Chain Link

Chapter 13

 The topic wasn't brought up until midnight when he was laying next to Alessa in her bed.

"Aren't you going to ask about it at all?" Logan asked. He had been waiting all evening for the moment that Alessa would send their brothers off to talk about it. It never happened. She didn't even bring it up when their brothers had left to go to bed and they were all alone in the room.

"Do you want to talk about it?" She asked.

Logan paused as his eyebrows furrowed. "What's that for a question? Of course, I don't want to talk about it. I kind of want to bury it all in the recesses of my mind."

"Well then I won't ask about it."

Logan let out a groan. "But don't you think that it's unhealthy of me? And don't you think that I'm being unfair? You trust me with all of your problems and I'm not even returning this. Aren't you mad at me?"

Alessa cuddled more into him in response. It was not the reaction that he was expecting. "If you don't want to talk about it, I'm not going to push you. I know that you trust me but we all deal with our problems in different ways. I'm not going to force you to talk."

The response should have calmed him but instead it infuriated him. "What if I want to talk about it?"

"Then we talk about it."

"Okay well I want to talk about it," he spat out.

Alessa raised her head from his side to look at him with a smile on her face. The smile suddenly didn't bring joy to his eyes. Instead it infuriated him. Didn't she understand what he was going through? This was a serious problem.

Of course hindsight told him that he was being ridiculous.

But hindsight always came in too late.

"Okay so then we'll talk about it."

The statement should have relieved the tension in his body, but he didn't. He had been avoiding this conversation all evening and now he was about to have it. Instead his muscles felt tighter than they had all evening.

"Your mom might be alive," Alessa stated.

The words felt like another punch to his lungs to get rid off all the air there once again. Although the thought had come up in his mind, the words hadn't been spoken out loud. Secretly he was hoping that they weren't true.

"Yeah," he breathed out. There wasn't much else to say without air available to him.

Alessa's hand reached up to run through his hair. The motions calmed him and the air was slowly returning back to his body. "Do you want to find out if she is alive?" The question didn't bring the pain from earlier. It might have been because the continued stroking through his hair. But maybe he had accepted it.

Yeah, that was probably it.

"I don't know."

Alessa let out a chuckle. The chuckle made the tension reappear. "Sorry," she murmured. "It's just that you are the one not to know what to do now."

The statement took awhile to process. It was mostly because anger had flooded in his mind. Why did she think that this was funny? It wasn't funny at all, but then the anger dissipated and realization sunk in. He let out a chuckle too.

"We both have pretty messed up families too."

Alessa hummed in agreement as she leant to kiss his shoulder while the hand kept stroking his hair. Calm started to flood into his family.

"I don't want Dan to know about this," he told her as clarity started to return to his mind by the soothing motions.

"I understand."