CHAPTER THIRTY
CONNECTICUT, AGE THIRTY
It was wild how quickly five years could pass when life was more or less playing out like the same old broken record.
Sleep. Work. Home. Repeat.
Sure, sometimes, I'd throw in the occasional trip to the grocery store. Every now and then, I'd set myself up on another date destined to go nowhere, just to take a break from the monotony, and once in a blue moon, Luke and I would go out to dinner or catch a movie or something. But as the years spread out before us, those dates and random outings stretched fewer and further between, and honestly, I wasn't sure I cared anymore. Maybe I'd care eventually. In a few weeks, a year, a decade … I couldn't say. But right now, it didn't bother me.
Routine was predictable. It was comfortable. It was harder to get hurt when you knew exactly what every day would bring, and I couldn't imagine myself ever thinking differently. In fact, how had I ever been convinced that anything could possibly be better than this in the first place?
Luke, on the other hand, didn't agree.
He was worrying about me again, the way he had after our parents died. Back when Melanie had talked him into taking me to therapy.
Therapy . I scoffed, thinking about it now, as I pulled the meatloaf from the oven.
My time with Dr. Sibilia hadn't been without warrant, but she had also been wrong about so many things. Number one being that there was any benefit to baring my soul to others.
A heart could only be rejected and hurt so many times before the scars finally turned to stone.
Lately, I'd had that uncanny feeling that it was about to be hurt again. Badly. And the safest thing to do was exactly what I'd been doing—nothing.
If only I could get Luke to stop prodding at me.
“So, hey, you wanna go to the movies tomorrow?” he asked abruptly, walking into the kitchen.
I glanced over my shoulder into the dining room, looking for Luke's latest sexual conquest, only to find it empty. “Where's—”
“Sent her home. She's a vegetarian, apparently.”
I looked into the pan and eyed the meatloaf he'd known I was making for three days since I'd been grocery shopping for the week. “You could've told me to make something else.”
“What?” He snorted an incredulous laugh as he opened the fridge to grab a can of root beer. “I'm not sacrificing meatloaf for pussy, dude. Never gonna happen.”
“And I wonder why you're single,” I grumbled.
“No, you don't.”
It was true; I didn't. Luke had made it very clear years ago that he was done with commitment. One serious girlfriend—one fiancée —had been more than enough for him, and although he'd also insisted plenty over the years that he wasn't happy , he also seemed to be somewhat content. And just in the way I didn't see any reason to change my own routine, far be it from me to insist he should change his.
But again, the prodding .
“Anyway, so you wanna go or not?”
I carried the meatloaf pan into the dining room to join the mashed potatoes and corn on the table. “Not really.”
“Come on. There's probably something creepy you'd like to see.”
“It's a waste of money,” I muttered, sitting down and spooning some potatoes onto my plate.
“We should go out,” he continued to urge, taking his chair across from mine.
There were two empty chairs beside his, another two beside mine. If it wasn’t for the fact that this was the same table we'd shared with our parents, I would've had half a mind to just get rid of the damn thing and give it to someone who could use the extra seating. We certainly didn't.
“We can watch movies here. And it’s Halloween anyway. We have to hand out candy.”
He sighed as he sliced off a slab of meatloaf and dropped it onto his plate. “You know, you're kinda starting to freak me out again.”
“So you've said.”
His eyes darted toward mine. “And that doesn't matter to you?”
I took a bite of mashed potatoes and lifted my shoulders high to my ears. “Not saying it doesn't matter, Luke. I just don't know what you want me to do about it. I don't want to go out. I don't want to waste my money on movies. I just want to go to work, come home, hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, eat dinner, and draw for a while. Okay? I don't understand why this is such a problem for you.”
“Because I don't think it's healthy.”
“Yeah, okay. And you'd know what's healthy. Sure.” I fought against rolling my eyes while I cut off a slice of meatloaf, lobbing it onto my plate. “When's the last time you got tested for STDs, huh? You know, if you're suddenly so health-conscious.”
The comment was cruel and backhanded, and I knew it. Yet I felt no shame or fear in leveling him with a stony glare, only to be met with one just as angry and harsh. If he wanted to throw a punch at me, that was fine. It wouldn't be the first time, and even though I might not have gone to the gym with him in a long time, I'd stayed in shape on my own, thanks to my job at the cemetery and the weights we kept in the basement. I could take him.
Anything to keep him from going out. Anything to keep him home .
“You know what? Go fuck yourself.” He spat the words across the table, but didn't get up from his chair.
I didn't bother responding with any of the snappy retorts that crossed my mind as we both resumed eating in tension-filled silence. And that was fine. Just so long as he dropped the subject of going out and came home after work instead.
I could remember a time years ago when I could be honest with him about the strong intuitive feelings I occasionally got. But it had been a long time since I'd had them, an even longer time since I'd felt it necessary to mention it to him, and now, I was just afraid he'd lump that in with the other reasons he thought I was going crazy—again.
Pissing him off seemed like the next best thing, and I needed him to be mad enough to come home.
***
The last bits of late October daylight left the driveway hazy as I pulled up to the garage door. Luke's bike wasn't where it belonged. The empty spot beside my car gave me a moment of gut-gurgling pause, but with a deep breath, I brushed it off. There were plenty of nights where he came home later, if he'd gotten wrapped up in a big repair job at the shop. Reason calmed me down from my panic, and I went inside to cook dinner.
Then, it was put on the table, and I began to eat, taking small, uninterested bites of a burger I had little taste for in between answering the door for the few trick-or-treaters that came by.
Luke's chair was empty. So was his spot in the driveway.
I pushed the plate away, slumped back, and scrubbed my hands over my cheeks before grabbing my phone and calling his number. It rang twice before being sent to voice mail.
“What the fuck, Luke?” I grumbled and called again.
Voice mail.
“Hey, asshole,” I said after the tone. “Just wondering where the hell you are. Would've been nice if you had told me not to make dinner for you. Call—”
I was interrupted by the faint vibration against my palm, and I cut off the message to find he'd sent me a text.
Calm your tits. At the movies. About to sit down .
Luke never went to the movies alone, and I couldn't chalk it up to a date. Luke didn't date ; he was unapologetically a bang-and-run kind of guy. He was still pissed off from last night's disagreement and had gone to the movies to spite me.
My nerves sprang to life, bringing my legs to a frantic jitter beneath the table as I aggressively tapped out a reply.
Oh, nice. Thanks for letting me know. Your dinner is getting cold.
I'll heat it up when I get home.
Whatever.
You wanna come down? You could get here now and just miss the trailers.
I said I didn't want to go.
You're gonna make me sad.
That's fine.
Crying into my popcorn now.
You always liked it extra salty anyway.
I don't need my popcorn to be extra salty when I have your whiny ass to come home to later.
I'm not the one who told you to go fuck yourself. Just pointing that out.
The conversation felt like the closest thing to an apology as we were going to get, and I sighed, letting the tension leave my shoulders. But that sick forewarning never left the pit of my stomach, and I stared at my screen, waiting for those three little dots to start jumping again.
They never came.
The movie must've started , I told myself as I grabbed my plate and took my food to the living room. I set it on the coffee table and turned on the TV, hoping something would distract me until my brother once again walked through the door.
The latest episode of Game of Thrones was just about to come on, and I sat through fifteen minutes of previews as I choked down my burger before the announcer finally said, “And now, the HBO original series, Game of Thrones .”
The theatrical, instrumental theme song began to flood the speakers as the image on the screen took me on a trip through the fantastical lands I'd grown attached to over the years, and I sank against the back of the worn, old couch, ready to immerse myself in the show.
That was when Luke came home.
The front door swung open with his dramatic entrance, and he slammed it shut, locking it and peeking through the big oval window.
Then, he turned around to look at me and said, “Charlie.”
My mouth flooded with saliva as a wave of nausea rolled over me at the sight of his heaving chest and shaking hands. His face, drained of all color. His eyes, big and wild.
“Luke,” I replied slowly, carefully. “W-what's up?”
He walked toward me, propelled by purpose. The closer he came, the louder his unsteady breathing became. “Ch-Charlie, I …” He thrust his hands into his hair, his face crumpled, and to my horror, he began to cry. “I fucked up. Oh God, oh my God , I-I don't know what I'm gonna do. I-I-I don’t know what I’m gonna do .”
He came to stand before me, then dropped to his knees, grappling for my arms with shaking hands and pressing his face to my thigh.
“What did you do?” I asked, struggling to hold on to what little calm I had left, even as my heart raced to a dangerous speed quicker than it had taken for my older brother to fall apart in front of me.
Luke released his hold on my arms as he took a deep breath and sat back on the balls of his feet. He raked back his mussed-up hair and groaned as he scrubbed at his splotchy red face.
Then, he pulled in a deep, quivering breath and pinned me with his watery gaze, and just as a fresh wave of tears began to fall, he said the three words that would change both of our lives forever.
“I … I killed Ritchie.”
The words left his lips.
His breath came from his open, slack-jawed mouth in short puffs as he looked into my eyes with a wide, vacant stare. But my brow furrowed as my hammering heart banged against my eardrums. I shook my head uncontrollably, my eyes watering in response to the tears falling from Luke's.
“ What ?” There was no way I had heard him correctly. No way in fucking hell. “ Ritchie ? How did … what ?! Y-y-you haven't seen—”
“He was there—”
“ Where ?”
“I walked in, and he was there , and I tried to ignore him, Charlie. I-I tried to fucking block him out—”
“I don't fucking understand what's happening right now!” I squeezed my eyes shut and reached for my hair, stabbing my fingers between the strands and pulling tightly.
“But, oh God , he wouldn't shut up. He wouldn't fucking shut up . He never ever, ever knew how to shut the fuck up!”
I leaned forward, pressing my head against the palms of my hands. The adrenaline pulsed through my veins, my mind zipping in one direction to the other, unable to collect my thoughts and hold on to a single one long enough to process what was going on. Luke was here. Luke was talking. Luke was sitting before me, crying and heading seriously close to hyperventilation, and I wasn't far behind.
This is really happening.
The sobering thought cleared a path through the barrage of discombobulated nothing in my head. I dropped my hands, and despite the force behind every beat of my heart, I made my best attempt at looking my brother in the eye.
The guy who had sat right there and told me I was a lucky butthole for no longer having to go to school.
The guy who had broken his best friend's nose in the basement after he wished me dead.
Sirens joined the sound of the TV, approaching from somewhere in the distance.
He was the one who'd set me up with my first girlfriend. The one who had taken me to my first therapy session. The one who had broken it off with his fiancée to confess the truth of my girlfriend's infidelity.
The sirens were closer now.
“No,” I whispered through a lump in my throat that was making it harder and harder for me to breathe. “You didn't do anything. You couldn't—”
“I did it, Charlie. I killed him,” he whispered back, like the rapidly approaching police could hear his confession.
“No.” I shook my head. “No, no, no. You … God, you aren't a fucking killer . You—”
Luke and I both turned our heads abruptly toward the cascade of red, white, and blue lights flashing against the sheer curtains covering the living room window. One, two, three cop cars pulled up to the house without a single care of where or how they'd parked.
My brother reached out and grabbed my shoulders firmly in his hands. “Look at me. Right now. Look at me.”
I didn't want to look at him. I didn't want to stare into his eyes and have him tell me the things I didn't want to believe were true because how the fuck could they be? I didn't want to see him, red-eyed and tear-streaked, afraid that this might be the last time I ever saw him.
God, don't make me say goodbye.
Not again.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
The front door rattled against the force.
“Lucas Corbin!” shouted a voice I didn't know. “If you're in there, come out peacefully or—”
“Charlie!” Luke gritted from between clenched teeth. “Look at me!”
I did, and the moment my eyes met his, as terrified as my own, I was certain the world as I'd known it to be for the last fifteen years of my life had exploded and turned to dust.
“I love you, okay?”
Of all the things he could've said to me in that moment, that was what he'd chosen to say. That he loved me.
“I love you too,” I said, my voice strangled. “Luke, what the fuck? I don't—”
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Lucas Corbin!”
He looked over his shoulder and dropped his hands to his lap. “Can I tell you a secret?”
I stared at the door. “Huh?”
“I’m scared, Charlie. I’m really fuckin’ scared.”
He didn’t give me a chance to reply. On unsteady legs, he stood. He pushed his hair back and wiped his face hastily with his palms. Then, he turned and headed toward the door, holding his head high and keeping his shoulders squared. Acting every bit of the cocky son of a bitch I'd known him to be while knowing that, deep down, he was as scared shitless as he or I had ever been in our lives.
As I watched his back, Game of Thrones on the TV and those goddamn lights flashing over everything in the living room, it struck like a brick to the head that I'd never see him walk through that door again.
He had killed a man. I didn't know how, and I didn't know why, but I knew it to be true.
Luke opened the door to three cops holding guns and wearing bulletproof vests. They were only doing their job, none of it was their fault, but, God, I hated them in that moment. I hated them for not giving us more time. I hated them for not letting me question my own damn brother before they could get the chance.
“Lucas Corbin?”
“Yeah,” Luke replied, pushing the door open fully and raising his hands weakly. Showing them he was unarmed.
I stood slowly from the couch and took a couple of cautious steps forward.
None of this can be real.
I don't want it to be real.
God, please let me wake up. I want to fucking wake up.
The cop grabbed Luke by the arm and spun him around. He holstered his gun and patted Luke down. “Anybody in there with you?”
“Just my brother. He didn't do anything. He has nothing to do with this.”
One of the other cops moved around them and stepped into the house, spotting me right away. For some reason, I held my hands up, and she offered a curt smile as she approached and quickly frisked her hands over my body.
“You can put your hands down,” she said and took out a pad of paper. “What's your name?”
Somewhere within my realm of understanding, I knew Luke was being guided from the house. I knew he was cooperating, knew he was looking at me the entire time. I knew the woman beside me was asking repeatedly for my name. I knew a handful of other cops were coming into the house and searching around as if there was anything to find.
But all I could focus on, all I could process, was that I'd never see Luke in this house again. And I was alone. He had abandoned me, and as much as I’d meant it when I said I loved him, I hated him a little too.