Seeing You Read Online Free

dinner, having a beer, when we see Wade come slammin’ outta the house and Simon’s sittin’ right here and says, ‘I doodled on some papers on his desk. Bet ya twenty bucks he goes in fully clothed this time.’ Sure enough, Wade got to the pond and kept right on walkin’, boots and all, until all we could see was his gray hat floating in the water where his head had been a second before that.” Mack paused as we all hooted with laughter. “We ’bout pissed ourselves laughin’, and wasn’t long before Wade musta decided the water wasn’t gonna help that time, ’cause he was up and outta that pond before we could blink. Came up, face all red, grabbed Simon’s hand and dragged him up to the house without a word. Didn’t see those two for days.”
    Joe was laughing, but never having met Simon, he obviously needed clarification. “So, Simon was doing stuff to annoy Wade on purpose?”
    “No, not really. Little shit was testin’ Wade,” Mack said with a fond smile, and I had one of my own as I wondered if that was the first time since the accident that Mack referred to Simon as a little shit. Hard to call the dead names, even ones you’d been calling them for years.
    “Testing?” Joe looked even more confused at this.
    “Oh, yeah. Wanted to see how far he could push ’im, wanted to force Wade to talk stuff out if they needed to so it wouldn’t build up like that. And based on the look in Simon’s eyes when it was obvious Wade had been in the pond, the little shit was havin’ fun, too. Kinda twisted sense of humor on him,” Mack said.
    I snorted at the last bit. Truer words. Simon and I’d had so much fun over the years, though.
    We were all quiet for a moment, smiling, remembering, and it felt good. Just deep down good in my bones, thinking of Simon looking up at me with his laughing brown eyes and his paint-flecked brown hair, so unlike my own blond strands. Much better than the last time I had seen him, his eyes filled with pain and his hair matted with blood.
    My smile faded, and I glanced over at the house when I noticed movement. I saw Wade sitting on the wooden swing in the deepening shadows of the front porch, and it felt like he was looking straight at me, but I couldn’t be sure.
    Mack spoke again, this time the sadness coming through in his gruff voice. “Yep, Simon sure was good for our boy over there. Just what Wade always needed.”

Chapter Five
     
    The rain pounded on the roof, the wind screamed through the trees, the crack and boom of thunder kept an even drumbeat, and I watched it all from my bedroom window in the bunkhouse, marveling at nature’s symphony and the inconsiderate rehearsal time.
    Well, to be fair, it wasn’t the storm that woke me up. It was the nightmare.
    The nightmare was always the same. The last few minutes with Simon, looking up at me and covered in blood, saying, “Love you…brother.” Then me screaming for help on the deserted highway, clutching Simon’s limp body, too mindless to pull my cell phone out of my pocket and make the call.
    Then there was Wade standing over us, seeming eight feet tall, fury on his face as he said, “Why Simon? Why not you?”
    I shuddered, thinking back to that night in May when I lost the man who was a brother to me in every way that really counted. Most of the nightmare was so tragically real, a flashback of those heartbreaking moments, but Wade wasn’t there.
    No, that was just in my mind.
    I hadn’t dreamed about the accident in weeks, hadn’t woken up sweating and crying and wondering “why me?” in months. I had recently, in fact, started dreaming of our childhood together, of Simon and Erin and our parents, Annie and Fred. I dreamed of the day I came to live with them when I was six, bewildered by the disappearance of my mother and this concept called death, when this Simon boy sat and held my hand all night when I was too scared to sleep. I dreamed of the time a pair of nine-year-old boys thought they could