19. Admissions #2
I barely react as he leans in, pressing a kiss to the top of my head, although my heart jumps in my chest. That, alongside the adrenaline-fueled anxiety keeping it at a full gallop, I worry it’ll stop altogether.
“I’ll be right back.” His words are nearly a whisper.
Despite opening my mouth to say… something, anything. I just close it again.
Despite myself, I inhale him as he passes, heading down the steps.
Watching his lean, muscular frame eat up the space far quicker than it did when I was with him.
Regardless of all the past feelings and messiness of our current situation, I can’t think of anyone more equipped to be at my side.
Gideon knows me; it’s clear that’s never changed.
He knows that even if the answer is shattering, the waiting will shatter me too, worse even.
Already, I can feel last night’s dinner roiling in my gut as I picture everyone from our small town that I love, the people I care about, lying in the woods.
Strung up by the neck like Uncle Rodney.
Pale, stiff, lifeless, and off-kilter like Dad. Bruised and naked like Mrs. Bell.
He’s over there for so long, led back deep into the woods, past the yellow tape, and out of sight.
Untucking my arms from the blankets, I lift the hem of my hoodie, prodding at the discolored flesh at my side where he’d gripped me…
pinched me. He’d done that when we were kids too, but never that hard…
never hard enough to bruise. Before it was when he was jealous, when I spoke to someone else or about someone else for too long, and he got tired of hearing it.
When my attention had strayed from him longer than he deemed appropriate.
I numbly settle the hoodie back in place, planting my now bare feet on the cold porch, stopping the swing from moving.
Eventually, I stand, heading inside for hot tea, which I start the water for, then forget about.
Pacing, walking around blindly and without purpose, doing this or that.
Anything to shed some of this nervous energy.
When I finally make it back to the teapot, the water has evaporated almost to the bottom.
The side is lined with white dots from where it boiled for too long.
The front door opens and shuts, making me drop it.
I gasp as it slams into the burner, bracing on the stove to let out a relieved breath that it landed bottom down and I didn’t just scald myself.
When I whirl toward Gideon, he doesn’t speak, not at first. Just stares at me the way he does, the way he always has.
I feel like a live wire jerking on the ground next to a puddle.
A puddle lapping at both of our toes. Each of us ready, waiting for the electricity to hit, for our bodies to lock up. Neither of us steps out of the puddle.
We wouldn’t dare.
“Bryan Jordan.”
My reaction isn’t immediate. Until it is. My knees buckle, sending me careening to the aged, cracked linoleum. My back slams into the front of the oven so hard I finally hear the teapot clank over, the sizzle and hiss of the little water that remained soaking the hot burner.
My hands grip my chest, trying to calm my pounding heart, and Gideon watches, studying my reaction like a scientist with a microscope. “How?” I breathe, the question alone sending tears overflowing from my eyes, rapidly tracking down my cheeks.
I don’t even know why I’m crying.
Why I care after all he’s done.
But… still I do cry. Everything bubbles up to the surface, spilling over like the teapot above my head.
“They don’t know yet. Still waiting for state officials to take over the scene, they arrived just as I left.”
God, Jess…
Their mom is going to be heartbroken.
It’s that… the thought of them that breaks the dam holding guttural sobs at bay.
How much Hilary Jordan loves her kids, and they take advantage of that.
Gideon walks over, his form as intimidating as a vengeful spirit as he comes to a stop over me, ignoring my unraveling at his feet as he cleans up the mess overhead.
He doesn’t even look down when a droplet of the boiling water hits my arm, making me jerk.
His movements are rigid, rough… angry. I watch them get increasingly more so; I watch Gideon get mad.
The reaction confuses me enough that slowly my sobs get softer, quieter.
I’m not ready for it when he slaps the wet towel he used to clean up the water in the sink.
A curse from underneath his breath is all that’s traded between us before he jerks down and lifts me up like a doll.
I screech, bracing for pain as he slams me down on the stovetop, the surface still hot…
painfully so, but not enough to do any damage.
The same can’t be said for the burner he only just turned off, mere inches from my ass.
I lurch away from it, only for him to force his way between my legs, his hands gripping the edge of the stove on either side of me.
Caging me in, trapping me.
Forcing me to choose.
The burner, or his chest.
I jerk into him so hard I grunt, my cries making my entire body shake with the weight of them. When his chin rests on the top of my head, I snuggle closer, deeper, suddenly desperate for the contact even though he’s not being gentle. He’s being Gideon. And right now… I’m okay with that.
“You’re really that torn up about your boyfriend?” he asks, his voice sardonic and cutting.
I let out a rough, angry sound, sobbing as I press my forehead into his collarbone, trying to what?
Get him to leave? Get closer? Hurt him? I don’t know why I keep doing it, grinding and shoving my forehead into him so hard it makes my own head ache, not even bothering to ask him how he knows about Bryan.
It’s Gideon. Of course, he just knows. “I fucking hated him.” The moment the ugly little truth leaves my mouth, I stop my useless assault on his collarbone.
Even my own cries fall silent at the admission.
I hated him.
It feels wrong to say it out loud now. To admit that maybe I hated him long before what he did in that shack… that maybe I’d hated him from the very start. Because I hadn’t wanted to date him, or her, for that matter. It was just an occasional fun thing until they changed everything.
I hadn’t wanted to fuck him or sleep with him beside me or hold his hand or smile at his stupid Christmas presents.
I only did those things because… I don’t know because Jess told me to.
So we wouldn’t get caught sleeping together, because her mom had suspected she was gay for a while, and they fought about it all the time.
Even after we stopped messing around with each other, I just…
kept doing all those things that I hated, and it made him even uglier to me, even more… disgusting.
“He was disgusting,” I whisper it, knowing how terrible it is. How bad a person I am for saying it out loud with his body lying up in the woods. But knowing I’m in the presence of the only person in the entire world who won’t judge me for it.
“Then why are you crying?”
I sniffle and answer honestly, “I don’t know.”
With that, he lifts me from the stovetop, his touch gentler than it was before.
My tears are still running, but they’re quiet now, my hands shaking as I wrap my arms around his neck.
My legs wrap tightly around his tapered hips, my core pressing against him as I snuggle deeper into his arms. Neither the tears nor the shaking, I think, have anything to do with Bryan anymore, if they ever did at all.
Gideon is like an eclipse, blocking out everything but us, as he carries me through the hall of my childhood home as easily as I’d navigate his.