At the Stars(44)

“Yeah, I know what that’s like.” The grass beside me crushes and rustles. His body heat closes in on mine. The tip of his elbow bumps me as he lays parallel to me under the sky.

With the breeze kicking up and the sun down, I want to squish up close and absorb his heat. Smell the woodsy soap he uses and feel his strength against me. I don’t want to be pushed away again, but he’s been different today so I don’t know. Maybe he wouldn’t? I want to find out what this is between us. If he’s willing to stop protecting me from some ridiculous notion that he’s a bad guy.

“I guess we both know what it’s like.” I roll onto my side, letting the little sharp points of the grass tickle my skin.

He responds with a neutral “mmm” and curls up into a kind of half crunch to slurp some of his soda. When he comes back down, I slide my hand under his head. When his breath pauses and he turns toward me, I decide to go for it.

This secret of his. He thinks whatever it is, I’ll hate him. Or I’ll run away. I have to know.

“So tell me about what happened after you left home?”

He turns to stone under my hand. Everything gets heavier, and his head practically crushes my hand. His breath is harsh in my ear, and I can even see the heavy rise and fall of his white T-shirt from the light of the moon. I can’t tell if I’ve made him mad, or... Or...

“Look, you don’t have to tell me. I’m sorry.” I pull away as a fissure runs down my chest. Without realizing it these past few weeks, that hollowness I got so used to had started to fill in. I hadn’t even noticed. Now I’ve upset Jake, and there’s a tiny crack where my confidence had begun to shore itself up.

He turns toward me with a long breath. His hand finds mine, the fingers clutching almost like they’re grabbing for something out of desperation. “It’s bad, Cassie. You keep saying it can’t be that bad, but it is. It’s not like what happened to you, but it’s a fucking awful thing that I can’t ever take back.”

I roll to face him and I press my forehead against his. “Hey. You’re a good person. I can tell.” He could try to deny it all he wanted, but he’d shoved me out of the way of a truck and driven me around so I wouldn’t have to walk, and now he was giving me a discounted car. Assholes didn’t do things like that. “So you know, I know you didn’t do anything that awful. It’s not like you killed someone.”

He gets completely still and silent. All I can hear is the sound of crickets in the grass around us, and the heavy clang of my hammering heart. I realize how badly I must have put my foot in my mouth.

No... He didn’t. “Jake,” I whisper. “Tell me what happened.”





14. IT WASN’T AN ACT


Jake

I can’t fucking breathe. I can’t feel anything except Cassie’s hand squeezing mine.

Tell me what happened.

I close my eyes, and there’s Davidson Banes with his big grin. “It’ll be okay, Jackson. I’ll go down, and we’ll both be fine.”

Except he wasn’t fine.

Cassie’s hand touches my chest, and somehow I manage to breathe again. “He was supposed to take a fall. He never got back up.”

It takes all the air I have to say those words. They scrape me raw when they leave, burning the inside of my mouth and throat. I haven’t talked to a single person about it who wasn’t already there that day, and I didn’t think I ever would.

She shakes her head. “Jake, I don’t understand.”

I know she doesn’t understand. I can’t put my thoughts together enough to explain. It’s all on a loop. That night. The argument with Arlo Specter, the deal I made with Davidson, and then the fight that ended so fucking badly.

I manage to back it up to where it all really started. “I told you I left home before I finished high school.”

“Yeah, you did.”

I try to push out a breath. I feel like I’ve got something stuck in my throat, and the air won’t go in or out. “Yeah, so I had this insane fight with my stepmom. Years ago. I left. I... I took up fighting—boxing mostly—to earn cash. Signed a contract with this shady guy who had equally shady refs on the take, but the money was decent.”

“Okay.” Her hand gives mine a hard squeeze. She probably gets it now, where this is going. She wanted to hear it though, so I’m going to tell her. We’ll see how fast it takes her to get that car back into town when I’m done.

“So this guy I knew, he wanted to quit. He’d taken some bad knocks, the doc had told him no more, and his girl was pregnant. He owed one more fight on his contract. We found out we were facing off, so we came up with a plan for it to look like I knocked him out early. He’d fulfill his contract and get out like he wanted without the risk of getting beat on round after round. We’d share the prize money. All win.”