One Tent My Forbidden Stepbrother novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: What She Left Unsaid
The phone went dark in Blaine's hand.
For a moment he did nothing.
Then his thumb moved, and the message played again.
"Blaine, honey, it's me."
"Blaine," Perry said.
"Don't." It came out strangled. "Let me hear the end."
There was no end.
The voice reached its last word, the cough rattled, the monitor chirped, and the line went to a flat soft hiss.
Blaine played it a third time, and a fourth.
On the fifth his shoulders began to shake.
Perry took the phone out of his hand and set it face down on the blanket, and put both arms around him.
Blaine came apart all at once.
It was ugly and loud, a wrenching sound that had been shut up in him for fourteen months.
He turned his face into Perry's neck and cried hard.
Perry held on.
He rubbed Blaine's back in slow circles, over the calamine and the welts.
He said nothing, because there was nothing to say.
The radio crackled.
Perry reached over with his free hand and turned it off.
"That's all of her I've got that was for you," Blaine said, at last, wetly. "It stops in the middle. I've listened to it every night since the funeral."
"Every night?" Perry asked.
"I thought it was goodbye. I thought she was telling you to look after me. And I thought you'd do it, because you're you, and you'd hate it, and you'd do it anyway."
"Blaine."
"I didn't want to be the thing you looked after." He drew a ragged breath. "I wanted you to want me, and I've never known if you did, because every time you looked at me I thought, here's the favor."
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