Chapter Seven
SEVEN
Andrew didn’t know how he was meant to react.
He’d never been one to break rules—at least not alone—but obviously he’d come because of Thomas.
As he tried to get his heartbeat back under control, he looked at his hand.
Only damp soil clung to his fingertips. No blood.
Of course there was no blood, what the hell was he thinking?
Andrew swallowed. “I was looking for you?” He hated that it came out as a question.
Thomas left the darkening shade of the oak, his sketchbook dangling from his hand, charcoal smudged near his mouth.
It was painful how Andrew noticed Thomas’s mouth like that.
The dying afternoon light turned the tips of his auburn curls to simmering fire and oh, there was a wildness about him, this boy made of angular frowns and thorny words.
He was brilliant and terrible and unmanageable.
Thomas’s odd flash of anger faded, and guilt ghosted across his eyes.
He picked his way across the mottled roots toward Andrew.
His foot slipped once, and he flung out both arms to steady himself, sketchbook pages flapping in his grip.
When he leaped off the last root and landed unsteadily, Andrew couldn’t help the compulsion to snatch the front of Thomas’s shirt and ground them both.
But it was Thomas who took Andrew by the shoulder and propelled him away from the oak. His grip was careful, as if Andrew was a fragile thing, easily hurt, especially out here, away from school walls and protective fences.
Thomas’s breath came too fast. “Don’t do this again, all right? Don’t come out here.”
“You shouldn’t be here, either,” Andrew said. “Usually you want me to break rules with you.”
A strange hollowness stole over Thomas’s face. “Let’s just go back.”
“What were you even doing?”
“Nothing.”
They fell into step as they walked toward the fence. Thomas still had fingers hooked in Andrew’s shirt as if he was the one dragging Andrew away from bad decisions.
“What happened today?” Andrew said. “Why did the police keep you for so long?”
Thomas didn’t answer. Light drained from the sky and the ground turned uneven and treacherous in the shadows.
Andrew kept waiting to see puddles of stagnant blood, but there was nothing.
He’d truly imagined it. But it felt like something was watching them leave, hungry eyes marking their footfalls and tracing the shapes of their shoulder blades.
He almost thought he heard the hiss of flesh scraping against tree bark, and thick, congested breathing.
A furtive glance over his shoulder showed only the forest watching their retreat with empty eyes.
By the time they reached the fence, both were sweaty and breathing quicker. The forest had left green smudges on Thomas’s white school shirt, and he looked unruly, collar popped and trousers muddied. It would be hard to hide where he’d been.
“Climb.” Thomas’s voice had a brittle edge to it.
Andrew obeyed. He deserved answers, though. Even if he had no stubbornness of his own, he could pretend he had some of Dove’s.
He waited till they’d run back across the athletic fields and into the rose gardens before he spoke again. The windows glowed with soft warm light, and the dinner bell must have sounded. There would be a head count. Marks against names if they didn’t show.
But Andrew couldn’t let this pass.
He stopped walking.
Thomas ducked under a wicker arch of vines before realizing Andrew wasn’t following. He spun back to see Andrew planted with arms folded, his mouth in the tight angle he’d seen on Dove.
The way Thomas looked at him was half despair, half frustration.
“Tell me what’s going on,” Andrew said.
Thomas checked the garden, but there was no one out here except them. Though Andrew couldn’t shake that feeling from the forest—the feeling of being watched by something not yet fed.
Thomas sighed, walked back, and leaned against the low garden wall. “My parents are officially starring in a missing persons case.”
“Okay,” Andrew said.
“And I,” Thomas said as the twilight painted his eyes black, “am a person of interest.”
Andrew stared. “Wh-what? Why?”
Thomas shrugged and tossed his sketchbook onto the wall.
He hauled himself up and sat there, drumming his heels.
“They tested the blood and confirmed it’s from two people.
They said at least one person could not have walked out after losing that much.
” His voice sounded flat. “You know how my house is at the end of a cul-de-sac? Well, nosy people can see into the front rooms. Some neighbor heard … screaming. Saw us arguing. And saw me…” He kicked the wall hard then.
“Saw me with, and I quote, ‘a knife.’ But there’s no hard proof. It’s my word against his.”
Andrew’s stomach had cramped so tight it took effort to push words out. “Then what really happened?”
“Nothing. Regular family argument. Then I left for … I left for school.”
He couldn’t look at Andrew.
Lying.
He was lying.
Thomas’s shoulders hunched forward and he rocked himself before hitting the wall with an open palm. Once, twice. Vicious.
Andrew thought of the scars Thomas hid, the brutal stories he delivered like jokes, the way it took nothing to convince him to drink, how distrust caged his heart, how once he’d said all parents slap their kids around sometimes.
Andrew had said no they didn’t. Thomas had looked genuinely surprised, and it had gutted Andrew.
Thomas’s parents had a lot to answer for.
A strange calm unspooled over Andrew. He let out a breath, long and slow.
“I don’t care, you know,” he said. “If you did.”
Thomas went still.
Time slowed, rusty gears caught and shuddering. Andrew’s words suddenly felt wrong in the air.
Thomas’s voice came so low it shook. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Andrew’s feet had grown into the path, his heart turned to petrified wood in his chest.
Thomas slid slowly off the wall. “You know me the best of anyone. But you think … you think the same as they do? You think I’m a murderer?” The last word came out in a hissed rage so poisonous it could rot bones.
Andrew had no words inside him.
“Do you think I murdered my parents and buried them in the backyard? Because”—Thomas jabbed a finger toward the school—“that’s what they think. They’ve got less than nothing to accuse me with and no evidence, but that’s still what they think.”
There had been blood on his shirt that first day of school. And no wound.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered.
“Take it back if you’re sorry.” Thomas snatched his sketchbook and stood there with anger radiating from him. Even in the dark, he flushed red to the tips of his ears. He did that when he was embarrassed. Or furious.
But mostly when he lied.
The air had been empty between them for too long. Andrew hadn’t rushed to fill it because he’d meant what he’d said, and he didn’t think he’d spoken wrong. He’d only meant to reassure.
He reached out a hand, uselessly.
Thomas jerked away. “This is why I can’t talk to you about anything real. It either freaks you out so you turn into a goddamn mess, or you respond in the most screwed-up way possible.”
It hit like a punch. This wasn’t happening. This didn’t happen. They didn’t fight.
Make it stop.
It had to stop.
“This is when I need Dove.” Thomas’s eyes were bright, a storm wearing itself out.
Andrew hardly recognized his own voice, raw with a bitterness he never showed. “Go be with Dove, then.”
Thomas looked stunned. He was shaking apart—or maybe that was Andrew. Andrew, who was tipping toward a steep cliff overlooking an endless chasm. He had no wings. He’d fall and die and he’d do so in silence.
He’d never made Thomas look at him like this, with rage or hurt or—something worse.
Betrayal.
When Thomas finally spoke, he sounded calm and terrible. “I’m walking away from you now. And I’m not coming back.”
The world was melting around Andrew, like a sword had been driven up to the hilt in his stomach.
He wanted to whisper, Wait. He couldn’t survive this, couldn’t be left alone out here when the forest felt far too eerily close, as if the hungry foulness of whatever had watched them was attracted by this fight.
Thomas turned, one hand in his pocket, the other holding his sketchbook like it was a dead thing he wished he’d buried in the woods. He walked away.
Inside Andrew, the world was ending. He was breathing too fast and yet not at all. He should never have spoken, even if he had meant it.
But no one who was innocent needed to be so violently defensive.