Where All Paths Meet, page 19
part #3 of The Adventures of Holloway Holmes Series
And all three of them had said it, so I had to duck my head and mumble, “I love you guys too,” and Glo and Emma both made those noises people make at babies, and Rowe turned the hug into some kind of shambling, unstoppable wrestling move that carried me out of my seat and pinned me against the table, and all I could do was laugh and beat on his shoulders until he had finally hugged me to death and released me.
“You’re insane,” I told him as he straightened his shirt. “He’s a lunatic,” I told the girls. “You realize that?”
“Sorry, Zaddy,” Rowe said with a smirk.
“It’s because he’s still using that salt spray,” Emma said. “That’s why his hair looks like that.”
Glo shook her head “I’m telling you, I know he says he doesn’t, but I think he’s using curling ribbons.”
“I’m done,” I said, and I would have left right then only thanks to Rowe, I didn’t have any feeling in my legs. “I’m never talking to you again.”
But we did talk. Not about Holmes, not after that conversation. Just about stuff. They were starting to make plans for the summer, and because they were my friends, they invited me. But they were talking about Cancun and London, and Glo kept insisting on Bali, and it never occurred to them that we’d had to cut our grocery budget so that I could keep my phone, and that vacation meant maybe a night camping at Bear Lake if Dad’s health stayed good.
Still, I would have stayed longer, but my phone buzzed with a message from Dad: How’s everything going?
It took me a moment to remember that, as far as Dad knew, I might still be facing trespassing charges, and that I’d pissed off one of the most powerful families in the world, and, even worse, lied to him. I texted back: Fine. No charges, so everything’s ok. I’ll probably get a ride home soon.
The delay between messages felt like a silence that grew and grew.
A ride from the library? Dad asked.
“Shit,” I said.
“What happened?” Rowe asked.
Emma sat up from where she was reclining against Glo. “What’s wrong?”
“My dad. These stupid parental tracking apps.”
Rowe shifted in his seat, and he couldn’t quite meet my eyes as he said, “Uh, Jack, like, about that.”
I glanced at him as I got up from the table.
“So, um, your dad is a little, like, intense, when he gets mad, so, um, maybe don’t, you know, use my name if you’re going to lie to him.” He sounded almost apologetic when he added, “You know, if you can help it.”
It was as close as Rowe had ever come to telling me I was a piece of shit.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Rowe.”
“No, dude, it’s, like—”
“No, that was shitty of me. I’m really sorry. I’ll make it up to you, and I won’t do it again.”
Some of the tightness left his expression, and his usual broad, generous smile rolled out again. “It’s cool, dude.”
We said goodbye, and I left. It was one of those perfect spring evenings, the shadows long and cool, the sides of the mountain purple. The temperature had dropped enough for me to shiver and chafe my arms as I turned toward the truck. Then I stopped.
Ariana was sitting there in the little green deathtrap she called a car. The Geo was silent, and she had her head down, looking at her phone. I thought about getting in the truck and leaving. Instead, I approached, and she must have seen the movement because she looked up, and her eyes fastened on me. She opened the door of the car, but she didn’t get out.
“I thought you were leaving,” I said.
She held the phone in her lap, both hands tight around it.
“If you were waiting for me to leave—” I stopped. “If it’s too weird, we can figure something out—”
“No, Jack. I did leave. And I came back.” Her hands flexed and closed around the phone again, and she looked out the windshield, I guess so she wouldn’t have to look at me. “I’ve never asked you—Emma and Glo told me a little, even though it’s none of my business—even when we were dating, I wondered.”
I thought of a million, magical ways that I could get out of this conversation. The frontrunners were alien abduction or killed by frozen poop discharged from an airplane. But since I was, technically, supposed to be a man, I dug down deep, looked for a pair of balls, and finally managed to say, “I wasn’t lying when I told you there was nobody else. But I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t start, you know, having feelings for him while we were dating.” I waited, but she was better at it, and I heard myself say, “There were a lot of reasons we broke up.”
“I know. I didn’t—that’s not what this is about. That’s not what I wanted to talk about. Or I don’t think it is, anyway. I came back because—” She did this weird little laugh. And then she looked at me, and whatever she saw, it made her smile, and her body loosened, and she shook her head. “God, Jack, are you doing it all over again?”
She didn’t have to say what it was. It was fucking everything up. Being Jack Moreno, and finding my own particular brand of screw-ups to ruin a good thing.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to. I’m trying not to.” And then, channeling the ultimate expression of dudes who know jack shit and have the emotional IQ of boot leather, “It’s complicated.”
She laughed again. “Oh my God.”
Somehow, that made it easier. I found myself smiling. “Come on, you honestly didn’t expect me to do better than that, did you?”
“No, Jack. I did not.” She was doing it again, her hands opening and closing around the phone. Then she said, “I saw how you looked at him. And I saw how he looked at you. I don’t know what else you’re waiting for.”
I rolled one shoulder.
“God, Jack, don’t screw it up.”
I thought about saying I so solemnly swear, but my throat wasn’t working, and anyway, I figured I didn’t want Ariana to kick my newly discovered balls back up into my body.
“I’m going now,” Ariana said, her voice thick. She set her phone between her legs and reached for the door. “I’m going to go.”
The Geo sounded like a lawnmower as she pulled away.
My phone buzzed again.
Dad: Get your ass home.
And then, on the heels of that text, another: This boy is driving me out of my goddamn mind.
Chapter 19
Baseball Bat Beats Knife
I drove home. The cottage glowed against the dusk, light seeping out from around the blinds, warm and yellow and pushing back the gloom—even if it was only by a few inches. I thought I could make out Dad’s silhouette through one of the windows. No sign of Holmes, but that had to be who Dad meant. My heart was beating so fast I thought I was going to be sick.
For my birthday, in some bizarre attempt at kindness, Holmes had bought me a truck. He’d ordered it, paid for it, had it delivered. He hadn’t shown up in person of course. And it wasn’t just any truck—it was a fully loaded 2019 Ford F-150. Black. I didn’t exactly have a truck fetish, but if I had, in theory, this truck would have produced spontaneous orgasm. And so, because I’d been firmly committed to hating Holmes with all my heart, I’d given it to Dad, and that’s why I was driving the Dodge.
All that is a long way of saying the Ford was parked under the carport, so I had to use one of the staff spots in the lot and walk the rest of the way. I spent the time focusing on not projectile vomiting, Exorcism style.
When I got to the cottage, the porch boards creaked underfoot. The front door opened easily. We never kept it locked, not living all the way up here. The smell of red sauce and cheese and carbs met me, and my stomach grumbled. I wasn’t sure the last time I’d eaten, and although fifteen seconds before, I would have sworn I wasn’t hungry, my stomach now decided to turn itself inside out.
Dad was in the kitchen, standing sentry over a pan of lasagna. Holmes sat on the couch, the stiffness of his body badly disguising his injuries. He’d found a crisp white oxford (of course he had, this was Holmes), and it only made him look more washed out. Dad narrowed his eyes when he saw me. Holmes’s head came up, his face transparent with relief.
“Outside,” Dad said.
“I just got here.”
“Jack—” Holmes began to rise.
“Outside,” Dad said again.
“Don’t get up, H. I’ll be right back.”
Holmes sank back onto the couch; even that short attempt seemed to have exhausted him, his face bluish in its pallor.
Dad bulldozed me out onto the porch and pulled the door shut. The light by the door threw a yellow cast over half his face, picking out the lines and wrinkles. The other half lay in darkness.
“We haven’t had lasagna in a while.”
Folding his arms, Dad seemed to wrestle internally for a moment. His voice was surprisingly even when he said, “Do you want to try that again?”
Crickets chirped in the night. Leaves whispered against each other with the perpetual restlessness of the canyon.
“I’m sorry,” I said, inspecting my Stan Smiths because it was easier than looking him in the eye.
The wind died. The trees held their breath. I risked a look up, where Dad’s face was still half a canvas of that waxy light. At the edge of my vision, between the porch and trees, stars glimmered.
“We’ve talked about this. About lying.”
“Dad—”
“You lied to me about Rowe.”
“Hold on.”
“You kept lying. You were gone almost twenty-four hours, and I still don’t have any idea where you went. I wouldn’t know anything, in fact, if you hadn’t gotten yourself arrested by the police!”
The last words surged into a shout, and I dropped my eyes again. When I shifted my weight, one of the old boards protested. “I didn’t get arrested—”
“Don’t talk back to me.”
I felt so shitty about it, I did the only natural thing: I brought my head up and said, “I wouldn’t have to lie to you if you treated me like an adult.” Dad tightened his arms across his chest, and I blurted, “And I can say my opinion too. It’s not talking back. I get to say something too.”
There might have been silence. Or there might have been fireworks going off. Or there might have been one of the background special effects, a sad trombone. I wouldn’t know because my heart was pounding so hard I couldn’t hear anything.
But I heard Dad fine when he said, “All right. Explain.”
I opened my mouth. Then, after a moment, I shut it again.
“You lied about Rowe,” Dad said quietly, and I was surprised, even as I tried to stay afloat in the flood of emotion, that he no longer sounded angry. “You trespassed on private property. You would have gotten arrested if Mr. Holmes hadn’t intervened. And you lied to me again, Jack. Tonight.”
“I didn’t want you to worry—”
Dad gave a tiny shake of his head, and I stopped. I was breathing hard. My face felt puffy, and I was blinking as fast as I could.
“I thought we were done with this,” Dad said, voice gentle. “I thought we were done with the lying, Jack.”
I had to gulp air, fight to keep my voice steady. “It’s not his fault.”
“What am I supposed to think? Holloway reappears, Jack—comes out of thin air, as far as I can tell—and we’re right back where we started.”
“That’s not how it was.” Although a part of me realized that yes, that’s exactly how it was. “Dad, he didn’t do anything. I fucked up.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“I messed up. I shouldn’t have lied. I know that, and I know you worry, and you’re right. But it’s not H’s fault.”
“Were you going to tell me?”
I stared down at the Stan Smiths again.
“Were you going to tell me,” Dad asked again, more slowly this time, “Holloway was back?”
It took me a beat too long. “Yes.”
Dad shook his head. He stared off to the side, and the rest of his face was swallowed up by shadow.
“I was,” I said. “It all happened so fast.”
“Jack, what he did to you—”
“He didn’t—he wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was doing what he thought was right. He would never hurt anyone, especially not me, ok? He—”
Dad didn’t raise his voice. Lost in shadow, he didn’t even seem to move. The words were flat and dead and still somehow hard as a slap. “I need you to stop talking now.”
I stopped.
“What’s going to happen if I tell you not to see him?” Dad asked in that same awful voice. “Are you going to keep lying to me? Are you going to ignore me? Are you going to refuse?”
Goose bumps chased themselves up and down my arms. The smell of the new leaves came, and it made me think of dark places under trees, and being very small, and very far away, and very alone.
“I asked you a question, son.”
I wiped my eyes.
Dad let out a slow breath and nodded. “Go to your room.”
I let myself into the house. H tried to sit up again, but his movements were uncoordinated, and he looked like maybe he’d been dozing. “H,” I said, and I had to keep it short or I was going to fall apart completely. “I can’t—you’ve got to go home.”
A question settled on his face, but before he could ask it, I plunged down the hallway. I was already coming undone, my chest hitching, my body pins and needles everywhere. When I got to my door, it was stuck, which it did sometimes, so I bumped it with my hip.
Several facts registered in a row:
My lamp was on.
My door hadn’t been stuck; it had been locked, but the flimsy latch popped right out of the frame.
A man dressed in black was searching my room.
He was kneeling, frozen in the process of sliding out one of the desk drawers, his head turned toward me. He wore one of those balaclava things, but it did nothing to hide his surprise and frustration.
All of my helplessness, all of my shame, all of my rage crystallized. I shouted, “Hey!”
Then I launched myself at him.
All things considered it was one of my better fights. I closed with him while he was still getting to his feet, and I threw a nasty kick that should have caught him in the face and broken nose, teeth, and if I were lucky, his jaw.
Instead, I got one foot tangled in a pair of discarded boxers. I tried to keep going, but as I brought my weight down, I found something that was definitely not the floor. There was a moment of resistance, as whatever it was tried to support my weight. And then it gave way suddenly. The floor turned slick, and I slipped. My kick caught the intruder on the side of the head instead of full in the face, and he staggered and crashed against the desk.
Gushers, my brain told me. You stepped on a pack of Gushers that someone had apparently at some point lost in the mess of clothes. I had enough clarity for a single, horrified thought: If I survived, Holmes would never, ever let me live it down.
By then my momentum was carrying my foot out from under me, and I was falling backward. I landed hard on my ass. The intruder loomed over me a moment later, stomping down toward my face. It was an ugly, effective street-fighting move, which meant Holmes had tried to use it on me every time we sparred. I rolled, and the intruder missed me.
I kept rolling until I hit the wall, and then I scrambled upright, bracing myself to take the blows that I knew were already coming for me.
Only, they never came.
A pained grunt pulled my attention to where Holmes stood. He was fighting one-handed, keeping his injured arm close to his side. Once again, I could see the contrast between the Holmes I knew and the one who stood in front of me. His blows were ragged, almost clumsy. He looked slow, although I knew he still had to be faster than me. The intruder had a knife by then, and he lunged twice, bringing it up in the kind of underhand blow meant to slide the blade under the ribcage and be instantly fatal. Holmes dodged both times, but the movements were stumbling, graceless. He chopped down, catching the intruder on the wrist with the blade of his hand, and the knife tumbled free. The intruder spun into the movement, hooked Holmes’s leg, and sent Holmes crashing to the floor.
A feat, by the way, I’d never once managed.
I was halfway to my feet when the intruder spun and clubbed me on the head, and I went down.
Blinking to clear my vision, I tried to make sense of the scrambled data making it to my brain. I was on the floor. Holmes lay in the doorway. The intruder gave each of us a considering look and bent to retrieve the knife.
He was still standing up when Dad came through the door with the baseball bat.
It turns out, baseball bat beats knife.
The first—and only—blow caught him at the base of the skull. The intruder dropped and lay still.
Dad was breathing so hard he sounded like he was hyperventilating. He swung the bat again—a wild, aimless blow—and then caught himself on the wall. He glanced around, but I got the feeling he wasn’t seeing anything. Somehow, I managed to get onto my hands and knees, and Dad’s head swiveled to bring me into focus. I had a moment long enough to think, Why didn’t he get the gun?
He let out a frayed sound that might have been a laugh and leaned more heavily on the wall. “Jack, what the fuck is going on?”
Chapter 20
His Heart
Dad hadn’t killed him, which was kind of impressive in itself, since he’d clearly been channeling his inner Cody Bellinger. We tied the intruder up with an extension cord, and I took a moment to study him as Dad called the police. I put the guy at my height, maybe a little shorter, but carrying an extra hundred pounds, and all of it muscle. He was white, the kind where they’ve got a blue tone to their skin—on him, it was most noticeable around his deep-socketed eyes. He couldn’t have been more than thirty. Black shirt, black tactical pants, black boots; the suggestion of ink on his arm, maybe a triangle. He looked like he could have been one of the background baddies from take your pick of Die Hard movies. On the phone, a dispatcher was telling Dad that a cruiser was headed our way. Dad called campus security next, and while he was on the phone, I checked on Holmes.
