Forbidden River (The Legionnaires #2.5)(22)
The tweezers held a bloody tuft of denim. Mate, it felt like he’d stabbed her, not removed something. Blood rolled down her shin. She bit her lip and rode out the pain, switching focus to his face. His stubbled jaw was square and serious, his brown eyes sharp, lines etched between them. His brow hunkered as he tugged again. She braced, keeping her gaze on him as the pain struck. As he worked, she kept staring, kept breathing. If he looked up, she could avert her eyes. In the meantime, she’d run with the only pain relief on offer.
“My brother, Zack,” he said quietly, still focused on her leg. “We were doing a river in Spain. He went down a waterfall and got impaled on a branch. Total freak accident. It was a mess.” He examined a fragment of denim in the tweezers like it was a portal into the past. “Years later, a doctor buddy—the medic in my commando team—went over the medical report for me. The way the stick hit was crazy unlucky—the speed he was going, the trajectory, how it snuck in under his life jacket and jammed between his ribs. A quarter inch either way and it might have just cracked a rib.”
Her chest tightened. “Was anyone else with you?”
“No. It was like this. Isolated. That’s why we picked it. He begged me to stay with him, but I figured if I did he was definitely dead. So I paddled for help. By the time we got back...” He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His eyes shone. “He’d only lasted half an hour. Half an hour.”
She shuffled forward awkwardly and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t usually talk about it,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “For exactly this reason.”
“I get that. So you blame yourself.”
“Should’ve known going for help was futile. Should’ve listened to him. He died alone, in so much pain... When we found him you could still see it on his face.”
Her eyes stung. She knew that look. You didn’t get that look out of your head, even with a stranger. With someone you knew, with your brother... “I would have gone for help, too. I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Sheesh, you’d think that after all this time she’d have found something more helpful to say than I’m sorry.
“I think that’s all the denim.” He ran his fingers around her calf and grabbed a packet of antiseptic wipes. “This is gonna hurt.”
She released his shoulder. “It’s fine.”
“Thank you for being the first person ever not to say, ‘It wasn’t your fault, there was nothing you could have done, you couldn’t have known...’”
“I figure you already know all that.”
He started wiping, his touch so gentle she could barely feel it, though she could feel the sting, all right. “My parents made such a point of not blaming me that I knew they were struggling not to themselves. They were so determined that it shouldn’t destroy us as a family, but something like that—it can’t help but screw everything up. So I did the adult thing and ran away.”
“Oh, believe me, I get that.”
“Thing is, because I’ve upended my daily life, it seems possible that Zack’s back in San Antonio, doing his thing. It’s not like I’m walking past his old office every morning, or sitting at the bar where we used to hang, or driving past his apartment. It’s mostly when I go home that...” He shook his head. “And I don’t go home, so...”
Her chest twisted. If she lost Tane...
“So, yeah, you asked before if I was pissed? I don’t know if it’s that anymore, but the regret sure follows you around.” He grabbed another wipe. “Are you angry, about your parents?”
“Hell, yeah. Whenever I think of it—which is a lot—I get this knot of rage right here.” She thumped her chest.
They fell silent. The pain dulled to a stinging throb, which had to be progress. She pulled her right arm across her chest and then her left, but the ache remained.
“To risk stating the obvious and saying what everybody says,” she ventured, “you know you shouldn’t be angry at yourself for your decision, right?”
“In theory, sure. But it’s not something I can rationalize. Not an hour of a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d stayed. Of course, I wish that fucking branch had never happened, but that wasn’t the direct result of a choice I made.” He tossed a wipe in a growing pile. “What did they go to prison for—your folks?”
Tia bit her cheek. How could she clam up after his admission? “They used to own a big retail chain. High profile, you know? Always sponsoring this and mentoring that and sitting on boards and getting awards and going to black tie functions. All over the social pages. Media darlings.”
He opened a tube of antiseptic cream and started dabbing her wounds. “I’m guessing you didn’t live around here.”
“No, I grew up in the city, in Auckland.” She massaged the muscles at the top of her back. “My dad didn’t want anything to do with my koro, with his working-class roots. He got out of Wairoimata as soon as he was old enough and only grudgingly came back to argue with Koro every Christmas. He sent my brother and me to private schools, hired tutors, sent us for music lessons and golf lessons. They were grooming us to take over the business.”
“You, too, huh? But you enlisted?”
He fixed a dressing to her shin and grabbed another. “My great rebellion. I always had this uncomfortable feeling about their business. I guess I picked up on the undercurrents in their conversations, their body language, but I was too naive to know what it meant.”