Page 41 of Deacon

“They came from such different places.”

The memory splintered around him.

A porch flashed into a yard, then the inside of Richard Morgan’s house. He saw the narrow side hall where Lila once looked at him like she already knew what he was fighting to hide. The lake returned for an instant, carrying her breath against his throat and the trembling courage with which she chose him.

Every image appeared too quickly and shattered before he could hold it.

“Him from the club. Matty and I from a house where my dad wore a badge and believed rules fixed everything.”

Jackson tried to answer. He wanted to tell her he had always understood, and that understanding had been the problem.

He took her home after the lake believing that maybe wanting something and having it could belong to the same life. Then he returned to the clubhouse and heard enough to realize Richard Morgan had tangled himself in things that made Lila impossible for him from that night forward. If Jackson stayed, she would fight for him. Eventually, fighting for him would force her to see too much.

No sound escaped him.

The dark shifted beneath his feet while the memory continued tearing apart.

“Two worlds that never stopped rubbing wrong.”

Something inside him lurched.

A twitch followed, small and distant yet impossibly close. His hand seemed to belong to a body beyond the dark, held there by someone warm.

Lila.

The woman, not the girl inside the memory.

He recognized the difference now, and the recognition made everything worse.

She continued talking about football and Matty, girls in the stands and boys moving too fast for their own good. Her words should have held the memories together. Instead, her voice felt wrong in a way that turned his stomach.

Too close. Too real.

This wasn’t the Lila by the lake or the girl watching from the bleachers. This was Lila now, somewhere beside him when she had no reason to be there.

Unless she wasn’t.

Perhaps his mind had stolen her voice to keep him from noticing the dark splitting beneath him. He tried to believe that, but each word dragged him closer to something bright and merciless beyond the memory.

His breathing changed.

He felt the hitch and the rough pull of a body remembering it possessed lungs.

He hated it.

Jackson wanted the lake. He wanted the night she loved him, when he had been weak enough to accept what she offered and selfish enough to believe wanting might create a future. He wanted the dark to leave him there.

“You hearin’ me, Jacks?”

Her voice came sharp and close.

Everything stopped.

No football field or lake. Only her voice, the dark, and the force pulling him toward both.

Jacks.

The name reached deeper than Jackson. It found the boy she knew before the world put its hands on him, the one who still believed he might stand near her without destroying everything she loved.