“Yessir.” I tried harder to relax.
A few minutes later, Seth murmured, “If you can’t sleep, tell me what brought you here the first time. Why’s a guy like you out on your own, flat broke and in trouble, a few days after your birthday?”
“Um. I told you, my dad and I didn’t get along.”
“Running three states is more than not getting along.” When I said nothing, he added, “Were you afraid of him?”
Were? Are?I wasn’t sure of the right tense. Dad was like this destructive hurricane at the back of my mind, but he should be my past, as long as I didn’t get arrested. He wouldn’t bother tocome this far after me. I was sure of that. Ninety-five percent sure.
“You can tell me,” Seth offered, after a silent minute. “Were you afraid?”
I should say nothing, shouldn’t burden him, but I’d been alone with my thoughts for days, and the words came tumbling out. “At the end, yeah. Maybe always, in a way. He didn’t hit me that often, didn’t beat me.”
“Doesn’t have to be often to be wrong.”
“I guess. Mom left when I was ten. Dad did hit her, a lot, and one day she took off with some guy she knew. Never came back.”
“She left you with your dad?”
“She had to.” Mom had loved me, I was certain, but she’d needed to save herself. “There was no way she could stand up to Dad. Anyway, he wasn’t that bad with me. He was proud of me sometimes, boasted to his friends about anything I did right. Put my perfect test scores up on the refrigerator. But as I got older, he got meaner.”
“Did he drink?”
“Some. Not like an alcoholic, but a few beers.” Dad was often worse after a few beers. “He stopped praising me for doing well in school, started pushing me to do more sports, got me a job at the ranch. He taught me how to fight and shoot, insisted I was going to join the sheriff’s department when I was older.”
“Did you want to?”
“No.” I didn’t want to be anything like him. “I let him think I would.”
Seth’s tone softened. “Do you think he knew you were gay?”
“Suspected, yeah.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them, glad my back was to Seth and the room was dark. Some things were easier to say in the dark. “He hated gay men. There’s one bar in the town where I lived, Max’s, where the gay guys often go. Dad and my uncle Hal used to drive out theresometimes, and I think they beat some guys up.” I remembered Dad washing blood off his undamaged knuckles in the kitchen sink, back before I understood why. “When I was twelve, the town elected a new sheriff, and Dad was super pissed. He and Hal bitched about how they’d have to be more careful, how Sheriff Breyer would make them coddle the queers.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a long way gone now, right? What about your folks? Did they march in parades and join PFLAG?” I regretted the bitchy tone before the words were out of my mouth but I couldn’t take them back.
“It was just me and my mom,” Seth said steadily. “Never knew my dad. Mom would’ve probably been fine with me, but she died when I was twenty, and still figuring myself out. So I never got the chance to tell her.”
That made it my turn to say, “Sorry.”
“I had a good childhood. No call to be sorry.”
“That you lost her.” I liked to think Mom was alive somewhere, happy and free, maybe married to that guy, and that he was good to her. If that wasn’t true, I didn’t want to know.
“Ah. Thanks. Aortic aneurism. She just… died.” Seth shifted around on the bed behind me, like his body was more upset than his voice. “I had a job by then, independent and out of the house. Sounds like you were working too. How did you end up so broke?”
“A seventeen-year-old can’t have a bank account without an adult cosigner. My pay went into that account. I had a debit card, no credit. The day I turned eighteen, it was all gone.”
Seth grunted like someone punched him in the gut. “Your dad? What did he do?”
“He’d pulled every cent out of that account the day before. Reported my card stolen. I had a few bucks in cash, but notmuch. Who uses cash these days? Even a little town like Dover’s Ridge runs on plastic.”
“He left you with nothing?” Seth’s voice held a hint of a growl.
“He said I owed him for eighteen years of room and board. He looked at me over the breakfast table, warned me not to use the card or I’d get picked up. Told me if I wanted to survive, I had to keep doing as I was told. There was this look in his eyes.” My throat tightened. “Fuck.”
Seth softened his tone. “You don’t have to tell me.”
