25. Detonation
Detonation
Bo
Kissing Falon is like heaven. Her lips are soft, and she smells like jasmine and vanilla, and I am not thinking about a single thing that isn't this moment.
Three months. Three months of talking myself out of it, talking myself around it, telling myself I was being honorable and responsible and keeping my word. And now Falon Williams is kissing me on a dance floor in the middle of Everwood ‘s Fourth of July.
Her hands are warm on my chest.
I can’t break away from her.
The music is playing in the background. The lights are glowing overhead, and the summer air is sweet and clean.
I hum when I open my eyes and see her blushing like it’s our first kiss. I would do anything to see this look on her face every day.
Then, a slight movement from the corner of the dance floor catches my attention. My heart sinks, and I still feel slightly. Tyler is standing twenty feet away, staring straight at me.
Falon sees something in my eyes, and I know she knows something is wrong, but I can’t let her know how much my heart betrays me.
The fiddler is still playing something slow, the town is watching the band, then, Bang.
Pop. Bang. The firework show starts, and the park is bathed in red and white light.
Tyler looks terrible. He’s thinner than when I last left him. The cast on his arm makes him look almost sad and broken.
I’ve known Tyler since kindergarten, and Tyler doesn’t show anything. He’ll take all he can before letting out a grunt. But looking at him now, the wreck took its toll. By the looks of him, he most likely just walked off a transport and came straight into the worst possible moment.
His eyes bore into mine as I hold his sister in a kiss. I can’t imagine a worse way for him to find out about us and a worse moment for him to come home.
Surgery had taken its toll, and too many sleepless nights wear a person down to the studs. The cast on his left arm contrasts against his civilian clothes, and he's standing at the edge of the dance floor with his good arm folded across his chest, and his jaw set like concrete.
He's just watched me hold his sister on a dance floor in the town we grew up in, and the look on his face is the quietest, most controlled version of fury I have ever seen on another human being.
I lower my hands from Falon's face, and she turns.
I step up beside her. Every instinct urges me to protect her. To place myself between them and take the brunt of his anger.
The three of us stand there while the fireworks go off overhead. My PTSD is on high alert, but not because of the fireworks. They are just background noise compared to the tension roiling off Tyler right now.
Tyler pays no heed to the show going off overhead.
Neither do I.
Rowdy presses into my leg from the left. He'd been at the bench, but he knows. He saw my posture and felt my tension from his post near the edge of the dance floor. Never taking his eyes off me.
"Tyler." Falon's voice comes out carefully and softly. She takes one step forward, and he shifts his eyes to her, and I watch something move across his face. It’s pain, anger, love, and disappointment. It's an emotion that only comes from loving someone and being terrified for them.
"Hey, bug." His voice is quiet. Just for her. "You look good."
"You look exhausted," she says.
The corner of his mouth moves. Almost. "Long flight."
Then his eyes come back to me, and the almost-smile is gone.
We look at each other, and a whole conversation happens in that one look. How could you? What were you thinking? I thought I could trust you. Years of friendship between us and a childhood promise have been broken.
"Bo." He says my name flat and even makes it sound like a curse.
"Tyler." I’d expected him to be angry, and I thought I’d be able to explain before he saw us, but here he was, and I had nothing to say. Not now.
He says nothing, but turns his back and walks away, slinging his duffel over his shoulder.
My mind stutters for a moment. Do I stay, or follow? Falon’s grip on my arm tightens when he turns his back, and I can tell her heart is breaking. A few tears streak her cheeks.
“Bo,” she whimpers.
“I know, honey, be patient. We both knew this would happen.” I try to reassure her, but I can feel her shudder when she buries her face against my chest.
I push her away from my chest, and I take her hand and squeeze it. "Find your parents," I say quietly. "I'll call you."
"Wait, Bo?—"
"This won’t be pretty," I say that because I know Tyler Williams, and Tyler isn’t going to listen to sense.
Not now. He didn’t just drag himself off a transport with a broken arm and a concussion to make a scene at the Fourth of July.
He came home because he needed to, and right now he needs to say things to me that he can't say in front of his sister.
"I'll call you," I say again. "I promise. "
She holds my hand for one more second before I let go and follow Tyler.
He's already through the park and walking down Main Street and moving at a quick and angry pace by the time I catch up. I fall into step beside him, and we walk in silence for half a block, the sound of the fireworks finale rolling out behind us in bursts of color and noise.
Rowdy walks on my left, doing his job at keeping me calm, or at least calm-ish.
Tyler stops at the corner. He sets his bag down, rolls his good shoulder, and looks at me with anger and betrayal.
"How long?" he says.
"Since we were seventeen."
He closes his eyes. Opens them. "I meant this summer."
"I know what you meant." I keep my voice level. "Since I got back." He rolled his shoulder again.
"How long have you been lying to me?"
"Since I was seventeen. I know I wasn’t as honest as I should've been." I don't dress it up. "I should have called you. I know that."
"You think?" He shifts his weight, and I see the pain the surgery cost him for a second before he controls it.
"Bo, I asked you to watch out for her. I asked you because I trusted you.
You were the one person I thought—" He stops.
Jaw tight. "I was out there. I was doing my job. And you were here, and you?—"
“I know,” I interrupt, but I won’t talk about this here. Not on Main Street. You and I can hash this out all you want, but it won’t be here.” I gesture to my truck just a half block away. “I’m more than happy to discuss this at home.”
Tyler narrows his eyes and follows me to the truck. He throws his bag in the back and hops in, slamming the door shut.
“I’m listening,” he seethes. Folding his good arm over his chest.
"I fell in love with her," I say, knowing he wasn’t going to like it. In fact, I knew he was going to hate it. "That wasn't the plan."
"The plan? That was nowhere near the plan." He laughs once, short and humorless. "Great. That's great, Bo."
"I know you're angry."
"You don't know the half of it."
"Then tell me."
He looks at me. The streetlights catch the lines around his eyes that weren't there two years ago, the set of his mouth that's gotten harder since deployment.
He's twenty-six years old, and he looks forty in this light, and I think about the crash, about what it must have been like, about the fact that he's standing here in a cast when he could very easily not be standing at all.
"She's my little sister," he says. Finally.
"She's the one thing in my life that hasn't changed.
Every time I come home, she's there. Same, Falon.
Same ranch, same boots, same stubborn, impossible, wonderful—" He stops.
"I needed that. You understand? I needed to know that one thing was going to stay the same. "
"I understand that. But you do realize that if it wasn’t me, it was going to be somebody."
"Somebody. Ha.”
“Ha, what. You don’t think that Falon would ever date?”
“None that stick, but now I have to deal with you.”
“I see,” I said, understanding part of what he was so upset about. He didn’t want me to break her heart.
“Do you? Because what I walked into back there didn't look like you understood it."
"Tyler." I wait until he looks at me. "You were keeping her the same for you. That's not the same as what's good for her."
The silence after that is long and specific.
"You promised," Tyler says.
"I know."
"I looked you in the eye?—"
"I know what the promise was. I was there.
" I keep my voice even. "And I kept it for eight years.
Eight years, Ty. I stayed away. I kept my distance.
I came back here in April because Pearl needed me and because I thought I could handle it, and I did handle it, until I couldn't anymore.
" I pause. "And then Falon made a choice. Her choice. Not mine."
"She's twenty-three."
"I know how old she is."
"She doesn't always?—"
"Don't." I say it quietly but firmly. "Don't finish that sentence. Falon Williams is the most capable, clear-headed, deliberately intentional person I have ever met in my life, and you know that. You know that better than anyone."
He goes quiet. I can see the weight of the pain, the tiredness, and anger surging through him. “Just take me home.”
I pull into the Andersons’, or Falon’s, drive and cut the engine. Falon's porch light is on, along with a few side table lights and the soft glow from the kitchen window.
I pull my keys out of the ignition and open the door, and Tyler grabs my arm with his good arm. I still.
“You’re living with her?” he says through his teeth. His grip tightens with anger.
Rowdy, who has been sitting on the middle console, starts growling and slightly bares his teeth.
“It’s okay, buddy,” I say, patting his neck.
“No, I’m not living with her. I’m staying in the guest house,” I say, taking a few deep breaths and trying hard not to let the sudden grip on my arm throw me over. I take a few deep inhales and breathe out through my mouth. Tyler sees me and lets go of my arm.
The guest house is dark except for the porch light.