Chapter 22
Peter Fenton
I was twelve the first time Derrick Hope brought me home to his family like I was a stray dog he wanted to adopt.
His home had floors that were clear enough to walk on, they had hot water and cable TV, and his dad made dinner that they ate together at the same clean table.
I stood around like it was my first day on Earth.
I went mute and had to be told everything to do, and Derrick was so kind and helpful that he explained it all to me like his family was the weird one.
He didn’t know the truth, but his dad did, and I couldn’t meet the man’s eyes even when he spoke to me with the kindness he’d passed on to his son.
That summer, Gabriel Hope let me and his son make our own room in the loft inside their barn. “You boys can sleep inside,” he’d told Derrick the first night of summer vacation before we’d spread out our sleeping bags and settled in with a camping lantern between us.
“Petey likes being out here more, I think,” Derrick whispered, hoping I hadn’t heard. While Gabriel Hope worried about us being comfortable in sleeping bags, my old man didn’t care that I’d gone missing for that whole summer.
Now I was 26 in a dead body, but I was back in the same place.
It had me wondering if maybe that night when Santos bit me had maybe been my death after all.
This was some strange version of Hell, to be brought back to this place in some endless, unbreaking loop.
I took a drag of my cigarette, then let the filter slip through my fingers down to the first floor, where it bounced onto the loose pile of butts I’d collected that night.
I leaned forward through the bars of the loft’s railing to look at them, my own fucked up version of tea leaves that might whisper clues for my own future to come.
Fallon. That’s what I saw. What I always saw.
She had to be my future. I leaned my elbow on the bar and pressed my mouth to my palm.
Another loop. This was where I’d lost her the first time around, too, back when I was skinny and buzzing with casual drug use, pretending I could hold down a job at this ranch doing hard manual labor.
I’d lost her through my own damn incompetence.
I’d been happy to rot in bed at her place and ignore my obligations to be on the ranch that morning at dawn, but she’d forced me off her mattress, shoved my clothes onto me like I was a damn toddler, and driven me out here herself, and that’s when she’d met her Prince Charming, the perfect Derrick Hope.
I clenched my hand around the metal bar. He was dead, but my bitter envy had only grown stronger.
I wasn’t keeping track of time back then, so it could have been a week or six months before the shaky tower I was sitting on, a pyramid of empty beer bottles, was knocked over by Derrick chucking a fastball straight at me. I’d seen it coming, of course, but it didn’t make the tumble hurt any less.
“Are you and Fallon together?” he asked after keeping quiet the whole morning as we worked together on the ranch.
First, I laughed. Then the jealousy flooded in when I realized why he was asking. It tasted like blood on my tongue in a time when it wasn’t sweet.
“We’re not together.”
There had only been a few times over the course of our friendship when I wanted to punch Derrick, but my fist was itching for it then.
He looked at me like the truth was written on my forehead, and my hand actually went up to swipe over the skin there.
It took a long time for him to ask the question that was hanging between us.
“Are you in love with her?”
No laugh came out, no matter how hard I willed it to happen.
I was too hollow inside, and the gusts of air from my open mouth sounded more like whimpers.
Derrick’s stupid, kind eyes were on me, and I couldn’t lie to him.
The idiot would have given up his chance at being with Fallon for me if I asked him to.
I was such a bastard I even considered it.
I hadn’t become quite so evil yet, though.
“It doesn’t matter, man. I know who I am just as much as you do. She deserves more.” I wiped at my nose with the back of my hand and gave up on my leaning. I had to pretend to be busy, just so he wouldn’t see how pathetic I was.
“Petey,” he said. I could already hear all those warm and fuzzy, perfect-Hope-family platitudes about how I could be a good man. It would be a waste of breath.
“Please, Derrick. Go for it. Please. If it can’t be me, at least let it be you. And it can’t be me.”
“It could.”
Derrick still saw the world like a child.
He really believed men like me could change with the power of love.
He was perfect for Fallon and her black and white, all or nothing world.
Two foolish idealists who’d probably spend the rest of their lives together.
They could hold hands at my funeral. How sweet.
“It won’t be. She’s yours. Take care of her, okay?”
“You really love her.” Derrick was all surprise and wonder, like he was seeing a goddamn miracle.
He didn’t understand that love didn’t mean much for happiness and he’d never get to live long enough to learn that lesson.
Hell, for people like me, love was almost always a form of pain.
And if I made Fallon one of those people, too — if I broke her — I couldn’t.
I was so afraid to love her wrong that it was better I didn’t do it at all.
That was how it happened. How I’d lost Fallon one morning on the ranch.
I’d expected it, but I hadn’t been ready.
The heartbeat that rushed in my ears pounded like the chimes of midnight.
The spell that had made my life bearable for a short, sweet period of time was broken by the weight of a few words.
I’d just wanted a little more time with Fallon.
She was Derrick’s now, though, and better for it.
I just wished I could have had a little more time with her.
Now I was right back where it ended, years later. It had started again, though, right here. A week ago, she’d taken me into herself, and we’d made love, and I could get more time with her.
I shook my empty cigarette pack, fooling myself into believing one might just be hiding around the corner. No such luck. Without that to occupy my fingers and lips, there was nothing left to distract me from the constant ache, that addiction deeper even than my hunger for blood.
I needed to see Fallon again.