CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(35)
Tomorrow I would keep my promises to Roe and to Stone. And to myself. If I couldn’t stop this self-destructive addiction on my own then I’d get help. But tonight I just need to sleep. Everything would be better tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CONWAY
Stone always snored like a motherf*cker. Sometimes smacking him in the face with a pillow would jolt him into changing positions, snuffing out the noise.
I’d slept like shit last night, although when I heard him come in I pretended to be sound asleep already. I sensed that he was standing over me and having some deep thoughts (or guilt) but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of opening an eye. Of course when I finally dozed off he started making as much racket as a saw mill as if even his subconscious was hell bent on taunting me.
Instead of hitting him with a bag of feathers I walked calmly over to his bed, grabbed the far side of the rumpled quilt he was sleeping on top of, and yanked blankets, brother and all to the floor. Stone landed with a thud and began flailing around while sputtering seventy creative variations of the word ‘f*ck’.
I stepped over him on my way to the shower. I took my time in there and let the hot water continue to run even after I was done. By the time I was dressed and spitting toothpaste into the sink the room looked like a sauna.
Stone was waiting for me when I got back. I expected it so I kept my elbows out, ready to throw some weight around, but he only sat on the edge of the bed, glaring balefully and complaining, “What the f*ck?”
My Carson’s Garage shirt was damp and dirty but I threw it on anyway. I was scheduled to work all day but a pristine appearance wasn’t exactly part of the corporate culture over there.
“Conway!” Stone bellowed.
“What?”
“What do you mean what? What crawled up your ass and died overnight?”
I tucked my shirt in even though Stone always laughed that I looked like an old snowbird when I did. Whenever I had briefly lapsed into sleep last night I’d been haunted by muddled nightmares. In one of them my mother and Erin were skipping arm in arm on the far side of a deep canal while laughing “You can’t play!” in teasing unison. In another I was in a deep, dark place and shouting up at the light. My brother appeared and stood there for a somber moment, looking down. Then Benton Gentry showed up with a wide length of plywood and covered the hole, trapping me in the darkness. There was one more. It was vague, just a passing image, not even a whole dream unto itself. But it was the most vivid of all. Erin, wearing Kasey Kean’s American flag bikini, was straddling Stone on his bed as they kissed, ignoring my screams of anguish from across the room.
“What’s wrong?” my brother asked and now his voice sounded strange. Less furious, more worried.
I looked at him. Stonewall Gentry, named for some reckless, wild great uncle who died before we were born. There’d never been a day that I was alive where he wasn’t my brother. And even though he’d had ten Conway-free months before I came along, I knew it was impossible for him to remember them. We’d always shared a home, a family, even a bedroom. We’d always been together.
“What’d you do last night?” I blurted out.
And there it was. Just for a split second. A flicker of something in his blue eyes before he looked away. Stone didn’t feel guilty about much so it wasn’t too often that a day came along where he couldn’t look me in the eye.
“Hung out at the bridge, got sucked off and came home.”
“That’s it?”
Slowly his eyes returned to my face. This time he was utterly impassive. “That’s it.”
“And you wouldn’t lie to your brother.”
Stone leaned back a few inches, like he needed a little bit of distance in order to see me better. His eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at, Con?”
“Not a thing. Just wondering when I missed the news that you and my girlfriend are now best buddies. Yeah, that’s right. I saw you guys all cozy and conversational out there. Not the first time in the last few weeks I’ve caught the two of you looking awful f*cking close all of a sudden. So tell me brother, just who belonged to the pair of lips that sucked your dick last night?”
He was angry. His face was red and his hands were clenched. But that wasn’t what was sinking my heart. If there hadn’t been a kernel of truth to those words then he would have jumped up in a fury and tackled me before I finished talking.
“Goddammit Conway, it wasn’t like that. We were just-“
“Just what?”
“Just talking for f*ck’s sake.”
“Bullshit. You spend as much time listening to what any girl has to say as you spend cleaning the toilet.”
He stood up then. I thought there was half a chance he was going to take a swing at me but he merely crossed his arms and glared. “You don’t think I would touch your girlfriend. There’s no f*cking way you can think that. Conway, I could have an ice pick to my balls and I still wouldn’t take a step in that direction. Never!”
I almost wavered. But then I flashed back to last night’s feelings of despair.
There’s nothing worse than what you come from.
In my lowest moment, when I’d just been fed a heaping plate of sordid surprises from my own mother, I stumbled through the darkness looking for comfort. The only thing I found was my brother and my girlfriend huddled together, talking earnestly about something that obviously didn’t include me. It wasn’t the kind of visual trauma that included naked skin and entwined limbs, but at that moment it was just about the loneliest thing I could have faced.