chapter 20
****FARREL
Street lamps and rapid camera flashes illuminate the idling black Escalade. I tune out the security team in my right ear, and I easily walk through the frenzied paparazzi.
About five men swarm the car, pressing their lenses to the tinted windows. Others pace back and forth on the sidewalk and call their colleagues hurriedly.
"Get here now!"
"We think it's a Hale kid, hopefully Xander."
Two men crowd the rear door, and I storm ahead. My threatening stride and appearance is like a gunshot. They stumble backwards, and I grip the handle to the Escalade. I mime opening the car door to rid the over-zealous idiots.
One man rushes up and knocks into my hard back. I shoot him a brief, scathing glare.
Brief, because they don't need to think I care about them. Some paparazzi want a fight for footage or insurance payout (I hurt them, they sue), and then most hecklers want a fight for fame or because they're morons. And my job is to avoid confrontations.
Not start them.
When I really open the door, I fit my body in the free space. Not letting the cameramen see Luna yet.
I'm not surprised by what I find. A gangly seventeen-year-old girl is sprawled on the leather seat like a starfish. And she's dressed in a full-body Spider-Man costume. Mask and all.
It's an easy ploy so people avoid snagging a money-shot.
She looks at me upside-down.
I won't smile during pandemonium, but Luna always manages to make life interesting. Out of all the Hale kids, I'd say I'm closest to her. For my twenty-fifth birthday, she wrote me an Avengers fanfic where Bucky Barnes and Captain America weren't merely just friends. It was entertaining as shit.
"Luna, you ready to go?" I ask.
The driver rotates. It's her three-hundred-pound bodyguard who's been blowing my eardrum out for the past ten minutes. I'm not close to anyone on Epsilon since the SFE lead calls me a "liability" when really, he could audition for the role of hall monitor.
Thankfully her bodyguard isn't the lead of Epsilon. I dodged that headache.
"She won't talk," he snaps at me.
"She doesn't need to talk to climb out of a car." I extend my hand. She grabs hold, sitting up and sliding across the seat.
Paparazzi scream, "WHO IS IT?! WHO'S IN THE CAR?! IS THAT YOU, XANDER?!"
As soon as she drops onto the cement and lets go of my hand, I slam the door shut. I push ahead to clear a path, and I make sure she stays right behind me.
I keep an eye in front and constantly glance back at Luna. She's not one of the kids who fear the paparazzi. She seems fine, but with her Spider-Man costume hiding her face, it's hard to tell why she's here and what happened.
When no more paparazzi lie ahead, I fall behind Luna and protect her from the back. We reach the brick stoop, and the door already flies open.
Max pulls his little sister safely inside.
Squatting down, I rummage through Max's bathroom cupboard beneath the sink. I hit my elbow on the nearby toilet a few times. There's no space in here, not even for a tub. Just a small shower stall.
I push aside Jane's baskets of nail polish, and Max bends down next to me and searches through the cupboard too. He has this intrinsic need to help, and he's been in big-brother, over-protective mode for the past twenty minutes.
His love for his siblings toughens him, not softens.
And a guy being so protective over the people he loves, I find extremely fucking sexy.
I grab the first-aid kit in the very back. "The mouthwash needs to be alcohol-free," I tell him, and when he finds a bottle, we both stand up. I pop open the kit to see what else I need.
Max watches me. "How up-to-date is your medical knowledge?"
"I know more than you," I say since he tried to diagnose Luna downstairs until I butted in, "and I'm the one who gradated medical school at Yale."
"But your undergrad only took two years—"
"Because I passed the requirements faster than the average person, Harvard Dropout."
"Really?" he deadpans. "Maybe you just sucked."
I roll my eyes and laugh. "That's not how that works." I sift through the kit's items. Gloves, cotton balls, a plastic syringe, thermometer, but I'm still missing something.
"Farrel," he says seriously, "if you're not sure—"
"Max." I look right at him. "I'm one-hundred percent sure that she has an infection from a really shit tongue piercing. If you don't trust me, then go Web M.D. her symptoms. It'll tell you that I'm right."
He cracks a knuckle. "I trust you. I'm just"—he gestures to his head—"processing that my sister stuck a sewing needle in her tongue a week ago, and it's still bleeding and she may have a low-grade fever. You know, the usual Friday night."
I take out my supplies and shut the first-aid kit. "It's a good Friday night when no one's crying or dead."
"Which is exactly why she didn't want to tell my parents yet." He rotates his stiff shoulders. "My dad will fucking die, and my mom will cry out of worry." He keeps shaking his head, thinking about something else. "Fuck."
"I need to make a saline solution, so take your fucks downstairs with me, wolf scout."
He carries the mouthwash while I have the rest of the supplies. Once downstairs, we bypass the living room where Luna and Jane talk quietly on the loveseat.
Not even a foot into the kitchen and Max already fills a pot with water and sets it on the stove. I smile and place my supplies on the counter. He slides salt to me and ropes my gaze tenfold.
"You know saline solution is just distilled water and salt," I realize. "Where'd you learn that? Wolf Scout Training?"
"Common sense."
Who knew common sense could be so fucking attractive? The heat ratchets up.
I end up saying, "Common sense is a good look on you." I pass him to grab a cup out of a cabinet, and my shoulder slides against his bare skin. Barely any room for two bodies in this cramped kitchen.
He tenses, breathing shallow, and he looks back at me.
He's still only dressed in drawstring pants, his ass literal perfection in them. I've never wanted to touch, hold and fuck someone as much as I want to touch, hold and fuck him. And even though I just massaged Max, it still feels like not enough.
Not nearly enough.