Chapter 16 Lee
LEE
“Are you going to bed, hon?” Mom asked, leaning in the doorway of the living room where I was staring at the television.
“Yeah, I was just…” I waved at the television.
“Just watching the blank screen?” she asked me.
Pretty much.
It had been a shit day, and I didn’t have the energy to reach for the remote control. I also didn’t feel like watching anything, so that was fine. But I stretched and forced myself back into the land of the living. “Did Sam go upstairs already?”
“It’s a school night,” Mom said. “So, yeah, she’s pretending to be asleep when actually she’ll be messaging her friends until two or three in the morning, and then she’ll wonder why she’s so tired tomorrow.”
I snorted out a laugh, because that sounded about right.
“You okay, Lee?” Mom asked.
“Eh.” Which I guessed answered that. At least my hangover wasn’t kicking my ass anymore.
I’d just levered myself out of my chair when the sound of a dirt bike cut through the quiet, coming to a stop in the driveway. Mom and I exchanged a look. A minute later someone knocked on the door, a quiet tapping.
I went with my mom to open it because it was pretty late.
She swung the door open an inch and peered out past the safety chain. “Chase?”
My heart caught in my throat, and a thousand different scenarios flashed through my mind, encompassing Chase coming here to beg to get back together to Chase coming here to punch me in the face for some reason and everything in between.
Mom closed the door and took the chain off, then opened it fully.
But it wasn’t Chase standing there illuminated by the porch light. His mouth was pinched into an anxious line, and his shoulders were hunched like he was trying to disappear into the space between them. But even knowing that Chase had a twin, it still took me a second to figure it out.
“Cash?” I asked, and Cash dipped his chin in a nod. “What are you doing here?”
His gaze met mine for a millisecond, then he looked down at his feet, and I remembered that he didn’t talk.
It didn’t stop me from asking, “Is Chase okay?”
He gave a tiny shake of his head, and his gaze darted over to the porch swing and back to me.
“Mom, can you give us a second?” I asked. “We’re gonna talk out here.”
Or play the world’s most awkward game of charades, I guessed. But Cash was here, and something was wrong with Chase, and I wasn’t going to let him leave before I figured out what the hell was going on.
“Sure, hon,” Mom said and closed the door.
Cash went and sat on the swing. I leaned on the front wall beside him, since I already knew how badly things went for me if I got in his personal space. The silence dragged on, punctuated only by an insect pinging against the porch light.
“Um,” I said at last. “Do you want me to text you?”
Cash gave me such a narrow-eyed look that for a second I thought he was Chase after all. Then he squared his shoulders and drew a breath. “I can talk.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
“He broke up with you.”
His voice was like Chase’s, but softer. It didn’t have the hard edge to it that Chase’s so often did, honed by sarcasm, hostility, or a combination of both.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, kind of.”
Cash glanced at me questioningly, then looked at his feet again.
“He wanted to go back to being casual,” I said. “And I didn’t. So we broke up.”
Cash was already shaking his head. “Chase likes you. You broke up because of me.”
“What do you mean?”
He took another deep breath and said softly, “He feels guilty because he wasn’t home the other night, when…” The words trailed off.
When Cash had been rocking back and forth in the back of the closet.
It wasn’t much of a revelation. I wasn’t so stupid that I hadn’t been able to draw that very obvious conclusion, but it wasn’t as though I could make Chase see he was wrong.
If he even was wrong. I didn’t know the first damned thing about Chase or his brother.
But Cash hadn’t come all this way to tell me what I already knew.
I took a chance and sat down next to him on the swing.
“Why did he feel guilty, Cash?” I asked, keeping my voice soft.
A long breath shuddered out of him, and I waited. If Chase was a feral cat, all teeth and claws, Cash was a scared little mouse. One sudden move and he’d disappear.
“Because when we were growing up, he took every hit for me,” he finally said. “And he thinks he still has to, for the rest of our lives.”
I wished I could say I was surprised, but it all fit. “That’s more than he’s ever told me.”
Cash snorted. “He always says I don’t talk, but he doesn’t talk either. He just does it more loudly than I do.”
For someone who didn’t talk much, Cash sure as hell had a way of getting to the heart of things.
Or maybe it was because he didn’t talk. Straight to the point, and then he could climb back in his shell.
Either way, he was here now—and the fact he was willing to talk to me, a guy he barely knew, spoke volumes.
“I really like Chase,” I said. “But he doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
Cash snorted again. “Optimus Prime.”
“What?”
He didn’t look at me. I figured he found it easier not to.
He stared at the ground instead. “We were seven. Maybe eight. It was Christmas. We knew there were Transformers in the back of our parents’ closet.
Optimus Prime and Bumblebee. Optimus Prime was his favorite.
He used to draw pictures of him and tell me stories he made up about him.
Then we pissed our dad off, and three days before Christmas he made us take them out of the closet and get them out of their boxes, and then he smashed them up in front of us. ”
“Jesus.”
Cash shrugged. “I cried, but Chase didn’t. He said, ‘I didn’t even want it anyway.’ That’s the only way he could pretend it didn’t hurt.”
“Jesus,” I said again. “I’m so sorry.”
Cash ran a thumb over a crease in his jeans. “You’re Optimus Prime.”
For a second I wished I was, because I had the urge to transform into a massive robot and beat the living shit out of their father. Probably blow some things up for good measure too. But that wasn’t what Cash meant, and I knew it.
“You make him happy.” Cash darted another quick look at me. “Well, not right now, obviously.”
I couldn’t help the tiny laugh that escaped me, because it turned out Cash had a few sharp edges of his own. “Maybe, but he’d rather die than admit that.”
Cash hummed his agreement. “But if you wanted to give him a second chance, maybe he’d take it. I don’t know, but maybe. He really does like you, Lee.”
God, I wanted that to be true, but even if it was, it wasn’t as though I could force Chase into changing his mind about our relationship.
To call Chase stubborn as hell was underselling it.
If you told him he’d cut off his nose to spite his own face, he’d tell you to go fuck yourself, he never even had a nose to begin with.
“Was it really bad?” I asked, trying to catch a glimpse of what had made him that way, to understand him. “Growing up?”
Cash hunched over. “Yeah. Sometimes they were okay, our parents. But mostly they weren’t. And when they weren’t, it was bad.” He shrugged. “Meth.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, my throat aching.
“Yeah.” He shrugged again and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket. “I told Chase not to let our dad win. So who knows? He might listen.” He glanced over at me and then fixed his gaze on the porch again. “But it’s Chase. He might not listen either.”
Something about the way that even his own twin didn’t know made me feel… not better maybe. But not as frustrated. It wasn’t just me who couldn’t get a handle on Chase. It was the entire fucking world, including Cash. Maybe even Chase himself.
And then it occurred to me how very lonely that had to be, in Chase’s shoes.
We sat there for a while longer, but it seemed as though Cash had finally run out of words. Eventually, he stood up, hands still balled in the pockets of his jacket, and nodded in the direction of the road.
“Thanks for coming,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”
Cash nodded again and then slipped out into the darkness, leaving me sitting alone on the porch swing wondering what the hell the morning would bring.
I stopped in for gas before work the next morning.
It was quiet as hell, and the guy behind the counter barely stirred as I filled up the tank and then headed away again.
I thought of all the times I’d gone inside before, bracing for an argument with the acerbic asshole who made such terrible coffee and how much I’d weirdly looked forward to it, never once imagining that the guy could bruise my heart.
The universe sure did love its jokes, didn’t it?
I turned off the highway toward Goose Run, familiar with every curve and bend in the road by now. The town was still sleeping when I pulled into the parking lot behind Gobble de Goose, but Tyler was already waiting at the door.
We got inside and got to work as morning slowly dawned.
Chase turned up just before seven, glaring at me suspiciously as he brought us our coffees.
“Hey,” I said, thinking of everything Cash had told me last night. I wanted to hug him, to tell him how shitty everything that had happened to him was, but I knew better. That fucking wall of his.
“Hey.” He backed out of the kitchen again.
Tyler sipped his coffee. “You guys gonna be weird around each other forever now, or…”
“Probably,” I admitted. “You gonna shut up about it, or will I put you in charge of frosting every fucking cupcake we ever bake?”
He gave me a salute and a shit-eating grin. “Shutting up, boss.”
Still, the day was slightly better than yesterday had been. So I decided to take it as a positive. It got busy behind the counter at one point and Tyler was up to his elbows in bread dough, so I helped Chase out serving for a bit. He didn’t murder me, so yeah, things were looking up.