Dozens and dozens of letters, I’d penned. Letters marked in tears and holding the pain of not just tired, worn out fingers, but also a broken and battered heart. Dozens and dozens of letters that all went unanswered. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. He froze me out. Kash, the one I would have put my neck on the chopping block for. Kash, the person I was sure didn’t do what everyone else thought he did – my father, the cops and the judge included. The longer I went without hearing from him, the more my doubts mounted. If he wasn’t guilty, then why the hell wouldn’t he have written back?
How well do we really know our friends, anyway?
How well do we know our lovers?
My neighbor Brandy was married to her high school sweetheart for thirty years before she found out that his “military career” was actually another family three towns over.
My own mother was blind to my father’s alcoholism even though he drank right under her nose and hardly ever went to bed sober anymore. If they could be wrong about their husbands, what made me think I could really know what my boyfriend—ex-boyfriend, I corrected myself—was capable of? I mean, we were just kids back then. And even though I thought Kash and mine was a special kind of love, I couldn’t exactly be sure. Kids and their stupid, feelings, right? Kids and the trust they put in the untrustworthy.
“I can’t,” I growled through my teeth. It trailed into a keening wail before I bit it off again. I couldn’t possibly know. That was why I’d asked him. Sideways at first, and then directly. But my questions went unanswered, festering into a pool of rage and grief and paranoia. The Tenacious Tripod was broken beyond repair, and everything around me was telling me it was Kash’s fault. While my heart was telling me that it wasn’t. But the thing was, my heart wasn’t how it once was. It was a mess. A mess of wanting and needing and missing Kash. A mess of mourning and wanting and needing my brother. A mess that the only two men in my life who I really, really, cared about couldn’t put right again.
I took a deep, shuddering breath and straightened my spine. I wouldn’t let Kash just sweep back into town and pick up where he left off with me. I might give him a chance to answer my questions, but I wasn’t making any promises. Not to him, and definitely not to myself. At worst, he was my brother’s killer. At best, he’d ghosted me for six whole years. Either way, I didn’t owe him a goddamn thing.
I wiped my face and hauled the case of beer up with renewed vigor. Screw him and everything he’d ever done to me. Everything he’d ever done to my family.
But his image followed me home, floating in my mind’s eye. Those deep, mournful brown eyes which had always broken my heart. His shoulders, broader and more muscular than they’d been before he left. His rough hands, reaching out to help me. I could see how strong they were. I remembered how gentle they could be. His scent, that earthy, clean-smelling aroma that clung to him no matter what he was doing. He still made my heart flutter, and that pissed me the hell off.
I nearly broke the screen door off the hinges as I marched into the house. I slammed the case down on the table, my eyes burning with new, furious tears.
“Hey! Watch it! You break those, you’re gonna go get me more.” Dad glowered in the doorway, his shoulders hunched with tension that wouldn’t dissipate until he’d drunk himself into a stupor. He twisted a cigarette into his mouth and patted his pockets.
“Sorry,” I snapped.
“Don’t take that tone with me, missy.” He took a couple steps toward me, trying to look threatening with half of his attention arrested by the beer beside me. “I don’t know what crawled up your ass, but you better handle that mouth.”
“Sorry.”
“That’s better. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Boys didn’t give you enough attention? Damn it, where the hell is my goddam lighter?”
It was sitting on the table next to his ashtray, where it always was when it wasn’t in his pocket. I picked up the heavy zippo and slapped it into his hand. “Drink your beer.”
I was suddenly too exhausted to be angry. I trudged down the hallway—it seemed longer than usual somehow—past the bathroom, past Hunter’s room, into the tiny little 12x10 paneled room I’d lived in since I was three years old. The floor creaked just outside my narrow door and the floor buckled. One of these days I’d put my foot clean through it, I was sure. Maybe then we would find a way to upgrade from our single-wide piece of crap trailer. Maybe one day we would get the hell out of here and move away to something better, something…something far away from here.
My full-size bed was too big for the room, and the lavender-and-grey bedspread I’d bought myself contrasted sharply with the comic book curtains Hunter had given me for Christmas the year before he died. I’d grown so much, but part of me still felt trapped in the life of that distraught eighteen-year-old girl. Hunter was my twin, the other half of my mind—how was I supposed to move on from that? Evidently, I hadn’t. Hence the curtains in my room and the drapes of sadness around my heart.
I flopped on the bed, almost missing the fury which had struck me down in the woods. At least there was energy in that. Now that it was gone, I just felt empty and confused. Just like I’d felt ever since Hunter
