Velvet Midnight - Max Walker Page 0,33

still couldn’t believe myself. It had been three days since I stuck both feet in my mouth. I thought ignoring the entire situation would be the best way to handle it, except there was no ignoring Rex Madison, not when he was living in my backyard. He had tried talking to me a few different times, but I managed to run off with minimal words spoken between us.

I just couldn’t look him in the eyes. I felt embarrassed and pissed and disappointed. Weird, considering I hadn’t been feeling much of anything lately.

I collected the brush and bucket and gave Electra a goodbye back rub. She tossed her head up and gave a loud rumble from her lips. Penelope grabbed her bone and followed me out of the pen. She ran ahead of me as I walked back to the house. I waved at Curtis, one of the security guards my parents had hired to keep watch. He gave me a warm smile back.

“How’s it going today?” he asked from inside his golf cart.

“It’s going,” I said. Going nowhere.

Curtis didn’t ask anything else. He gave me a smile and got back to his patrolling.

At least I didn’t ask him to be my boyfriend.

With a sigh, I started back toward the house. I didn’t make it another three steps before my phone started to ring. I assumed it was my mom calling to see if I wanted anything for lunch.

“I just had a sandwich,” I answered without even looking at the caller ID.

“Oooh, what kind?” That wasn’t my mom’s voice. It was my brother Dusty.

“Sorry, I thought you were Mom calling.”

“I still want to know.”

“Ham and cheese.”

“Wow,” Dusty said. “That’s a real kindergarten gourmet dish you’ve got going on there.”

I chuckled. Truth was that I hadn’t even eaten lunch. I hadn’t been eating much at all lately, actually. I still had all the muscle I’d worked hard for over these last few years, but if I kept this up, I’d be back to my high school weight in a couple of months.

Just something else to worry about.

“How’ve you been, Benj? Everything good?”

“As good as it can be, I guess.” I didn’t want to talk about myself, though. This was my twin. He’d figure out something was up, and I just didn’t want to deal with it right now. I switched topics real quick. “And you? How’s the job going?”

“As good as it can be going,” my brother said, throwing my phrase right back at me. He’d been working at NASA for a few years now and already had two promotions under his belt. I couldn’t have been prouder of him.

“I’m on break right now actually,” he said. “But I didn’t call to chat about sandwiches or my job, Benj.”

“Okay…” My eyes narrowed. “Why did you call? Just to say hi to your favorite twin brother?”

“That, and I wanted to make sure my favorite twin brother was doing okay… I still remember that talk we had by the lake, Benj, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot. How you said that you felt like something was broken… Do you still feel that way?”

I could have lied. It might have been the easier choice to make, even if it wasn’t exactly the morally correct one.

“I do,” I answered. There was no lying to my brother. He’d see right through the smoke and mirrors. “It’s only gotten worse, Dust.”

Shit. There it was. Putting words to what I’d been feeling—or rather, lack of what I’d been feeling. This felt like a “no turning back now” point. The avalanche had begun, and it roared down the mountainside, ready to entomb me in an icy white calm.

“Talk to me,” he said, coaxing the words from me like a snake charmer. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”

“I’m not, Dusty. That’s the problem. I can’t feel anything. All the days just blur together, and I don’t really know when it’s going to get any better. I can’t look forward to anything, and I can’t look back on anything either. It’s all just… blank. I really do feel broken, Dusty. So fucking broken.”

“You aren’t broken, that’s a fact. This is something you can overcome. I shared a womb with you, I grew up watching you place first in every single competition you ever played in. You helped me learn how to read when I was having trouble, and you were speed-reading the freaking dictionary. You helped me when I wasn’t saying a word to anyone, and you helped me overcome that