Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
WESTON
“I need to talk to you,” she’d said to me when she got home earlier this evening.
“Me too,” I’d told her, practically vibrating with excitement. “And me first.”
She didn’t put up much of a fight to that, but she also wasn’t exactly excited when I loaded her up in my pickup, a lunchbox in the back that she probably hasn’t noticed yet. That should’ve been enough of a warning for me, but I was hyped about my surprise and didn’t press that hard.
“What’s wrong?” I’d asked her.
She put her hands to her stomach, said she wasn’t feeling well, but didn’t ask me to stay in tonight or anything, so I’m hoping what I have planned will make her feel better. At least cheer her up. But my stomach is in a state too. I wouldn’t call it butterflies, more like some tiny bastards are doing motocross inside my gut. This is excitement on a new level for me.
As we drive, I keep one hand on the wheel, one hand on her thigh where she sits in the passenger seat, thumb running a line back and forth on her bare skin. I steer us through the winding mountain roads, headlights on as we navigate to a hidden area of the Heights, racing twilight to get there before dusk falls.
It took a fair bit of research to work tonight out, but with Duke’s help, the romantic geezer, I think we’re gonna be golden.
Wish we could’ve gone in the Charger, but I haven’t had much time for it lately and it’s not gonna be road-ready for a while yet.
Amelia still hasn’t figured it out as I park the truck in a grassy lot, not far from where she parked her van that first night we fucked. What was supposed to be her last night in town.
Racing out of the driver’s side, I round the truck to open her door for her and help her down. Grabbing the lunchbox from the back seat, and an extra couple of hoodies I brought for us to sit on (or wear if it gets chilly), I lead her through the wilderness as the last light of the sun blinks out.
We make it to the clearing just in time, and the log I set out earlier today is still there, waiting for us.
“Ta da!”
I wave my arms around, gesturing at the tree trunks on all sides.
“The woods? Is this the surprise? I feel like you’ve shown me the woods before, Weston.” Her voice is tired, drained, not at all what I’m used to hearing from this girl who’s so full of life, who finds ways to laugh even in the darkest of situations. That’s okay. We all have rough days, but she’s about to have one hell of a reason to smile.
I set the hoodies down on the log, then move her over in front of one, pressing on her shoulders to urge her to sit down. She humors me, lowering down and taking a seat.
Joining her, I wave at the trees again, specifically the lower portions of them.
“I don’t?—”
“Just watch,” I interject.
Seconds pass, and then, a glow. And another. Tiny fireflies light up all around us, in synchronized harmony. At least five flashes in a row, and then darkness.
Another series of flashes starts up, this time from the ground.
More darkness when that sequence is over, and then the ones from higher up start again.
Amelia watches, wonder overtaking all the worry in her face, and I watch it hit her, where we are. What we’re seeing.
“What? How? I don’t?—”
“The synchronous fireflies,” I whisper.
“But how?” she asks. “I thought we didn’t get the passes.”
“Turns out we can see them from here.” I point with my head to the display all around us, any way we look.
“Clearly,” she says, then she gives a soft laugh. “I just… I’d given up on seeing them this year. Maybe ever.”
“Well, now you can move it to your “Been There, Seen That” board.”
Amelia rushes me, leaning forward to hug me tight, her head buried in my shoulder. I feel her body shaking and it scares me.
“What’s going on, darlin’?”
“It’s past time I let you in,” she says cryptically once she pulls back.
“I think you already did that, though it took some work,” I tease, nudging her with an elbow, but her mouth doesn’t so much as twitch upward.
“What do you know about the Santa Slayer?” she asks, a scary lack of inflection to her tone.
“This is about true crime?”
“Just answer the question.”
I’m not a true crime junkie like she is, but sure I know who the Santa Slayer is. Everyone does. Some whack job who offed a bunch of mall Santas one year before Christmas. I think it was in my senior year of high school. Next Halloween, half the kids we grew up with went as dead Santas of one kind or another.
“Some guy named Artie Sanford went ape shit on some Santas. Knifed ’em up. Is that what you’re worried about? Being stabbed randomly by some psycho? Might be too much Vixens if Jynx is getting you scared of something that random and unlikely.”
She ignores me and starts talking.
“When I was a kid, I was small. I’m still small. But I was a late bloomer, and I was always in the bottom percentile on size and weight. It tended to make people extra protective of me, when that’s never what I’ve wanted. I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to look less childlike after so many years of insufferable baby talk to my face. Getting the implants, my piercings, the hair, the boots. It’s all to help me feel stronger, badder, bigger than I am naturally. I never want to be seen as small again.”
I nod, taking her hand in mine and holding it, encouraging her to keep talking.
“Anyway, when I was twelve, my growth spurt hadn’t hit yet. Some friends and I were at the mall. I went to the bathroom on my own, and, uh…”
The toe of her white sneaker nudges the ground, trying to find the words. My stomach is a ball of lead and I almost don’t want her to keep going, but I need her to all the same.
“There was a man in the bathroom. I think he thought I was a little kid, the way he spoke to me, the way he tried to lure me into a stall with him. But I was twelve, not some first-grader who didn’t know better. I stomped on his foot and ran out of the bathroom.”
Her breathing turns staggered, and her free hand comes up to wipe her face angrily. That pit in my stomach grows deeper, and I don’t want to know what she’s going to say next.
“It should’ve ended there. My mom could’ve filed a report with the police, done a sketch, and that would’ve been that. But no.”
Ice runs through my veins, chilling me from the inside out. My asshole can’t decide whether to clench like I’m sitting on a glass pineapple, or to let out everything inside me that’s turned to liquid. “What happened, angel?”
Her eyes squeeze shut. “She told my dad. My overprotective dad.”
I think I know where this is going, but I don’t stop her. I wonder when she’s ever told someone this story before. If she ever has. She probably needs to say it as much as I need to hear it.
“He didn’t want a police report. He wanted to handle it himself. By the time I heard the door slam and ran out to the kitchen where they’d been talking, my mom was crying, my dad was gone, and so was the biggest knife from the block on the counter.”
The backs of my eyes sting, watching tears drip from hers. Bright teal, even in the darkness, under the moonlight and surrounded by the glow of the synchronous fireflies.
“I never saw him again,” she says, sniffling. “Except on the news.”
Amelia pulls her hand back from mine, turns to face me, and scoots herself further away.
“Weston, my birth name is Angel Sanford. Artie, my dad, is the Santa Slayer. The man from the bathroom…he was a mall Santa. And my dad went to find him. He found the wrong one first. I guess it was a shift change or something, I dunno how that works. By the time he found the ‘right’ one, others had tried to intervene, tried to stop him, and they got killed too. A security guard, an elf, and a random Good Samaritan who thought they could take him out. He was possessed; nothing could stop him until he got the guy who tried to take his daughter. And then the cops showed up.”
Her head falls, shoulders shaking with a couple of sobs, and I can’t help myself. I move in closer to her again, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and taking her hand in my other. Lips pressed against her head, I whisper, “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me.”
“You deserve to know,” she says when she can speak again. “The whole world knows half the story. Only my mom and I know the whole one.”
Amelia collects herself, breathing deeply before lifting her head to look me in the eyes as she tells me more.
“I think by that point he realized what he had done. He didn’t want to live with himself. He chose suicide by cop rather than face the consequences of his actions. He left us to live with them instead.”
She hiccups, and I rub her back as I try to take it in. After a minute, she gets her breath back and continues. “My dad charged one of the cops with the knife he’d used to kill five other people in broad daylight, forcing them to fire on him. Coward that he was in the end. Making someone else a killer rather than face justice himself.”
The jokes I’ve heard about the man over the years resurface, playing like a slideshow in my head, a montage of nightly news clips, skits on comedy shows, and even videos online of people pretending to pull an “Artie Sanford.” How he hated Christmas so much he took out Santa and the elves. It circulates every year. Never once have I heard even a fraction of this side of it.
I can’t imagine having to live with the knowledge that someone you were related to, someone you loved, committed such a heinous act. But to have it be perpetrated in your name, for your honor? To have those horrible crimes be the one thing you’re connected to when anyone hears your name for the rest of your life?
“I am so fucking sorry, Amelia,” I tell her.
What do you say to something like this? Southern manners didn’t prepare me for trauma like hers. When the worst thing I’ve ever been through is my parents divorcing, how am I supposed to wrap my head around the tragedy she’s experienced?
How quickly my reality has changed should leave me spinning, but I’m so focused on her that somehow I keep it together.
She scoffs. “It’s not your fault, Weston.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not sorry it happened,” I tell her. “I’m not apologizing for it, I’m empathizing with you because it happened. You can accept empathy if you want to. Compassion won’t make you any less strong of a person.”
Nothing could make her anything short of superhuman in my eyes. But I see the shift in her as my meaning sinks in. Her face softens and tears start to form. I have a feeling she’s never let anyone lessen her burden before, the way she’s so fiercely independent.
My hand cups her face, fingers wiping below one eyelid as I keep talking. “It doesn’t make you weak to share your load with someone else. That’s what love is. Sharing in the good, the boring, and the unthinkably horrible. It’s always better with someone else. You’re not alone anymore, darlin’.”
“Love?” Her voice is a cracked whisper.
“Yes, love. I love you, Amelia. Regardless of your history, of whatever name you use, I love who you are here and now. How you make me feel when I’m with you. Shit, even when I’m not with you, I’m better because of you.”
“I tell you my father is one of the most famous killers of our lifetime and you tell me you love me?”
“I don’t care that your father was a serial killer,” I tell her, pushing some hair behind her ear so I can see all of her beautiful face.
“Mass murderer,” she corrects me, laughing darkly. “No wonder you didn’t make it in the National Association of Serial Killers. You don’t even know the standards to qualify as one.” She laughs again, sardonic, with a hint of her tears in there. “Dear old dad didn’t make the cut.”
It makes even more sense now. Her dark humor, her tragic outlook on life. It’s all she’s had to cope with, on her own, that immense black cloud following her everywhere she goes.
I’ve heard that trauma victims cope in a variety of ways. Looks like she got the black humor version of healing. I can work with that. At least it’s not self-harm, or substance abuse. Fucked up humor, I can do.
“I think we have enough killers in the family,” I tell her, gentle smile on my face so she knows I’m kidding and this changes nothing for me.
She’s spent years keeping everyone else out because she doesn’t want the judgment, the reminders of her past. I want to show her that it’s who she is, regardless of what happened to her in the past, that makes me love her.
“If it’s okay with you, I’ll retire permanently from that option. We’ll pick a new career for me together.”
She laughs, tears rolling down her face. “You’re seriously telling me you’re okay with this?”
Okay?
I struggle to control my voice, my volume, as the words shoot out of me, but I focus on assuring her, not scaring her. “Of course I’m not okay with what happened, what you went through. Nothing about that is okay . It’s going to take time, and probably a lot more talks, for me to really understand what your life has been like as a result of what he did. But it doesn’t change the way I feel about you.” I scoff before continuing. “Shit, if anything, it makes me love you more, for how strong you’ve been, the fact that you managed to live anything close to a normal life after going through trauma like that. You’re fucking amazing, angel. You managed to let me in after all of it, too, which might be the most amazing part of all.”
Her face crumbles and she ducks into my chest, crying harder than before.
It takes minutes, maybe longer, but she calms down eventually. When she gets her breathing back to normal, she tells me the rest of the story.
How the rest of her middle and high school years were hell, complete pariahs, both her and her mother. Her mom couldn’t find work that could replace the income they’d lost, and no one would hire her except some asshole who ran a skeevy diner and barely paid her. Amelia’s dick of a brother was out of the house by that point, but he held their father’s death against both women and was a raging sweaty ball sac to them both.
She tells me how she couldn’t wait for college, a fresh start, where people wouldn’t know her, wouldn’t know her past. And for the first time, once she was there, she was able to have friends, and a boyfriend. Except when she began to trust him and told that motherfucker the connection to her father, he freaked, ruining everything she was trying to build there.
Just a few months to get a taste of what life would’ve been if she were a normal girl with a normal childhood, and then it was all trashed with one confession. She left school, changed her legal name, and started studying code online.
Amelia explained how there was an insurance payout—back before the law protected insurance companies from suicide by cop—that went to her mom. But she wouldn’t touch the money, and put it into a trust for Amelia that she could access once she turned eighteen. While she didn’t want the money either, Amelia eventually caved, using it to buy a used van and convert it for van life. She donated the rest to the victims' families and has been living off of her wages ever since, sending money to her mom regularly to help her make ends meet, and donating the rest to a charity supporting the victims’ families when she has anything above what she needs to survive.
Apparently, somewhere along the way, her brother started raiding their mom’s mail. Found some correspondence from the insurance company and lost his shit that there was a payout and he didn’t see any of it. He started threatening their mom, then Amelia (when he could find ways to get ahold of her), and that’s when she got extra creative on keeping on the move, changing up her contact information regularly, and risking no form of connection to any one place or person.
Their mother, though, had nowhere to go, and has been stuck working a shitty diner job for a piece of shit manager ever since. The brother has been using blackmail over Amelia’s identity to keep the mother in line all this time, and it’s kept her from seeing her mom for nearly a decade.
As bad as all that is, by the time she’s finished the entire story, a long time later, it seems like some of the worst parts of it for her are the emotional conflicts it created within her.
“Sometimes,” she says, sniffling, head on my shoulder, not meeting my eyes. “Even though I hate him, sometimes I still miss him. And I hate myself for it. How can I miss anything about a monster? But before that day, he was just my dad. Before that day, I had a normal life. A good life. And so, so many lives got ruined that day. I don’t have the worst of it, I know I don’t. I don’t have the right to feel sorry for myself when so many others lost their loved ones who were actually innocent. Their lives were shattered and they didn’t deserve it. But it’s so hard not to think those thoughts, you know?”
Sucking in a breath through my teeth, I consider how to respond and decide to speak from the heart. “I don’t know if there’s an easy answer to this, darlin’, but I’m gonna tell you how I see it and you can do what you want with that perspective.”
She nods against my shoulder and I take it as encouragement to keep going, my hand rubbing her arm as I do.
“The world we live in is full of shades of gray. It’s only black and white to the colorblind. The best people can still make awful mistakes. And sometimes there’s good in the worst of people. You’re not a bad person for feeling something other than hate toward him. Your compassion for the victims and their families makes you a great person, if you’re asking me.”
The sounds of her sniffling faster tell me she’s hearing me, even if she has nothing to say to that, so I go on.
“Emotions are complex, Amelia. The human experience isn’t a simple one. Your feelings are valid. You had a childhood of good memories and it culminated in something unbelievably tragic, but that doesn’t necessarily change the times you had before that. I’m not telling you how to feel about him, or what you’ve been through, but you’re welcome to talk to me about it if you want to and I’m not judging you for any of it.”
She cries harder, and I hold her tight until the sounds soften and her trembles stop.
“I’m a mess,” she finally says, sniffing again, wiping her nose with the sleeve of the hoodie she’s sitting on.
“You’re incredible,” I tell her.
“You have every reason to run from me,” she says, finally finding my eyes with her own.
The fireflies continue their performance, dancing and glowing in the wooded surroundings.
“You see those?” I ask her, pointing to the fireflies as they light up in harmony, circling us in their greenish yellow glow.
“Yeah,” she breathes. “It looks like we’re in a fairy tale. There must be thousands of them.”
“Every one of those fireflies is a reason I have to love you, Amelia. They stretch out forever, damn near infinite. You are the impossible, darlin’. Too good to be true. The way you care so damn much, how you see the world around you, and the way you make my life worth fucking living despite every reason you have to hate the world. You still choose joy, even after what you’ve been through. Somehow, against all odds, you are the brightest light glowing in a world of darkness, and there’s nothing that could make me run from you.”
Her eyes widen, looking between me and the glowing forest around us, eyes rimmed with fresh tears.
“You’re too pure,” she says, shaking her head, like she’s struggling to accept my words.
I let her take her time, making sure she hears them. After a moment, she looks up again, eyes glossy.
“I didn’t even think I was capable of love until you, Weston Grady. I didn’t think I was worthy of love until you. You fixed that. You see only the best in me?—”
“—I just see the truth,” I cut her off with a smile. She grins, shoving my shoulder with her own.
“You see the best in the world around you, and you make it better just by being you. The world is lucky to have you, but not as lucky as me.”
Amelia turns, facing me fully, making sure I don’t miss her next words.
“I’m the one who gets to love you every single day.”
Reeling from her declaration, I place a soft kiss to her lips, her cheeks, her perfect little nose, and her forehead, keeping my lips pressed to her skin until I collect myself.
“I thought I was broken, I thought I didn’t have the capacity to love until you, Amelia. Turns out I just wasn’t able to love anyone but you. I don’t know if we fixed each other? Or maybe we were never meant to love anyone until we found one another.”
Her bleary smile, so genuine, full of heartbreak, healing, and a range of human emotion it might take a lifetime to unpack and understand, it gives me all the assurance I needed that I can be the man she needs me to be. The purpose in life I’ve been looking for all this time is right here in front of me. Someone to make laugh, share the load on tough days, and give them a reason to smile every single day.
“Although, for such an important moment between us, you forgot to mention how much you love my dick,” I tease, swooping in to kiss her. When I pull back, I add, “I mean, I could give you a whole ’nother speech just on your tits. Don’t get me started on the rest of you.” My eyes flick over her frame and back up to her face, lips pulling up.
“Maybe I wasn’t done talking,” she says, nose in the air.
“Don’t let me stop you,” I say, smiling. “Go on, tell me more about why you love me.”
“No, I think I’m done now,” she says, face turned away from mine to hide her grin.
“Not even gonna give me like one reason per inch? Surely you have close to a dozen.” I go into a falsetto to do a terrible impression of her voice. “Oh Weston, I love how your cock is the only one that’s ever hit my ribs before, I love that I’ll never choke on it because I can’t even get it past my teeth, and how I come every time I’m even near it.”
We’re both laughing by the time I finish my awful impersonation, but she’s doubled over, leaning down on my lap, giggling furiously.
“I do not sound like that!” she says.
“Naw,” I admit. “You don’t.”
I let the silence hang for just a moment, long enough for her to think that’s it, before I add, “You sound more like, ‘Fuck me, West, no one’s ever made me come so many times I passed out, uh!’”
It’s so over the top, overdone in such a ridiculous way, that I don’t expect her eyes to heat in response, but they do. Warm gold hues popping through those teal rings around the black depths of her pupils, and I’m melting in her scorching gaze.
“I do believe you just gave yourself a new goal, Mr. Grady,” she says, all purring seduction.
Amelia stands from the log at my side and drapes a leg over my lap, sliding down to straddle me. Her arms loop behind my neck, mouth pressed to mine, and she whispers, “I love you, West. And now I want you to fuck me and make me come till I pass out.”
Who am I to not give my girl what she wants?
So I give the fireflies a show of our own.