Chapter Eighteen #2
The leader kept their eyes locked together as he leisurely put on his coat, flipping up the collar as if that was still a thing, stupid wannabe gangster.
But the others had gotten their coats on as well.
As Hilary had warned, there was no talk of payment, and they’d ordered expensive shit too.
Lots of meat. Shrimp. The beautiful portobellos that had come in that morning.
Trenton knew he’d have to cover for them.
If not for the cost of the meal, then at least the price of the ingredients.
Archie wouldn’t insist, but he’d probably expect it.
As if he paid him enough to be eating restaurant food.
But they were leaving. At least they were leaving, and Hilary was out of their hands. That was the part that mattered.
Trenton relaxed too soon, his stance slackening. Maybe that was what the leader had been waiting for, because as the man turned toward the door, something shifted in his face, a nasty kind of look.
“Oh,” the man said, as if only just noticing the plates on the table, like they’d come to the restaurant for pleasantries and not to rob him of a meal. “We shouldn’t waste food.”
It happened quick—too quick—the positioning for it perfect. And then the remains of the Shrimp Alfredo were shoved with vicious force at Hilary’s face.
It might have blinded him, one of those stubby fingers skating the ring of an eye socket before shoving into Hilary’s mouth, and with it came a flash of something in Trenton’s mind.
A flash of others. Of men. Or boys. A group of them as these had been.
Trenton saw little else. Not even enough to recognize the overlap.
It was just the feeling it brought, one of such clotted rage everything else was subsumed.
He didn’t feel his body move. Didn’t see through his eyes.
Didn’t even hear the sounds of breaking flesh.
Even that one touch—the one that mattered—was drowned in it, hopeless to it, until that piercing—
“Trent!”
He came aware with a dizzying kind of jolt, blinking the world into focus.
There was the leader, though he didn’t look like himself, purpling under his grip, veins bulging on the back of Trenton’s hands with all the force he was putting into it.
And Hilary. Hilary around him, pulling at him and insisting, “Let go, Trent. Let go.”
It was surprise that did it. The feeling of that thick neck bulging against his palms. His hands opened, and then he was vomiting, the dizziness mixed with revulsion, vision tilting as he made the adjustment back to reality.
But Hilary was there, and the hold on his arm wasn’t restraint, but support.
“I’m here, Trent. Tell me what you need. ”
There were two others he’d gotten during the disappeared time. One was moving for the door, crawling, a bloody hand pressed over his face. The other wasn’t conscious, face down on the floor, as he’d been when—
The pain came without warning. Absent, and then abruptly there, the flare of it like nothing he could compare it to. It was an explosive kind of heat too sharp even to cry out against, the breath stolen away from his lungs as he gripped his arm just below the elbow as if he might rip it free.
“What is it? Where?” Hilary’s voice was urgent, a command to be answered.
“Arm.” It was all he could gasp, the only word in his head.
His sleeve was wrenched up. Almost he grabbed at it, at Hilary’s wrist, to stop him, sure that whatever lay beneath the material would explode outward as soon as it was free. But there was nothing. No bulging break. No barely contained explosion.
“Not real.” Hilary was still urgent, but something in his voice was promising solutions. “Not anymore, it isn’t.”
But it had to be. No pain like that could be imagined. But even as he thought it, the feeling was fading. Still there, but already an echo of itself, dwindling with every moment.
Someone offered something—a handkerchief, and the hand attached to it was thin and papery with blue veins close to the surface, but it wasn’t trembling. Debra.
“Orville’s gone and called the police,” she said, looking a little put out. “I told him not to, but you know how stubborn he is. Says it’s better to do it than to have these bastards be the ones to call.”
Hilary took the square of fabric and passed it to Trenton. It smelled faintly of lavender. “Thanks for the warning. Is anyone hurt?”
Debra sniffed. “No one who matters.” She waved over at her husband, who was dithering a short distance away. “I’ll tell him to wait for them outside. He does better when he thinks he’s being useful. Doris, dear, is it really time for the lemon cake?”
Hilary’s arm was around Trenton’s shoulders. That was what he was focusing on. The warmth of it. The steadiness there. “Can you stand?” Hilary asked, pulling at him. “Just to that table over there. I’ll get you something to drink.”
Trenton couldn’t let go. The shadow of that feeling and the panic at the thought of meeting with it again kept him clamping down on the arm that held him, but Hilary didn’t break the grip, giving him instead the water already on the table.
“Just a little,” the man insisted when he tried to refuse, a choking kind of lump pushing into his throat as if he were the one being strangled.
His shirt was sticking to him, the sick sweat covering him and still coming, his mind racing with nothing, unable to grip onto anything, lending to that feeling of urgency.
When he heard the sirens outside the restaurant, panic came. “No.” He wanted to run, but the dizziness swung back up with a vengeance when he tried to stand. “I can’t—”
“It’s alright.” Hilary had not let go of him for a moment, that hand gripping tight.
And still, Trenton was going to be sick again, his stomach churning, his throat burning with the taste of it. “There’s something you don’t know. Because you don’t know—”
“I know.”
Hilary was never supposed to find out. Trenton had avoided closeness—had avoided anything that might have steered them to this exact situation, and here they were anyway. He groaned, the feeling like a cancer inside him. He was going to lose Hilary. All this, and he was going to lose—
“I know about it.” And Hilary’s grip was on his face, a tight hold on his chin. “The incident when you were a boy. The details. I know everything.”
And the man did. Trenton could see that he did, and that was impossible.
He himself didn’t know the details, only what the case reports said and what the people at the center had told him.
Deaths. Five murders, though it was true he’d been ruled mentally unfit to be tried for it.
The case had been deemed one of self-defense, though Trenton himself couldn’t have argued for it one way or the other.
He had no memories of the act and all the time surrounding it, that entire year a blank as if it had been cut out and his life roughly sewn back together without it, jagged and ill fitting.
When the door opened, the panic came. The police were here, and it would end. Like starting over. “I can’t.” His knees wouldn’t take him. He had to run, but his knees—“Not again. I can’t do this.”
“You won’t.” Hilary’s grip was almost painful, but still separate, each divot of his fingers outlined in white. “You’re with me.”
“You’ll leave.”
But Hilary refused that. “We’re going home together once they’re gone. You see this hand? It won’t let go of you. Not for a moment.”