I find him on the back porch a little while later watching the winter sun go down, turning the sky into hues of reds and orange. He’s sitting on the wooden porch swing, his long legs spread out wide in front of him while he puffs on a cigarette. The sleeves of his black Henley are rolled up to the elbow, exposing his thick tattooed forearms. He tips his head back against the swing, bringing the cigarette up to his lips. He takes a drag before blowing out a cloud of smoke.
How the hell does this man manage to make something so disgusting look so attractive? But that’s just it, he doesn’t have totry. He justis.
He exudes confidence, it drips from every pore. He’s sexy without even trying.
“You gonna join me or you just gonna stand there picturing me naked?” He’s gazing up at me wearing that same annoyingly sexy smirk I’ve seen a hundred times.
“I was trying to calculate how many minutes that drag of your cigarette just knocked off your lifespan.”
He takes another drag. “We’re all gonna die at some point, butterfly. Might as well enjoy it while we can.”
I join him on the swing, it sways slightly as I lower myself down beside him, the wood giving out a little creak. “Are you not afraid of dying?”
“I’m afraid of notliving.”
I nod slowly, his words hitting deep. “Me too, and I haven’t done a whole lot of living yet. My whole life has been spent gearing up for law school, it’s been drilled into me for years that law would be my career path, it was never an option to study anything else. I don’t have hobbies or any real interests, I was never allowed to dream of doing something different, something I enjoyed. I’m almost twenty years old and I have no idea what I want to do with my life, I don’t feel like I’ve lived and… it terrifies me.”
“You’ve still got time. And it shouldn’t scare you. It should excite you. You can go and do whatever the fuck you want and get whatever you want out of life. Go and do all the shit that you’re not supposed to do, that’s the fun part,” he says with a wink. “If you could do anything, what would you do right now?”
“I always had this one dream. It’s nothing ambitious, really. I’d open a bookstore in town. Well, a bookstore where you can drink coffee and pet cats.”
“Cats?”
I nod. “Yeah, like a cat cafe, with books.”
He chuckles. “I think it sounds great.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“What did you mean yesterday when you told Daniel you didn’t spend seven years in prison for nothing?”
His spine stiffens, but he doesn’t seem surprised by my question. “Would’ve thought your dad had filled you in on all the gory details.”
“I’d rather hear it from you, that is if you want to tell me. You don’t have to.”
“My mom—if you can even call her that—spent most of her time shooting something into her arm or a sniffing something up her nose, too fucked up to notice I was even there. My dad split when I was a kid, probably tired of my mom’s bullshit. He left me with her so that tells you everything you need to know about him.”
He brings his cigarette to his lips and takes a deep drag on it.
“My mom had a different guy in her bed almost every week, no matter how bad they were for her she couldn’t handle being alone. Some encouraged her addictions. Some tried to change her, the former tended to stick around longer than the latter. Some were just assholes.”
He flicks the burnt out butt of his cigarette onto the ground and leans forward, his forearms resting on his knees.
“I came home from school one day when I was seventeen to find some guy raping my mom. I’d seen him around a couple times but he was he prick, I knew that much. She was on the couch, he was on top of her and she was trying to push himoff. She was totally out of it, but she was hitting at him, telling him to stop. He didn’t. I remember grabbing a lamp off the table and hitting him over the head with it. It was solid brass, an heirloom from my grandmother, I think. I didn’t think I hit him that hard, I only wanted to make him stop, but when he hit the ground, he wasn’t moving… I killed him.”
“Oh my God,” I breathe out.
“Apparently they’d been fighting before I got home and one of the neighbours called the cops ‘cause of all the noise. When they got there and saw what I’d done, they arrested me. I was so fucking scared. I didn’t mean to kill him, I held onto that. When my mom came to the station to make a statement, she took that fucker’s side.”
My eyes widen. “She what?”
“Told the cops they were fucking and she liked it rough.”
“And they believed her?”
“They said there was no proof of sexual assault, it was her word against mine and that if what I was saying was true, I used excessive force. By the time the trial rolled around, I’d turned eighteen and got tried as an adult for manslaughter.”
