Eleven
Eleven
I remain motionless. Paralyzed. “What…?”
Thomas is breathing deeply. He moves me off his legs, as if to reject any sort of human contact in this moment. As if he cannot stand it.
I sit on the end of the bed staring down at the floor, while around me, it feels like the room is spinning. Thomas stands up and starts pacing, running his hands over his throat and the back of his neck. His breathing becomes increasingly labored. He’s moving like an animal in a cage.
He grabs his pack of cigarettes from his pocket and puts one in his mouth, lighting it.
Then he goes to the window and opens it, leaning his forearm on the frame above his head and inhaling deeply from the cigarette.
“That’s the first time I’ve ever said it out loud,” he murmurs a few seconds later, and I jump a little bit at the sound of his voice.
“His name was Nathan…” I can see Thomas’s back rising and falling in an irregular rhythm, as though speaking right now is costing him a great deal of effort. “And he was thirteen.”
My heart aches for him. He was just a little boy. Another moment flashes into my mind: “I’m grieving, Ness. And it’s my fault.” He was drunk when he told me that just a few weeks ago, and I thought it was the liquor talking. But in reality…
“He…he never should have been with me that night. I knew where I was going and what I was going to do there. I knew it was no place for him, and I knew my mother would slit my throat if she knew I was taking him out in the middle of the night with me when I was in that state. I didn’t want him to come, but arguing with him was pointless.
When he got an idea into his head, there was no changing his mind, and I was too pissed to even try,” he continues in a voice shot through with anguish while clouds of his smoke rise skyward.
“He wanted to come with me because he was afraid that, with the headspace I was in, I was going to get into some kind of shit. And I don’t know…
I really don’t know what was going through my mind when I let him.
I just wanted to get out of that goddamn house as fast as I could.
So I took him with me, not realizing that neither of us would be coming back that night. ”
My tears are really flowing now, and this time, I don’t try to stop them.
“He died alone, on an empty wet road in the dark, just a few feet away from me. He was screaming my name, begging for me to help him, and I couldn’t so much as lift a fucking finger to get to him.”
It feels like the world is collapsing in on me. My head spins as blood pounds in my ears. I instinctively press a hand to my chest, feeling the rapid, convulsive beat of my heart.
“Ten days later, I woke up intubated in the hospital,” he continues, wrathfully tossing his cigarette out the window.
“My sister was sitting next to my bed. The first thing I did was ask for him, but all I had to do was look at her eyes, and I knew everything she couldn’t bring herself to say out loud.
My brother was gone. They’d already buried him. ”
Silence falls over the room. He wasn’t even able to go to the funeral…
“He was dead,” he adds, with a cruelty in his voice aimed squarely at himself, “because of me.”
At these words, my head jerks up, anguished.
My throat is burning, and my breathing is still erratic.
I feel numb, but I can’t just let that go unchallenged.
I wipe my eyes and go to him, wrapping my arms around him from behind.
He tenses up as soon as he feels the contact, and I take a step back.
“Don’t say that, Thomas,” I murmur brokenly.
He gives me a sour look over his shoulder. “I took him with me, even though I knew I was putting him in danger. I got drunk and drove the bike,” he says, staring straight ahead.
“But it was the truck that forced you off the road,” I murmur.
Thomas rests his forearms on the windowsill, and I realize for the first time that it’s absolutely pouring outside. “If I’d been sober, my reaction time and my reflexes would have been faster. I might have been able to avoid the whole thing.”
“You were on a motorcycle in the dark on a wet road; you would have ended up off the road either way.”
I hear him inhale sharply through his nose.
The idea of him just a breath away from me and near tears, struggling to bear all his pain and remorse, sends me shattering into a thousand pieces.
I hurry to his side and turn him, forcing him to look at me.
His eyes are reddened, but his face is dry.
My God…I wish there was something I could do, anything.
I want to soak up all his pain and free him from this torment because seeing him like this is killing me.
I stand up on my tiptoes to take his face in my hands, and I look him straight in the eyes.
“Don’t blame yourself for your brother’s death.
You can blame yourself for driving drunk, but not for your brother dying, because that wasn’t your fault. ”
He grabs my wrists roughly and shoves my hands away from his face. “Don’t do that,” he orders coldly. I’m willing to take the risk of getting all his wrath vented on me if I can prevent him from torturing himself like this.
I square my shoulders and try not to be intimidated by his glacial stare. I grasp his face firmly again and hold him steady, forcing him to keep looking at me. “It wasn’t your fault,” I say resolutely.
“Stop it.”
“It wasn’t, Thomas.”
“Do you think you’re going to make me feel better?” he shouts at me, clenching his hands around my wrists. “Do you know what I see every night just before I fall asleep? It’s his eyes, full of fear as he took his last breath!”
My vision blurs again, but I don’t want to cry.
I don’t have the right. All I can think is, How can anyone survive with a burden like this on their conscience?
How much misery can one human being take before they implode?
When his grip on my wrists slackens, I barely notice the slight burning sensation.
“You lost your brother; you lost a part of yourself…” A tear runs down my cheek.
“But if I’ve learned anything from being abandoned by my father, it’s that the only way to get past pain is to face it.
” I put my hand over his heart, which is pounding like a drum.
How much suffering do you carry in here, Thomas?
“You have to forgive yourself. You have to find the strength to do it.”
He exhales shakily. “What if I don’t want to forgive myself?”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
He takes my hand away from his chest but still holds it in his own. “Because that’s the price a monster like me ought to pay.”
Oh, Thomas…
“You are not at all a monster,” I reassure him, staring into his eyes. “If you were, I wouldn’t be here with you. Your sister wouldn’t be with you. If you were a monster, my heart wouldn’t want you.”
His green eyes, hard and tempestuous, pin me to the spot, but he doesn’t say anything.
Instead, he sits down on the floor with his back to the wall and his forearms propped up on his knees.
I yield to his silence, sitting down next to him, and we stay that way for a long time, saying nothing to one another, lulled by the sound of rain on asphalt outside.
“What if my mother was right? What if I really am like him? My father?” he asks me, suddenly shattering the silence. His face is a mask of disgust.
“You’re not,” I answer immediately, no hesitation.
“How can you say that? You don’t know him.”
I turn my gaze on him as he stares skeptically at me from under his eyelashes. “But I know you, and I know that you would never do all the horrible things he did to you.”
He releases a pained breath and leans his head back against the wall.
“I take after him. At the pool party, when I jumped Travis…there wasn’t a single part of me that wanted to stop.
Not with Logan either. I never want to stop.
I don’t know what happens to me in those moments.
My brain goes haywire. I can’t hear anything; I can’t see anything; I can’t feel anything.
The anger and the bloodlust take over completely; it’s out of my control.
” He scrubs a hand over his face, frustrated, adjusting his forelock. “Jesus, I’m a fucking mess.”
My thoughts tangle restlessly. A normal person would probably be running away after a revelation like this.
But not me. Despite everything, I can’t be afraid of this.
So, moved by an instinctive need, I perch on his legs to get a better look at his face.
His gaze strays for a moment to my exposed thighs, but I don’t care.
I lightly touch his eyebrows with my thumbs.
Gently, I run my index finger down his straight nose until I reach his stubbled jaw.
Even though he’s watching me with disarming gravity, I can see his face soften and his breathing slow, as though my touch is giving him the comfort he needs.
“You should get as far away from me as you can, Ness,” he whispers in a small voice, twisting a strand of my hair between his fingers while his other hand skims my ribs.
“I won’t,” I answer in a low voice, continuing to touch his face, so tired and worn by what he has told me.
“I’m not afraid of you, and you shouldn’t be either.
You are not like him. You’re not evil. You’re just a boy who grew up surrounded by evil.
And it marked you. It made you impulsive, aggressive, lost, at times…
But there is goodness in you. A kindness that your father never had, and it makes you different from him.
I can feel it.” I brush my finger across his lips and lock eyes with him.