CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)(9)
“You sure?” he whispered. His hand traveled higher, unhooking my bra. I pulled at the soft cotton of his t-shirt until my hands found the muscled skin beneath.
“I’m sure.”
All at once we were were rolling around in the sand. A rock dug into my back and something alive hissed in the brush, scrabbling around, unhappy about being disturbed. It wasn’t the ideal place to be intimate but I didn’t care. I needed him to be closer. I needed it so badly I could hardly breathe. And Con was in a fire of passion, hands everywhere, even more intense than usual. Tomorrow we could blame the strange darkness for taking this moment that we’d been waiting for forever.
But tonight we just needed to use each other. So we would.
He unzipped his pants. I helped him. He groaned.
And then with a gasp of brilliance the lights of Emblem resumed.
Main Street became unbearably vivid. The neighborhoods that had melted into the darkness unseen spread their wings in every direction. It was like watching a sleeping giant roar awake. Conway and I stopped what we were doing and looked out at our hometown while our friends applauded the return of electricity. Someone threw or dropped a bottle. The crash of glass was loud, so terribly loud.
“Stone!” whined a female voice.
“Hey Gentry,” hissed someone else, “you’re gonna f*cking pay for that. Fuck. My last forty.”
Conway had twisted his head around at the sound of his brother’s name. It was true that he and Stone never missed an opportunity to knock each other over. But it was also true that if anyone dared to mess with one he’d have to have to face the wrath of the other. If Conway even got a whiff of anything like trouble he’d go barreling into the darkness ready to defend his brother. No matter what, the Gentry boys were a team. Everyone knew it.
I didn’t hear Stone’s response, if there even was one. Conway relaxed. He pulled me into his lap as I finished re-hooking my bra. His strong and steady heartbeat pulsed against my back and I matched my breathing to his. I closed my eyes as he held me close, saying nothing, doing nothing, while the imprint of the town’s garish lights disappeared behind my eyelids. We wouldn’t go any further tonight. We would hold each other until the clock demanded that we stop.
Until then there was just this. And this was enough.
CHAPTER FOUR
CONWAY
One afternoon this past spring Mr. Carson caught me and Stone swiping cigarettes from the glove compartment of an empty Ford truck parked behind his garage. We’d done it before. We would huddle behind the dumpster and wait for the mechanics to park in the lot behind the garage when they ran out of room inside. At night they moved everything indoors and locked up but they were more careless in daylight. We’d never found anything valuable and I’m not sure we would have taken it if we had. Small bills, loose change, cigarettes and once a yellowed, old fashioned map of the state of Arizona that appealed to Stone for some reason.
Stone had a pack of Marlboros clutched in his palm and I was still ducking out of the front seat when Mr. Carson happened to waddle outside to the scene of the crime. But instead of wearing us out and calling his goons to herd us out of there he scratched the back of his mottled neck and said, “If you boys want to hang around here so bad, why don’t you throw on a jumpsuit and learn a thing or two?”
Mr. Carson was the kind of guy who didn’t say something if he didn’t mean it. Stone wasn’t interested though. He was busy making some change in a numbers game he’d started some months back. But I’d always been fascinated by how things were put together, what made them tick. I was glad to have the chance to find out. Mostly I swept the garage and kept the equipment clean but lately Mr. Carson had been letting me in on some oil changes and brake jobs. I liked it, working with my hands, the powerful pride that came from being useful. It came along with a hunger to learn more, to do more.
Erin always gave me a hard time for not stepping up in the classroom. She said I had no excuse because I was far from stupid. She was right. I always did well in math, really well. Years ago when we were still something like a normal family, the school would call my parents down once a year to talk about how high my scores were on these tests the state always required. My mother would yell at me for not ‘living up to my potential’ but then she’d kind of forget about it. My dad was different though. He’d slip me a ten dollar bill when no one was looking and tell me how proud he was.
Not my dad. Elijah.
I shouldn’t think that way. I knew damn well Elijah Gentry had been my father in every way that counted. My mother didn’t answer questions and really I wasn’t even sure who my father was supposed to be. Some of the gossip pointed to his cousins, Benton and Chrome Gentry, but I didn’t know whether to take that seriously. Chrome was dead and nobody in their right minds would want that violent sack of shit Benton as a father. They’d had sons of their own, cousins I remembered vividly, especially Deck. He was like a celebrity, riding around town all full of cool tattoos and danger. But along with the infamous triplets, he’d made his Emblem exit a while back and didn’t come around much. I wished he would. I would have liked to ask him a few things.
“Quit daydreaming.” A steel-toed boot nudged me but the voice was not unfriendly. It was Booster, one of Carson’s mechanics. He’d allowed me to roll under the belly of an ancient Bronco for an oil change.