Chapter 33
THIRTY-THREE
AUGUST
It all happens so fast.
I never imagined Jake could actually track us here. But all of a sudden, I looked up, and Jake is closing the door of the truck, a car I don’t recognize parked on the other side of the gas pumps, and driving away with Lennon.
Oh my God!
“Lennon!” I shout, chasing after them, but it feels useless as he speeds away with her.
An alarm starts wailing as the gas pump snaps from the line as he drives off. Why the fuck didn’t I lock the door behind me? I just never thought—
I sprint faster—
And then watch as the car veers wildly.
For one suspended second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing. The world goes white with flashing headlights and the high shriek of tires tearing across pavement.
Then there’s the sick, heavy sound of metal slamming into earth as the front end of my truck drops out of sight off the right end of the road into the ditch and the whole back frame bucks hard. The rear wheels kick up mud like it’s trying to claw its way back out.
“Lennon!” I scream, still running as the crash finishes happening.
My boots skid on the shoulder gravel, one knee nearly going out from under me, but I catch myself and keep going because no way in hell am I stopping until I know she’s still breathing.
The gas station alarm is still going off behind me. Someone is shouting from the store doorway. The clerk maybe. A customer. I don’t know. The whole world has become the stretch of mud between me and the driver’s side window.
My truck is canted forward into the ditch, nose buried in the embankment, back end sitting high enough that one rear tire still spins uselessly. Mud sprays in a dirty arc. The engine revs, catches, then revs again.
Jake’s still trying to drive away.
The bastard is still trying to take her.
I slam into the driver’s side door hard enough to bruise my own shoulder, grabbing for the handle. It’s locked, dammit.
I see Jake’s panicked face through the glass, blood dripping from his nose even though the airbags clearly deployed. I can’t see Lennon past the still-puffed-out bag on her side.
But then I realize Jake is shouting and pounding the steering wheel with a frustrated fist as mud continues spewing out behind the back wheel.
I hear his voice through the window. “You stupid bitch! Do you have any idea what you just did?”
And then comes Lennon’s voice as her hands bat away the deployed passenger seat airbag and she finally enters into view. “I’ll do anything to get away from you, you psychopath!”
She braces one hand against the dashboard, her hair wild around her face. Even through the muddy glass I can see how pale she is. Too pale. Poison-plus-shock pale.
Still alive, though, and that’s all that matters.
My vision tunnels so sharply the edges of the world go dark.
“Open the door!” I slam my shoulder against the window.
Jake’s head whips toward me, and for the first time in my whole damn life, his mask is down.
There is no wounded older brother in his face. He’s not the sad, embarrassed saint who has only ever tried his best with the unstable people God handed him.
Nope. There’s just naked, ugly hatred there. And it’s familiar enough that some younger version of me recognizes it before I do.
Then he smiles.
Actually smiles.
“See?” he says, but not to me. To Lennon, already crafting the story in his head. “Look at him.”
Lennon twists back toward the panel of door controls.
But Jake sees and grabs her wrist. Son of a bitch!
Lennon’s face tightens in pain and she claws at his hand, scratching him as I continue shouting and yanking at Jake’s locked door. He curses and jerks her toward him hard enough that her shoulder hits the center console.
But her hand manages to sneak out to pop the lock, even as he manhandles her.
I take advantage and yank the driver’s door open.
Jake turns like he has something clever to say but I’m done hearing the shit that spews out of that hole.
I grab him by the front of his shirt and tear him down out of my truck.
He hits the mud on his back, all the air gusting out of him in one go. I follow him down, my vision red, still seeing him putting hands on Lennon in my mind’s eye.
I punch him in the face, and my fist snaps Jake’s head sideways.
For a second, the whole world stops.
Blood appears bright at his mouth, gushing from between his teeth, and the world rushes back in all at once.
The gas station alarm. Lennon screaming my name. Mud cold through the knee of my jeans.
The bones of my hand lighting up with pain.
And underneath all of it, worse or maybe just brighter than everything else, the terrible clean satisfaction of getting to finally smash the fucking bastard’s face in.
I have imagined this more times than I would ever admit to Dr. Delaney.
Not like this exactly. Not in a ditch outside a gas station with Lennon trapped in a truck and sirens in the distance. But Jake under me, his poisonous mouth finally stopped and the outside rearranged to reflect the ugliness on the inside.
For years, I told myself violence was not the answer. Refraining from hitting him was proof I wasn’t the maniac he told everybody I was.
Every time Mom cried and Jake stood behind her with his arms folded, looking at me like I had done something to both of them by having teenage feelings and grief about Dad that was too big and wild for their comfortable realm of “normal.”
Every time I swallowed the fury and called it self-control because I was terrified that if I let even one part of it out, everyone would point and say, there, see, we told you. Violent maniac.
When really, the whole time, they were the would-be murderers.
So yes, the first punch is for Lennon.
The second one is all for me.
It lands harder.
Jake grunts, body jolting under me, and blood spills over his teeth when he smiles.
Smiles.
“Oh, come on,” he says, breath thin. “This is all you’ve ever wanted. To beat the shit out of me.”
His words crawl under my skin because in some ways, he knows me. He always knew how to find a kernel of truth to make me second guess myself. It’s what makes him so sinister.
My hand tightens in his shirt.
“You took her.”
“I saved my wife from my lunatic brother.”
My vision flashes red at the edges.
He’s still daring to call her his wife? The woman he just put hands on as she scratched and screamed to get away from him?
“You poisoned her,” I scream, and my voice doesn’t sound like mine. I’m so full of rage at his hypocrisy and how he betrayed both of us. His own fucking family.
Jake laughs, ugly and wet. “Listen to yourself.”
There it is.
The old spell.
For a second, I am fifteen again. Sixteen. Twenty. Twenty-seven. All of them at once.
I’m standing in a hallway with Mom crying behind a closed door and Jake telling me I need help.
I’m sitting under fluorescent lights while strangers ask whether I’m a danger to others or myself, and I sob, broken, because I didn’t know.
They’d told me so often I was, I couldn’t tell which way was up or down anymore.
All I could hear was the silence where Dad used to be, and looking at a body I was too young to find and too late to save.
Listen to yourself, August.
Do you hear how you sound?
This is what we mean.
I scream out in feral rage.
My fist draws back again.
It’s so tempting to fucking end him, once and for all. Then his worm-tongue will never poison anyone ever again.
Lennon slides out of the truck on the driver’s side because her door must be jammed against the culvert.
She half falls through the cab, one knee going into the mud.
I freeze, fist shaking in the air, as she cries my name, “August!”
Jake laughs underneath me, and spits blood in my face. “Do it, pussy!” he shouts at me.
“Let him go,” Lennon says, softer this time, reaching for me through the noise. “Baby, please. Let him go.”
Baby.
The word lands somewhere Jake hasn’t managed to poison.
My fist lowers.
Jake sees it, and his eyes flick between us, calculating even now.
“You always wanted to be the center of attention,” he says. “Poor August. Never loved enough so you always had to make everything about you.”
“What are you even talking about?” I shout back against his madness, as confused as I ever was by his vitriol. My voice cracks, and I hate that he gets that from me, even now. “I never wanted that.”
Jake’s smile widens.
The truck engine finally dies behind us. The sudden absence of it makes the gas station alarm sound even thinner and more frantic.
“I just wanted a family,” I say, and the words come out before I can make them harder. “I wanted a family that loved me like everybody else’s did.”
For one raw second, the truth sits in the mud between us.
Lennon goes still.
“Bullshit,” Jake spits. “You couldn’t stand that Mom loved me more.”
And there it is, finally. There’s the whole rotten root of it, dragged into open air.
A laugh drags its way out of me, but there’s no humor in it. “Are you serious?”
I push off him and stand because if I stay on top of him, I will hit him again. I’m man enough to admit where my self-control ends.
“Mom’s batshit,” I say to him. “She kept you codependent on her your whole life because she loved it best when everyone around her needed her. She kept all of us sick, one way or the other. And you learned every trick she had because being useful to her was easier than figuring out how to be a man of your own.”
Mud sucks at my boots as I step back and head towards Lennon, hands shaking. Blood streaks my knuckles.
Lennon’s hands are muddy. Her face is streaked with it, too, one line of blood drying near her temple, and her eyes are enormous.
I lean down and check Lennon over, only calming down mildly when I see that other than the bump on the head, she seems to be okay. Well, the bump on the head and the poison she’s been consuming for god knows how long.
I help her get to her feet, and she sways slightly. She clings to me once she finally gets standing. Fuck, I’ve got to get her to a hospital.