Mr Mysterious [boyxboy]

09.

Tarama ends up staying the whole weekend with Brad, who still has not spoken about what the phone call was about. He has been irritable and short tempered the whole weekend, which is why Tamara insisted on staying, that and that each time she mentioned going home his eyes would widen and he would grab her hand and ask her not to. Whatever it was that Jasper said to Brad over the phone has him really shaken up and Tamara doesn’t know what to do about it.

It’s Sunday afternoon and Martha has gone to have coffee with a friend, so Brad and Tamara are once again alone in the house. Brad is sitting on his bed with his legs crossed, he stares blankly at the wall across from him, chewing his nails anxiously.

“Brad.” Tamara speaks firmly, to make sure she gets his attention.

“Hmmm?” His blank stare doesn’t waver.

“Are you going to tell me what he said, or are you just going to keep on staring at inanimate objects and not speaking to me until I get up to go home. Seriously, what the hell is going on?”

“What, you’re going home?” Brad jumps off the bed and falls to his knees in front of Tamara who is sitting on his desk chair, spinning in slow circles. When she is facing him he clamps his hands down on her knees, “Don’t.”

“Were you even listening?” At first she is scolding, then she sets her hands on top of Brads and her tone becomes gentler, “I’m not going, not yet. But you’ve gotta talk about this,”

Brad falls away from his begging position, backwards against the edge of his bed, letting his head loll back onto the mattress. “If I talk about it, it means I believe it.”

It’s true, while he keeps silent about what Jasper told him, it means he can pretend Jasper made it up, that he knows it is not worth worrying about or worth worrying anyone else about. But if he verbally expresses his concern, he feels like he is betraying Ty’s trust; like he doesn’t have the faith in his brother that he should. Surely, if Ty were in any kind of trouble, he would confine in Brad about it, wouldn’t he? They have always been close, and sometimes one of them needs to give the other a push to get them to open up, but they never really hide anything. They can read each other, so Brad would have noticed right? He should have noticed, and if Jasper is telling the truth, and Brad didn’t notice, then whatever is happening to Ty, is partially his fault.

“Brad!” Tamara snaps her fingers in front of her friend, bringing him back from his thoughts. When he says nothing in response she lets out a frustrated groan and gets to her feet to make her way to the door.

“Ty might be in trouble.” Brad blurts out when he realises that Tamara is about to leave him.

She stops instantly at the sound of him speaking and sits down on the floor by his side. Tamara knows not to push, because that one sentence is the most she has gotten out of him in the last forty-eight hours. When they have been sitting in silence together for another ten minutes Brad looks over at her. She has her hands clasped on her knees and she is watching them intently.

“But he might not be.” He adds as an overdue afterthought.

“How might he be?” She asks, without looking over at him.

Brad looks away from her again and tries to find something else to focus on. “Jasper saw something. Apparently, Ty has some pretty nasty bruises on him. He thinks someone is hurting him.”

Now Tamara does look over at Brad, analysing his face. He has scrunched up all his features, as if thinking about it is painful, which Tamara expects, it is. She wouldn’t like to think about her brother being hurt at someone elses hand, at anyone’s hand. Well, she wouldn’t if she had a brother to worry about.