Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Cole
The house on Cembrook Road breathes easy tonight, which is so unusual I almost don't recognize the sound of it.
Windows pushed all the way open to the late-August heat, the screens doing their sad half-assed job of keeping the bugs out while letting in just enough air to remind you air exists.
Cicadas going full tilt in the maples out front, that scream they make when the temperature drops below ninety and they decide, collectively, they've got one good night left and they're not wasting it on subtlety.
Dishes dry on the rack by the sink. Three plates, two forks, a knife I used to cut an apple Trevor didn't eat.
The dishwasher's been broken since the first Bush administration — not the second, though at this point the distinction feels academic — so we wash by hand like pioneers, or like people too broke to call a repairman, which is what we are.
A new box fan oscillates in the corner of the living room, its plastic blades pushing warm air in a slow arc that covers maybe sixty percent of the room before giving up and starting over.
Seventeen dollars at the hardware store.
Worth every penny, even if it sounds like a helicopter trying to land on a mattress.
The coffee table's been cleared of its usual disaster.
My notebooks — blue, red, green, the color system that only makes sense because I invented it — are shoved to one end, spines cracked, pages dog-eared.
On top of them, folded open to page three, the Roan Weekly Gazette.
Not for the headlines. For the margin. My handwriting there, cramped and hurried, ballpoint pressed hard enough to leave impressions: Quinn — Voss, bad with girls going back years, Calloway covers.
Just a fragment. Confirmation of what we already knew, delivered by a phone call from Mr. Quinn, who coaches Little League and sees what nobody else sees because coaches have a front-row seat to the wreckage of small-town adolescence.
Nothing new. Just the case sitting there like a low hum under everything, present but not screaming, which is about as much peace as this investigation has ever given me.
I'm on the couch with a beer going warm in my hand.
Haven't taken a sip in twelve minutes. Not thirsty.
Just holding. The bottle sweats against my palm, condensation running down my wrist into the cuff of my t-shirt, and I don't wipe it because moving takes energy, and what I've got I'm saving for something I haven't figured out yet.
Trevor's in the armchair across from me.
Shirt off. Just jeans and boots and that chest I've spent more hours not looking at than I'll admit.
His forearms rest on his knees, elbows locked.
The lamp throws his profile in sharp relief — jaw, cheekbones, the set of his mouth that looks like he's biting down on something bitter even when he's not.
His skin is tan. Not beach tan. Work tan.
The kind that comes from being outside with your sleeves rolled and not caring what the sun does, because caring is a luxury Trevor Hollander stopped believing in around the same time he stopped believing in anything else.
We've been sitting like this twenty minutes. Not talking. Not fighting. Just existing in the same room without the charge that usually sits between us like it's got its own gravity. It's strange. I don't trust it.
"It's getting dark earlier." I say it to the room more than to him. Flat, observational, the kind of statement that doesn't need a response because anybody with eyes can see it's true.
Trevor doesn't look up. His eyes are on the floor between his boots, or some middle distance that exists only in his head. His jaw works once.
"It's almost September." Dry. Flat. The deadpan he deploys when he's decided stating the obvious is the most efficient form of conversation. "Sun stops giving a damn about light."
I bark a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "Poetic."
"I'm a poet. Didn't you know. Part-time haiku enthusiast. Collection drops next spring."
"Can't wait. Illustrations?"
"Just photos of my ass. For the art crowd."
"You've got a niche."
"I've got an ass."
The banter sits between us. Easy. Almost comfortable.
The kind of exchange that would be unremarkable between any two people who've known each other more than a week, except we're not any two people, we're Trevor Hollander and Cole Marek, and comfortable is so far outside our parameters it might as well be a country neither of us has a visa for.
It trails off. The silence that replaces it is different from our usual loaded ones.
No fight in it. None of the tension of two men circling something they both want and neither will admit to.
Just quiet. The fan turning. The cicadas.
The occasional creak of the house settling as the temperature drops another degree toward something almost bearable.
My eyes drift. They do that. Unsupervised.
They find Trevor's left shoulder — the scar tissue, a puckered ridge that runs from just below the collarbone to the outer edge of the deltoid.
Pale against his tan. Raised. The kind of scar that tells you exactly what happened without the story: something went in, something came out, and the body did its best to close the hole but couldn't make it pretty.
I've looked at it before. Dozens of times.
In the garage. In his room. In the hospital hallway while Eileen slept and neither of us watched the clock, because watching the clock meant admitting why we were there.
I've looked and looked away, because looking too long felt like staring at something I had no right to see.
Tonight I don't look away.
"That the one?" Flat. Direct. No preamble, no softening, just the question dropped between us like something I've carried and finally decided to put down.
Trevor goes still. Full-body. The stillness that comes from below conscious control, the muscles locking because the brain hasn't finished processing the input.
One beat. Two. His eyes find mine across the room, and whatever he sees clears some threshold, because his jaw works once and the word comes out quiet.
"Yeah."
I set my beer on the coffee table. The bottle clinks, too loud for the quiet.
I stand. Cross to him. Drop onto the arm of the chair — not beside him, not quite, just perched on the armrest where the wood's worn smooth from twenty years of bodies doing exactly what I'm doing now.
Close enough that he has to decide whether to shift away.
His thigh is a few inches from mine. The heat off his skin reaches me through the charged air, and charged air has been the defining feature of us since we were teenagers sharing a bed and pretending not to notice.
He doesn't shift away.
I reach out. My thumb finds the scar. Runs along it, slow, the pad of my finger tracing the raised edge from one end to the other.
The tissue is different under my skin — warmer somehow, or maybe that's the contrast with the rest of him, which runs hot, because Trevor Hollander is a furnace in human form and always has been.
The ridge catches against my thumbprint.
Bumpy. Irregular. A topographical map of damage and repair, and my thumb reads it the way you'd read braille, learning the story through touch because the words have never been adequate.
His shoulders go rigid. A sharp inhale through the nose, controlled, the breath you take when something hurts and you're deciding whether to admit it.
His chest doesn't move. His jaw is set so tight the muscle jumps, and from this angle I can see the tension in his neck that means he's holding something back by sheer will.
He doesn't pull back.
My thumb stills at the center of the scar.
Holds there. Pressed against the thickest part of the ridge, where the tissue is raised highest, where whatever went in did the most damage on its way through.
My throat does something complicated. Swallowing doesn't fix it.
Nothing fixes it. The words are right there, stacked behind my teeth like freight cars waiting for a track that never clears:
I know why you left. I know it was because of me — because of what was crackling between us in this house, in that bed, in the inches of charged air we've carried since we were old enough to know what the charge meant and young enough to be terrified by it.
I know that when the word came back you'd been shot, I put a bottle in my hand and didn't put it down for months.
I know Mick found me sleeping it off behind a dumpster and dragged me to his garage and handed me a wrench and a reason to show up, and the reason was the closest thing to absolution I've ever gotten, and it still wasn't enough.
I know I was the reason you left, and the reason you ended up on a rooftop overseas when the round came through, because if I'd treated you like a person instead of a threat — if I'd looked at you the way I'm looking at you now instead of the way I looked at you then, all antagonism and forced disdain and the cruelty of a teenager in love with his stepbrother who can't handle it — you might have stayed, and if you'd stayed you wouldn't have a scar there, or the blankness that shows up in your eyes sometimes when you think nobody's looking.
I don't say any of it. The words live in my throat and die there.
So instead of speaking, I let my whole hand rest flat against his shoulder.
Palm against skin. Warm. Still. The weight of my hand on his body, and the weight of everything that hand means, and the impossibility of getting any of it across through touch when touch is the only language I've got that doesn't come out broken.