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“Get out of my way,” Nash demanded.
“Make me,” I snapped as all the anger and frustration I’d been feeling exploded inside of me. “Were you just going to fucking leave?” I asked. “Not say goodbye? Is it that easy for you?”
“You know it’s not!” Nash bit out. “You know better than anyone how hard all this has been for me. I did what you fucking told me to. I tried to take what I wanted, and look at what happened. I’ve still got shit. So fuck you, Gage. I don’t owe you or anyone else anything. You can both go to hell.”
He tried to shove past me, but I grabbed him and spun him so that his back hit the door with enough force to completely close it. “We’re not that piece of shit kid who fucked you over, Nash. We can figure this out.”
“Yeah?” Nash said snidely. “He made promises like that to me too. Didn’t do me a bit of good when I was sitting in juvie.”
“Juvie?” Everett said quietly from somewhere behind me. “Juvenile hall?”
“He was put in there after he was accused of sexually assaulting the son of one of the foster families he ended up with. But the little fucker lied.”
“Get off me,” Nash snapped as he shoved at me hard. He was like a wounded animal ready to gnaw off its own leg to escape. But I refused to release him.
“Kid’s name was Christopher Atwater. He was fourteen years old when his parents took Nash in. Nash was fifteen. Six months later, the parents walked in on Nash and Christopher in the parents’ bed. They’d come home early from a trip. Christopher spouted off a story about Nash raping him, but luckily, Nash’s social worker didn’t buy it and she investigated the claim. She discovered that the kid had a history of seducing the boys his parents brought into the home. The judge dismissed the case against Nash and sealed the records. He was placed in a new home.”
Nash had stopped struggling in my hold, but I could still feel the tension running throughout his body. Everett appeared at my side, but his eyes were on Nash.
“Did he… did he hurt you, Nash?”
“No. We were together… at least, I thought we were.”
He’d calmed enough that I was able to ease my hold on him, but I didn’t let him go completely.
“He was my boyfriend. I’d never been with another guy before him. Even though he was younger than me, he was the more experienced one. I believed him when he told me he loved me. We had all these plans. He… he knew how hard things had been for me… how I’d never had anyone before. He played that up – promised he’d always take care of me. That I’d never be alone again. His family… they were amazing. His parents treated me like I was one of their own kids, and his younger sister always introduced me as her brother, not her parents’ foster kid. One of my first foster families when I was a little kid started calling me Nash because there was already another Jonathan living in the house at the time, and the nickname stuck. When some kids in one of the group homes I lived in found out I’d been left in a trash can, they started calling me Nash the Trash.”
Nash closed his eyes, like he was living through that moment where the cruel nickname had been spoken for the first time. “When I told Chris, he actually cried with me and he never called me Nash again. He called me Jonathan and he made his family call me that, too. They were the only ones who ever did and I… I lived for it. It was like Chris knew the real me. I couldn’t wait for the day when we’d leave everything behind and I could be Jonathan to the entire world. No one would ever know me as Nash the Trash again. I was happy to give Chris everything. My trust, my heart… he owned me, and I’d never been more at peace. Then it all went to hell. I kept waiting for him to explain the truth to his parents so they could come get me out of juvie and tell me everything was okay – that we were still a family. But they never came. He never came.”
“Was he punished?” Everett asked.
Nash shook his head. “No other kids were willing to go on record about what he did to them. I just wanted to forget the whole thing. I didn’t talk to anyone about it because I was afraid anything I said would hurt my chances of getting into the Secret Service.”
“The FBI must have done a background check,” I said.
“They did, but if they found the juvie record, they never said so. I didn’t report it.”
