Waking the Dead by Jane Davitt, Alexa Snow Read Free Book Online Page A

heavily on the other end of the couch and yawned again. “I didn’t even know I was that tired. I just sat down for a second, and the next thing I knew I was waking up.”
    “Don’t worry,” Nick said. “You’ll get a good night’s sleep tonight and be pretty much back to normal tomorrow.”
    “Good. I’d hate to spend the whole vacation imitating someone with narcolepsy.” Josh found himself watching Nick whenever he could get away with it; there was something slightly like looking in a mirror about it. They had the same eyes, and now that he wasn’t a kid anymore he was pretty sure they had the same nose, too.
    “We’d hate that, too,” John said. “Can’t fish in your sleep, though sometimes I’ve tried when we’ve been out for forty-eight hours with no breaks.”
    “You do that?” Josh asked, incredulous but not disbelieving.
    “Used to.” John shrugged with one shoulder, most of his attention on the fly, a bright dazzle of orange and black. “When I was your age. Not now.”
    “Getting old,” Nick said. He and John exchanged a look that left Josh feeling not excluded, not exactly, just… an observer. “Or maybe not,” Nick finished, a knowing smile flickering into life and fading again too quickly for Josh to be sure he’d seen it.
    He carried on watching Nick as he turned back to his computer, concentrating on his brother and still hazy with sleep, enough that he wasn’t being as careful as he should have been. Because, really, slipping past the barriers everyone had, fence posts widely spaced with no wire between them for most people, was so easy, so simple, just like walking through a doorway into --
    … never get old. John  -- my John  -- God, last night  -- I can still taste you  --
    Josh jerked, his face flushed with shock. He’d done this before and fallen into some really lurid fantasies; people really did have sex on their minds a lot , but Nick was his brother, for God’s sake, and the images that had gone along with the thoughts, mixed in with them in a way he’d have trouble describing because he experienced them as a gestalt, had been really vivid.
    No, they weren’t old. Not in his eyes and not in theirs, and John was looking at him with mild reproof, but Josh couldn’t feel anything like fear or a hasty slamming of doors. And he could be blocked if someone tried real hard or was naturally closed off.
    “Why don’t you help me with these? Make some of your own, I mean.” John said, deliberately returning his attention to the feathers and wire he held. “It’s never quite the same catching a fish using another man’s flies.”
    Distraction was a good thing at a time like this, Josh had found, so he nodded and shifted closer, looking at what John was doing. “Okay,” he said. “Show me.”
    The rest of the afternoon was spent in fly-tying lessons and a walk down to John’s old house, which Josh was assured he’d seen on his last visit even though he couldn’t remember it at all. The tourists who were renting it had gone to
Mull
for the day, but John still wouldn’t go inside, saying that it wasn’t polite. Josh, who’d grown up knowing vacations as times spent mostly in hotels, where the cleaning staff would come and go seemingly as they pleased, didn’t quite get that, but he didn’t argue. That was another thing about being able to hear what people were thinking; he could tell when there was a chance the other person would waver.
    They were just finishing up a dinner that had taken longer to cook than they’d expected -- Nick explained that the oven was temperamental at times, and the chicken ended up being in there forty minutes longer than anticipated -- when there was a knock at the door and Caitrin came in with a strong breeze at her back.
    “Oh, sorry,” she said. “I thought you’d be long done by now.”
    “We would have been,” Nick told her. “If you didn’t always refuse, I’d accuse you of showing up hoping for a free meal.”