Page 39 of Deacon

Another laugh escaped me, easier this time. Blue caught my eye over the rim of her mug and smiled, small but real, and for a moment the entire afternoon loosened around us.

Then Evan pointed at the screen with his cracker again. “That one is basically Priest with skates.”

Blue snorted. “Absolutely not.”

“He’s too pretty to be Priest,” I said, glancing up, “but the emotional repression is close.”

Evan looked delighted. “That is exactly what I mean.”

Blue muttered something about needing better coworkers, though she was smiling when she said it.

The episode rolled on while Evan maintained a running commentary filled with scandalized sighs and wildly unhelpful observations. Blue pretended to be above it while remaining just as invested as the rest of us.

I sat between them, listening to their nonsense and the comfort of voices I knew by heart, and finally let some of the tightness inside me ease.

11

Deacon

The dark was never truly empty.

That had been its first lie.

At the beginning, it felt like peace, deep and undemanding. No blood or brothers. No roads, choices, or mornings that might reveal what had broken while he slept. It wrapped around him, warm and soundless, carrying him wherever it wanted, and because pain had yet to find him there, he let it.

Then the memories began.

They never brought the ugly ones first. The dark knew better than that. It offered him the pieces he would reach for.

Lila laughing with her head tipped back, sunlight caught in her hair and her eyes bright with a recklessness she never knew was killing him. Matty running his mouth in the driveway while Jackson leaned against his bike and pretended to listen, waiting for Lila to come outside. Stadium lights over worn grass. Summer air thick with gasoline and the sound of her saying his name as though it belonged in her mouth.

That was the trick.

The dark gave him her, so he stayed.

Maybe stayed wasn’t the right word. He sank into it. Circled through it. Haunted the same places until the memories became more solid than whatever waited beyond them. He returned to the nights when Lila was young and close, looking at him as though he might be something more than a mistake waiting to happen.

Somewhere beneath it all, he knew something was wrong.

The knowledge reached him in sharp flashes, light slipping beneath a door in a room that should have had none. Sound traveled toward him as though through deep water, followed by pain too distant to name but close enough to promise its return.

Whenever it happened, Jackson shoved harder toward the memories.

Toward Lila.

The truth beyond them carried machines and metal, blood and grief. It carried the taste of something left unfinished, and he wanted no part of it. He wanted the clean brutality of loving her before he ruined everything. He wanted their final night by the lake, grass crushed beneath them and her breath against his throat, the stunned wonder in her face when she trusted him with something sacred.

That was where he always tried to go.

Sometimes he found her at sixteen, barefoot in the yard with her hands planted on her hips, ordering him and Matty to stop trying to kill each other during a game of tackle football with no equipment. Other times, she was seventeen and standing too close in the Morgan kitchen after one of Richard’s barbecues, her eyes lifted toward his while adults laughed outside and the world narrowed to the inch of air between them.

Sometimes, the lake opened for him.

That was the memory he wanted most, the one he would have carved into his bones if pain were the price of keeping it.

He pushed toward it now, through the dark and the strange tearing sensation that came more often lately, through the pressure of something trying to pull him backward. The memory formed gradually. Warm air settled against his skin. Summer filled his lungs with grass, lake water, and the faint sweetness of her. Then Lila appeared in his arms, younger than the ache inside him but no less real.

His girl.