Chapter Thirty-seven #2
“I said, shut up.”
“And instead, you got a flicker of interest that petered away to nothing.”
“You know nothing.”
“Except I do. Because I’ve lived it. I guess it’s good to know that it wasn’t all about my sexuality, that the disinterest would have been there anyway.”
I watched Owen as he took another trip along the length of the wall, holding my breath as he executed the tricky turn before coming back the opposite way.
“If your parents bought you, then I don’t understand why they treated you so badly.
Why spend all that money on something you don’t really want? ”
Owen laughed bitterly. “People with more money than sense do it all the time. They buy expensive cars and use them for racing. They buy pedigree dogs and chain them up all day. I was the pedigree dog.” He ran a hand through his hair, the slight tremor visible.
“Perhaps they thought they wanted me, but I didn’t live up to their expectations.
Unfortunately, they don’t have obedience classes for children. ”
“No,” I said quickly. “You were a child, a baby. It’s not your fault. It could never be your fault. They were just bad people.”
That caught his attention, Owen turning to face me. “They were bad people.”
A realization sank into my bones—one I didn’t want to voice, but had to. “They’re not around anymore, are they? What happened to them?”
A smile tugged at the corner of Owen’s lips.
“There was a house fire one night. The father smoked. They think he had too much to drink and fell asleep with a cigarette in his hand. The mother had been drinking too. They were so out of it that the theory is that they simply slept through it. Did you know that rather than waking them, the toxic gases from smoke often put people into a deeper sleep?” He waited for me to shake my head.
“Nearly half of all residential fire fatalities occur when the victims are asleep, so it’s nothing unusual. ”
“Or suspicious,” I added.
“The son was lucky,” Owen continued as if I hadn’t spoken.
“His bedroom was far enough away from the source of the fire that he got out. He tried his hardest to get to his parents. So hard that he had to be held back by the neighbors, but it was to no avail. By the time the fire brigade arrived, it was already too late. The son was treated for smoke inhalation in hospital for a couple of days. He was devastated, the poor thing. He could barely talk to the police without crying. If only he’d woken sooner.
If only they’d had fire alarms. If only he’d been successful in persuading his father to give up smoking.
If only they weren’t such heavy sleepers. ”
“How old were you?” There were two reasons for my question: genuine curiosity and a desire to cut through the third-person bullshit.
“Seventeen. Only a few months shy of my eighteenth birthday.”
“Perfect timing,” I said.
“I was due some luck.”
“And I’m assuming all their money went to you?”
“Minus one very crispy house, yes. It was the least I deserved.”
“Was it a lot of money?”
“Enough.”
The nausea was back with a vengeance. Should knowing I wasn’t his first victim make me feel better?
It didn’t. There was an argument that they had deserved it.
They’d bought a child and then treated that child in a reprehensible way.
But two wrongs didn’t make a right, and the picture Owen had painted of the poor orphaned child pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes was nothing short of sinister.
A gust of wind caught Owen’s coat, knocking him off balance again. “Come down,” I repeated.
“You understand, right?” There was something beseeching in Owen’s expression. “You said it yourself that it wasn’t my fault.”
“I was talking about the abuse. Not the fire. You could have gone to the police and told them what was going on. There were other ways to deal with it.”
“They weren’t good people.”
I laughed. “There are lots of people in the world who aren’t good. You can’t kill everyone who wronged you.” It made me wonder who else had fallen victim to Owen, both before and after I had.
“I had no choice.”
“You had choices. There are always choices.” Over Owen’s shoulder, streaks of red announced the impending sunrise.
“Give me a better choice.”
“Me?” There was no keeping the surprise out of my voice. “You killed me. I should be dead now because of you.”
“I made a mistake. I thought you were my nemesis when I should have known that wasn’t the case.
We’re twins. Two halves of a whole. I was young and stupid, and damaged.
You could have helped me. I see that now.
” He tried for a smile, but it didn’t take.
“Even after what I did, you’ve been trying to help me.
You keep asking me to come down when you have every reason to want me to fall.
” He held out his hand. “Help me, Baxter.”
I stared at the hand. He was right about me not wanting him to fall. But he was giving it more altruistic reasons than it deserved. No human wanted to bear witness to the extinction of someone’s life. Nobody normal, anyway.
Owen leaned back slightly. “Help me before I fall.”
“Stop. Don’t do that.”
“I won’t if you help me. I need to know that someone is there for me, someone I can talk to, someone that gets me.” I held fast to the barriers as something probed at my mind.
He shuffled his feet back so that his heels hung over the edge. “Please, Baxter.”
The wind picked up again, and I moved before giving it conscious thought.
I realized his intention as soon as his fingers closed around mine in an iron grip and he tugged me toward him.
My foot slid on the damp concrete and the parapet bit into my hip as I lurched forward.
Owen laughed then, not loud, just a breath of it, and leaned back harder.
He’d dropped all the barriers in his mind, his thoughts broadcasting that this wasn’t so much a murder attempt, but a twisted suicide pact that lacked the consent of one of its participants.
The only way I could stop it was not to let him drag me up there. Owen was strong, though. And determined. I wrenched my arm down and slammed my shoulder into the parapet, the impact knocking the breath out of me.
The laugh cut off, replaced by a sharp intake of breath as his balance finally broke and his foot slipped.
For a split second he looked surprised—not afraid, just wrong-footed—and then he was hanging there, my hand locked around his wrist, the wind tearing at us both as the night opened up beneath him.
The pain came all at once, bright and fiery, a hot line spreading from my shoulder down into my fingers, as if I’d stretched my arm past any sensible limit.
My grip burned, tendons screaming, the joint in my shoulder feeling loose and wrong, every gust of wind making him heavier as his feet scrabbled for purchase without finding any.
I pressed my chest into the concrete and held on anyway, teeth clenched, knowing exactly how easy it would be to let the pain decide for me—and refusing to give it that power.
“Let go,” he said.
“No.” The word scraped out of me, small and final, and it seemed to surprise him more than anything else.
His weight dragged again, a vicious, deliberate pull, and white pain tore through my shoulder, down my spine, until my vision pinched at the edges.
My fingers went numb, then burning-hot, skin slick with sweat as if my hand no longer quite belonged to me.
“Baxter,” he said, anger and fear in his voice.
I flattened myself harder against the roof, cheek pressed to the cold grit of the concrete, breathing in short, broken pulls of air.
Every second stretched, unbearable and ordinary at the same time, the wind roaring past my ears as I held on and learned exactly how much it hurt to keep someone alive.
I had every reason to let go. My death. Jamie’s near-death.
The cat-and-mouse game he’d played with me in recent days.
His parents’ death at his hands. Him luring me here.
His intention to die, but to take me with him.
The reasons lined up neatly in my head and waited for me to act, and I still didn’t.
The problem was that I couldn’t hold on forever.