Chapter 17Cody
17
Cody
By the time I crossed back over the twin bridges and the flashing casino marquees came into view, I had shoved all thoughts of my mother’s apartment out of my mind and replaced them with a plan.
An insane one.
“Siri, call Ace.”
After a few rings, my former friend answered, sounding out of breath. “I thought you’d blocked my number.”
Just hearing his familiar voice gave me a moment of hesitation, making me wonder if I would live to regret this.
Actually, I was certain I would. So, with a steely breath and a fuck ton of festering resentment, I trooped on with my madness.
“AJ,” I responded, ignoring his statement and the casino sounds in the background. “I have a proposition.”
There was a pause and then abrupt, total silence. He must’ve gone into a soundproofed office. “Okaaaay. I’m listening.”
One day I’d tell Bree about this. In the meantime, I wouldn’t lie to her about it, but I would hold off on coming clean for a little while.
Two years ago, I would’ve known how this phone call would go. But that was back when I thought Alexander Juno—my friend, Ace—was just our jackass. Mine and Bree’s. Now he was just a jackass. One without any loyalty.
I wasn’t sure what had made my mind wander to AJ during the two-hour drive back to the Coast, but as it had, an extremely troubling conclusion had formed alongside my plan.
He was me.
If I’d allowed my mother to raise me in her image. If I hadn’t had just enough of a suspicious nature to see her bullshit at an early age. If I hadn’t removed myself from her nurture at just the right time in my life.
AJ’s emotional plate was buffed within an inch of its life, making it slippery as fuck while it carried all the wrong things.
I wouldn’t forgive him for imploding our friendships and treating Bree so heinously, but when I thought through the list of people I could call to help with this errand, and he happened to already be on my mind as I psychoanalyzed him, I took it as a sign that he was the best option.
In this isolated instance.
And maybe I’d get some semblance of closure so I wouldn’t have to leave space for him on my theoretical future plate.
“Cody,” he huffed. “I can hear you having a mental tangent. Get your ADHD ass out of the clouds and tell me what’s up. I have a feeling this isn’t a social call.”
“You are such an asshole, Ace.”
He sighed. “There’s nothing I could say to make you think differently, but I’m also not wrong.” Then he surprised me by adding, “And yeah, you’re not wrong either.”
He did know me, unfortunately—to a degree, at least. Better than most, which was probably why the hurt caused by his actions was so sharp.
I turned into the Fortuna parking deck, pulled into a spot on the second level near the elevators, and took the phone off the magnetic holder on the dash and held it to my ear. “Yup. Nothing but a time machine and a fuck ton of therapy could make me think you’re not an asshole. Now, if you want to make the tiniest bit of amends without any expectation of forgiveness, meet me on Level B within the next ten minutes.”
“ Jesus, Cody , I’m working. I don’t have time for whatever scheme you’ve got planned.”
I held back a full-body twitch as I rejected the onslaught of memories of our adolescent escapades, relieved when the large corner of my mind reserved for nostalgia remained a void.
“Don’t Jesus, Cody me. I’m leaving in ten, regardless,” I replied before pressing End on the call. That switcheroo on the day’s theme didn’t provide near the satisfaction it should have.
Taking a moment to check my messages, I opened a text from Bree with an update about her grandmother. Even as vague as it was, it didn’t sound very positive.
Which, weirdly enough, relieved some of my guilt about what I was about to do.
Slapping my phone back onto its holder, I scoped out the parking lot. There were quite a few people milling to and from their vehicles, but AJ wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t really surprised, but when Dad said he’d been asking about me, I thought it might mean that he’d be interested in this offer.
Restarting the truck, I put my arm behind the headrest and looked both ways before easing slowly out of the spot, lest a buzzed gambler suddenly appear behind my tailgate. I turned the truck toward the exit, but then a loud boom shook the truck as if I’d hit something, and I about jumped out of my silky boxers as I slammed on the brakes.
“What the fuck,” I hollered, looking wildly around the parking deck for a victim or perpetrator and nearly jumping to the next life as AJ’s blond head came into view outside my passenger window. “Oh, Jesus,” I muttered to myself before throwing the gear into Neutral, engaging the e-brake, and then leaning over to manually unlock the passenger door.
It swung open the next instant, and then AJ was beside me, his dark-blue stare incredulous. “Dude, what the hell . It hasn’t even been five minutes since you hung up on me.”
I relaxed at that and smiled. Finally, there were some of my petty chickens coming home to roost. Shifting the car back into first gear, I started back toward the garage’s exit.
“If this is going to work, there are going to be rules,” I stated as soon as we turned onto the road.
“Cody, the last time I saw you, you tackled me between a row of Larry the Lobster slot machines, punched me, and then elbowed me in the eye. I had a shiner for two weeks.”
I threw my head back and laughed, almost swerving off the road. “I’m so sorry—would it have been better for you if I’d beat your ass in the high-rollers room? Or maybe in the million-dollar bathroom? The buffet?”
In my periphery, he dragged his hand down his face and his shoulders sagged. “What’re the rules?”
Stopping at a red light, I turned and raised an eyebrow at him, pushing back all my emotions and focusing on the task at hand. “They’re simple. Don’t talk about her, don’t banter with me, and tell no one what we’re about to do. Assuming you agree to do it, that is.”
His expression pinched. “And you’re not going to tell me what that is?”
The light turned green, and I drove under the Fortuna sky bridge and toward our destination. “You’ll see soon enough.”
We spent the rest of the laughably short drive in humorless silence. I pulled onto the side of the road and partially into some woods, and when I glanced over at AJ, he had paled, and his eyes were shifting to the door as if he was about to fling himself out and make a run for it.
I had to take a beat to grieve the fact that I couldn’t tell Bree about this yet. She would probably enjoy the humor of it—if she could ignore everything else about this messed-up situation like I was trying to do.
“I’m not going to murder you in the woods and bury you under a willow tree, AJ.”
He straightened his shoulders and rolled his eyes. “I know that.”
I smiled sardonically. “You sure about that?”
His answering frown had me rolling my eyes in turn as I got out of the truck, and he did the same.
“Make sure you lock it before?—”
“—before I close it, I know,” AJ finished for me, cutting me off. He rounded the truck and came to stand beside me, looking entirely out of place with his hands in the pockets of his pressed suit. “I’ll never understand why you bought this junker and returned that sweet Mercedes your mom got you for your eighteenth.”
I offered him a droll look. “I know you don’t.”
Keeping close to the tree line, I picked my way up the path, and he fell into step behind me with his hands still stuffed in his pockets, but apparently he wasn’t done talking.
“So, Miss Barb’s house, huh?”
I said nothing, instead cutting through the woods for several yards until I poked my head out of the brush and checked that the coast was clear. I didn’t expect anyone to be hanging around, but what I was about to do wasn’t exactly legal.
“Miss Barb used to tell people she had trained alligators in all these woods surrounding her property,” AJ whispered from beside me. “And trip wires that would make sirens go off if anyone walked into them.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “I told you, do not banter with me. This is a banter-free excursion.”
He snorted, and I was very annoyed that he’d taken my anti-banter speech as banter.
Say or think the word “banter” one more time, dickhead.
I was the dickhead.
The dickhead was me.
I knew something that would shut us both up, though.
“Okay,” I said, turning toward him and putting on a brave face. “We’re breaking into the Big House.”
I wasn’t sure if calling Barbara Ann Copeland’s two-story, white-columned home “the Big House” was started by her to add to her own mystique or if it was called that before she bought it, but it’d stuck either way.
His eyes widened. “You’re not serious.”
Mine narrowed in challenge. “I am.”
He poked his head out from the tree line and surveyed the backyard. “What do you even want from in there?”
“Jesus Christ, dude, I’m not going into Bree’s grandmother’s burnt home to steal something for myself.”
He scoffed. “That’s not what I meant. I meant, like, why? Just… why?”
“Funny,” I said, making the snap decision to let some of the raw hurt of the past two years show on my face. “I’ve been wondering the same thing about you.”
We locked eyes for a few seconds, and for the second time since I’d picked him up, Alexander Juno’s shoulders sagged. “Fine.”
Confident that no one was about to witness my flirtation with illegality, as Liem proba?—
Nope.
I wouldn’t let myself think about him right now or wonder what he was doing over in Gulf Shores with his family who loved him so dearly—as they should—while I was doing something he probably would have?—
Regret kicked me. He would have 100 percent approved of this and risked himself to take part in it.
But after how I reacted to the scrapes on his hands and his cut eyebrow, including him may as well have been a funeral dirge for my nerves, so no. I shouldn’t have called him.
But he was going to be so mad when he found out about this. Or maybe not? The fact that I couldn’t predict his reactions was definitely part of the allure of Liem Lott.
And ironically was also the part that scared me utterly shitless about him.
“Why does your face look like that?” AJ asked, cruelly bringing me back to the present.
“I fucking said to not banter with me.”
He threw his hands up. “Dude, I wasn’t trying to. You just looked weird.”
“Well, so do you, so— ugh, never mind. Let’s go.”
I stomped past the back porch and forced myself not to look at the damage there, where both Bree and Liem had been injured. If I did, I’d start imagining how they would have looked thrown to the ground and bleeding while I was wasting days on a cruise ship.
And then I’d probably spend the next hour on all fours, puking my guts out instead of doing something good. Instead of making my own amends by ensuring that my best friend didn’t lose her memories, however conflicted they may be.
Or however dangerous they were to retrieve.
We came to a halt under the largest oak trees in the side yard, and I rounded on AJ to tell him the plan, but he was no longer there.
The sound of retching suddenly came from the other side of the tree.
Had I manifested that?
With a lot of reluctance and the resolve to breathe through my mouth, I peered around the trunk, finding AJ braced against it with one hand as he panted heavily. Sweat was beading on his forehead, and he no longer looked pale. He looked gray.
He eventually recovered enough to remove his suit jacket and wipe his entire face with it before tossing it onto the ground.
I gestured toward the scorched, broken home. “Surely you’ve seen this before today.”
Leaning back against the tree, he closed his eyes tightly and gritted between clenched teeth, “I was dealing blackjack when it happened.”
Bewildered, I just frowned at him. He opened his eyes then and fixed me with a fierce stare, and I subconsciously braced myself for whatever he was going to say next.
“I didn’t set the fire.”
I reared back. “ What ? Why—” I shook myself, my mind like the reel of a slot machine trying to come up with three matching pieces, but it didn’t make sense. “Why do you think you even needed to say that?”
He opened his mouth to respond, but I continued, “Do you really think that if I suspected you’d set Miss Barb’s house on fire, we’d be doing this?”
Throwing his hands in the air, he yelled, “I don’t even know what we’re doing here! You’re being weird as fuck! And no, I hadn’t seen this, to answer your question. It’s fucking awful!”
“Like that’s new! Get with the fucking program, Ace.” I gestured wildly to the house, forgetting to not use his nickname in my outrage. “Bree has been in red-tape hell about this place, and there’s almost no chance she’ll be able to get any of her things from the house before it just rots away or is torn down.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you called me or why you brought me here!”
I threw my hands up in frustration, both of us now flailing like a pair of demented inflatable tube men outside a car dealership, except our signage would read “ Pull over and watch our personal drama unfold before we engage in illegal activities !”
“It doesn’t matter!” I yelled, matching his volume. “Are you going to help me with this or not?”
He glared at me before marching away, a harsh, muttered “ Fuck!” leaving his mouth before he spun on his heel and barreled back toward me. “ Fuck,” he repeated . “Fine.”
“ Fine, ” I parroted, ignoring the relief that he hadn’t left. I wasn’t sure I could pull this off solo. “I just need you to get me onto that branch and catch whatever I can salvage,” I explained, pointing at the thick branch that was maybe twelve feet above us.
AJ squeezed his eyes shut briefly, looking like he regretted his entire life. As he should. “You are one dumb motherfucker.”
I slapped him on the shoulder more forcefully than was friendly. “I know. Now, give me a boost, and remember. Tell no one.”
He raised a blond eyebrow at me. “Won’t it be obvious when you rock up with a bunch of trinkets that reek of smoke?”
My brain fritzed at the valid question, but I ignored him. “No more questions.”
“Lord, help me,” he prayed under his breath as he walked over to the tree and made a cradle with his hands. “Up you go, then.”
With surprising strength and precision, AJ yeeted me onto the tree branch on the first try, and I had to hold back a howl of victory. The adrenaline was truly pumping now, but I didn’t want to lead him on by letting him think this was going to be a bonding or healing experience for us.
It made me feel like an asshole, but it wasn’t like I had a handbook for what to do when childhood friends made horrible choices that hurt the ones you loved.
And if I had such a thing, it’s not like I would’ve read it.
I shimmied up the tree until I reached the branch closest to Bree’s former bedroom on the second floor.
This part of the house didn’t have much visible damage from the outside, but I knew I needed to be careful regardless.
As if echoing my thoughts, AJ yelled from below, “Cody! Take it slow, man.”
A few maneuvers later, I was perched outside the window just as I’d done dozens if not hundreds of times before, though back then, I’d brought a handy stepladder with me to get onto the branch.
But a stepladder couldn’t call 9-1-1 for you.
I eased the glass up, surprised when it opened effortlessly, and crawled inside, immediately choking on a cough at the acrid smell.
Doing my level best to compartmentalize my existence and my errand, I tucked the lower half of my face into my shirt, pushed through the watering of my eyes, and took a tentative step into the room. The sun had never reappeared after the morning’s rainfall, so it was nearly pitch-black inside. A smarter person would’ve brought a real flashlight, but I made do with the one on my phone, following its narrow lit path to the closet, where, like the moron I was proving to be, I tentatively poked the folding door’s handle as if it might still be hot more than four months after the fire.
Huffing inside the front of my shirt and making it flutter, I gingerly opened one side of the door and nearly collapsed in relief.
They were there, and they were undamaged.
Her boxes.
These were so much better than the little trinkets I’d brought back from the ship.
Steeling myself, I extracted the five plastic containers—all of them bigger than a shoebox but smaller than one of those big storage containers—one by one. I stacked them in a tower, set my phone on top of them, and then picked them up carefully, placing my chin on top to help balance them. With more care than I’d taken with anything in my life, save not stripping Liem Lott naked in a public stairwell—why, why would such a thing cross my mind right now?—I made my way back to the window.
I perched my ass uncomfortably on the sill and unloaded the boxes onto the overhang outside the window as flashes of Liem Lott, writhing and lit by fireworks, played in my mind.
My compartmentalization must have been effective, because the truth of the matter was that my discomfort wasn’t courtesy of my surroundings. It was all thanks to the surprise boner I was sporting because of that intrusive daydream about Liem.
And his hips.
The tattoos on his fingers.
His hands. Have mercy, his hands.
I held back a shiver that could have knocked the derelict house down and released a groan into my shirt before letting the fabric fall from my face.
Fuck. My. Life.
Barbara Ann Copeland was going to haunt me for the rest of my days for having filthy, gay daydreams while literally sitting on her house.
“ Cody , what’s happening?” AJ’s voice heralded from below, deflating my boner—and my spirit. “Are you hurt?”
Taking one more beat?—
No .
Taking a breath to compose myself, I waved a hand outside the window to indicate that I was fine.
“If you’re signaling for help, I need you to use words. Or, like, scream or something,” AJ hollered, sounding closer than I expected now that I was applying my senses to my actual surroundings.
Poking my head out the window, I peered down but didn’t see?—
“Uhh, dude, are you crying?”
My soul left my body—I hoped it visited Miss Barb in the shadow realm or wherever and begged for forgiveness whilst away—and I clutched my chest, my gaze flying to AJ, who was perched on the oak branch.
“The he—” I started but had to stop and cough my lungs up for several seconds before continuing, “The hell did you get up here?”
He shrugged even as he frowned deeply at me, something like concern in his gaze. “I got a ladder from that little shed out back.”
I glanced down at the ladder angled against the tree’s trunk and then back at AJ, not sure what to say, so I just nodded and started handing him the boxes. He accepted them without hesitation and arranged them carefully behind him on the thick branch.
“Is this all?” he asked when I made no move to hand over more.
“No,” I rasped, steeling myself for what was next. The photos in the hallway.
Everyone deserved to have family photos, no matter how messed up their family was.
“Dude, you’re uh…. You’re giving me qualms.”
My gaze and focus snapped back to him. “Get the fuck out of here with your qualms , AJ.” Rolling my stinging eyes toward heaven, I spun back toward the darkened room and retucked my face into my shirt. “ Qualms ,” I muttered under my breath, using the phone’s light I hadn’t turned off to navigate toward the bedroom door.
It didn’t feel like it was about to cave in, but I knew things could be different on the other side of the bedroom door.
The door that did not want to open.
I gripped the handle, turned it, and tried again and again before realizing I was going to have to be more aggressive. Stepping back, I slipped my phone into my pocket, braced a foot on the wall by the door, and pulled with all of my strength and that of my ancestors until it opened with a violent creak, painfully jerking my shoulder to the side.
Barely feeling the burn in the joint, I put my shirt that had slipped off back over my face and grabbed my phone again, pointing it broadly down the hallway.
A sharp inhale was the only reaction I allowed myself. It was so much worse than I could have ever dreamed. Much worse.
Casting my light over the hallway walls, I scanned them for which photos might be most important, then decided on a quantity-over-quality approach. I didn’t want to linger here, inspecting photos in a hallway of questionable fortitude.
There was reckless, and then there was bending over to invite disaster to destroy you.
The floor creaked loudly beneath my feet, and I held my breath for a moment while praying I hadn’t peed myself.
For whatever reason, it made me think of Jeanne’s kids building forts at Dad’s house.
I wanted to see it.
I wanted to see a lot of things, actually, but if I let my mind wander off to yet another daydream, I might not be seeing anything again.
Not with my sanity intact, anyway.
Firmly turning off my mind, I swept down the hall and removed frames from nails and hangers until my arms were full, my eyes stung unbearably, and my fingers ached. I still didn’t go back to the window, though. Not yet. I propped the stack of frames between the bedroom jamb and my body, then retrieved my phone from on top and shone its light onto the stairs, confirming my fears.
There would be no descending them. Any items down there were lost.
Which really sucked, because rescuing one of Barb’s rooster statues and presenting it as a gift in a few years might’ve been the best—and most morbid—long-con joke of my life.
Shaking the wave of sadness away, I propped my phone back on top with the light pointed upward, illuminating the path at least partially, and heaved my burden into my arms.
And I’d just about made it to the window when a bright white light filled the space and a boom rattled the house. My body lurched, and suddenly I was sure the house was about to collapse with me in it.
But then there was another flash of light, and my senses creeped back.
Thunder and lightning. A storm.
Letting out a breath, I set down the frames and perched back on the sill for the last time.
AJ was still in the tree, also looking like he might piss himself. “ Hurry,” he pleaded.
Nodding, I started handing over the frames at a rapid pace, taking him in as much as I could through my stinging eyes.
AJ was terrified of storms, but there he was. Sitting in a tree during one, waiting for me.
I understood nothing.
After easing out of the window and onto the overhang, I pushed it closed, though I wasn’t sure it even mattered, and took a deep breath of thick, clean air.
I choked on it and had to endure several painful, raking coughs as AJ shimmied down the ladder, shaking like a leaf, with a stack of frames under one arm.
I perched halfway down the ladder and handed over the rest of the loot to him once he’d reached the ground, and we worked wordlessly until it was almost done. I was just pulling the last of the frames—the biggest and heaviest—across the branch and into my hands when the sky did another massive bass drop and evaporated my senses. The frame went flying like a frisbee, well past AJ’s shaking form, and I followed it, flinging myself off the ladder, the quietest whisper of grunt leaving me as I hit the ground and barrel-rolled across Miss Barb’s backyard.
Panting, I lay on my back and faced a stormy sky.
Miss Barb, was that you?
I hadn’t died, so perhaps she wasn’t that mad.
AJ’s face appeared above me, framed by turbulent clouds. “I hate you, Cody Desmond.”
An overdue burst of air left my lungs like a tractor-trailer releasing its brakes before I rasped, “Right back at you, Ace.”
He disappeared from view, and I closed my eyes as I tried to find the energy to get up, my body throbbing. Eventually, AJ plopped down beside me, and as one does after a perceived near-death experience, I said things I normally wouldn’t have dreamed of saying.
“I don’t know why you did what you did. I’m not even sure I want to know.” I cracked my eyes open at him. “And honestly, I have a feeling you don’t know either. But it’s not up to me, or to her, to fix it. Or to even want to at this point.”
There. I could be mature.
A few long seconds of silence followed until, without a word, AJ got up and walked away, one hand in his pocket and the other clutching his soiled suit jacket.
I let him get a long head start before I ambled to my feet with a groan, taking it slowly as I reoriented myself to Earth. Then I scooped up the frame I’d thrown and headed back through the woods to my truck, where I found all the frames stacked neatly in my truck bed.
AJ was gone.