I couldn’t believe I asked that question. I hadn’t even planned to. It had just fallen out without expectation, like a part of me I didn’t really control had asked for it.
“Nah, I’m good with Tara,” Brock said. “Thought about getting a ring for her, in fact. I’ll always love Rachel, but it’s not romantic love anymore.”
“Makes sense.”
I prayed Brock read nothing more into it, and thankfully, he didn’t. Because if he had, I wasn’t even sure how I’d react.
But either way, it was clear that Rachel’s return was making things very interesting now.
“Come on,” Brock said. “Let’s go get some training in. Let’s prepare to fucking slaughter some Bandits.”
Rachel
Although I liked going out and stretching myself past my comfort zone, something about returning to my apartment put me at such ease.
I needed to push myself, but not to the point that I fell down. I needed to challenge myself, but not to the point of breaking. Coming home felt like coming to my castle, a sort of secure place that no one else knew of except my landlord. I always made sure that cars in the parking lot of wherever I went, even just nearby parks, didn’t follow me. It might have burned a few gallons of gas, but it saved me quite a bit of paranoia and headaches.
I prayed for a day when this level of fear wouldn’t consume me and wouldn’t overwhelm me. Maybe that day would come if I could make the boys a part of my life again.
But they weren’t really boys anymore, were they? They’d grown up now. I’d grown up too, albeit probably not at the pace they had.
I got to my apartment, looked around, let myself in, locked the doors, shut the blinds, and collapsed on the bed. My place was not anything to share with the world—it was a one-bedroom apartment with a bed I got from a literal dump and a bathroom that got dirtier faster than I could clean it. Opening cabinet doors to grab food always showed me new bugs—the only question was how many.
But it was mine, and no one else knew it was mine.
I unlocked my phone and, still with the memory of the boys in my head, went to my photos. Finding pictures from a decade ago wasn’t that hard. The truth was, there was an enormous gap of time after the events of that night until very recently. I wasn’t a weirdo who had no photos, but I definitely didn’t have more than maybe fifty pics total per year in the dark time.
One caught my eye immediately.
It was me, Brock, Connor, Mason, and Steele, plus one other girl from my high school who was dating Steele then, all together at a bowling alley. We looked so…young.
We all did, that was, except for Mason.
Even ten years ago, back when he had more hair and the boys had far less facial hair, there was a certain hardness to him that looked kind of sad in these photos. The rest of us may have been young and stupid, but at least we were stupidly grinning. Mason just had a half-hearted smirk on his face, like someone had yelled at him to smile before they took the camera.
I scrolled through to the next few ones. There were a few of just Brock and me—how much like kids we looked like! There were ones of Connor and I—that guy had changed dramatically, although the “soft-hearted” part of him, I could tell, was still there. It was just armored with a lot more tattoos and a hell of a demeanor.
And then there was one of Mason that, until now, I’d never really taken that close a look at.
In that one, the two of us stood outside a pizza shop that had long since closed. We weren’t hanging on each other’s arms—in fact, we weren’t even seated on the same section of the table. We sat across from each other, sharing a laugh.
I had no idea why this photograph had been taken, and every time before, I’d either seen it while with Brock or in my shock or recovery phase. But now…
I saw the way his eyes looked at me with such compassion and curiosity. I saw the way he leaned forward, his half-eaten cheese slice looking like it would have slid down at any second. I saw the way his whole body pointed to me as if he wanted to hear something about me.
And most of all, I saw his smile.
Like, his real smile. Not his fake smile. Not his smile meant to get someone to shut the hell up about him not smiling.
His genuine, authentic smile.
It was touching.
But now…
I put the phone down. What now?
Well, now, we were all grown up. Now, we were adults who knew better than to think that the world was ours; parts of the world were ours, but the “conquer all” attitude the boys had once so stridently shown had now just become “protect this damn town.”
