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Now… my part, he thought looking over to the couches to find the other high schoolers doing their best to not look like they weren’t just staring at him.
“Morning,” he said, walking over to them and sitting on the couch next to Danny.
“Morning,” Mark said from across from him, pulling at his fingers. Kevin and Danny muttered an echo. An uncomfortable silence fell over them as they collectively looked at anything that wasn’t each other.
“So,” Kevin said to break the silence finally, “what’s it like being roofied?”
Mark and Danny both jerked as they glared at him, Mark’s fist hitting Kevin’s chest with an almost hollow sound.
“Ow,” Kevin groaned, the pain echoed in the other two as they held their heads.
Thomas heard himself laugh before he realized where it was coming from and shook his head. Between the pain killers and the breakfast Seong made him, he felt almost normal— certainly better than the three of them were. “I don’t remember anything,” he told Kevin, shrugging his shoulders. “The last thing I remember clearly was Danny taking his shot and Andy’s hissy fit about me not ordering a shot.”
“Fucking prick,” Mark gritted through his teeth in what might have been rage or his throbbing pain. “You know he spent the whole fucking night trying to convince us that you were the dick who abandoned us when as far as he knew fucking Jerry was doing God knows what with you?”
Thomas shuddered, his stomach clenching as the thoughts of what Jerry might have planned to do with him tried to claw their way back into his head. “I-I saw the group chat this morning,” he said, grimacing. “Andy never liked me much. Didn’t think he disliked me enough to try to make me disappear but-” He shrugged.
“Why- why did he not like you?” Kevin asked, frowning and catching Mark’s fist this time when he tried to punch him again. “I’m serious. You two have been in O’Hare’s program a year longer than me and I got the impression he already didn’t like you. Did you have a bad first impression or something?”
Thomas glanced away, frowning as he thought back to the first time he had met Andy and what Andy had said on the phone. “…No,” he said finally. “I think… I think, it had something to do with Jerry and Jake’s relationship. Jake would tell me to stay away from Jerry and Andy pretty much ignored me from day one so it was easy enough.” He shook his head again. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter what reasons he or Jerry had.”
“What do you mean,” Mark asked him, frowning. “They- what if they come back?”
Thomas went still as he realized that none of them knew what was happening- that they weren’t going to come back. Seong had refused to tell Thomas anything but the unsaid was loud enough. “…They won’t,” he said, unable to bring himself to look at any of them as he rubbed at the back of his neck. “They poached in the Italian Ring in an Italian business. The Cat being here is clear enough that the Family will be handling anyone involved with last night. He’s just being polite by allowing O’Hare to be involved and talking to our guardians. By every right, he could have entered no-man’s land and made everyone who had been at the club go away without saying a word.”
Someone gulped hard enough that Thomas heard it.
“You- you really do know a lot about the ugly side of the business, don’t you?” Danny said quietly.
Now Thomas swallowed, thinking about what Seong said about how he would make a good Clover. Reaching into the pocket of the leather jacket Seong had handed him before they left, he pulled out the plastic snake to wrap around his fingers. “I guess,” he said softly. “But I don’t want to.”
“What do you mean,” Mark asked him.
“I-I mean I d-don’t want to know about it,” he said, still not looking at them as the words started to stick in his throat. “I don’t want to be i-in it. I don’t want to have th-this knowledge. I don’t—” He thought again about Seong and what he said about paths. “I j-just want a normal life.”
Silence formed again, this time broken by the soft clicking of the snake wrapped around his fingers.
“I’m sorry, Thomas,” Kevin said, breaking the silence again.
“Y-you don’t have anything to be sorry about,” Thomas told him, taking a deep breath and looking over at him.
“Yes, I do,” Kevin said, rubbing at his neck and looking down. “I’ve been… Marcus once told me that I treat all of this like it’s a podcast. That I think of it like a story that can’t touch me or the people I care about and that no one gets hurts. I didn’t think I did. I know people get hurt in this stuff but… Even with what happened to mine and Mark’s parents… It’s never felt quite real. Maybe because everyone who got hurt was- They aren’t here to talk about how much it fucking sucks to live through it all. I didn’t- I shouldn’t have asked you about- I’m sorry.”
Thomas studied the bigger man silently, watching as the football player tried to make himself smaller in his shame. He stood up, wrapping the snake around his wrist instead where it clicked to itself to make a bracelet, and edged past Danny and around the low table to stand in front of Kevin.
Dark eyes glanced up at him, confused and full of hurt.
Thomas didn’t know the others’ stories. He didn’t know how Kevin and Mark had come to live with Marcus and what had happened to their parents, but from the sound of it they, like Thomas, didn’t have any anymore. He held out his hand. “Thomas O’Malley.”
The confusion only grew in Kevin’s eyes as he took Thomas’s offered hand almost automatically. “Uh- Kevin Williams?”
“Nice to meet you, Kevin,” Thomas said, giving the thicker fingers a firm squeeze and forcing his lips up into a smile. “A clean slate, alright?”
Kevin blinked then relaxed as relief seemed to wash away his confusion and pain, squeezing back. “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah, a clean slate. Thanks, Thomas.”
Thomas nodded back as his hand came to his side, starting to draw a breath when shouting erupted from the closed office.
“ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME,” Aunt Ceri was shouting, her voice cracking through the air with a power that Thomas swore only came from boot camp. “WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN DOING, FERGUS?”
