Chapter 19
I don’t know where the hell they’re taking me, but I’ve been pretending to be asleep for the last three hours, hoping Mommy Dearest in the front seat doesn’t sic her piece of shit son on me again.
It hurt like a motherfucker when he stabbed me with his godforsaken syringe, and I don’t want to deal with that again.
My arms and legs are unbound, surprisingly, and they’ve placed me in the back seat of their pickup truck.
My back is to the front of the car, so I’m sure they can’t see my face.
That’s why I allow myself this moment. A tear trickles down my cheek, because I miss Bubba, and I miss Johnny.
A few weeks ago, if someone told me I’d be lying in the backseat of some hillbilly’s truck, crying over Johnny Boyd and Bubba Jenkins, I probably would have slapped them right in the face.
Now, it’s truer than it’s ever been, because I feel all shattered and broken inside.
Not only am I missing my daddies, but Barb hasn’t said a single goddamn word to me since these bastards kidnapped me. She’s been uncharacteristically quiet the entire trip, and that tells me she’s scared. Scared of being called out. Terrified of my wrath.
Her downfall will be spectacular.
I jolt in the seat when a hand gently strokes my shoulder, ruining all chances of remaining hidden.
“Sweetie, we’re going to pull over for gas.
Why don’t you get out with me and stretch your legs,” Ladonna says.
I look over my shoulder, momentarily forgetting the tears trickling down my cheeks.
The moment she spots them, her expression falls, and she gets this distant look in her eyes.
Her hand finds my cheek again, and she gives me the most genuine smile I’ve ever seen.
“I’m really sorry about the way this happened, but I’m happy to get to spend a little time with the man who stole my boy’s heart.
” She chuckles softly. “It’s still strange to think of Johnny with another man, let alone two. ”
“It’s not so strange,” Pete says, clearing this throat, eyes locked on the road, hands at ten and two on the steering wheel.
His eyes dart up to meet mine in the rearview mirror, and red heat stains his cheeks.
“It makes sense. He’s always been different.
” Pete swallows. “He’s always thought he was different, somehow.
Now, he’s got a name for it. He don’t like girls.
Or maybe he likes them a little, but it’s not nearly as strong as this new thing.
This special thing.” His blush spreads even more. “This precious thing.”
Right. Well, Pete is clearly a raging bisexual, and I’ve got a feeling Jaden Jenkins is his awakening.
They’ll probably wind up falling madly in love with some silly, ridiculous kink, weirder than either of Austin and my kinks, but that’s a story for another day.
Probably not, actually, but I’ll consider it canon.
“Where are you taking me?” I ask Ladonna, because I don’t have time for Pete’s late-life bi awakening.
Johnny would probably kill me dead for calling someone younger than him a late-life anything, but I’m young, unhung, and full of cum, so I know a little more about being youthful than either of them.
“Home, sweetie,” she says to me, her thumb gently brushing my cheek. “We’re going home to Dunsberry.”
“You’ve kidnapped me. I don’t know what part of Bumfuck, Nowhere, you grew up—”
“We grew up in Dunsberry,” Pete interjects. “Why are you acting like you don’t know where we live?”
“I’m speaking in hyperbole,” I argue, my voice quite shrill, because I’m fucking done with Pete.
Bringing my voice to a decibel that won’t pierce the eardrums of any dogs within a five-mile radius, I add, “Stop making this about you. I’ve been kidnapped, and here you are, using it as a platform to work out the confusing effects of your shifting sexuality. Knock it off, Pete.”
Pete rolls his eyes. Prick.
“We’re taking you back to the farm.” Ladonna says.
“Why?”
She removes her hand from my cheek, and much to my surprise, my skin feels so much colder without her there.
She was caressing me the way a mother caresses her pride and joy.
It’s a touch I don’t remember feeling before, and now it’s gone, and all the fear and lonesomeness resigning in my heart magnify tenfold, but then her hand finds mine, and she weaves our fingers together.
“I may not understand all this, but I’ve always known my Johnny was different. He’s always been a bit softer than his brothers.”
“Don’t let him hear you say that,” both Pete and I say in unison. His eyes light up in the rearview mirror, but I just scowl at him.
“I wish death upon you,” I remind him. A pout settles on his face, but what does he have to pout about?
He’s not the one who has been stolen from the men he loves.
He’s not lying in the backseat of this hoarder’s nest of a truck, surrounded by farming equipment, fertilizer-covered boots, and random seeds lining the floorboard that reminds me of that steakhouse that lets you throw peanut shells on the floor.
Johnny and Bubba took me there a few weeks ago.
Oh, what I’d give to go back there, just to see the smile Johnny gave me after I stuck two straws in my nose and used them to make bubbles in Bubba’s clam chowder.
Who the fuck orders clam chowder at a steakhouse?
Pete scoffs and breaks eye contact. As he should, because if he even thinks about giving me some sort of sassy retort, I’ll punch his lights out. Okay, maybe I won’t, but the sentiment remains. If he’s thinking about being a prick, he better think again.
He flicks the blinker, veers off the interstate, and pulls into a gas station just a few yards away, parking next to a gas pump.
I have one chance to escape, probably, and this is it.
I could run. I could sprint across the field behind the gas station, into the residential area just past the fence, and beg a good Samaritan to allow me the use of their phone.
I would call Bubba, and he’d make everything okay, because he always makes everything okay, and Johnny would tell me how worried about me he’s been.
He’d tell me he wants me to come home, because it’s where I belong, and then he’d stay on the phone with me the whole trip, much to the dismay of the phone owner.
Johnny and Bubba are the only place I feel safe, and I don’t feel very safe right now.
My legs won’t work the way I want them to.
I don’t run. I barely move a muscle. Ladonna has to step out of the truck and open the back door just to get me to stir, and when I do, I sit upright, not wanting to leave the car.
Pete goes inside to pay the clerk, but Ladonna just stands beside me, smiling sympathetically.
“I want to go home,” I whisper. “Please, just take me home.”
Her mouth ghosts my temple before she puckers and kisses me on the forehead.
I don’t know what it is about the Boyd family’s fondness for forehead kisses, but they’re just as heartwarming coming from her as they are coming from Johnny, so it must be hereditary.
They should trademark them. Bottle them up and sell them for pocket money.
“That’s exactly what I’m doing, sweetie,” she says.
“You’re coming home. All my boys are. Don’t worry.
They know where we’re heading, and they'll be right behind. Barbara was very clear that as soon as we get home, we have to give your parents’ address to Barrett.
” I blink at her, because her words are stupid.
“It’s all part of the plan. You’ll have to trust me on this. ”
“You kidnapped me. I don’t have to trust shit.”
“Goodness. Your mouth is just about as bad as Pete’s. I never had to worry about that with Johnny. He’s such a good boy.”
“He really is,” I agree, missing him like crazy. “I didn’t think so at first, though. I hated him at first.”
“I don’t know how anyone could ever hate Johnny.”
“Spend a little time with him. It will become clear very quickly,” I say, but she obviously doesn’t understand my brand of humor, because she just stares at like I told her I fucked her husband. “Don’t worry, it’s our thing. We’re real jerks to each other sometimes.”
“Is that how your kind court each other?”
I wipe away the last tear from my cheek and raise an eyebrow. “My kind?”
She nods. “I don’t remember what it was that Barbara kept calling you. Homosapien, maybe?”
“Homosexual,” I correct, “And I don’t really care for the generalization, but yeah. It’s pretty accurate.”
“How fascinating,” she says, and she sounds like she means it. “I don’t care for cruelty as a form of flattery, but whatever works for you is fine by me. Your journey is yours, it is not mine. All I can do is let it unfold and show as much support as I can find.”
I gape at her. “Good God.”
Her eyebrows scrunch together. “What’s wrong? Did I say something untoward?”
“No, Ms. Ladonna. It’s just … your poetry. That was beautiful. Was it Faulkner?”
She blinks a few times, my question lost in translation, apparently.
Bubba would’ve understood it. Hell, Bubba would’ve been the one asking the question, and now, I’m stuck with a very kind woman who doesn’t understand me at all, and her crackpot son with his shiftable sexuality.
It’s all too much, and I want to go home.
“It’s just something Bubba and I joke about,” I finally say, breaking the silence. “I miss him. I miss them both.” I squeeze her wrist, pleading with my eyes. “Please, Ms. Ladonna. Please, just let me call him. He’s got to be worried sick.”
She cranes her neck and looks out the window like she’s trying to be incognito, fuck knows why. After a pause, she shakes her head. “We ain’t made it far enough yet.”
“Far enough for what?” I ask, but I’m not sure I want to know the answer.
“Far enough that he can’t catch up.”
I swallow. Though nothing about the truck’s structure has changed, it feels like the walls are closing in around me.
Is that a threat? Why wouldn’t she want him to catch up?
I thought she said they would be following us here.
What the fuck does she plan on doing to me in the meantime, exactly?
It’s a question I don’t have the courage to ask, because she’s hill folk, and God knows what hill folk do to those they deem unfit to date their son.
I mean, that has to be what this is about, right?
She has to be lying about them coming after me.
Why else would she take me away from the only home I’ve ever felt at home in?
“You don’t want him to find us?”
“Not until we get home. I imagine he’s probably already on his way.
At least, I hope he is. I’d hate for you to be stuck in Dunsberry without a shoulder to lean on.
” She lifts her hand and pats her shoulder.
“But if worst comes to worst and it takes them a while to get there, I’ve got a shoulder too, and you’re welcome to lean on it whenever you need. ”
I don’t want her fucking shoulder. I don’t want anything from her. I just want to go home.
The other door opens, and I look back in time to spot Pete pointing another syringe at me. I’m not fast enough, and he jabs it into my calf, making me squeal out in pain.
Ladonna gives her son a death glare. “If you do that again, you’re walking home.
I was trying to chit-chat. I had hoped we could bond on the drive back, because Lord knows you’re not one for idle conversation.
” She turns her focus back to me, still cupping my cheek, still staring fondly.
It’s a bit creepy, but, somehow, for some strange reason, I don’t hate it.
“Get some sleep, sweetheart. When we’re an hour or two outside town, I’ll call them. ”
I don’t know how she plans to call them, because she doesn’t have a phone, and I doubt she has his number memorized like I do, even though there’s absolutely zero reason for me to memorize someone’s phone number in this day and age.
I know it by heart, so I should be able to just blurt it out, but my lips are too heavy to make them move.
I guess we’re shit out of luck. My eyelids draw closer and closer together until the only sight I see is her smiling face through the narrowest of slits.
It’s a big smile, though. A warm one. It’s a smile that feels true.
I can only hope it’s as true as it seems.