Page 5 of Prohibited

Ryan raised his eyes slowly to look at Alex on the other side of the table. Alex didn’t touch Tommy, but he leaned over him, keeping his eyes fixed on his older brother’s face.

“I’m sure,” Lindsay said, softly. A tremor in his voice, too, though it was anguish instead of anger. “He’s dying.”

The very air around them seemed to hold its breath.

And then it happened–one instant Tommy was there, and the next, he was gone. Ryan felt it, though he would be hard-pressed to explain what it was he felt. He knew only that his brother was gone.

Lindsay leaned forward and checked his pulse again, lowered his face over Tommy’s mouth.

“He’s dead.”

The change in Tommy crushed the air from Ryan’s lungs. It beat him across his throat like a heavy iron chain and wound his body as tightly as a coil. A deep, ugly animal sound came from him, a sound he didn’t even know human beings were capable of making.

Breathing came harder and faster, so fast he thought it might kill him. More horrible sounds were ripped from his throat. He became deaf and blind to everything around him. Though he loathed to let go of Tommy, he had to move. The anguish was driving through him like a demon he had to exorcize. If he didn’t, it would kill him.

He released Tommy’s hand and turned away, gripping his hair in his hands until it felt like it would come out of his scalp.

A loud crash behind startled him only slightly out of the suffocated fog that was trying to hold the crushing weight of reality at bay.

Alex was tearing things off of the shelves in the living room, anything he could get his hands on. Hurling books against the walls, smashing knick knacks they’d collected here and there. He flipped the coffee table over and hurled Tommy’s baseball so hard into the wall that it left a hole. They all stood in stunned, hypnotic fascination while they watched him. Never in the years he'd known him had Alex ever shown such a display of feeling.

He smashed the mirror hanging over the fireplace with his fist and stifled a yell as blood began to flow down his hand, into the white cuffs of his pristine shirt.

“Alex,” Lindsay said, moving toward him.

“Don’t,” Alex said, sharply. “Lindsay, don’t.”

Ryan turned and looked at Tommy and felt another wave of anguish seize him. He gripped the edge of the table. “Fuck. Fuck.”

He should have gone with him. That feeling in his stomach all day, that there was something wrong, was a warning. His intuition telling him to do something about it. If he had just been there, he could have stopped this. It might have been him, but at least Tommy would have lived.

This fact yawned inside of him, an abyss swallowing up everything except his agony.

His whole body trembling, he slowly raised his eyes until he met Alex’s, sparkling with unshed tears. A fact that would have astonished Ryan if he could have felt anything other than anguish.

“He’s dead,” Alex said, voice trembling with shock. Then more quietly, staring at Tommy’s body, “He’s dead.”

They all stood there in a silence that was so deafening that Ryan thought his eardrums might collapse. Then, like a statue coming to life, Alex took slow, deliberate steps across the wreckage of Ryan’s living room, the bottom of his leather Oxfords crushing glass and paper under foot.

When he reached the table where his dead brother lay, his face twisted a little, then settled again. Eyes still glittering, jaw working while he looked up and down the body of his older brother, whose eyes were still half open. With a shaking hand, he gently pulled down each eyelid, closing Tommy’s hazel eyes for the last time. A surge went through Ryan, a great and terrifying urge to smash something. Instead he let it ripple through him and balled his hands until they ached.

Alex reached into his pocket and then opened his hand, two coins in his palm. He picked them up, one at a time, and placed them on Tommy’s blue eyelids with shaking fingers.

“For the ferryman,” he whispered.

Alex raised his eyes until he and Ryan were staring at each other, some indefinable, dreadful current running between them.

Tommy, their only family, was dead.

Chapter three

Alex

Ryan looked like an entirely different man when he slept. All of the intensity drained from his face. Those shocking blue eyes hooded safely behind his eyelids. Lines of worry smoothed out of his sharply carved features.

Peaceful. Beautiful.

Even snoring, dead drunk, smelling like a fishmonger’s wife.