Badd Motherf*cker(84)

For now, though, I was doing okay. I had my brothers gathered around me, and Sebastian was happy as fuck, grinning ear to ear and refusing to let Dru get more than a foot away from him. I grabbed a beer from the ice bucket at the head of the food line, piled a plate high with grub, and took my seat next to Lucian at the head table near the stage.

God, Lucian. The kid was back, and just as opaque as he’d ever been. I always thought I did a good job of keeping my internal bullshit to myself, but Lucian just…the dude let out nothing, so even for those of us who knew him well he was nearly impossible to get a read on.

Yet here he was, leaning his chair back on two legs, sipping a beer out of a red Solo cup, a sly, amused grin on his face.

“What’s funny, Luce?” His nickname was pronounced loose, even though his name was pronounced LOOSH-yee-an. Go figure, right? No accounting for familial nicknames, I guess.

He just shrugged at me. “This.” He waved at the proceedings with his beer. “Bast, gettin’ hitched.”

I shot him a warning side-eye. “Why’s it funny?”

He shook his head side to side. “Eh, not funny stupid or funny like it ain’t serious.” He paused to take a drink, probably because he’d reached the limit of how many words he could say all at once. “Just…funny weird, I guess. Bast…married? Never thought he’d be the first of us to do that, is all. And it’s weird. And kinda funny.”

I couldn’t help a chuckle. “Yeah, I hear that.” And thus we spent the next few hours, Lucian and I, sitting at the table and sipping beers, neither of us real big into hard drinking. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m inclined to get black-out drunk from time to time, I just do it in private. Not sure about Lucian, but I suspected he rarely let himself get so far gone he lost control.

Brock and Bax, however, had no such inhibitions. A party was a party, especially for Bax. He was well on his way to getting wasted, and unless things had changed while he was in Canada playing for the Calgary Stampeders in the CFL, Bax always provided an interesting time when he had too much to drink.

Case in point. I just looked up and, yep, here we go. Bax was standing with one foot on his chair, one up on the table, a bottle of Jameson upended, chugging straight from the bottle. The crowd was chanting “CHUG! CHUG! CHUG!” and Bax, being Bax, looked like he was gonna try to polish off the whole bottle in one fuckin’ go…and goddammit, that would NOT end well. At all. For anyone.

So I hopped up, snagged the bottle from him and said, “Bax, don’t be a dumbass.”

He peered at me blearily, angrily. “Hey, fucker. I was about to win a bet.” He winked, a little unevenly, at a couple of girls, who tittered and giggled coyly. “I kill a whole bottle of Jameson at once, they’ll take me back to their hotel with them.”

I chuckled, despite my irritation. “Bax, buddy. Listen. You slam this bottle of whisky, won’t be nothin’ happening with either of ’em, or both of ’em, even as fine as they are, since you’ll have a wicked case of whisky dick. So, this is me doing you a big-bro solid. Be smart, yeah?”

Bax reached out faster than I’d have expected him to be capable of given his state of intoxication, and snagged the bottle from me. “I…don’t…get whisky dick…bro.” He shot me a dirty look, stuck out his tongue, and polished off the bottle in half a dozen long swallows. “I mighta shared this, but now I ain’t.”

He was still standing in his Captain Morgan pose, one knee up, one foot on the table, so I shoved him, half as a knee-jerk reaction to him being a dumbass, and half because I was pissed at him. He toppled backward, arms wind milling, bottle flailing, and then just before he went down, he got a grip on my shirt and hauled me down with him. He hit hard, and I slammed down on top of him, and I heard the sound of glass breaking. Bax rolled over, throwing me off, and I felt something sharp gash my ribs, and then I was on my back, the wind knocked out of me, ribs screaming fire and pain, and people were shouting, and Bax was cursing.

I sat up, pressed my hand to my ribs and it came away red. Lifted up my shirt, checked the cut; not too deep, might need stitches, but not sure. Nothing too terrible. I grabbed a handful of napkins and pressed them against the cut, clamped them there as hard as I could, and then turned to check on Bax.

Fuck.

FUCK.

He was in a bad way, a jagged piece of the smashed bottle deep into the meat of his upper thigh. An inch in, if not more. I knew basic battlefield triage, which meant I knew to put pressure on a wound, how to improvise something to keep the pressure on, and I knew to not attempt to remove something impaled into the body.