“You okay, Blackbird?” Hael asks as I pass by the kitchen and find him cooking eggs in nothing but his boxer shorts from last night. I nod, but I don’t bother to explain, intent on following Aaron up the stairs and into his bedroom.
He closes the door behind us as my breath quickens.
This is his room in this house, but it’s almost mine. Since we’ve officially gotten back together, if I sleep in here, he usually does, too. Before that, he either slept in the room with the bunk beds or on the floor in the girls’ room. Even when he was ignoring me and acting like I was an imposition in his life, he was being accommodating.
“You didn’t bring me all the way up here just to ask me to suck your dick, did you?” I joke, but Aaron just gives me a tight-lipped smile.
“Nope,” he says, opening his closet door and digging through the random shit that’s packed inside of it. There’s some old sports equipment, dirty clothes, action figures that he probably hasn’t touched since he was ten years old. I smile and cross my arms over my chest, leaning my shoulder against the wall next to the door.
Aaron clears the crap out of his way, uncovering a small shelving unit in the corner. It’s one of those plastic ones you can get at any department store, with little pull-out drawers stuffed with odds and ends. He opens the bottom one and extracts a small cardboard box.
“What is that?” I ask as he rises to his feet and turns to face me, holding the box close to his chest. Aaron closes his eyes for a moment, like he’s trying to prepare himself for what he’s about to do. My pulse starts to race, and I push up from the wall. “Aaron Atlas …” I warn as he finally opens his beautiful eyes up to look at me.
“We’ve been keeping these for years,” he says, still clutching the box. “I probably should’ve given them to you sooner, but I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. With all my heart, I truly wanted you to leave and make a life somewhere else, a life without blood and guns and dead bodies.” He hands the box over to me and our tattooed fingers tangle together into a very pretty picture. “But now that you’re here, I may as well give you the world—even if it’s not the exact one I had in mind.”
“What is this, Aaron?” I ask, feeling a drop of sweat slide down my spine. I’m afraid to open the box and see what’s inside.
“Just open it,” he commands me, and because I’m damn-near positive that whatever is in this box is going to shake me, I sit down on the floor. Aaron joins me, and I’m reminded of that one time we played spin the bottle with just the two us, so we’d have an excuse to kiss each other.
The box has a few cobwebs clinging to it that I swipe away with a shaking hand, carefully lifting the flaps so I can look inside.
What I see blows me the fuck away.
My breath catches, and I get so dizzy that I have to close my eyes to keep from falling over. Even sitting down, I feel unsteady.
“Bernadette,” Aaron whispers, and I open my eyes again.
Inside the box, I see a stack of old photos and a USB drive. These are all the pictures of Penelope that I thought I’d lost when the boys loaded my shit up in the backyard and set it on fire. At the time, my sister was still alive, so while I was heartbroken, I wasn’t suicidal about the whole thing. But then … Pen killed herself.
Or … was killed. I’m not sure I can ever get the answer to that particular mystery. The Thing wouldn’t have told me anyway. Even under torture, I’m not sure he would’ve shown all his cards. That’s the thing about those psychopathic narcissist types; they can literally rewrite reality in their heads and start believing their own lies.
Actually, there’s a South Park episode called “Fishsticks” that perfectly encapsulates that point.
I dump the contents onto the floor, looking for one photo in particular. My eyes are swimming with tears again, but I know that Aaron isn’t judging me. There. I find what I’m looking for: a strip of pictures from a stupid photobooth at the casino arcade. Mom and Dad used to go there to mingle with their fancy high-roller friends. I have very few memories of life before my father died, like my subconscious blocked it out to protect me.
After all, how could I keep going under the current conditions if I had memories of what life was supposed to be like? I needed to get used to the crap I’d been handed and deal. That was the only way.
“Jesus,” I murmur, looking down at Pen’s smiling face. She was only seven in this picture; I was six. We were so goddamn cute, so innocent, unspoiled and perfect. My thumb rubs across the picture, wishing I had more than just this. Wishing I had my sister back. “Killing Neil didn’t bring her back, Aaron,” I say, even though that’s a stupid statement to make. Obviously killing Neil Pence wasn’t going to resurrect my sister from the dead. “For so long, all I’ve wanted to do is hurt him, make him pay.” I look up from the photo to find Aaron watching me carefully, like he isn’t sure if he should just listen or if he should scoop me into his arms and take over, stroke my hair back, murmur sweet things in my ear. “Now that he’s gone, that it’s done … I feel empty.”
Aaron gets onto his hands and knees and crawls over to me, my first love wrapped in ink and violence. But when he presses his forehead to mine, all I can feel is his compassion, his need to protect. On the day of his father’s funeral, Aaron told me that he wished he could take care of all of us, that he wished he were strong enough.
He’s spent years granting his own wish. He can and does take care of this family; he is strong, on the inside and the outside.
“Fill all of that emptiness with my love,” he whispers, eyes still closed. I want to close mine, too, because I’m crying so hard, but I love the way he looks on his hands and knees in front of me. Such a beautiful boy, and an even more handsome man. “We’re here to warm up that void, Bernadette. Get used to it.”
I smile, dropping the photo to my lap. Our faces rub together and then our mouths meet. Aaron kisses me properly, stealing my soul away through my mouth, making it his. In return, he gives me his own soul, and I accept it with greedy fingers and a desperate heart.
“You and me, we’re fucking fate,” he says, his mouth moving against mine as he speaks the words. My arms wrap around his neck as our tongues tangle. He takes great care to push the photos safely to the side and then climbs on top of me, encouraging me to lay back on his rug so he can ravage me with his lips. “You’re all there is for me, Bernadette. I live and breathe by your command.”
Aaron shoves my pants down my hips, breaking our kiss to drop his face between my thighs. He puts his mouth on me, lips hot and tongue greedy, tasting me and groaning with pleasure at the same time.
He takes his time with it, moving his lips to mine, and his cock to my opening only after he’s certain that I’ve been satisfied several times over. We don’t leave that room until it’s time to get the girls, and when we do, I make sure to take Penelope’s picture with me, so I can give it to Heather.
“Here,” I tell her when she climbs in the car, and the way her face lights up tells me that’s all she needed, a reminder that Pen was alive once, that was happy, that she was real.
I decide that later, when everyone else in the house is asleep, that I’m going to bury the journal in the backyard, and all of its dark, awful secrets with it.