I should have listened to him.
Because I died here.
Or Iwilldie here.
In the desert, I walked and I walked, and when I fell, my mind brought me back to this place. I can’t understand why this would be my final memory. Why here and why Makhi, who made me cry when he chased me away?
Will he be the one who kills me?
Chapter 10
Makhi
Ilift my head off the dining table.
Blinking blearily around me, I struggle to identify what woke me.
When the kitchen stays silent, I reach for the bottle of whiskey on the table in front of me, top off my glass, and knock it back.
“Drinking won’t fix anything,” a Southern drawl comes from the doorway, making me jump.
I refill my glass and knock back the contents. “Jealous I’m hogging it all?”
It’s a low blow Vonn doesn’t deserve.
His soft footsteps move toward me. The scrape of a chair against the hardwood floors warns that he’s sitting down. The bottle of whiskey is pulled away from my loose grip. Though it’s not so much of a loose grip as a drunken clasp.
“I won’t punch you again, so whatever way you want to punish yourself for Byrdie being hurt won’t be with my fist or this bottle. Go talk to her.”
When I need to think, I get on my bike, but I’m not looking to think tonight. I’m looking to forget.
I nudge my empty glass away from me. With Vonn laying claim to the last of the whiskey, it’s a wrestling match I don’t foresee myself coming out the winner. My eyes feel gritty, and my mouth, given I’ve been knocking back shots for the last two hours, is surprisingly dry.
Vonn’s jeans, t-shirt, and boots suggest he couldn’t sleep either. Sleep has always come more easily to me than to Vonn, who likes to sit at the kitchen table and take his gun apart and put it back together to focus his mind. All while eyeing his security blanket: a bottle of whiskey. Like a psycho.
“What kind of person drives someone into the desert and leaves them there to die?” I ask Vonn a question that no amount of whiskey can help me figure out.
Stabbing someone, pushing them off a roof, or shooting them in the head makes sense to me. I get that. Being left in the desert to die of heatstroke or however else a desert slowly kills a person feels too much like torture for me to understand.
I’ve never been tempted to torture a person, not even my POS dad or the mom who spent more time climbing into a bottle of Jack than she spent raising me.
From the pause because Vonn speaks, it’s as much of a puzzle to me as it is to him.
“A sick one,” he eventually says.
I reach for the bottle of whiskey. He drags it further out of reach, and I mutter a curse and sit back in my seat, accepting defeat. “The guy said something about a sweatbox. You pushed right past it like you already knew what it was.”
When he starts eyeing a bottle he hasn’t drunk from in well over a year, I know whatever this sweatbox thing is, it’s bad.
“Yeah,” he says, attention fixed on the bottle I’ve nearly drained dry.
“So?” I prompt.
He shakes his head. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answers to, Makhi.”
“So, this is a war thing?”
He doesn’t talk about serving or the things he saw. They keep him up at night, but he never says one word to Nash or me. Just sits in the almost dark kitchen at night and takes his gun apart and puts it back together again.
