twenty-nine #2
Maybe it wasn’t about me at all. I picture Duke the first time he came to my house, trading barbs with my brother.
I remember him wanting to go to my house later, saying it was to rub it in Colt’s face.
Now I’m not sure if he meant it the way I thought at the time.
Now I see a million moments I missed. And I picture moments I didn’t see at all—Duke sitting in the dark where I did so many times, not much more than a kid himself.
I see him now as he must have been then, a fourteen-year-old boy filled with rage and confusion and guilt for feelings he couldn’t understand or change, feelings that would never be acceptable in his family.
I picture him cutting his name into the wall the way I did, the way Colt did, because it was the only way he could express what he wanted, what he wasn’t allowed to want.
I’m still sitting there when the door opens, and my brother sticks his head in. “You okay?” he asks. “I think we’re going to take off in the morning. Get back on the road where we belong. Should I say goodbye now?”
I stuff the photos into the folder before he can see. But after a second, I motion him over, and I shove it into his hands. “Did you know about this?”
He swallows and looks down at it, but he doesn’t open it.
“Did you?” I press, my heart somehow breaking again, though it’s already in smithereens.
He opens the folder slowly, as if he’s reluctant to see what’s inside. His thumb skims over the first picture, and he stares down at it, not looking up to answer.
“Colt?” I whisper, my throat tight.
“Yes, I fucking knew.”
He slams the folder shut without looking at anything else and hurls it across the room. It crashes into the wall, and the pictures scatter, tumbling down across the floor.
“How?” I ask.
Colt rakes a hand through his hair. “I didn’t know about… That,” he says, gesturing to the mess before turning away, like he can’t bear to see more than he already has.
“How’d you know?” I press.
He paces in front of the door a moment, one hand over the bottom of his face, the other planted on his hip. At last, he turns to me, his eyes steely and unflinching. “We fucked.”
I nod slowly. “For how long?”
“What?” He blinks at me, then gives a quick shake of his head. “No. It was one time. Christ, Mabel. We fucked once. ”
“And then?”
“What do you mean, and then? ” he demands, resuming his pacing, like he wants to run but won’t let himself.
Colt didn’t fail me like the others, but he thinks he did.
To atone for his part in it, Dad covered up a murder for me, became an accomplice after the fact when he got rid of the body.
Colt stays to face my questions, though I hold him blameless.
He did what he could, and what he had to do, just like I did for him.
“You like men too,” I point out after a moment’s silence.
He never told me that, but I don’t watch men for nothing.
I never brought it up because it didn’t matter to me.
But I noticed it the first time he brought Maverick over to hang out.
The way they touched each other, as familiar as he was with our cousins, though he’d only known Maverick a few months.
The different nature of those touches, almost possessive, strangely intimate—Maverick giving Colt’s hip a little squeeze when he left the room, Colt’s fingers ghosting over the back of Maverick’s neck when he walked behind the couch.
That made me remember just how many nights he spent away when things got bad, and how he talked about Maverick in a way he’d never talked about his friends before.
“It wasn’t like that,” Colt says, holding up a hand and stopping me from going too far down that path. “Duke was straight. He just wanted… Something extreme.”
I swallow hard, my pulse hammering as I stare at the evidence strewn across the floor. “He loved you.”
“What do you want me to say?” Colt asks, stopping and dropping his hands to his sides, his shoulders slumping in defeat.
“That it’s my fault? That he’d be alive if I could’ve loved him back and gotten him away from Baron?
Maybe you’re right. But I couldn’t. Or wouldn’t.
I don’t even fucking know anymore. Does it really even matter?
He’s gone, and yes, I fucking failed him.
After what he did to me, and to you… Mom, Dad, our whole goddamn family was destroyed.
I’m sorry I couldn’t forgive him. I’m not a fucking saint like everyone else in this town. ”
“He tried to protect you,” I whisper.
“Bullshit,” Colt says flatly. “Don’t try to rewrite history now that he’s dead. He was there for all of it, just like his brothers. He enjoyed it. He doesn’t get to be romanticized now.”
“Do you want to tell Baron?”
Colt scowls. “Why would I do that?”
“To be honest about who he was, like you said. He didn’t get to live his truth. Shouldn’t he get to die in it?”
Colt thinks a minute. “If he wanted Baron to know, he would have told him,” he says at last. “I think we should honor what he chose in life. I think that’s how he’d want to be remembered. But none of us can really know. He was your boyfriend. You should do what you think is right for his memory.”
I go to the mess and start picking up the pictures. Tears drip down my face, but I ignore them. I need to get this cleaned up before anyone sees. Colt’s right. He left Baron with the image of him that he wanted him to have.
After a minute, Colt joins me, crouching to sweep the pictures back into a pile.
When we’re done, we stand facing each other in my childhood bedroom, the room where he came to find me hiding when our parents fought, where he sat with me in the closet, our backs pressed to the wall, both of us knowing he was the reason for all of it, blameless or not.
“Do you think that’s why he was with me?” I ask. “I’m the closest he could get to you?”
“Maybe I was the closest he could get to you,” Colt says. “He loved you first.”
My throat tightens, and I think about what it must have been like for him after I left. Did he really love me that much? I didn’t know he was capable. Colt says he was straight. Would he look for pieces of me in everyone, even a man, just to feel close to me for a moment?
“I think you’re right,” I say at last. “I don’t think Baron needs to know.”
He loved you first.
The grief hits me all at once, not like a tsunami but like a lightning strike.
I go to my knees on Duke’s bedroom floor, and Colt sinks to his knees beside me.
He wraps his arms around me, and I fold into him.
I let my tears drip onto his shirt, and I pretend I don’t see his falling with mine, soaking the fabric in our mingled Darling guilt and grief.
When we’re done, I tell Colt I’ll burn the folder, and we go downstairs together. Everyone is still up, lingering after the memorial, though the guests have gone home. When I see Baron there, guilt twists inside me. He looks at us like he knows. Or maybe, like he knows that we know.
Not for the first time, I’m reminded of the way he insisted on burning himself to match his brother, and before that, of all the times they switched places on me, until I didn’t know one from the other, right from wrong. Until I thought I was losing my mind.
They did that on purpose.
Like Colt said, Duke participated equally, reveled in our destruction, laughed as we screamed in agony. He wasn’t innocent. Now he’s paid.
And Baron has lost the only thing he ever truly loved.
I was always trying to figure out what it was, the way to hurt him, and now I know. There’s no way to hurt him anymore.
In a sick way, one I never would have chosen, I’ve won the game.
It’s over.
As I look around at the stricken faces left, though, there’s no joy to be found in victory.
Crystal sits on the floor between Devlin’s feet, looking exhausted and puffy, while he rubs her shoulders.
Beside his cousin, Preston sits on the couch, while Dolly sits on the floor next to Crystal, patting her leg and offering comforting words.
At the end of the sectional, Eliza sits draped over King’s lap next, murmuring to him and stroking his cheek.
Harper is squeezed into the loveseat with Royal, both of them glassy-eyed with grief and alcohol but secure in each other.
Baron sits alone in an armchair, an untouched drink in one hand.
In my pocket, I curl my fingers around the bottle I found at Christmas.
I’ll never use it, but I keep it as a reminder.
Dahlia is real. I’m not crazy. Someone loved me, and not just the boy I bewitched, ensnared in my web, and wrapped up like a precious gift.
It’s what I wanted from the very first day he spoke to me, when I knew he truly saw me, saw that I was different and came closer instead of running away.
That was when I knew that he was special. And now he’s mine forever.
I shiver at the thought.
Gloria pats the sofa next to her, scooting down so Colt can join her.
I watch my boyfriend watching her boyfriend move across the room to her.
I watch him set his drink down with a little more force than necessary.
He grabs me and drags me down on his lap, his grip on my hips bruising, as if he’s punishing me for the crimes I haven’t committed instead of the ones I have.
The crime of being who I am instead of what he wants.
I promise myself that I will never punish him for doing the same.
I know that ultimately it doesn’t matter. I will never really know. I can only trust his word as much as he trusts mine. Which is to say, not at all.
But I am not crazy. I will not let him make me think so. Even when I don’t know what’s real, I know that much.
And I know three things for sure.
We are both liars. We both have secrets. And neither of us will ever tell.