3
Deacon
The first thing that comes back is summer.
Not a date or a place he can name right away.
Just heat trapped in the earth after sunset, rising through the soles of his boots while night settles around him.
Crickets hum somewhere in the dark. Water moves nearby in a slow hush, and the air carries damp grass, lake water, and faint smoke from somebody’s firepit farther off.
It feels like a hundred nights stitched together, familiar enough that he doesn’t question it.
He stands with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders loose, looking across the water as though he has nowhere else to be.
He hears her before he sees her. Lila had never been loud, but he knows the sound of her, the quiet way she always approached him, careful for half a second before forgetting to be careful at all. She stops beside him, her shoulder brushing his arm lightly enough that it should mean nothing.
It never means nothing.
He turns and finds moonlight caught in her hair, her face half in shadow.
She looks the way she did a hundred times over the years and somehow unlike any of them.
Younger around the mouth, then older around the eyes.
Softer. Sadder. Her image shifts the harder he tries to hold it still, stirring something uneasy beneath his ribs.
“You snuck off,” she says.
A smile pulls at his mouth. “Looks like you did too.”
“I followed you.”
“Yeah?”
Her lips curve, small and stubborn. “You act like I haven’t been doing that half my life.”
That lands somewhere tender and dangerous.
Jackson turns toward the lake because looking away had always been the safer choice with her.
Looking at Lila too long made him forget himself, and forgetting himself around Matty’s little sister was something he could never afford.
Not when she was all scraped knees, library books, and sharp little comebacks.
Not later, either, when she grew into the quiet kind of beautiful that made other men look twice and him force his eyes elsewhere.
The water folds over the shore in a black shimmer. Neither of them speak for a while, but they never needed to fill every silence. Lila made quiet feel full, easy in a way he never found anywhere else.
Then she says, “You’re going to leave.”
The words slide into the night so softly they almost disappear, but they strike hard enough that he turns. “What?”
Her eyes remain on the water as her arms fold tighter across her middle.
The uneasiness in his chest sharpens because she shouldn’t look like that.
Not tonight. Not here. She should be flushed from the ride, bright and shaken and eighteen, standing too close after kissing him back as though she had been holding it inside for years.
Instead, she looks like she already knows something he hasn’t told her.
“Maybe not tonight,” she murmurs. “But you are.”
He stares at her.
That isn’t right.
The thought comes slowly, dragging through his mind like something caught in mud, but once it takes hold, he can’t shake it.
This isn’t how the night went. There had been nerves and laughter, the hard rush of finally touching what he had wanted for too long.
This ache hadn’t been there. Neither had the sadness living in her voice.
He reaches for her without thinking, his fingers brushing her wrist. Her skin is warm and real beneath them. “Lila.”
She looks at him, and for one sick second, her face changes again. The girl from the lake gives way to a woman he doesn’t know before becoming the girl once more.
“You don’t stay,” she says quietly.
The lake vanishes.
The Morgan backyard returns in a flood of porch light and voices, the smell of grilled burgers hanging heavy in the air.
Somebody laughs too loudly near the fence.
A bottle cap strikes the deck, and Matty stands twenty feet away with a beer in his hand and the easy grin he always wore when surrounded by people who loved him.
Jackson leans against the pergola post with ketchup streaked down the front of his shirt and curses beneath his breath.
The screen door opens behind him, and he doesn’t need to turn to know it is her.
Her voice reaches him first, soft around the edges as she asks, “Hey, you trying to hide from the world again?”
He looks down at the stain. “Nah. Just outta sight, outta mind, is all.”
She laughs and asks whether he spilled something or stabbed his shirt, but the memory slips forward before it can settle.
It carries him past the pergola and around the side of the house, into the driveway where she finds him with Matty’s shirt folded in her hands and a look on her face that changes the whole night.
For a stretched second, neither of them breathes right. Teasing her is easier than drowning in what her expression has already given away, so he lets a grin pull at his mouth. “See somethin’ you like, Princess?”
She nods once, small and immediate. Honest.
Color climbs her throat when she realizes what she has done, and his grin disappears before he can stop it. The whole night changes with it.
“You’ve always been what I like.” The shyness leaves her voice, giving way to truth. “What I wanted.”
Something low inside him breaks open.
He should tell her no. Send her back to the party, pull on Matty’s shirt, and laugh the moment away before it becomes something neither of them can survive. He knows that. He can feel the shape of the right decision waiting inside his chest.
Still, when he speaks, what comes out is, “Get on the bike.”
Her breath catches.
He swings onto the seat and looks back at her, telling her he is serious when she questions him. Lila lets the folded shirt fall to the driveway before climbing on behind him, and the second her hands slide around his waist, his entire body tightens with awareness.
Too much and nowhere near enough.
He starts the bike before he can change his mind. The engine roars between them, swallowing the laughter from the yard and the clink of bottles, drowning everything warm and easy as he pulls away from the curb. The road opens ahead. The house falls behind them.
The lake waits.
The memory twists before it settles.
He is ten, maybe eleven, standing on the Morgan front walk with one eye swelling shut and blood drying at the corner of his mouth.
Lila cries into Rose Morgan’s skirt, her knees scraped raw and her palm wrapped in a torn strip of his shirt gone pink with blood.
Matty is yelling at him until Lila chokes out, “He saved me.”
Matty’s face changes, the anger dropping out of it so fast it would almost be funny if Jackson’s eye didn’t hurt like hell.
Rose studies him for a long, quiet moment, seeing too much the way she always does. “You’re staying for dinner.”
He starts to tell her he should go, but her brows rise. “That wasn’t a suggestion.”
Inside, Richard asks what happened, his voice smooth in the dangerous way. Everyone lies at once. Playground fall. Clumsy feet. Nothing serious. Richard doesn’t look convinced.
Lila sits at the table in one of the frilly dresses she refuses to stop wearing, her lower lip pushed out because the scrape across her palm stings.
Jackson sees Richard’s suspicion sharpening and throws the first distraction he can find into the silence.
“Wouldn’t have been so bad if she didn’t wear those Disney princess dresses all the time. ”
Lila glares across her plate. “I like my dresses.”
“Then I guess the Princess needs somebody keepin’ a better eye on her.”
Matty laughs while Lila sticks out her tongue. Rose hides a smile, and Richard’s attention shifts just enough for the danger to pass.
Princess.
That’s where it starts.
The scene changes again, carrying him into a summer afternoon with heat rolling off the driveway. Lila’s braid smacks between her shoulder blades while she wobbles on a bicycle too big for her, Jackson running behind with one hand gripping the seat.
“Don’t let go,” she yells.
“I got you.”
“You better.”
He grins despite the sweat running down his back. “You always this bossy?”
“Yes.”
Her answer makes him laugh hard enough that he nearly lets go by accident.
When he finally releases the seat, she makes it halfway down the drive before realizing she is riding alone, then topples into the grass.
He reaches her as she shoves herself upright, furious and red-faced but clearly unhurt.
“You let go!”
“You were ridin’.”
“You said you had me.”
“I did.” He holds out his hand, and after one dramatic huff, she takes it and lets him pull her upright.
The simple weight of her small hand in his does something to him even then. He doesn’t have words for it and doesn’t need them yet. Some things begin long before anyone knows what to call them.
The lake flashes back. Lila is fourteen and clinging to his shoulders in the water, sputtering because she has forgotten how to float and breathe at the same time. He laughs with one arm locked around her waist, holding her steady while she glares at him through wet strands of hair.
“You said this was easy.”
“It is.”
“This is dying slower.”
“You’re dramatic, Princess.”
“I’m being murdered by public recreation.”
She smacks his shoulder. He tightens his arm around her without thinking, then feels the brush of her body against his beneath the water and goes still. Lila feels it too. He sees the realization move through her face.
That is one of the first moments everything changes. The shift comes quietly, too small for anyone else to notice, but after that, keeping his distance starts requiring effort.
The dark presses in again, softer but stranger than before.
The memories refuse to stay still. The lake folds into the driveway, then into the football field with Matty beside him after a win, both of them muddy and laughing while Lila watches from the stands in an oversized school hoodie.
Her face slips through every scene, younger and older, changing before he can hold on to any version of her.
Her voice reaches him from somewhere he can’t find.
“Jackson.”
He turns toward it, but the darkness thickens.
Then she is closer, her voice rough and threaded with the kind of anger that could only belong to her. “You stubborn bastard. It just had to be my ER you wound up in, didn’t it?”
Warmth closes around his hand for one brief, impossible second. It vanishes before he can curl his fingers around it.
Still, he follows.
Even lost inside whatever this is, with memory and dream tangled around something darker, he knows that warmth. He knows her voice and the shape of wanting it badly enough to chase it through the dark.
Somewhere ahead of him, just beyond his reach, Lila says his name again.