#18 in TeenFic
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❝Don't,❞ he pleaded softly, offering her a tiny smile, ❝please don't make me a promise you will never be able to keep.❞ He released a quiet but deep breath, leaning forward even more, tilting his body towards her, until thei...
"I had a brother," Nick found himself confessing to Bree a few weeks later.
They were both seated on the topmost row of seats on the bleachers surrounding the basketball court. Their lectures were over for the day but the campus grounds were still open, what with students taking late evening classes too.
Bree found it strangely comfortable up there, with the silence of the grounds and the February chill in the air, her body huddled close to Nick's.
"Had?" She asked, picking up on his phrasing. Bree tilted her head up from where it was resting on Nick's shoulder, and fixed her eyes on his face.
Nick didn't meet her eyes but she saw his eyebrows furrow slightly.
"Yes..." He seemed to lose focus, his voice trailing off.
Bree didn't know what to do with this piece of information. She hadn't thought that Nick might have had a sibling -- and now that she did know, it wasn't clear how she should respond on them being dead. She'd never had a loved one die before.
She tried to think of Maya, her sister, and how much she loved her. Bree then tried to wonder what it'd feel like to lose her -- but it was a nasty train of thought she had to shut off soon. It was terrible.
"I'm sorry," Bree said then, truly meaning it. And as soon as she said it, she also wanted to take it back. Sometimes it was complicated to offer your sympathies to people who'd lost a loved one -- they tended to take offence and make it about pride and pity. Even if those were the last things Bree intended for.
"Sorry?" Nick seemed to fall back into their world, out of the trance he'd been under just moments ago. His thin layer of confusion made that obvious. "Sorry about wh--? Oh." He blinked. And then titled his chin down to meet Bree's eyes. "No," he said, with a shake of his head. "Michael's not... He's not dead."
Michael. Bree noted the name in her head at the same time that the confusion crawled in.
"Okay?" She frowned. "That's -- that's great, I guess." She knitted her brows together, intertwining her fingers with Nick's and keeping their joined hands on his knee. "What did you mean by you had a brother then?"
Nick sighed, and Bree felt it with the way his shoulder slouched against hers and she fell a little more into the side of his relaxed body.
"Just that he... He's not someone I'd be able to recognise, I guess." Nick's fingers returned the hold on Bree's hand, acknowledging the small contact she'd made earlier. "I had a brother," he muttered quietly, "because now he's something else."
