Shame

“NO. I HAVEN’T TALKED to her.”

Shame overheard Con’s comment, but he didn’t pay it much attention. If it applied to him, well, Con would have seen fit to tell him. Since he hadn’t, then Shame didn’t see any point in listening in, although the terse conversation between Riley and Con—his two best friends—was clearly a tense one.

“She hasn’t called me back, damn it. It’s been three days.”

“She’s a big girl, Ry.” Con took the tray from the woman who appeared at the end of the bar and said, “Wait right there.”

After he deposited the burgers and fries, Con returned to Shawntelle and gave her a smacking kiss that had more than a few people whooping it up.

Shame hadn’t been surprised when she’d appeared back in Ballz & Bellz a while ago. She’d moved in with Con and when one of the other servers in the pub had asked her about it, she’d said she’d decided she liked small-town life.

She was now working part time in the pub, although Shame suspected she and Con spent half their time flirting.

No. He wasn’t jealous or anything. Not like he’d want to spend hours staring at anybody all dopey-faced.

A heart-shaped face slid up from the back of his mind, eyes laughing at him, then smiling. And her mouth...

Stop it. You’re getting her out of your system, remember?

“Doesn’t it bother you at all that our baby sister took off to Mexico without any warning and hasn’t called—”

Shame slammed down the bottles he’d been stocking along the back of the bar. Spinning on his heel, he glared at the two brothers. Con met his gaze levelly, but Riley didn’t even look at him.

“What’s going on?” he asked quietly.

Con frowned at him. “Nothing, Shame.” Then he turned to Riley, talking to him in a low voice.

It wasn’t low enough.

His muttered, “We can talk about this later,” had Shame’s every instinct on edge.

“Is there a reason you can’t talk about it now? Ry just said she’s down in Mexico and you haven’t heard from her in days.”

He hadn’t seen Charli in weeks—too many of them—but it was for the best.  This was the first he’d heard of her taking off to Mexico.  He didn’t like the fact that Con didn’t want to talk about it, either.

Shame strode over to the brothers, ignoring the woman at the bar who tried to flag him down. He hardly ever worked with the customers. He’d bus tables, wash dishes and stock, but interacting with people was more than he cared to do.

The only reason he came in and worked the twenty hours a week he did was because Riley and Con had put it into the contract he’d signed without telling him and he hadn’t paid it any attention. He hadn’t worried about them screwing him out of money. He hadn’t thought they’d try to make him actually interact with people.

Assholes. Friends could be total assholes.

“Why in the hell is she down in Mexico anyway? She’s trying to finish her stupid internship,” he pointed out. Immediately, he felt bad. Charli was so close to finishing up her residency and would soon be a doctor. He knew how much that meant to her. She’d talked about it ever since she was a kid. She’d been ten years old and he’d been thirteen while she sat on the bed behind him, carefully cleaning up the wounds on his back from yet another beating. She hadn’t asked how it had happened. Con had been poking around looking for the right stuff to use on the wounds and she’d found him, then followed him and pushed her older brother aside, saying he was ‘contaminating the clean bandages.’

He’d also been hurting Shame like hell.

Charli hadn’t been near as rough, not that Shame would ever tell her that.

She’d talked the entire time about how she’d be a doctor and if he ever got hurt, he could just come to her.

Most of his life, when he was hurt, she was the one who came to mind.

But he didn’t go to her.

He couldn’t risk it, because the hold she had on him was too great already.

Still, he knew her dreams of being a doctor, and if she’d skipped out in the middle of her residency...

“She was given time off from work,” Con said, his voice short. He gave Shame a dark look and shook his head. “Leave it alone.”

“Why was she given time off?” Riley was the one to ask the question.

Con and Charli had always been the closer of the siblings. They’d been younger, closer together in age, and while Riley had been off working to take care of them, Con had been at home actually cooking for Charli and making sure she had clean clothes to wear to school the next day.

All of the Steele siblings loved each other. There was no denying that. But there were certain bonds that just went...deeper.

Con slanted a look at Riley and shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me.”

Shame could tell Con was lying.

So could Riley. Shame saw it in the man’s eyes.

“Doesn’t it seem sort of weird that she takes of like this?” Shame pressed. “And then for her not to call. Y’all never go more than a couple of days without talking to each other.”

“She talked to me.”

The words came from the most unexpected place.

Shame swung his head around and looked at Shawntelle. She’d slid behind the bar and stood there, filling a glass with soda water. After adding a twist of lime, she glanced up at him and shrugged. “I called her this morning and she answered.”

“She talked to you?” Riley asked.

There was no denying it.

He sounded put out.

Shawntelle took a sip of her water and shrugged. “Yeah. Maybe her phone was off when you called, Ry. I don’t know.”

“Her phone was off? And when she was done talking to you, it never occurred to her to return my calls?”

Riley was thinking the same thing he was. Bullshit, Shame thought sourly.

He was tempted to pull out his phone then and there, but he didn’t.

He’d call her later.

He didn’t call her very often, but when he did, she always answered, usually on the first ring. If not the first, then the second.

He’d call her and figure out what was going on. Once he did, he’d tell her brothers and Riley could stop being a mother hen.

He’d do it just to be a friend, too.

No other reason.

He’d gotten her out of his system, after all.

Decision made, he went back to stocking the bar.

* * * * *

HE DIDN’T CALL HER while he was working.

He knew better than that.

No, he waited until he got home.  Once he was inside, he tried not to think about the times he’d had Charli here, and how much emptier the place seemed without her.

It hadn’t been like that before.  He hadn’t bought this house with a lover in mind, hadn’t anticipated things would change so much after a few short encounters.

Now he was already thinking of selling it, but then he’d have to find another place that suited him and that wouldn’t necessarily be easy.  This place had been ideal when he’d been ready to own a home—a basement for a gym, a bedroom, a decent kitchen and a couple of spare rooms that he could do whatever in the hell he wanted with.

One of them was an art studio.

The other...well, he didn’t always want to think about what he’d made the other into. His prison. His dungeon. A reminder of what he’d escaped. A reminder of what he’d never become.

That was the room in the very back of the house, built on like an afterthought, and he didn’t even have to see the door unless he was specifically looking for it. It was kept padlocked. Not just locked, but padlocked, so he didn’t have to worry about anybody going in there unless he allowed it. And that would never happen.

He ignored the odd urge to go into the room—it came and went more often than he liked. Instead, he went into the living room and sat down, pulling out his phone.

He’d call Charli.

She’d tell him what was going on and then he’d hang up.

She always told him things he didn’t want to hear, as if she was drawing him into the web that was her warmth and light. This wouldn’t be any different.

After a couple of minutes, he had himself hyped up enough and reached for the phone and punched in the number. He refused to let himself program it into his phone, although he knew it by heart.

It rang once.

He ignored the hitch in his chest.

It rang twice.

He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself.

But then there was a third ring, and a fourth.

By the time it had rung six, then seven times, he was scowling.

The eighth ring had him worried.

Then it went to voice mail and without thinking, he snapped, “Answer your fucking phone, Charli.”