Chapter 12 #3
“Whatever.” Oscar rolled his eyes and ripped his gloves off the side of the stall. He pocketed his knife and clipped my shoulder roughly with his. “I didn’t want to clean up dead boy anyway.”
Dead boy.
I waited for Oscar to leave the barn. I stood completely still, staring at the loud poker game until the rest of the guys noticed my scowl and waddled their way out to play in the main house.
Sometime later, as I leaned my back against the stall and refused to step inside, I heard multiple tires spin over the dirt road and gravel driveway.
“Jamie?” I croaked out once I knew it was safe.
How long had I been crying? My fingers brushed the wetness of my pale cheeks. They felt burning hot. I struggled to pull air past my swollen lips.
Swallowing back the bile rising in my throat, I grabbed the black metal bar and ripped the stall door through the sliding track.
It caught against its own weight but eventually moved to uncover the lifeless body of Jamison.
I didn’t even know his last name, but I knew his eyes were a stunning crystal blue even after death.
I knew people called him Jamie—his mother would call her baby boy Jamie when she cheered for him on the sidelines.
It was only a dead body. Killing was in my blood; I shouldn’t be experiencing this like some out-of-body karma. I should stand with my head high and be proud the bratva had my back.
My knees slammed against the rubber matt under piles of old horse hay. It had been years since my uncle kept horses here. He only restocked the hay when it was too bloody to hide the smell. Hay didn’t absorb much, but it covered set-in stains.
I brushed my leather palm against his bloody cheek. His tight curls and small ears made him appear stuck in a trance. I guided a single curl behind his ear and gulped as it sprang back into place. My other hand joined his face, cradling his cheeks in my hands.
He was so cold.
Grief ripped through my chest like someone had yanked at my heart, and I collapsed with a suffocating sob. I tugged on the material of his shirt until he flopped over the tops of my thighs, digging my bare fingers into his bloody hair.
When I finally felt like I wasn’t asphyxiating, my trembling crimson fingers brushed his eyes closed, and I kissed the only place on his face where blood wasn’t sticking to his cold flesh.
“I’m sorry, Jamie.” My bottom lip trembled. I could feel in my stomach how violently I was shaking. “You were going to go so far.”
He was. He was going to go much further than I ever would. People my age would excel in what they loved because they were born into families that supported them. He would have changed the world of baseball. And for that, I wanted him to know how sorry I was that his life had to end this way.
“I-I’m so sorry.”
My words were barely above a whisper, but I hoped in death, he could hear me. I hoped, in death, he hated me. I hoped I burned in hell. I didn’t even know him. I didn’t know anything about him besides the fact his mother stood in her seat every time he took the field.
This was her son. This was the son she cheered for every baseball game. This was the son of the woman I rolled my eyes at the one time I watched Christian get tagged out by Jamison during baseball season.
This was the baby boy of a proud single mother who would never recover.
I rocked back and forth, shaking my head. My fingers brushed his hair in the same direction I remembered seeing his mother fix his curls after the games. She knew her child better than me. I didn’t know which way his messy hair needed to go.
“It’s okay.” I wished my whispers were true. I laughed softly to myself, wondering how the fuck I would hide a body when I knew nothing about it. I was a fucking hurricane who killed everyone around me. “It’s going… It’s going to be okay.”
I’m going to be okay. I’m going to be okay.
I sat there with him for hours, long enough for more tires to pull out and leave me in a dark barn, only illuminated by the moonlight in the dark, overcast skies. The warmth of his body faded away, and the color in his lips, a soft, blushing pink, turned a deceiving, frosty blue.
In the distance, I could hear the squealing of pigs. Someone must have fed them before leaving. They loved any scraps they could get their snouts on.
As I sank down into the hay and loudly screaming, my head fell back. I glared up at the ceiling of the barn, hoping the bitches who directed my path in life fell from heaven right here, right now. I hoped they smashed their halos on this concrete so hard, they shattered.
“Fuck the angels.” I pushed myself off the floor and wobbled to the side of the stall. The temptation to vomit grew as I hung my heavy head.
I squeezed my eyes shut tight and tried to ignore the sound of pigs in the distance. They were too loud. It was a direction, though, the only direction I knew I could go in and never worry about anyone catching me covered in Jamison’s blood, hiding his body somewhere over the state line.
Pigs destroyed everything. It was what they did.