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Why is there a child out here all alone?
He shuffles a little and nods towards the house, walking alongside the fence near me. “Okay. I’ll lead you back.”
Walking silently, I watch him as he bounces a ball at his feet. It’s a sad vison. As sad as the look on his face that seems permanently etched in. After a while I begin to understand the feeling well, falling into my own sense of depression and confusion again. “Do you live here?” I ask, as I dip under the fence to get onto the road way with him.
“Yeah.”
“Does your mom work here?”
“Not really.”
I continue following him, part trying to work out why he’s here if his mother’s not and part not caring. Maybe his dad does. Who knows? Not my business anyway. And my mind’s too busy wandering to all kinds of things about the last few weeks of my life. If it is weeks. Could be months. Thoughts of Gray’s words sting all the more, as I walk. They bleed through me until questions start building into wild fantasies of what the hell this whole thing has been. I’m not insane. I’m not. I know that. Things are clearer now than they were at Malachi’s, but that doesn’t negate the things he said to me or the actuality of what he did to those women so millionaires could get high and enjoy fucking in some new realm of hedonism.
I look at these sneakers on my feet and the baggy sweats I’m wearing, trying to find realities that aren’t this one I’m now in. There isn’t any. I got one of my truths.
It wasn’t pleasant to hear.
My eyes narrow at the thought. One of my truths. One. How many more? I don’t know him, don’t know who this man is that I’ve been spending time with, enjoying, chasing. Irritation and some kind of self-loathing start bedding in, making me question all the things I’ve felt, been part of, and endured under him, as I listen to the footsteps of the boy shuffling along. The ball bounces again and again - thud, thud, thud. Thud, thud, thud – and a new realisation begins entering my mind. One I’ve never even contemplated.
“Charlie, go up to the house.”
My head looks up sharply, eyes peering at Gray’s sudden proximity. He’s off to the right, hands on his hips and half panting as if he’s been running to chase me down. The boy nods solemnly and starts walking again, only briefly glancing back at me before he’s disappeared into the darkness.
“Who’s that?” I snap.
“I’ve just said his name.”
“Why is he here?”
No response. Just a brooding temper that seems to be building and a slight look of apprehension about something. Maybe he thinks I’m about to report him to the authorities for being a … I frown, searching my mind for words that make sense. I don’t even know what the word is for abusing women to make drugs that make sex better. Either way, he should be nervous about that. I might. When I get away from here.
But that’s not what my question was about.
I stare at the boy disappearing, my heart racing with possibilities that I don’t want to even contemplate, let alone accept, because I never even asked him. Never thought, for one second, that he might have a family somewhere.
Giving him a wide birth, I scamper around the hedges and start moving in the direction Charlie was going in. I’ll just get back there and find Jackson, maybe then I can get the hell away from all this and find normality again. Every step hurts, though. Exertion, exhaustion, but mainly just pain. Heartache even. I can feel it inside me, burning and sore, trying to find the man it thought it knew. Trying to find thuds that mean something again. And I can hear him, almost hear his breaths as if they’re still hovering over me, his lips less than a whisper away from mine.
Not real.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he calls.
“Home,” mumbles out of me. Not that I understand where that is. Maybe I thought it was him for a while, wanted that. It isn’t. I’m nothing more than a test case. “Away from here.”
He chuckles a little, reminding me of laughs that meant something, to me at least, and lips that kissed me. “How exactly are you going to do that?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t know you anymore and I want to leave.”
He sighs at that and closes the distance down between us, as if the things he said don’t mean anything to me and he can somehow magic them away. His hand catches my arm, spinning me to him. I snatch it away from him, for the first time since we met uncomfortable with the touch. Those things he said do matter. They prove all this to be the lie I was trying to deny, and my feet walking backwards away from him prove it too.
For once, for the only time since I’ve known him actually, he looks surprised. A little lost even. His hands go to his pockets, the scowl he’s usually so good at wearing faltering under my gaze.
“If it makes it easier to tolerate, I didn’t sleep with any of them.”
“You didn’tsleepwith me.”
He puffs out a breath, a brow arched at me in irritation. “I meant, I didn’t fuck any of them.”
Well, that’s much better then.
