A Measure of Love (7 page)

Riley grumbled. He supposed all four of them hovering around
the family room wouldn’t help his father much, but he still wanted to do something useful.

“So how’re things?” he asked Seb instead. “Work good?”

Seb was probably the quietest and least confident out of the four brothers, so Riley was proud of him when he opened his own gym two years ago.

“Everything’s fine.” Seb’s cell buzzed once and he reached over to retrieve it. “Busy.” He read the message and sighed before putting it back.

“How long you staying here?”

“It’s my weekend off this week, so I booked a flight for Sunday. Freya’s watching the place.” Freya was Seb’s business partner. The two of them had been friends since college, and shit had always been purely platonic as far as Riley knew. Although, how that was possible was beyond him: Freya was a fox.

Seb’s phone buzzed again.

“Someone’s jonesing for you,” Riley commented. “She your new plaything?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Riley laughed. “Bullshit you don’t. You work day in, day out surrounded by people with six-packs in skin-tight spandex, which is pretty much like Disneyland for a guy like you. There’s no way you’re not fooling around with someone.”

Seb chuckled and lifted his eyebrows. “No one worth mentioning.”

His answer confused Riley. Seb was usually open about who he was fucking, and he fucked a lot. Handsome son of a bitch.

“She not treating you right?” Riley asked seriously. Placing his cell on his chest, Seb kept his stare on the ceiling. Riley prodded further. “
He
not treating you right?”

When he was twenty, Seb had come out as bisexual, much to the surprise of the family. He’d never brought a guy home, but
Riley knew, unlike many others, that Seb had dated a couple of men. How serious those relationships had been, Riley didn’t know, but he and the rest of the family supported his brother.

Seb exhaled and turned to his brother. “I’m okay, Ri. Honestly.”

Letting it go for the time being, Riley harrumphed and looked down the bed to his bare feet, wiggling his toes.

“What about you?” Seb asked. “You seeing anyone?”

“Not for longer than a lunch hour.”

“Still hitting and quitting, huh? And they let you, even with that beard?”

Riley snorted, ignoring the way his brother’s words, as true as they were, made his chest tight. Jesus, he wasn’t about to yell and boast about the notches on his bedpost, but they were what they were, and he wasn’t ashamed. He enjoyed the women who came to his bed and he knew for damned certain that the feeling was mutual. He played safe and treated them right.

Did the fact that his bed was empty after dark more often than it was occupied make him miserable? No. But it didn’t fill him with warm fuzzies, either. Having someone to love and hold at night was a comforting idea, of course, and he allowed it to flitter through his mind just as he had the day before at the body shop.

But, as always happened, it fizzled and spluttered before it could gain any traction. For a split second, Lexie’s laughing face once again washed through his mind.

You mean all the world to me.

“So, what’s the plan? You gonna man up and see her?” Seb asked quietly as though reading Riley’s thoughts.

Riley cleared his throat of the anxiety squeezing it. “I don’t even know if she’s back here. Last I heard, she’d moved with her mom when they sold their house.”

“Yeah, I heard the same,” Seb confirmed. “You know where?”

Riley shook his head. He didn’t dare drive down Wick Avenue
in case the house was still empty. That would be a goddamn travesty.

“You gonna find out?” Seb prodded.

Wasn’t that the million-dollar question? “I have no idea.”

Seeing Lexie after five years of radio silence invited all sorts of feelings that Riley tried his best to ignore, and not because he was emotionally stunted. Far from it. He just didn’t see the point of becoming wrapped up in what-could-have-beens, what-ifs, and maybes. Life had provided him and Lexie paths that led in two very different directions and, as much as it sucked, the chance of their paths ever crossing again was minimal, to say the least.

Refusing to wallow, Riley sat up at the same time his belly emitted a furious growl. “I don’t know about you,” he said as he stood, realizing he hadn’t eaten since the night before in New York, “but I need a shitload of food and coffee to strangle the fuck out of the nostalgia in this place.”

“I hear ya,” Seb mumbled, drawing a cocked eyebrow from Riley. Something in Seb’s voice told Riley he wasn’t just being agreeable. “Mom said there was food,” he continued as he stretched. “But we need to go to the store to stock up. Aunt Carol and Maggie are coming tomorrow.”

Riley smiled at the thought of seeing his favorite cousin. “Move your ass, then.” He shoved Seb, almost toppling him over the edge of the bed. “I need bacon.”

Riley cooked breakfast for himself and his brother before they took their father’s Buick Riviera to the store to pick up the essentials. And maybe a few not-so-essentials, like chocolate and ice cream—because Seb and Tate’s sweet teeth were ridiculous—and maybe a couple of bottles of alcohol, because Riley needed a buzz after the drama of the past twenty-four hours.

Tate and their mother arrived home a little before 7 p.m. looking
tired and despondent, and with little news. There had been no change in their father’s condition. He was still unconscious, but his heart was beating. The doctor’s opinion was that Park Moore was a fighter, but he still had a way to go.

Guessing that neither of them would have much of an appetite, Riley forwent cooking and ordered a couple of pizzas before pouring his mom a glass of wine. He handed it to her as she curled up in the large armchair in the corner of the living room.

“I didn’t know we had wine in the house,” she uttered before taking a sip.

“You didn’t,” Riley said around the lip of his Heineken. “I figured you might need some, to take the edge off.”

“Thank you,” she said, dropping her head back against the chair. “I do.”

“When will they move dad from ICU?” Seb asked as Riley placed the pizza boxes on the coffee table.

Tate lifted the box lid of the meat pizza despite his initial remarks that he wasn’t hungry. “Until Dad’s condition improves, they’ll continue to monitor his progress carefully.” He picked up a slice and bit into it. “They’ll call if there’s any change.” Tate’s jaw halted mid-chew, as he looked Seb over as though seeing him for the first time. “Where the hell did you get that?”

Seb lifted his pizza-filled hand to display the shirt. “Awesome, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Tate agreed, all but drooling over the original
Jurassic Park
T-shirt Seb was wearing. Riley’s reaction had been the same. “Where from?”

Seb smirked and chewed his pizza. “I know a guy.”

“Just one?” Riley commented. “No wonder you’re antsy. By the way, is it still too soon to mention the hair?”

Tate sniggered at the same time Seb rolled his eyes and tucked a piece of his hair back. It was long enough that it sat a little below his earlobe. “Not if you want me to leave that beard alone.”

Riley laughed. “Why? My beard is only a teensy bit longer than it was last time you saw me.”

“Yeah,” Seb replied through a mouthful of pizza. “And now you look a teensy bit like you’ve stapled a hamster to your face.”

“But it’s a
really
awesome hamster,” Riley remarked, stroking his chin. He’d originally grown the beard in Kill, where, for obvious reasons, razors were in short supply. He liked it enough to keep it. Regardless of what Seb said, he knew it looked good.

Seb looked back at Tate, finally answering his question about the shirt. “eBay.”

“You boys and your T-shirts,” Joan commented from her seat, ignoring the insults, napkins, and colorful language flying across her living room. On her chair arm, Seb had placed a small slice of cheese pizza on a plate, which she had yet to touch. “I just don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Riley said with a patronizing tap of his hand on hers.

She narrowed her eyes and pointed at his chest. “I hope to goodness you didn’t wear that one to the store.”

Riley’s T-shirt was one he’d picked up from a small Amish shop on a road trip he’d taken in Pennsylvania before he went to college, and was one of only four he’d left in the closet at his parents’ house. The shirt declared “I Love Intercourse” (which was a real, honest-to-God place) and, even at the age of twenty-nine, it still made him giggle like a schoolgirl. He still had a photograph of himself standing next to the Intercourse welcome sign at the side of the highway.

“Of course I wore it to the store, where tons of your friends saw me,” he answered his mother with an innocuous blink. “Why, was that bad?”

Joan laughed lightly, her face brightening for the first time since Riley and Tate had arrived.

They sat for a couple more hours, chatting and catching up,
all of them trying their best to forget why they’d all been brought together so abruptly. As nice as sitting in his parents’ living room with his brothers was, it brought a sudden wave of melancholy over Riley. He absolutely needed to make more of an effort with his family.

He saw Tate at least once a month, but Seb, Dex, and his parents deserved more than his biweekly phone calls or biyearly visits. Sure, they were all busy, they all had jobs, routines, but Riley’s father being ill punched home how much his family meant to him, and how shitty he’d been at keeping in touch.

Joan managed a few bites of her pizza slice and finished half of the wine in her glass before she took herself up to bed. Riley followed quietly to make sure she was okay. “You don’t have to baby me,” she remarked fondly when she spotted him hovering at her bedroom door.

He smiled and shrugged, leaning on the doorjamb, watching her take off her earrings. “I know,” he said. She sat heavily on the edge of her bed and kicked off her shoes. “It’s been a long day, huh?”

She nodded and removed her watch, placing it on the side table. Looking around the room, Riley noticed his father’s slippers next to the wardrobe upon which Park’s collection of ties also hung. He rubbed at a slight ache in his belly and swallowed. “He’s gonna be okay, right, Ma?”

His voice trembled and made Joan’s eyes soften. She patted the bed at her side. On heavy feet, Riley approached and sat down next to her, welcoming his mother’s arm around his shoulder. “If I know your father,” she whispered close to his ear, “he’ll do everything in his power to get better so that he can finish fixing that damned roof.”

Riley huffed a laugh and nodded. Joan squeezed him tightly.

“Last time we spoke was . . .” he began, the rest of his words
sticking in his throat, overwhelmed by the moment. He tried again. “I let him down. I let you all down.”

“Sweetheart,” Joan murmured. “We all make mistakes. I told you that. Your father
knows
that. Believe me, he’s made his own share. That man can be stubborn as all hell, but whatever’s gone before, your father loves you very much. Don’t ever doubt that, okay?”

“Okay,” he managed, as she kissed his temple the way she always had when he was little.

·   ·   ·

Riley’s aunt Carol and his cousin Maggie arrived before lunch the next day. They wandered into the family room of the hospital where Riley and his mom had been since eight o’clock that morning. Neither Tate nor Seb had argued when Riley said he would accompany their mother.

Carol was Joan’s twin sister and Riley’s favorite aunt. She was one of those cool aunts who was always more of an older sister. Maggie was the youngest of Carol’s three children—her two brothers were in the navy, like her father—and, having grown up the only girl of their generation, could banter and wrestle with the best of them.

Not that she could wrestle much now with her six-month baby belly and her five-year-old daughter, Rosie, clinging to her leg.

Maggie grinned at Riley, her brown eyes dancing. “Hey, stranger,” she said as they hugged. “It’s been a while.”

Riley kissed her cheek. “I know. I suck.”

“Kinda like this beard,” she commented, poking his chin.

Riley shooed her hand away and laughed, reaching to hug his aunt.

“Don’t you listen,” Aunt Carol said. “It makes you look very handsome.”

“And maybe homeless,” Maggie added, cocking her head to the side considering him.

“You’re lucky you have these to hide behind,” Riley said, pointing to Rosie and then Maggie’s belly. “Or I’d have to kick your ass.”

Maggie waved him off. “Don’t delude yourself. I’d still win.”

The teasing quickly lifted the tense atmosphere that had crept into the family room as the hours ticked by with no news about Riley’s father, which was the best of a bad situation—no news was good news, after all—but he was still about ready to climb the walls. It was also a relief to fall back so easily into the usual family repartee, despite his not having seen Maggie since his father’s last heart attack. That realization brought along another truckload of guilt that Riley knew he deserved.

He looked over at Rosie as Joan lifted her onto her lap and smiled. “Hey, baby girl, you’ve grown so much since I last saw you.”

Rosie’s eyes were the same as her mother’s—as was the jet-black hair braided down her back. She hid her face in Joan’s neck, but Riley detected a smile.

“Don’t scare my kid with your beard,” Maggie mocked.

Riley barked a laugh. “It’s not
that
bad!” He brushed a hand over his whiskered cheek. “You’re only jealous because you have to shave yours off every morning.”

He yelped playfully when Maggie smacked his arm and again when, apparently done with being shy, Rosie smacked him, too.

They managed to entertain the little girl for an hour before she started getting restless. Not that Riley blamed her; it was boring as shit sitting around the airless family room and there was fuck-all on the wall-mounted TV.

“How about you take the girls and go get some food?” Joan suggested, glancing at Riley as Rosie whined and pushed away everything Maggie was trying to amuse her with. “Get out for a while, take her to the park.”