Chapter 242: Reid
When we were kids, people made us into a chart.
How much we ate. What we liked. Who ran faster, talked sooner, cried first. Jake came four minutes before me and somehow that made him the control group. Mom used to say she could tell us apart at a glance as babies—Jake cooed and smiled; I didn’t. By six, we were done being somebody else’s experiment. If comparison was the game, we’d collapse the variables.
We synced everything.
Same haircut. Same plate, same portions, same seconds. We tutored each other until our grades lined up like soldiers. Jake dialed down his brightness and I dialed mine up, just enough to pull even. If a girl asked one of us out, we asked if she had a friend. If one of us broke up, the other did, too. We learned to move the same, talk the same, think the same. A look carried conversations. If I could lift it, Jake could. If he could run it, I could. People tried, but they couldn’t separate us with rulers and questions. We were one thing. Us against whatever.
When we fought, it was a storm—same force, same words, same stubbornness meeting itself in a mirror. The only time we allowed ourselves to split into two people was behind a closed door.
We kept most of that as adults because it worked, but life has weight and corners. Jake went for another degree; I signed onto a boat as an engineer. Jake tried a real relationship. It got complicated the moment the word twin came up—extra shadows, extra expectations. Me? I mostly fucked. Never wanted more than that. A year-long thing once, probably less, and even then it felt like she was looking at me and seeing half of him grafted on. Like she liked the Jake parts of me. We’d spent so long syncing that the edges underneath—mine, not ours—didn’t get out much. Women liked the Jake-light in me. Jake said they liked the Reid-dark in him.
When we came back together and built SWMRI, some of our separate colors showed again. Jake got that ease back, the throttle on his temper. I didn’t. Didn’t want to. The hard edges kept the wrong people at bay. Folks said it made sense—the younger brother, the one with the growl. Jake was the trustworthy one. It amused me how right they thought they were.
The truth is there’s something in me I’ve never learned to name without setting the room on edge. A tight fist in the center of my chest. A vise that doesn’t care about right or wrong, line or law. It has its own weather. It shuts me down. It makes me move before I ask why. Sometimes it stares out of my eyes in the mirror, turning the brown into black. Sometimes it wakes me with teeth and nails through nightmares. I used to think that darkness was mine alone, a bad inheritance nobody saw on ultrasound.
Then Madeline walked into our house and that darkness went still.
Curious, if you can believe it. Like she’d walked into a cave with a candle and the thing that lived there wanted to see. She’s bright in ways that don’t glare—vanilla and salt air, a laugh that shakes dust out of corners, a brain that crackles. For a while the dark quieted and watched. Then it came back, but different. Possessive. Focused. Not chaos, purpose: keep her safe, and nothing is off-limits. Anyone who pushes between her and me pays the toll.
She saw it. God, she saw all of it. The hunger. The edges. The way I can’t shape a feeling into a sentence until it’s already tearing me in half. I didn’t try to hide it; some part of me wanted to see if she’d run. She didn’t. She stepped closer. Looked right at the worst of me and reached. When Jake started showing interest, the dark thing went feral, certain I’d lose her to him the way crowds tend to tilt his direction.
But that’s not what happened.
Madeline looked at me and saw a home. Then she looked at him and saw the same. She was made for both of us, or we were made for her—pick your myth. She makes that fist loosen. Heals without asking me to be soft. She wants the parts I’ve only ever trusted in a fight, and she trusts them back.
When Nick threw her overboard, I spared Jake one glance before I went into the water and it took the breath I had left. The thing I thought was mine—this black engine—was in his face too. Not a copy. The same species. He and I, one thing again for the first time in years, the way it was when we were boys and cause and effect answered to us and nothing could separate us with a ruler.
For a second, I wondered if it had left me and moved into him. A trade, some sick cosmic mercy. It didn’t. It’s been screaming since the first flatline. Not a roar you can hear, a tearing you feel—inside my ribs that won’t expand all the way, behind my eyes that won’t stay dry. His is screaming too. We sit outside her room and the monitors throb and the medicine machines tick and everything looks civilized, but inside we’re both back on that deck—blood, glass, rain—ready to kill a man twice over for breathing in her direction.
People always wanted to compare us. Nature versus nurture. Who smiled more. Who kept a promise better. They were measuring the wrong thing. The only scale that matters is this: how much of yourself you’re willing to burn to keep the person you love alive.
I know my number.
I learned it the second her lips went blue and the ocean tried to claim what’s ours. I learn it again every time the door opens and closes and a nurse says “no change” and my heart tries to walk into the room without me. I learned it when her parents looked at us with a kind of grief that made me want to apologize for existing and thanked us anyway for dragging their girl back out of hell.
The fist in my chest stills when I think of her breathing. It goes quiet when I remember her laugh, a little breathless when she’s so excited she forgets to be careful. It listens when I promise her mornings and socks and a porch that smells like coffee. It does not care about legal signatures. It only wants one thing, and for once I don’t plan to fight it.
Stay. Breathe. Take the day we pry out of time’s teeth and take another after that. The dark can have me—every mean inch—if what it buys is her.