And that’s what this was really about, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like they would be working with Simon for years or anything. It was a few months. This was about Blake’s lack of trust in Trevor. He was scared that Trevor would start using again and screw things up for Rock Solid and their family. Maybe he thought Simon would hurt Trevor and he’d relapse. Whatever the reason, this came down to his fear that Trevor wouldn’t stay sober.

He turned and fell into the chair. He rested his elbows on the table, forehead in his hands. His right leg bounced up and down with nervous energy as he tried to catch his breath. Trevor kept his eyes closed. Opening them wasn’t an option because he couldn’t handle seeing the doubt on his brother’s face. “You have no reason to trust or believe in me. I know that. It fucking kills me, but I know it. Still... I need you to trust me, man. Not Mom, or Jason, or my sponsor. Not the people from meetings or anyone else. You. You’re my brother. My twin. It’s always been you and me. The only times it wasn’t, those were my fault, and now I’m asking you to forget about that. I get it, but I’m asking anyway. I can’t do this without you. I need you to believe in me.”

They kept going around and around and things weren’t changing, and that wasn’t helping.

“Right now the only person in my world who I don’t feel like I’m letting down is Simon. Again, that’s because I didn’t hurt him the way I did you, but...I can’t lose that. Don’t ask me to walk away. You have to trust that I know what I’m doing. That I’m not going to screw up. How can I do this without my twin?”

Trevor finally breathed when he felt Blake’s hand on his shoulder. “Do you remember our twenty-first birthday? I wanted to go out with you so badly. You already had a problem. I think I realized that, but you were my big brother. I looked up to you, and you knew all these people in the city and places to go. I wanted to go out and get hammered with you that night. It’s all I wanted. We were finally legal.”

Trevor squeezed his eyes shut tighter, and tried to ignore the pain in his head, in his chest.

“You didn’t show up and I was devastated. Jase was already twenty-one and he said he’d go out with me. He knew some gay clubs we could go to but I didn’t want to. It was our birthday. You promised me and you weren’t there.”

Their twenty-first birthday? He could have sworn they spent that together.

“I stayed home all night. My mind wouldn’t stop going. I was done with you. It didn’t matter if we were twenty-one or not, if we were finally legal to go to clubs and drink, I didn’t want anything to do with alcohol or you. You didn’t come home until the next night. When you did, you didn’t know what day it was. You thought it was our birthday, and then it was you who was so excited to go out with me. You missed our birthday and you didn’t even know it...but there was the other part of you, who in your own way had come through for me that day. You left whoever it was to come spend your birthday with your brother. It didn’t matter that I’d just sworn to myself that I wouldn’t ever drink with you. All I could think of was the fact that you’d come through for me. It had been just as important to you to spend our birthday together, you were just too far gone to keep track of your days.”

Trevor huffed, feeling every one of Blake’s words in his chest. “Way to make a guy feel better.” He meant it as a joke but neither of them laughed.

“I’m just trying to say, it might not be on your time schedule, but I’m trying to come through for you too, Trev. I’m trying, and I know I’m not the only one. Neither of us might not be able to do exactly what the other wants, when they want it, but we always come around. And no matter what, we’re always brothers and we always have each other’s backs.”

Trevor kept his eyes on the table, but reached up and grabbed Blake’s hand on his shoulder. They stayed like that for minutes, Blake standing next to Trevor, letting him know he was there. He might not always do it in the best way, but he was there. And Trevor letting him know that he was trying, too.

***

Simon sat on the couch, with his laptop on his lap. He’d been there for hours, looking up the same things he’d looked up a hundred times—hand trauma and surgery.

He read the same information a million times, some discrediting a new procedure and others praising it. It had been known to do great things, it said. Modern medicine was incredible. He couldn’t do what he did and not believe that. In his years as a surgeon, Simon himself had performed what some people called miracles.