“I’ve already lost it.” Cade was almost snarling. “Nowyouneed to lose something.”
“What on earth is going on?” Aiden’s mom’s eyes were wide. She stared at Warren, searching for an explanation.
He took another long look at Cade, then shook his head sadly as he turned back to Aiden’s mom. “I’m sorry, Nic. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on it. I have no idea why he’s focusing on me. Well, I guess it’s the money. He wanted me to pay him to keep him from talking. From making up crazy lies about me.” He turned to Aiden. “I’m sorry, son. I could see how much you cared about him, so I tried to defuse the situation. I tried to convince him it wasn’t a good plan. I hoped to have a conversation with him on the plane today, one last try to make him see sense before I had to tell you all about this….”
“No.” Aiden found the word as liberating as Cade apparently had. “I don’t know what you’re saying, exactly, but, no. Cade doesn’t make up lies. He doesn’t… you think he’s after your money? He barely lets me buy himdinner. I don’t know the details, but I knowCade, and there’s no way any of this is true.” That was all he had to say to Warren, at least for the time being. This was all too confusing, but there were things Aidenknew, dammit. He turned to Cade. Cade was the important one here. “Come talk to me. Tell me what’s going on. Just you and me, and we’ll figure it all out.”
Cade shook his head fiercely. “You’re such a fucking optimist, Aiden.” But he started for the door, apparently willing to at least give it a try. Aiden exchanged a quick, baffled look with his mother, then hurried after Cade.
They headed out into the forest, up the steep path to the fort, and then it was as if the emotion that had been driving Cade disappeared. He stood in the little clearing as if he was lost. He looked at the fort, then at the trees that hid their cliff-face hideaway. Then he turned back to Aiden as if he had rejected both of those locations and decided to stay where they were.
“Cade, what the fuck is going on with you and Uncle Warren? Is that what this has all been about? Did he do something? But why wouldn’t you have told me about it?”
Cade’s face was drawn tight. He looked miserable, almost sick, and his voice was unfamiliar as he said, “Can you not look at me? I’ll tell you, okay? But can you look somewhere else?”
“What? Why?”
“Please,” Cade begged.
Aiden took one more long look, and then he turned away. He looked at the fort and remembered falling asleep in there, his arms wrapped around Cade. It had only been a couple nights earlier, but it felt like much longer. “Okay,” he said.
Cade waited so long Aiden almost turned back to check on him, but finally he said, “After high school, both of us took a year off. You traveled….”
“And you worked, saving money for school.”
“Yeah.” Cade sounded exhausted. “I worked. And Itriedto save. But I could only get a minimum-wage job and neither of my parents were working. I had to buy groceries, and I had to buy clothes to wear to work and a bus pass to get there. After a couple months, I only had a few hundred dollars saved. Nowhere near enough.” Aiden heard scuffling behind him and knew Cade was shifting around, probably staring at his feet the way he did when he was upset. Aiden wanted to turn and look at him, but he resisted the urge and Cade spoke again. “Then my parents had friends over and they all got drunk, and somebody—I don’t know who, whether it was one of my parents or one of their friends—somebody got into my bedroom. I got home from work and I could smell puke. Someone had thrown up on my bed. But even worse, they’d found my money. My savings. Took it all.”
It was hard to imagine a few hundred dollars mattering that much to anybody, but Aiden knew Cade’s situation well enough to imagine the heartbreak. After working so hard, coming home and finding that, and adding the possibility that it had been one of his parents….
“That must have been pretty awful,” Aiden said. He had no idea how it related to whatever was going on at the cottage, but he wished he’d been around back then to help Cade get through all that.
Cade didn’t seem to hear anything he was saying. “I tore downstairs and tried to find out who’d done it, but no one was talking, and my dad ended up kicking me out. I just started walking. I don’t know where I was going, really. And after a while I stopped at a light and a car pulled up next to me.” Cade took a deep, shaky breath. “And the driver….” Another breath, and Aiden was pretty sure Cade was crying. He wanted to turn around and take him in his arms. It didn’t matter what Cade was going to say. Aiden didn’t need to hear it, not if it made Cade this unhappy to talk about it.
But Aidendidneed to hear it. So he stayed still, staring at the fort, and finally Cade said, “The driver asked me how much.” Now the words came quickly. “At first I had no idea what he was talking about! And then I figured it out, and I was being a smartass, so I asked him what he thought I was worth, and he said he’d give me two hundred bucks.” A long pause, and then Cade whispered, “I really needed two hundred bucks.”
Aiden’s mind refused to work. It sounded like… what Cade had said, it sounded like… but, no, not Cade. It didn’t make sense. Except for how it did. “Just once?” Aiden managed to ask. “That was… are you saying the guy was Uncle Warren? Are you sayingyou slept with Uncle Warren? For money?” He stopped before his voice turned all the way into a scream.
“Not that time,” Cade said quietly. Now that he’d gotten this far, he seemed to have lost all the emotion in his voice. “That first time was some random guy. But the money was good, and I—I don’t know. I needed the money. And after the first time—after I’d done it once—it got easier to keep doing it.”
“More than once,” Aiden said, at least partly to himself.
“Lots of times.” Cade still sounded like he was reciting mundane facts. “Almost every night, for about eight months. I quit when I went away to school. I had enough saved to get through the first year, and after that I got better scholarships, and a grant.”
Aiden couldn’t accept it. It made no sense. “I thought you were avirgin. When I first met you, and you were so serious. I mean, you made me wait formonths, and the whole time you were a fuckingpro?”
“Not when I knew you! Never at all after I got to Purdue. And I was always careful with them. Always condoms. Always. And I got tested, lots of times.” Cade sounded as if he was offering the only consolation he had, and he sounded as if he knew how completely inadequate it was.
Aiden couldn’t say anything for a long while, and they both stood there silently. Finally, Aiden decided that he needed to hear it all and get it over with. “How does Uncle Warren fit in?” He realized that his voicehad become just as dead as Cade’s. He supposed they were both numb, or trying to be.
“He hired me. A bunch of times. The stuff he wanted to do was… it wasn’t regular stuff. He wanted to—” Cade broke off before his voice could rise, and when he spoke again, he sounded calm. “I thought about not going with him after the first time, but he found me and he… I should have… I don’t know.” He admitted it like it was a failing he’d considered over and over. “It’s not like I could have gone to the cops. I guess I could have tried to fight him. Yeah. I should have tried to fight him. But he paid me double. And at least with him, it wasclear, you know? I hated him. That made it easier, kind of. Some of the others were nice guys, really. And it was… I don’t know. It was confusing.”
“And now? You ran into him here? That’s all?”
“No. It’s not all. He wants to start again. When I quit… he said he didn’t find anyone else he liked as much as he liked me. So he said I had to start working for him again, and if I didn’t, he’d tell you and your family about all of it.”
Aiden thought of Cade’s reaction to Warren on the golf course. He remembered finding Warren in Cade’s room that morning. “When did he tell you that?”
Cade sounded a little confused, as if he couldn’t figure out why Aiden’s question mattered. “That first morning. After we slept in the fort.”
