Chapter 20 Jericho
JERICHO
The fall fest is packed today. School is out for the first day of fall break so every family within a twenty mile radius decided that today was the day to come.
It’s nice for me to be kept busy, it keeps my mind off of the important things I should be thinking about, but refuse to.
I’m manning the baked goods for my mom, offering up help to people when they ask for it and making small talk with people while they look at the array of sweets my mom concocted.
Her and Ema ran off thirty minutes ago to go see what other vendors are offering, leaving me to hold down the fort.
It’s fine though. It is. Even if I can see Raiden painting faces for little kids the next booth over, smiling and telling the little girl in his chair how adorable she looks while he carefully traces his paint brush filled with pink paint across her face.
He sticks the tip of his tongue out the corner of his mouth in concentration, playing with his piercing, and I lose all semblance of mind as I stare at him.
This is not going well. I can’t keep my eyes off him, my mind replaying our kiss over and over again until I can explain in detail every nanosecond our lips were pressed together.
Raiden lifts his face up, and I quickly turn my head away so he doesn't catch me staring at him. Pathetic, I know.
Hollis and Connor stopped by earlier, they left Noah and Ezra in charge of the booth.
Ezra, I can understand. Out of all of them, he’s the most level-headed.
Noah, not so much. I scan the interior of the community building, looking for anyone to offer me a reprieve.
I need a minute to get out of here and get my bearings together.
I need Connor to stop back by, because my mom wouldn’t mind if I left him here while I left for a moment.
There’s no one. The bastards can probably smell my desperation so they’re avoiding me.
“Jericho? Is that you?” A feminine voice asks, walking up to the booth, holding the hand of a young child. She looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t put a name to her face.
“Yeah, that’s me.” I chuckle awkwardly, and she smiles, juggling the bags in her hands so she can reach her hand out to me. She has a firm grip and pumps my hand up twice before stepping back.
“Sophie, remember? We were in the same grade.”
I want to slap myself on the forehead. Of course. She’s changed a lot since high school, maturing that way that people do after they have kids.
“And Damon, right? My mom was telling me all about you,” I say to the small kid who’s tucked against his mom’s leg and looking up at me with suspicious blue eyes. He holds a spiderman figurine under his arm and I get a bright idea. “Hey, buddy. What if I told you Spiderman was here right now?”
He darts his gaze up to his mom and I hold back my chuckle at seeing his excitement. “Momma?” Damon asks sweetly, taking his gaze off his mom for a minute to look at me.
“You got him started now. I’ll never hear the end of it until I take him to meet Spiderman,” Sophie says, rubbing her hand lovingly across the kids' hair.
I lower my voice, hoping to not be overheard by Damon. “My buddy Connor has a booth on the end, it’s a private security firm. He has a few of the other employees dressed up. I was Spiderman last year but I passed the gauntlet to someone else.”
Sophie chuckles, holding Damon’s hand in hers and looking around the area to find the booth I’m talking about. When she spots it, she shoots me a grateful smile.
“Well, it was nice running into you! Your mom said you and some friends will be over at her house on Halloween? If having a kid there is going to cramp–” I cut her off.
“Your kid isn’t going to be a problem, if anything my friend Hollis is going to love having someone with his same mentality to run around with. He’s a toddler himself.”
I watch her as she walks away, dodging past families and other stragglers. I feel a pang of sympathy for her, having to do it all by herself. But from our short interaction, it seems like she has it down to a science.
“Cute kid,” Raiden says, sidling up beside me. Close, too close. I can feel his body heat and smell the scent of his floral perfume burrowing itself into my senses. He painted his own face, the bright array of the rainbow curving delicately across his right eye and down to his cheek.
Fuck, why is he so perfect? Can’t he tell how much he’s fucking with my head?
“That’s Damon. Do you remember Sophie? That’s her and her kid.”
His eyes go wide for a moment as he whips his head to find them, but they’ve disappeared into the crowd. “I do remember, I haven’t seen her since graduation.”
“Did she not come to your wedding?” It’s out before I can realize what I’ve said and I flinch, tensing myself to prepare for his answer.
“No, no one came,” he says, melancholy painted all over his face. I reach my hand out to offer him comfort, and then realize what I’m doing. In public. Where anyone could see.
“I’m sorry.”
“You always offer up apologies as if these things are your fault.” He doesn’t look at me, instead his eyes are unfocused, staring off into the distance like he’s deep in a memory.
“Josh told me he didn’t want anyone to come, he wanted it to be intimate.
” Raiden mocks the word intimate and shakes his head, clearing his thoughts.
“It doesn’t matter anymore, we deserved each other.
We were both awful, but I couldn’t take it with him any longer.
If I thought our relationship in high school was bad, our marriage was even worse. ”
Why are we having this conversation right now? In this crowded public place. This isn’t the place for this conversation, but I can’t be trusted alone with him to have the conversation anywhere else.
“Then why did you do it?” It’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times. I want to know why I wasn’t good enough. What Josh could offer him that I couldn’t.
“Because he made me feel like I could be loved. He didn’t love me, he loved the idea of me, but I thought something was better than nothing. That was my first mistake.”
How many mistakes did you make?
“That sucks,” Raiden turns his head and his eyes catch on mine and a smile cracks through his stoic features.
“I mean it, I couldn’t imagine what you’ve been through.
And I remember how bad it was in high school…
I just wish you would have talked to me.
” And that’s the truth, because I could have reminded him how badly Josh treated him.
I could show him all the ways he deserved to be loved.
“It was hard. Looking back on it now, there were a lot of things I hid from you because I was worried how you would react.” He drops the bomb on me as easily as if we were talking about the weather outside. My heart drops and the pitiful organ thumps sadly.
“What?” I ask, shocked.
“Can we talk about this later? I have my makeup done and this is a conversation that I should have without makeup on.”
“Okay,” I agree way too quickly. My mouth is not on the same wavelength as everything else.
I shouldn’t meet up with him later. I should go home and invite my boyfriend over and we can watch a movie and eat popcorn on my couch.
But as quickly as that thought comes, I shove it away.
It’s shitty of me, but I need to know what secrets Raiden has been keeping from me for all these years.
“You can come over to my apartment. I’ll text you the address. ”
“I don’t have a car, sold it when I moved back in with my parents.
I figured if I needed to go anywhere I could borrow mom’s car.
” Well, that makes this plan even harder.
If I could divert some of the blame, maybe my guilt won’t be so bad tomorrow.
If I do this, I’m consciously making the decision to be alone with him, after everything.
Knowing how my mind and body react to him.
Knowing that I’m going into this with a boyfriend, and willing to risk my relationship with Liam.
“I’ll come pick you up.”
I text Liam, letting him know that I’m leaving the Fall Fest because I’m not feeling well. The text burns a hole in my retinas as I press send, knowing that I’m signing my own death warrant. I despise lying, and that’s what I’m doing. Lying to the one person who has only asked me for honesty.
Liam doesn’t deserve this from me, but even I’m not sure how this is going to play out. I’m not going to end my relationship over something that might be miniscule in the grand scheme of things. That makes me a shitty person, I know. But I do care for Liam, and I don’t want to hurt him.
I just need to figure this out for myself before I make decisions on anything else.
Liam: Do you need me to come over? I can bring soup. :(
I know he was looking forward to going to the Fall Fest, and I feel even worse knowing that he’s going to be disappointed.
But I still don’t change my mind as I pull my truck out of the parking lot and head to Ema and Rodney’s house to pick up Raiden.
He left the community building with his mom after he finished the last face painting.
The clock on the dash flashes with 7:02.
I told my mom my leg was starting to hurt, which is a cop out.
I asked if she would mind me leaving her by herself, and she patted my shoulder telling me to take it easy and to ice the bottom of my leg.
My leg is fine. The abundance of lies are going to crumple, but as I turn on the road to pull onto the familiar road my pulse skyrockets.
Every small second has brought me to this big, life altering moment.
Raiden is waiting for me by the curb, his hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket.
I slow down, not fully parking while he walks into the street to hop into the passenger seat.
“Hey,” he says easily. He fiddles with the screen on my dash, skipping through the songs until he settles on one he likes. It's exactly what he used to do when we were younger, when there wasn’t this distance between us.
I don’t respond. I don’t have a word in my vocabulary that will escape my mouth. The warring emotions inside of me are fighting for release, and I don’t know which one will win.
He’s freshly showered, the strong scent of his body wash filling the cab of the truck. I suck in deep breaths, trying to keep it all for myself.
“I brought a movie, I wasn’t sure if you had it but I thought it would be like old times.” He rummages in a bag I didn’t notice before and my eyes widen. He packed a bag. A bag, full of things, that he’s going to bring to my apartment.
“What movie?” My voice is ragged and I tap my fingers against the steering wheel trying to keep my mind from focusing on what this means. It means nothing. We’re two friends, hanging out and catching up on old times. That’s all. That’s it.
“The Best of Me, you still like that movie right?”
Why me? Why, why why?
I nod, keeping my eyes on the road while he tells me about watching it on the last tour he did. A different city every night, but he loved it. His favorite part was watching Nicholas Sparks movies with the rest of the dance crew.
“I loved watching them cry. Does that make me a sadist?” He cocks his head and looks at me. His lips are shimmery with the lip gloss I watched him swipe on.
“Definitely.” And that would make me a masochist by default since I’m willingly and knowingly subjecting myself to his special brand of torture.
“It also reminded me of you–it was nice to have that reminder of home while I was on the road. It felt so lonely sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job.
Being the head choreographer and dancer was everything I wanted, but it wasn’t enough.
I still feel like I need more. I know what I’m missing, but I’ve been too scared to take it. ”
“What are you missing?”
I know his answer before he even opens his mouth, and I tense my body waiting for the blow to land.
Even with my preparation I’m not ready for the single syllable word to be uttered into the cab of the truck, tainting it with this memory for years to come.
“You.”