CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CONNECTICUT, PRESENT DAY
The moment that puzzle piece had slid into place, Soldier's cautious demeanor toward me had disappeared altogether. So had Noah's, and I suspected that had everything to do with his father and nothing to do with me. Now, the two of them chatted with me like we'd been best friends forever, and on one hand, I enjoyed it. Soldier knew things about my brother that I didn't. He had stories that I couldn't tell, and the moment dinner was finished, and we retired to the living room to give our bellies a rest before dessert, he dived headfirst into one like he'd been waiting to share it forever.
“God, your brother, man …” Soldier leaned back against the couch cushions, crossing his ankle over his knee and stretching his arm across the back.
His eyes twinkled with mirth, and his grin made my own cheeks hurt. Luke always had that effect on people. He was likable, even at his worst, and at his best …
The guy could've gone places if he hadn't messed things up so damn badly.
But we'd already established that.
“I gotta tell you about this one time. So, there was this lady officer at Wayward—I think her name was Shawna, but I could be wrong. Anyway, she came to work there sometime around the time Zero—uh, Luke,” he corrected for my benefit, probably, “was brought in. We called him Pretty Boy for a while, for obvious reasons, and Shawna, or whatever the hell her name was, agreed, I guess. ‘Cause it didn't take that guy long to, uh”—he raised a brow and shifted his gaze toward the toddler playing with a set of blocks on the floor—“ get friendly , if you catch my drift.”
Noah rolled his eyes in Soldier's direction. “You act like I'm a little kid. I know what sex is, Dad.”
Soldier pulled in a deep breath and met the teenager's glare. “Yeah, I'm well aware. The censoring was for your little brother, wiseass.”
“Oh.” Noah's cheeks pinked as he sank deeper into the cushions.
“Anyway,” Soldier continued, the blended look of amusement and nostalgia returning to his face, “the way it was there, you could get away with some stuff, if you knew your way around. But if you weren't careful, it was easy to get caught. So, one night …” He stopped for a laugh to bubble past his lips, and I missed my brother so much that my heart throbbed angrily in my chest. “Luke and Shawna met up in the dorm bathroom. Now, I don't know if you know what that looks like.”
I shook my head.
Soldier sat up straighter and began to gesture with his hands, like he was painting a picture. “So, you have a row of urinals, a few stalls, and then a row of showerheads. That's it. Not many places in there to hide, is what I'm saying, okay?”
I nodded.
“So, Luke was in there with Shawna, who wasn't, uh, exactly discreet. I was awake, reading in my bunk, and I heard footsteps coming down the hall. I thought to myself, Oh shit. This lady's about to lose her job, and Zero's about to get a crapload of solitary . So, I jumped out of bed, got to the bathroom, and there was your brother with this chick up against the wall. She saw me in there, asked if I wanna get in on the action, and I was like, 'No, lady, and honestly, you probably wanna stop unless you wanna be out of a job in the morning.’”
He paused again to laugh, and I smiled, excited to know what came next.
“Luke never told me about this,” I said as I waited.
Soldier wiped the moisture from his eyes and said, “Oh, man, just wait. It gets better.”
He cleared his throat to continue, and now, he had the attention of Chris, Barbara, Ray, and Stormy, who had all come in from the kitchen after clearing the dinner table. Stormy came to sit by my side on the love seat, automatically taking my hand in hers as her head rested comfortably against my shoulder. All our eyes were aimed at Soldier, with the exception of Miles, who was more interested in building towers.
I imagined myself looking in on this sight, like a fly on the wall. All of us sitting around, sharing stories about a man not with us, the way you did when remembering fond moments with the dead.
The thought struck hard and morose. Sad . I didn’t like it. It didn’t sit well. I couldn't decide if I wanted Soldier to go on or just shut up altogether. But because he couldn't read my mind, he began to speak again.
“So, there was this other guard—”
“Harry?” Ray asked.
Soldier shook his head. “Not Harry. He was usually there during the days. No, this dude was, uh … not the nicest guy in the world. They scheduled him at night ‘cause a lot of guys liked to pull shit when it was lights out, like good ol' Zero. Anyway, we heard footsteps coming toward the bathroom, and Zero shoved Shawna toward one of the stalls. Then, before I knew what this freakin' guy was doing, he grabbed me, yanked my pants down, and shoved me up against the wall where he’d just had Shawna. The guard walked in, saw us there, naked from the waist down, and he said, 'Huh. It's about time someone made Mason their bitch. I always knew he'd sound like a woman.' Then, he turned around and left, having no idea whatsoever that Shawna was hiding in the stall, standing on the toilet seat.”
Ray waited for him to stop speaking before asking, “Oh my God, that's so funny. What did you do?”
He looked at his wife, taken aback. “Are you kidding me? I turned around, punched him in the fuckin' face, and told him to buy me dinner first the next time he decided to rub his junk all over my ass.”
I couldn't help it; I laughed. We all did—hard. I laughed until my stomach ached and my face hurt, and when I was done, I realized I was also crying. Not from the laughter either—well, not entirely anyway. No, I was just sad , and I knew I’d said it before, so many times, but fucking hell, I missed my brother so damn much. I wished he'd been the one to tell me that story. I wished he'd known he could tell me about it. But … well, actually, I wouldn't have let him, would I? I never did. I had hated him so much for sharing any of the goodness he'd found behind bars, hated him so much for leaving me to fend for myself in a world that had never wanted me, and I'd spent every minute of my limited time with him making him feel bad for me.
Now, I just wished I'd had allowed him to make me laugh instead.
I quickly dried my eyes and played it cool, like it was only the amusement from Soldier’s story that had forced the tears to stream down my face. Nobody seemed to pay any attention to my emotional slip or hasty recovery, not even Stormy. But when my eyes landed on Soldier, I knew he knew, and I didn't like it.
“I saw him not too long ago when I was visiting my uncle Levi,” he said, suddenly somber and more serious than I preferred. “He said he hadn't seen you in a long time.”
Barbara glanced at me, suspicion in her eyes—or maybe I had imagined it.
“I moved,” I replied sheepishly.
“Yeah, I know. He said you had to leave.”
Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, help me.
My eyes dodged toward Stormy, then to her mom, dad, sister, nephew, then back to Stormy. They had all stilled, all keeping their gazes on the floor or their hands or the chocolate-colored couch cushions, like they could sense the tension filling the air and didn't want to let a sliver of breath loose, so as not to upset the balance.
“I relocated,” I answered stupidly, like rewording the same response would end the conversation.
“From what he said, you had no reason to run away like that. You hadn’t done anything wrong , Charlie,” Soldier said, laying it out and confirming that he did know. God, maybe he knew everything. “You know that, right?”
Stormy turned then, her gaze drilling a hole into the side of my face. “What is he talking about?”
Soldier tipped his head back, his lips parting. Realizing in an instant that he was the only other person in this room who had any idea about what had happened outside my bedroom door.
My throat struggled to swallow the fear down as I tried to speak. “I—”
“Nobody in town would leave him alone after his brother was thrown in prison,” Soldier cut in, surprising me with grace. “He had to get away to live his life.”
“Oh,” Stormy whispered, nodding. “Right, you told me about that.”
“Y-yeah.” That damn lump in my throat wouldn't budge.
Soldier caught my attention as he stood up, groaning, as if standing were the most taxing job on the planet. He walked toward the coatrack, and it was then that I noticed the slight limp to his gait.
“Ray, you okay with me heading across the street for a few minutes?” he asked, already pulling his jacket from its hook.
“Yeah, I'm good here,” she replied softly, a slight smile touching her lips.
Soldier slid his arms into the leather sleeves as he turned to face me. “Charlie, you wanna take a walk with me?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck . “Uh, sure.”
Memories of Ritchie bending my finger back, close to the point of breaking, rushed at me like a speeding freight train as I stood on legs of rubber.
“I meant it, you know. You should have been in that car.”
“Aw, how sweet,” Stormy cooed, clueless. “They're bonding.”
If by bonding she meant she was likely to find my lifeless body in a patch of dirt at the side of the road somewhere, then I was willing to bet money on her being right.
***
Soldier was more intimidating now than he had been inside Stormy's parents’ house. The two of us walked side by side through the open cemetery gate. We were alone, far enough away for my screams to be muffled to any listening ears, if I could scream at all with his gigantic hands encircling my neck. And it struck me as fitting, as I surveyed the neatly kept grounds, that I might find my end in the very place I found the most peace.
A consolation prize, if you will.
“You know, I really don't see anything wrong with having secrets,” Soldier said, abruptly disturbing the silence. He held his head low, watching the ground as he walked. Leading us along a dirt path, deeper into the graveyard. “I think it can be kind of a selfish thing—to keep something to yourself. Not, like, in a damning way, but just …”
He sighed and tipped his head back, eyes holding on to the setting sun and a painted sky. “Well, like, for example, sometimes, when I'm heading back home from Wayward, I like to stop by this place. It's not really on the way or anything, but I like to come by and pay my respects and, I dunno, just hang out with an old friend of mine. Ray doesn't know. I've never told her, and she's never asked me why some days I'm home later than others. And maybe that makes me an asshole. Some people would probably have me crucified for keeping something so seemingly innocent from my wife. But …” He lifted his shoulders and dropped them heavily. “It just feels personal, you know. Not so personal that I wouldn't tell her if she asked, but …”
“I think I get it,” I replied, almost as quiet as the breeze that blew between us.
“Yeah, but I don't think you do. Because the thing is, some secrets … they gotta come out, man. You can't keep them inside, or they're gonna drive you insane. And if they don't manage to do that, they're definitely gonna drive her away when she eventually finds out.”
So, we were talking about me. I should've picked up on that, but hadn't. But at least he wasn't threatening me. That was something.
Soldier turned down one row of markers, and I followed.
“We're a lot alike, I think,” he said. “I'm an orphan too. My dad was killed in a car accident before I knew who he was, and my mom was murdered by the piece of shit who tried really fuckin' hard to kill me.”
My head whipped to the side to stare at him. “Holy shit.”
One side of his mouth tipped upward in a smile that didn't touch his eyes. He patted his thigh. “Shot me here and”—he laid his hand over his stomach—“here.”
“Damn.” My mouth went dry as I thought about the scar near my groin. “I'm sorry.”
“Yeah, well, it's fine. I'm still here, and he never got his hands on Noah or Ray. That's all that matters. They are all that matters. And that’s why, when they asked me why I'd been in prison, I told them. They wanted to know my story, and I didn't hide it. I was scared shitless of what they'd think of me, yeah, but I wanted them to know. It wasn't a secret to be kept because, when I really think about it, it's not a secret at all. A quick Google search of my name will tell you everything that happened. But I told them anyway because they mattered to me and I wanted them to know.”
We came to a stop, and Soldier gestured toward a bench, wordlessly telling me to take a seat. I listened, and he sat beside me.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Charlie. But if I'm guessing correctly, Stormy matters a lot to you, like Ray matters to me. And I think she deserves to hear it from you before she Googles your name ‘cause I'm willing to bet it's all there, if she digs deep enough.”
Actually, she wouldn't have to dig very deep at all, but I didn't say that. He was too busy making a point, a good one, and I was going to let him finish.
“We're a lot alike,” he said again. “I blamed myself for a long time for what had happened. But it took telling my friend Harry and Ray and accepting their acceptance to make me realize that it wasn't entirely my fault. I did my time for the part of it that was, but I hadn’t made Billy take that fucking pill. That was all on him. That was his fault, and he's been paying the ultimate price for that for almost twenty years.”
Billy .
I followed Soldier's gaze to the gravestone across the way to see WILLIAM “BILLY” PORTER carved into the granite. The year he was born would've made him the same age as Stormy. He had died of a drug overdose, from what Soldier was saying, and so had Stormy's Billy, her old friend who'd gotten her into drugs. The old friend who had fucked her and gotten himself killed by taking drugs given to him by his drug-dealer friend.
Holy shit. Soldier was that drug dealer .
“I did some shit I'm not proud of,” he said quietly, as if reading my mind. “I had my reasons, and they made sense at the time, but I was a stupid, desperate kid. I know better now, and I wouldn't make the same decisions if I could do it all over again. That's where we're different, Charlie. Everything that happened to you … none of it was your fault. You have blood on your hands, just like me, but there isn't even a shred of blame on you for what happened. She isn't going to judge you for that.”
“ I judge me for it!” I exclaimed, my voice ringing out to disturb the peace. “I wasn’t supposed to meet someone. I wasn’t supposed to grow attached. I wasn’t supposed to be happy . I wasn’t supposed to do anything but live my miserable life and feel sorry for what I had done. This”—I thrust my hand in what I thought was the direction of Chris and Barbara’s house—“was never ever supposed to happen.”
Soldier hadn’t so much as flinched in reaction to my abrupt outburst. But he turned then and leveled me with a gaze full of empathy and understanding. “Yet here you are.”
I slammed my back against the bench, the cool stone bleeding through my jacket to my spine. “I don’t want to tell her,” I confessed aloud for the first time.
“I know. But if I can be honest with you, I think you’re more afraid of reliving it than you are of her reaction. I think that’s really what you’re running from, Charlie. Not what she might think, but what you already think. And let me tell you something—you’re never going to heal until you face this shit head-on. You’re never going to find peace—nobody will. Luke will never find peace, the dude who attacked you won’t either, and if you can’t move forward for yourself, then do it for them. Tell her that part of your story because whether you like it or not, it is a part of who you are. You can’t take it back, you can’t erase it, but you can learn to accept it, and I’m telling you this from experience—she can help you do that, if you just give her the chance to try.”
***
What kept me awake that night wasn’t the conversation in the graveyard or the unsettling truth that Stormy’s sister’s husband was the same man to end the life of her friend, Billy—
Thank God , I thought, then quickly scolded myself for even allowing such a horrible thing to pass through my mind.
It was a dirty little silver lining, wasn’t it? Had he not swallowed that poisoned pill, Stormy might’ve met the same fate with him later—or instead of. It was unlikely I’d have ever met her, and that deserved its own thank God .
But, no, what kept me from finding enough peace to sleep beside her was the awful betrayal of my damn brother spilling my darkest secret to men I didn’t know. How many of them had there been? Soldier alone was one too many. And never mind that anyone could pull up an internet search on Connecticut’s Corbin brothers and find anything they wanted to know. Soldier hadn’t learned of either incident from a fucking Google search; he’d heard from my brother. My brother !
“Some secrets … they gotta come out, man,” I could still hear Soldier saying.
And, sure, I saw his point in regard to spilling the ugly details to Stormy—I had never not planned to tell her, for the record, but that didn’t mean I wanted to, and it didn’t make it easy.
But what the hell business had my brother had to talk about me to his prison buddies without my consent, like some gossiping girl in the retail break room?
Maybe he was looking for advice or … or … or … help.
Stop making excuses for him.
They’re not excuses though. Right? They’re valid reasons. Maybe he just didn’t want to carry the weight of it alone. Maybe … maybe …
Unwanted tears sprang to my eyes as I thought, Maybe he just felt helpless, knowing there was nothing he could do. Maybe he knew I was going to leave. Maybe he knew I couldn’t take it anymore. Maybe he knew the years of us being an ironclad duo were coming to an end, and he needed to air his heartbreak to the only friends he had left in this cruel, fucked-up world that had never ever, ever been kind to either of us.
Wasn’t he allowed that?
Wasn’t he allowed to feel sad in the way I had so many times before?
I rubbed my hand over my face, smearing the tears down my cheeks. I was getting ahead of myself. I knew nothing. But I could find out. I could see him.
Am I ready for that?
No. No, I’m not, but I want to be, and that has to count for something.
Stormy rolled over and laid her arm over my chest. I wanted to sleep. We were having lunch with Stormy’s parents. We had Ivan’s wedding later that evening. But, God, insomnia was an unforgiving bastard that would never give me grace, not even when I needed it most.
“Hey. Why are you awake?” Her whispered voice was half slurred with sleep, but I understood.
“Soldier scares the shit out of me,” I half joked, hoping she couldn't tell that I'd been crying. “I’m terrified he’s gonna come get me in my sleep.”
I felt her smile against my chest. “Soldier is one of the good guys. Don’t let him freak you out.”
“He wasn’t always a good guy,” I pointed out, almost bitterly. Alluding to knowing more than she knew I knew.
I hadn’t told her what we’d said in the graveyard. That would’ve led to more of an explanation than I was ready for.
But when will you be ready, huh?
Some secrets are meant to be told.
“He told you?”
“He told me he was the one who had killed Billy. Unintentionally, but … still.”
Her hand fell from my face and returned to its spot on my chest. She nodded. “Soldier’s situation was a bad one,” she quietly explained, the sleep fading from her voice. “Lots of us make bad choices— hard choices—out of desperation. It doesn’t make him a bad person; it never did. It took me a long time to understand that, but I get it now. Billy just got caught up in it. Honestly, if Soldier’s mom’s pills hadn’t killed him, someone else’s would’ve. He was never getting out of that shit, and he was going to drag everyone else down with him. I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s out of my life. Does that sound terrible? I feel like it makes me terrible.”
For the first time maybe ever, I willingly allowed Tommy and Ritchie to enter my mind. “I understand. And if that makes you terrible, then so am I.” Except I knew I was—terrible, I mean.
I just didn’t want to face that she could've been too. But she wasn't, of course, despite what she’d said. She was only human, and humans were never perfect—even the ones who seemed to be.
“Yeah.” She sighed a slightly mournful sound, and I imagined she was thinking about her old friend. “But anyway, you can stop BSing me now. I know you're not afraid of Soldier slitting your throat. So, what's really going on?”
I huffed a humorless laugh. “How do you know I'm bullshitting you?”
“Because I see you, Charlie. So, what's up?”
It was funny how that happened, wasn't it? Someone could know you your entire life and never truly see who you were. But then you could only know someone else for a month, and they could know you better than you knew yourself.
“ If you don't marry that woman, you're a fuckin' asshole ,” I imagined Luke saying, and I couldn't have agreed more.
But I had to tell her a story first, and even though it was late at night and we had a lunch and wedding to attend, there was no time like the present.