Clay
I was used to people looking at me with exasperation and irritation, which came with being the kind of person I was and always had been, really.
My family had always looked at me like that, and even Gina had looked at me like that several times in our relationship and then in our marriage.
Hell, even my own son, who looked so much like me but in his heart was his mother’s son, had given me that look on occasion.
They at least tempered it with affection most of the time, save when they were really pissed.
Reggie though? God, he looked ready to throw me out the nearest window, even if it did mean falling a long way to the ground below.
He peered around the wreckage I’d made of my room last night, and I was pretty sure I could see his future as a mental patient or the victim of a stroke.
Not that I could blame him; this was the second time I’d caused property damage in the past couple of weeks.
If the rumors were true, there was a lot more money than usual coming in, but that probably didn’t mean he was looking to start throwing money into a hole because someone kept breaking shit.
“Please, please, please tell me this wasn’t some kinky sex thing,” he said in a tired voice as he toed at the upturned table’s bent legs. I didn’t even remember using that much force, but well...I wasn’t exactly in a normal state of mind at the time.
I stared at my room with a blank expression before huffing, reminding myself that people had every reason to believe that sort of thing about me, but geez. “C’mon, Reggie. Do you really think I’m going to fuck things up over sex?”
“I do not pretend to understand or know why you do the things you do.”
“Weren’t you a Guide? Like the Guide once upon a time?”
“Yes, Clay, I was, but that doesn’t mean I magically have windows into the soul of every man who comes here.”
“Fine, then use logic.”
“What?”
“Look at me.”
“What about you?”
“If this was because of kinky, rough sex, don’t you think I would look a little more fucked up? I mean, even if I was the one in charge, don’t you think I would have marks? Or don’t you think someone else around here would look rougher than they do?”
He stared at me. “Fine, then please explain how you caused property damage again. And I swear, if you pull out Isaac’s excuse of it being a ‘breakthrough,’ I might just have a ‘breakthrough’ of my own.”
I smiled at that and fidgeted where I sat in the only chair that wasn’t damaged.
I had told Isaac I would handle this on my own, even though he’d insisted he would be there to help me.
But he had already done so much for me in the past twenty-four hours; he didn’t need to be there to clean up my mess as well.
“I guess Isaac would still call it a breakthrough,” I said wryly, wincing when Reggie gave me a withering look. “Let me explain before you start!”
“I am letting you explain, but I’m allowed to give you a dirty look.”
“Would it make it better if I told you it probably is going to help me?”
“Maybe, maybe not. That depends.”
“On?”
“Whether or not I believe it’s a genuine breakthrough or if it’s your, at times, barely controlled temper getting the better of you again,” he said with a sigh.
I peered up at him. “So...you’ve read my file, right?”
He glanced at me, his irritation flickering on his face. “I have.”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“This conversation is starting off on so many good feet.”
“I mean it.”
He searched my expression before sighing and nodding. “I can do that.”
“Over three years ago,” I began slowly, as if I hadn’t been keeping track of the number of days since I had lost my family, down to the exact time I had been told.
“I...well, I was married to a wonderful woman named Gina. She dealt with my bullshit better than most people, but she managed to make me feel like it wasn’t bullshit, or when it was bullshit, it wasn’t a bad thing every time.
She was good at that...making people feel special. ”
Reggie nodded, smiling a little. “I know someone like that.”
I briefly wondered who it could be but pushed the question out of my head.
I couldn’t afford to get distracted; this was hard enough as it was, and being distracted was a good way to give me an out from talking about it.
Not that Reggie didn’t already know my history since he had full access to each guest’s file.
But we were supposed to be pretending he didn’t know, even if his already knowing helped to let me get this out.
“We had a little boy, Mikael,” I explained, and for the hardest part of this entire conversation, I reached out and took hold of the framed picture and carefully walked up to him to hold it out so he could take it in his hands. “He...he was six.”
Reggie’s expression was soft as he took the frame with the same level of care and reverence Isaac had used when he’d carried it.
Actually, no, there was something in his eyes that hadn’t been in Isaac’s, something familiar.
Isaac had looked sad, heartbroken, actually, and so did Reggie, but Reggie looked more like someone reliving their own pain rather than experiencing mine.
“You’ve lost someone close,” I said softly.
He glanced up in surprise before giving a soft laugh. “I, uh...I was married once too. We got about five years, two of them married.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Aneurysm,” he said, gently handing the picture back.
“We had no way of knowing. Most aneurysms give no warning, not unless you’re already digging through someone’s head for other things, and he was the picture of health.
The day he died, I got up, woke him up before I left for work, because if I didn’t, he would end up being late.
Dumbass always stayed up late, even though we both had morning jobs.
He got up that day, poured some coffee, sat down on the couch with his phone, and.
..never got up. I found him when I got home to pick something up I’d forgotten.
..it took me a long time not to blame myself. ”
There was a pause, the kind that was normally filled by all sorts of stock phrases, genuinely meant, but tiresome after so long.
You could only hear so much about how sorry people were, or how, if you needed anything, to let them know, before you started not to care about how genuine or fake it all was; you just didn’t want to hear it anymore.
“A fire,” I said, looking down at the picture, my chest aching at their happy faces peering up at me.
It had been the last vacation we would ever have together, the picture taken a couple of weeks before the fire.
Gina had insisted on having the picture printed and framed the old-fashioned way, even though I had teased her that it was the twenty-first century, and you could get digital photo frames.
Now I was glad she won that battle, because somehow having a physical picture both made it worse and better at the same time.
“They said that...that it was the wiring. They never found out where the fault was, but deep down, I knew where it started, because there was a faulty outlet in the hallway that we could never use that I swore up and down I was going to fix and never did.”
“Maybe,” Reggie said, surprising me, and I looked up to see him looking thoughtful.
“Just like I told Malcolm he was overdue for a health check-up, but I never pushed it. Maybe they could have found something if he had listened to me, and maybe you could have prevented what happened if you’d just fixed that damn outlet.
But...maybe they wouldn’t have found anything if he’d listened, and maybe the faulty wiring wasn’t that outlet.
Maybe it was another room, or the whole damn house. ”
“And we’re never going to know, one way or another, are we?” I asked, strangely reassured by his acceptance that I might have been at fault, or, at the very least, that I could have prevented it from happening.
“Ha! No. Did you ask them to investigate?”
“I wanted to see the reports, but they never concluded exactly where it started. The fire was,” I stopped and swallowed hard, “total in the part of our house where it started, and since they concluded it wasn’t arson, they didn’t dig deeper than that, even when I demanded, needed to know.”
“You did better than me,” Reggie said with a shrug, leaning back against the doorway.
“I had the chance to find out if the aneurysm was detectable, and I...didn’t.
It used to eat at me, even when I refused to know.
I called myself a coward for backing away from the truth when I’d always been someone who believed the truth would set you free.
It turns out that sometimes the truth is fucking terrifying and I would rather not know. ”
“I never got the truth,” I admitted.
“Neither of us did, by choice on my part, by circumstance on yours.”
“How…” I began, then forced myself to take a deep breath.
I remembered the way Isaac looked at me last night, completely calm and without the slightest judgment, just understanding and compassion.
It had given me the strength to pull myself out of my emotional spiral, and awakened something inside me that I hadn’t felt in over three years.
What we’d done last night hadn’t been misguided lust or a way to avoid what was bubbling, boiling, and hissing away in my heart, but a way to.
..connect to someone else. “How did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Deal with not having the truth.”
He sighed. “At some point, I realized that that truth didn’t matter.
Would it have mattered if I had found out that a thorough check-up found the aneurysm waiting to happen?
What if it had been? I would have been eaten up by so much guilt I wouldn’t have been able to function, and I was barely functioning as it was after he died. ”