, the hit knocking him into a set of cabinets, his body angling down as he comes at me again to grab me around the middle and drop me to the floor.
Now is as good a time as any to tell him the truth.
“I’m with Emily.”
His fist cracks me in the nose hard enough for blood to splatter.
“Just thought I’d let you know,” I say on a groan.
That did it. A growl tears from his throat, and he grips my shirt to pull me up and punch me again.
Emily is going to be pissed when she sees the evidence of this conversation.
But it’s a necessary conversation, so she’s just going to have to deal with it.
This is who we are.
We both break away from each other, heavy breath causing our chests to expand, our shoulders moving with each inhale.
“You couldn’t leave it alone, could you? I had a fucking feeling that’s where you were last night,” he roars, blood on his knuckles from where he hit me.
We’re circling each other now.
Violence and Anger.
The air popping and cracking around us with tension and rage. It’s not me, though.
Yeah, I started this because I knew it would come to this, but I don’t want to fight Damon.
Not after what he’s been through.
Not while knowing he had it worse than me.
All that fury sparking around us belongs to him. And I can’t blame him for it. Can’t hold it against him. If one of us was handed the short end of the stick, it was Damon. But nobody knows that.
It’s why I couldn’t tell Emily the full story of what happened on those weekends. Some secrets simply don’t belong to me. I may have been forced to watch, but Damon was the one who endured it.
“We need to talk this out, little brother. It’s not going to change. I just thought I’d get this part of it out of the way first.”
He runs at me and catches me hard enough to slam me against the kitchen island, the edge of the counter jamming into my lower back.
I shove forward to push him off, a cabinet door breaking when his shoulder hits it, the wood listing down off the snapped hinge.