Chapter 32
THIRTY-TWO
LENNON
Escaping for the second time feels even sweeter than the first.
Maybe because this time I’m not only running away from something.
I’m running toward something too. Toward the dark blur of highway unspooling beneath August’s headlights.
Toward proof, answers, and a hospital where Jake can’t lean against a doorway and make himself sound reasonable while I slowly disappear inside my own body.
Toward the man beside me, one hand steady on the wheel, the other flexing like he has to keep reminding himself not to reach for me every five seconds.
The first time I left, I was terrified. All I had was my hastily packed suitcase and my phone lighting up with Jake’s name until I shoved it under my coat and pretended I couldn’t hear it buzzing.
I thought fear was the worst thing a person could feel.
Cute. Adorable, really.
I stare out the windshield at the blacktop shining under the headlights. It got dark about an hour ago. The car smells like August—clean sweat, leather, and that faint mineral bite of tattoo soap clinging to his hoodie.
“You doing okay over there?” he asks for what has to be the fiftieth time.
His voice is gentle, but the gentleness is strained around the edges. August trying not to come apart is still August. A little rough and a little too gorgeous for words with the dash light cutting across the hard line of his cheekbone.
I smile even though my face feels heavy, like all my muscles have been run through the wash. “Yeah.”
His eyes flick toward me, then back to the road. “That didn’t sound like yeah.”
“It’s the best yeah I’ve got.”
“Okay.” He swallows. “I’ll take it.”
I let my head sink back against the seat. The motion makes my skull throb, not the full white-hot migraine from before, but the leftover echo that’s still painful as hell.
“It’s just so hard to wrap my head around,” I manage. “I went to the doctor a lot when I first got the migraines. They ran tests. Blood work. Imaging. They asked all these questions about stress and sleep and hormones.”
“Probably not tests for whatever the fuck is in silver polish.”
The words come out low and vicious, and something inside me twists because part of me still wants to go on the defense. Not for Jake. I’m finally past defending Jake. But it’s like I’m still trying to hold onto the reality I thought I knew.
I mean, the idea that a person can stand in the kitchen with you and butter your toast and also be calmly, methodically poisoning you? What the fuck?
“Because it’s unbelievable,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“No, I mean…” I turn my head against the seat so I can look at him. “It’s unbelievable until it happens to you. Then it’s your life, and everyone else is standing there squinting at it like maybe you’re being dramatic.”
His jaw tightens. “You’re not dramatic.”
A thin laugh scrapes out of me. “That’s the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
That gets the smallest shift in his mouth.
Not quite a smile, but enough to make warmth move through my chest. Even now.
Even with poison in my bloodstream and fear sitting heavy between my ribs, my body knows him.
It knows the scrape of his voice in the dark and how his attention feels when it settles on me completely.
It should be terrifying, needing anyone this much.
Instead, it feels like being found.
I glance down at the GPS glowing blue-white between us. Thirty-five more minutes to Houston.
I sink back into the seat and let my eyes close again.
The tires hum over the road. Somewhere in the distance, an eighteen-wheeler groans in the next lane, its lights passing over the inside of the car in bands. Bright. Dark. Bright again. August’s breathing stays careful and measured, but I can feel the tension coming off him like heat.
“I get scared every time you go quiet,” he says. “I know you’re too tired to talk. But I keep looking over and thinking…”
His voice breaks off.
I open my eyes. “Thinking what?”
“That I’m going to miss something.”
Oh.
The answer lands right under my breastbone.
I reach across the console, slow because every movement feels like negotiating with a body full of lead barbells, and I touch the back of his hand.
His fingers turn instantly, catching mine.
“You talk,” I say, my smile small in the dark. “I’ll grunt at emotionally appropriate intervals.”
His thumb drags across my knuckles. Once. Then again.
It shouldn’t feel so indecent, the stroke of his thumb on my hand, but it does.
Especially at a time like this. But maybe to spite the situation I’ve found myself in, my mind fixates on the memory of his mouth at my throat and his hands braced on either side of my hips.
That look he gets when he’s trying to be good and failing by inches.
He exhales through his nose. “You’re bossy for a woman who almost fainted in a Dollar General bathroom forty minutes ago.”
“I was not bossy in the bathroom. I was brave and mysterious.”
“You looked like you were three seconds away from puking.”
“I didn’t say what the mystery was.”
This time his mouth really does curve. For one second, the whole terrible night loosens its grip.
“She’s got jokes at a time like this.”
“Always for you, baby.”
He shakes his head. “What should I talk about?” he asks.
“Anything.”
But the word sits there, too open. Too easy. My mind, inconvenient and half-poisoned, goes exactly where it shouldn’t. To all the questions I never got to ask because every time August and I found a pocket of peace, Jake reached into it and yanked us out.
“Actually,” I say carefully, “I’ve been curious. What was it like when you were kids?”
His fingers tense around mine.
I wince. “You don’t have to. That might be too much right now.”
“No.” His voice is quieter when he answers. “It’s okay. I want you to know everything about me. Even the hard stuff.” He glances over, and the look in his eyes makes my throat ache. “Especially the hard stuff, maybe. God knows you deserve the truth from somebody.”
The highway curves. He follows it smoothly, the muscles in his forearm shifting under tattooed skin. There’s something hypnotic about watching him drive.
He’s quiet for a while, like he’s gathering himself.
“I loved my childhood,” he says at last. “That’s what made later so hard, I think.
When I was little, I thought life was perfect.
I mean, my older brother didn’t want me hanging around most of the time, but sometimes he’d decide I was useful or funny or whatever, and those moments felt like winning the lottery. ”
Jake as a boy. God, I hate that I can picture it. A smaller version of him discovering the pleasure of withholding affection and watching people scramble for it.
“And my dad…” August’s voice changes. Softens.
“I thought my dad was a riot. When he got these bursts of energy—I know now he was manic or whatever—but we’d have the best time.
We’d climb trees in the backyard until my mom yelled that we were going to break our necks.
He had this old Nintendo he kept repairing with electrical tape, and we’d stay up too late playing like we were both twelve.
Sometimes he’d start wrestling with me in the living room and knock over some ugly vase my mom loved, and I’d laugh so hard I couldn’t breathe. ”
He smiles, but there’s such pain in it.
“He was just like this big kid. Messy and loud and alive. I loved him a lot.”
My insides feel scooped out.
I slide my hand from his fingers to his thigh, needing to touch more of him so he knows I’m here in a tangible way. His muscle tightens under my palm, like his whole body registers my touch.
“You must still miss him so much,” I say.
His Adam’s apple bobs. He nods once, hard, and for a second he covers my hand with his, pressing it against him like he can anchor himself there.
“Finding him after he swallowed that bottle of sleeping pills, it just—” His chin trembles.
He puts his hand back on the wheel before the car can drift.
“It fucked me up. Because how could he leave me alone with them? He knew. He saw how Mom favored Jake. He saw how she treated me like I was this defective copy she didn’t know what to do with. He was my shield.”
A terrible thought comes so fast I almost don’t recognize it as mine.
My fingers curl against his thigh. “August.”
He looks at me.
“Are you absolutely sure he did?”
The car seems to go quieter around us.
His brows draw together. “What do you mean?”
“Was there a note?” I hate every word as it leaves my mouth. “I’m not trying to make this worse. I know this is awful to even say. But your brother has been poisoning me. So I have to ask.”
August’s mouth parts. His head swings toward me, then jerks back to the road. “Holy shit.”
“I know.”
“No, Lennon. Holy shit.”
He scrubs a hand over his mouth, the wheel shifting slightly before he corrects it.
“There wasn’t a note. And there wasn’t an autopsy.
He had the diagnosis. There was an empty bottle.
Mom was screaming. Jake was the one who called 911 because I couldn’t…
I couldn’t move. They concluded cause of death on the scene. ”
The dark outside presses against the windows.
“Do you think Jake…?” I can’t finish. Even after everything, some part of me recoils from putting that much evil into the air.
“Or Mom,” August says.
His voice is flat now. Too controlled.
I can feel the moment rearranging itself inside him. The past shifting, furniture dragged across the floor of a room he thought he knew by heart.
“There’s no way to know,” he says. “And maybe we’re wrong. Maybe this is just our brains trying to make monsters out of people who were already bad enough.”
“Maybe.”
“But Dad hadn’t been depressed,” he says, and now the words are coming faster.
“Not then. He’d been in good spirits. The flips could happen quickly, sure.
Like a balloon popping. But I was fifteen by then.
I knew his patterns. He’d been talking to me more.
He told me he was thinking about leaving my mom. ”
I go cold.