The Rocker That Needs Me (The Rocker...) by Terri Anne Browning Page A

off?”
    “Worst headache of my life,” I assured him. “My mom…” I swallowed hard. I rarely talked about my mother. It was just too painful to think about her. “My mom thought I had the flu and stayed home from work to take care of me.”
    “Do you want to talk about your mom, Drake?” Dr. Kent asked, having seen me flinch at the mention of my mother.
    I sighed and locked my fingers together behind my head. “Not really,” I muttered.
    Kent was quiet for a long moment, as if he were giving me time to rethink my answer. When he finally did speak, he surprised me. “Your brother has come to visit you a few times, but he never stays long. Why is that?”
    Pain sliced through my chest thinking about Shane and his last visit, just the day before. Lana was gone. She was in New York now, three thousand miles away. I hadn’t gotten to tell her goodbye or that I loved her. She was just gone, off starting a new life that I had no place in.
    “He just wants to see how I am,” I told the doctor, “but he knows that I will want to leave with him if he stays too long.” Yesterday had been one of those days when I had nearly begged my little brother to get me the hell out of this place. I wanted to get on a plane and follow Lana across the country!
    The only thing stopping me was the knowledge that I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be with Lana just now. First, I had to become a man that was deserving of my angel. The man I had been three weeks ago, when I had walked through the front doors of this place that was so private it didn’t even have a name, didn’t deserve Lana. I was working toward being one that did.
    “Maybe we should sit down and have a group session. Me, you, and your brother. Perhaps, the only way to sort out your past is to face it head on. Do you think he would be open to that?”
    I glared at the doctor. “I don’t want to put Shane through that.”
    The doctor let it go, and I spent the rest of the session just staring out the window again…
    When I walked into Kent’s office the next morning, after a nurse had informed me that I was to have a session with the doctor again, I wasn’t pleased to find my brother sitting on the long sofa in front of the doctor’s usual chair.
    “What the fuck?” I exploded and faced the doctor, who was sitting calmly behind his desk. “I told you I didn’t want to do this!”
    “Dray, I want to be here,” Shane said, and I turned around to look at him. He looked pale, and I could see that his hands were fisted at his sides, but there was determination in his blue-gray eyes.
    “I don’t want to put you through this,” I told my little brother, the urge to protect him still eating at me. “You don’t have to…”
    Shane was already shaking his head. “I think it will be good for both of us, bro. Just give it a chance.”
    I frowned at him for a long moment. It went against everything that was inside of me, but I finally sat down beside him. The doctor stood and moved to his chair across from us, his iPad in hand. “I agree with you, Shane. I think this will be a good thing for you both.”
    “Emmie thinks so too, or I wouldn’t be here,” Shane assured the man who grinned at the mention of Em.
    “Well, I’m sure if she agrees then we can’t go wrong.” He typed something into the iPad and then put it on the table between us. “Let’s start off simply by talking about your mother.”
    Even as my whole body tensed, I could sense Shane’s doing the same. “Our mom was one of the best women I have ever known,” Shane began after a static filled minute. “I always like to remember her as the saving grace to everything else that was bad in the world.”
    It hurt to hear Shane talking about the woman that had been everything to us both. She had been a great mom, working hard to support my brother and me to make sure that we never wanted for anything. Our dad had been a decent enough guy, when he was around, but once he had gotten