Page 66 of Single Malt
“I’m guessing since you didn’t call our parents that you don’t want me to take you back there.” I walked on the same side as her injured arm, using my body to prevent anyone from bumping into her. If she noticed what I was doing, she didn’t comment on it.
“I was sort of hoping my favorite big brother would let me crash at his place.” She gave me a sideways look.
“So, Austin’s coming to get you?” I teased.
She rolled her eyes. “I’d hit you if you were on the other side.”
“Why do you think I’m walking over here?” I held the door open for her and the two people behind us.
“Seriously, though, Brody. Can I come back to your place tonight?”
I unlocked my car and opened the passenger door for her. The fact that she didn’t make a snarky comment about it spoke volumes. She might’ve been trying to cover it, but I could tell how exhausted she was. Most people didn’t realize how much energy a serious injury took out of a person, especially when the person in question had a high threshold for pain and didn’t like others to see any form of weakness.
When I slid into the driver’s seat, I half-turned toward her before starting the car. “Is this a ‘can I stay the night so I can figure out how to tell our parents what happened’ or is it an ‘I plan on hiding out indefinitely so I’ll need you to field calls from our parents’ kind of request?”
She gave me a sheepish grin. “I was hoping for the second one, but I’ll take the first.”
I sighed and turned the key. “How about we compromise? I’ll take you back to my place, and tomorrow, we’ll discuss where things go from there.”
“Thanks.” She leaned back into the seat with a pained sigh. “I have a dig scheduled in South America in a week, and the doctor said that if I rested between now and then, I’d be good to travel. I’ll have to get someone else to do any heavy lifting for a while, but I can still do my job. Mostly.”
I understood where she was going with this train of thought. “You’re worried that if our parents find out about your shoulder, they’ll try to stop you from going on your dig.”
“Do you really think they’d be okay with me going when I can’t use my arm correctly for a few weeks?”
“Only a few weeks?” I asked.
“The doctor said I’d heal almost completely in just three weeks.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Oh really?”
The little sheepish half-smile she gave me said she knew I was calling her on her shit. “Well, he said it can take anywhere from three to twelve weeks, but if I do everything I’m supposed to do, it’ll be on the shorter end of the recovery time.”
“You sound like you have it all worked out.” It didn’t surprise me that, even with a dislocated shoulder, she’d already started thinking of ways to keep doing her work.
“Yes, of course.” She put her head back and closed her eyes. “You’d do the same thing.”
“I wouldn’t risk making an injury worse,” I countered.
She made a snorting noise, and I glanced over to see a loopy smile on her face.
“The drugs have really kicked in, haven’t they?”
She laughed but didn’t open her eyes. “I only took half a dose when they offered it because I wasn’t about to be all goofy yet. Doctor gave me the other half when the person came with the plastic picture.”
I chuckled. Paris had a high pain threshold but a low tolerance for pain medicine. She’d once lost an entire day after taking an adult-sized dose of cold medicine. Fortunately, she’d been at home with our parents at the time, so she wasn’t in any danger, but we’d all heard stories of the crazy things she’d said and done. She’d been good-natured about the teasing and had since been cautious about any medicine she took since.
“You wanted to be able to ask me if I’d take you to my place before you got all loopy.”
She nodded. “I say lots of stuff.”
“Yes, you do.” I glanced at her again. “You want to be able to downplay your injury to Mom and Da, and you think you wouldn’t have been able to stop from telling them the whole thing.”
“Yup. I say lots of stuff.” She turned her head so that her face was toward me, but she didn’t open her eyes. “Like I say, you should find a girl. Nope. Woman. Nice woman. A sister I don’t have to share with. Except you. I share you with her. Not my room.”
I laughed. Before our family had moved to San Ramon, we’d spent the first few months of our life as a blended family in the Carideo’s house in San Jose. It’d been big, but we’d had two big families, so the place had been more than a little packed.
Paris was little when it’d happened, but it’d made an impression because both my biological sister Maggie and the youngest biological Carideo, Aspen, had shared Paris’s room for that short period of time. When we’d moved into the big house in San Ramon, one of the things she’d been adamant about had been that she wanted her own room.