Chapter 20 Dex - Past
twenty
Dex - Past
THE FIRST BODY.
I’d buried a lot of bodies for someone who’d never killed anyone.
I wasn’t good. Nothing about me ever had been.
Those rumors? The things I got up to, the people I’d hurt…
were more true than not. I’d done things for Archer, things for the Strays, things for my mother.
Those things had secured my place in hell long before I reached adulthood.
I’d accepted it. Long given up on trying to be anything else.
I was past the point of it bothering me, or at least, I had thought I was.
The closer I got to Jonah, the more I realized that if I wanted to keep him, I’d have to let him in. I’d have to let him see what his devil was capable of.
If I were a better man, I’d acknowledge that Jonah was too good for me, maybe keep away from him and let us live on our set paths. But I wasn’t a better man. I didn’t care what path he was supposed to be on. He was coming with me.
It was too soon, though. I’d barely got him within my teeth. He could still choose to run. He needed to be completely caught in my trap before I showed him what I really was. Helpless little rabbit at the mercy of the wolf.
It wasn’t fair, I knew that, but I could see it in him. Pain like my pain.
He was hurting, like me. Maybe our pain wasn’t the same, but both did what all pain does—it isolated.
It was why Jonah lashed out, why he glared and snapped at anyone who got too close.
He’d been alone in his pain for far too long, like me.
Sure, he had Becca, but she didn’t have what we had.
She wasn’t broken. She couldn’t understand him like I could, and so he couldn’t ever truly escape his loneliness with her. He could with me.
He’d deny it I’m sure, but I knew Jonah acted the way he did because he wanted people to notice that he wasn’t okay. He wanted to drag his pain out into the open and force everyone to look at it. They didn’t want to look at it. They never do. But I was looking. I saw him.
When he understood that I saw him, truly, as he was, and I wouldn’t leave him no matter how ugly his pain might seem, then he’d stay. He’d be mine. Only then would I show him my own, because I knew he’d understand that too. He’d see me too.
Dropping my cigarette, I stomped it out right above where the bastard’s head would be. The first body. Beneath the dirt, leaves, and roots. One day I’d bring Jonah here, where I’d never brought anyone else, because he wouldn’t ever truly know me until he knew this place.
It was where I came when the nightmares happened.
The ones he’d given me. Memories that played on a loop, reaching through time and dragging me back into a much smaller body.
I came here to remind him, to remind myself, that he was gone—that he couldn’t hurt me.
I just wished I’d been able to kill him myself.
Tonight’s nightmare hadn’t been from him, though, not exactly. It was from her.
It was the night I’d had to bring him here. The scene was still so perfectly clear in my mind, like it had only just happened instead of all those years ago.
“DEXTER!” my mother had screamed, and just the sound of her voice was so loud, so hysterical, that it made me want to puke. I had to be quick, and I had to be cautious as I made my way to where her voice had come from. Downstairs. Kitchen. I couldn’t keep her waiting.
Even though I never had any idea what to expect when it came to her, I never would have imagined what I found that deceptively sunny afternoon.
Her eyes were manic, her chest heaving and fingers trembling as she shakily lit a cigarette.
Before that moment, I hadn’t known it was possible to smell blood so strongly, but it made sense when there was so much of it.
I’d stared down at the body, my back pressing against the wall beside the entry, trying to stay as far from the situation as possible without leaving the room.
His face was completely mangled, though it was hard to really see the damage underneath all the blood.
Beside him on the ground was a pink stiletto shoe, its heel and sole covered in blood. So were her hands.
I’d fought to keep the bile down as I’d met her gaze again. The only question running through my mind was… am I going to be next? Was that why she’d called me into the room? My mother had finally snapped and was just going to go on an unhinged murder spree until the cops gunned her down?
“You need to fix this,” she’d told me as she took another drag from her bloodied cigarette. Hair that had been bleached too many times was pulled back in a messy bun and splattered with red.
“Fix… this…” I’d echoed, wondering how the fuck I was supposed to do that. “He’s… dead.”
“No shit, Sherlock. Fucking king of observation, aren’t you? Do something about it.”
“Do… what… exactly?”
She’d looked at me like I was the crazy one, like I should know exactly what to do with a dead body. Like any of what had happened was fucking normal.
“Just… get rid of it.”
“Get rid of it,” I’d repeated dumbly, and she’d thrown a half-full box of cereal at me from the counter. Its contents spilled out onto the floor, soaking up the red that pooled around the man I’d hated but she was supposed to have loved.
“You deaf as well as stupid? Yes. Get rid of it.”
“It,” she had called him. Like he wasn’t the man she’d allegedly been in love with, like he wasn’t her entire world until she had jammed the heel of a shoe into his face over and over and reduced him to nothing but “it.” A problem to be dealt with, apparently by me.
If she could be so cold with him, I wondered what she would have done if it were me lying on the floor.
I’d known then, despite his fate, that he’d been right. That the secret we shared, the one he’d forced upon me, could never be revealed to her.
I knew at that moment without a doubt, whatever compassion my mother may have at one time possessed, the drugs and alcohol had devoured it. It had died a slow but complete death until we’d ended up here. She was no longer my mother, but a monster wearing her haggard skin.
I’d listened to her. Of course I had. I’d rolled his body up in the living room rug while she chain-smoked by the window, watching on with disdain—for me or for him, I didn’t know.
I’d taken my mother’s car and started driving, so sure I was going to get pulled over and arrested, for driving without a license at the very least, and if they’d found the body in the trunk…
Hours of driving with no other destination but away, I’d followed back roads and streets with no traffic until asphalt turned to gravel turned to dirt.
Until my mother’s shitty Corolla was bouncing along a rocky path, dodging trees and large stones, where I was certain no car had driven before and I prayed no car would go again.
I drove and drove until the car got stuck and I couldn’t go any further.
Then I cried. Cried until the night passed into morning.
When I stopped crying, I started digging. Deeper and deeper. My hands were bleeding by the time day turned to night again and I finally felt brave enough to open the trunk.
When he was buried, the disturbed dirt covered over as best I could manage with dying leaves and forest brush, I’d set the car on fire. I’d used my father’s lighter, the one I’d always kept with me even before I’d started smoking.
I’d stayed on my knees, covered in dirt and blood, and I watched it burn, convinced the smoke or the flames would draw attention, that someone would call and report the fire, that they’d come, and they’d find me and what I’d done.
I’d thought maybe it would be better if they did, that I would have deserved it.
I’d still thought I had a chance of being good back then, that maybe if I was punished enough I could be cleansed of all the bad things done to me, done by me, and I could go back to being good the way my dad would have wanted me to be.
I didn’t have that hope anymore.
No one had come for me in the end. The flames had burned until there was nothing else for them to consume, leaving me with the husk of a car and a freshly dug grave.
I walked to the ocean after that. By the time I arrived, the blisters on my feet matched the ones on my palms from the shovel. They’d stung as I walked into the water, hoping the ocean would wash me clean far beyond the blood and dirt that coated me.
It hadn’t. There were stains on my soul now that could never be cleansed. Stains I’d since added to. Each new one further cemented my place in hell. So no, I wasn’t good, and I never could be. But I wasn’t evil either.
Jonah called me Devil, and it was far from the worst thing I’d ever been called. I wished he were right, though. I wished I were the devil. I wished I were this vile, evil thing incapable of love. But I wasn’t. I was human. And I craved love so much it made me sick.
Maybe, just maybe, he could be the one to love me.
I was so certain I’d never come back here after that day, but I did… the next time I needed to hide a body. After all, no one had found the first one.
Now I came here not only when I needed to remind myself he was gone, but when I needed to remind myself of who I was.
There were still hours left of the night.
I’d have to go to work in the morning, but I knew sleep wouldn’t happen for me after this.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I sent a text to the only person I thought I could stand talking to tonight.
He wouldn’t know what I was dealing with, not yet, maybe not ever, but I still hoped that maybe he could give me something anyway.
Some small tether I could use to find my way back out of this darkness.
You sleeping?
Five minutes passed. Ten. Until I assumed no reply was coming. Only as I was putting it back in my pocket did I feel it vibrate with a response.
Rabbit
Yes.
A smile pulled at my lips.
Liar.
A few more minutes passed before Jonah replied again.
Rabbit
What do you want?
You. Obviously.
Rabbit
Well I don’t want you.
If you didn’t want me, you wouldn’t have replied.
There was more silence, and just as I feared I’d scared him off, another response came through.
Rabbit
You can’t prove that.
I can actually. You can lie to me, Rabbit, but your dick can’t.
Rabbit
Where are you?
I’ll be at the field in an hour.
Rabbit
Isn’t it cold?
I know a way to keep warm.
Rabbit
I’m not coming.
You will be ;)
Rabbit
Gross.
See you in an hour, Rabbit.