by R. J. Lewis
Conor gave Jem a look. “Why?”
Jem looked back at Max. “Just wondering if I can pop it open again. You wanna try opening it, Max? Or do knives scare you too?”
“Leave him alone,” Conor retorted, growing exhausted as he pulled his pocketknife out of his backpocket. “If I give this to you, promise you won’t wave it around Max.”
Jem let out a dramatic sigh. “Oh, come on, just throw it.”
“Jem.”
“I promise.”
He tossed it Jem’s way. Jem caught it and opened it, oohing and awing for a moment. It was a nice red handled fold-out knife. It’d been sitting in his old man’s cabinet for ages, untouched. When Conor took it, his old man hadn’t even noticed. Lately he’d been practicing opening it up with one hand, but it was hard to do without nicking his middle finger.
Jem suddenly made ghost sounds as he waved the tip of the blade close to Max’s head. Max shuffled away, face red.
“God’s sake, Jem,” Conor seethed. “Close it and give it back to me.”
Jem laughed at Max’s expression. “Yeah, yeah, always someone to Max’s rescue.”
He closed it and tossed it back at Conor. Conor caught it and slid it into his butt pocket.
“So, we going to play Hide and Seek then?” Jem pressed.
Max’s spine stiffened.
“We don’t have to play it,” Conor said just then, giving Max a reassuring look. “Honestly, we can turn back now.”
Max was visibly terrified, but one look in Jem’s taunting eyes, and he shook his head, desperate to prove him wrong. “It’s not that…” he repeated, licking his dry lips. “It’s just…my mom wants me home early and…”
But that wasn’t true, and they knew it, and Max knew they knew it, too.
“Let’s turn back,” Conor began to say. “Better not to walk through the rain, anyway –”
“I’ll play,” Max interrupted, standing up, barely reaching Conor’s shoulders standing as straight as he was. “I’ll play, Conor, I’m fine to, I promise.”
Conor studied him for a moment while the others looked to him for the final say.
Max would find a safe place to hide, like always, and while Conor didn’t feel like playing much, he wasn’t going to take the fun away from Dom and Jem.
Ultimately, he stiffened a nod. “Okay. Let’s rock, paper, scissor who goes first.”
Chapter Two
Thames
It had just gotten dark when he got to Blackwater. Those few hours of silence were a blessing. Nothing but the wind in his ear and the soft hum of the car wheels against the asphalt.
He was exhausted. Every inch of him ached for sleep, for the promise of darkness to ease this maddening pulse he felt in his soul. He knew he wouldn’t make it back to the city tonight. He hardly had enough money for a night at the shadiest motel, but none of that mattered.
He had to settle the shakes. He had to know she was okay, that after all this time she was still real. Because he couldn’t feel her. He hadn’t felt her in a while. The pain was self-inflicted. He wronged her by pushing her away, but even now he still felt convinced it had been the only way to save them both.
Blackwater was altered in a way, but it was also the same too. He cruised down familiar streets, the feeling of nostalgia not far off. He took the same route to his house with ease. Every night in prison he remembered the way, imagining the route like the back of his hand, and every single night in prison he found himself hovering outside the large door of his gargantuan house, waiting to see the face that answered.
Sometimes he couldn’t see Charlotte clearly. Sometimes he wondered if he was filling in the blanks all wrong. It had frightened him when he began to forget the fine edges of her face, when he began to question how raised her cheekbones were, or just how dark her hair was.
Remembering wasn’t the hard part, he realized, it was forgetting.
He was getting twitchy by the time he drew closer. His hand clenched the steering wheel harder when he recognized the deserted land he chased down Billy in. He swallowed hard as he inched down the street now, passing neighbouring house after neighbouring house. Finally, he braked, coming to a slow stop in front of the very house he cherished her in.
Only…he stilled, feeling tremors course through him as he gaped in shock. It took him a long time to process what he was staring at.
His heart dropped.
His blood ran cold.
It was gone.
All of it.
Replacing his house was a mountain of rubble and dirt.
What in the fuck?
He felt lightheaded as he blazed across town, heading straight in the direction of Jem’s bar. It was closer than his mother’s house, and he needed answers. He needed to know she was okay. He needed to understand why the fuck his house was burned down and why it looked like it had been destroyed a long time ago.
He was queasy by the time he turned into the parking lot of the bar. He was shaking everywhere, it physically hurt. The car was parked sideways in the crowded lot, and he hadn’t even locked the door when he hurried out. He stormed into the bar, vaguely noticing how completely unchanged it was. The place was packed with unfamiliar people, new residents, new drunks, new smiling faces, but the warm atmosphere was just the same.
Feeling like his head was spinning, Thames scanned every face, searching for one he recognized. He gaped at every waitress, at one point stopping mid-step when one held the similar body shape of his beloved. The immediate reaction was almost too much to bear. He nearly bent over right there on the spot. The waitress turned and it was not her, and he wasn’t sure whether he felt relief or disappointment.
Thames forced his way further into the room, feeling more and more uneasy. Thoughts of her in that house as it burned fucked with his mind. He might have puked if there’d been anything in his stomach. By the time he made it around the bar, practically shoving people away as he forced his way to the backroom, he was physically distressed. His steps were all wrong, weighed down by panic and fear.
Surely if something had happened to her or to his baby he would have known. His family – and the prison – would have made sure of it. Yet…paranoia ate away at the last scraps of his sanity. The what-ifs swirled around him, swallowing him whole.
He barged into the backroom, his eyes rimmed red. He immediately found Jem seated behind his desk, making orders over the phone. Looking up, he had a mad expression that the door had been charged through. His mouth was already forming a harsh curse when his eyes landed on Thames and suddenly he went still.
“Oh, my God.” Jem exhaled. The phone fell from his hand, hitting the desk with a sickening crack. He bolted up just as Thames rounded the desk and grabbed at the collar of Jem’s shirt, looking disturbed and ragged.
“Jem,” Thames forced out, his throat feeling strangled. “Where is she? Is she okay? The baby…Jem, the house…The house is gone.”
Jem’s face broke with emotion. He pulled Thames to him, supporting his weight. Immediately, he grasped Thames’ shirt in response and nodded, hurriedly responding. “She’s okay. They’re okay, Conor. They’re alright, buddy.”
Eyes bright with unshed tears, Thames withdrew his grip from Jem and staggered back, breathing for the first time since he’d seen the sight of the rubble. His entire body prickled with the most intense need to see her. While he shut his eyes momentarily to focus on bringing down his body’s response to what he had seen, he felt Jem studying him.
“Thought you had three more months left,” he said, sounding apologetic. “I wish I’d known. How’d you get here? Jesus. I feel like I’m looking at a fucking ghost, but…” He paused, looking more disturbed now as he uttered, “but I’m also feeling like I’m looking at a stranger.”
Thames was too lightheaded to respond. He gripped the back of a nearby chair and squeezed it hard. He felt like every ounce of his energy had been drained from him. All that pent-up worry, all that fear and anxiety ebbed away slowly, until h
e was finally forced to absorb his current situation.
Jem.
Jem was in front of him. He hadn’t seen his friend in so long. There was such a chasm between them.
“Are you okay?” Jem asked, watching him intently.
In a physical sense, yeah, but…
Thames swallowed hard as he looked into Jem’s eyes, catching sight of that old familiarity. Still, it felt all wrong being here, standing before him now after having nearly lost his sanity.
“I need to see Charlotte,” he spoke, his voice eerily calm now.
There was something in Jem’s expression that didn’t sit right with Thames. It was wariness and hesitation. He pursed his lips together, thinking.
“Jem,” Thames pressed, cocking his head to the side as he watched him. “I’m not asking.”
Jem let out a long sigh and leaned back against his desk, arms crossed. It was a defensive stance, suggesting he wasn’t going to part with this information straight away. Rubbing at his face with sudden exhaustion, he asked, “Are you planning on seeing her right this minute?”
“Is there something wrong with that?”
“Have you seen your mother?”
“I want to see Charlotte.”
Jem nodded stiffly. “Then you haven’t seen your mother. Of course not. She’d have told you about the house, about it burning down two years ago. About who was responsible for it.”
Thames let his words soak in without responding. He forced himself to stay calm. He clung to that apathy, aware now of why it existed in him. If he felt any of that old flame of rage, he would have lost his shit. He would have torn the town apart, searching for the culprit.
But now, well, now the laws of human etiquette didn’t entail open violence of that nature.
“I don’t want to know right now, Jem,” he declared, solemnly. “I want to know where Charlotte is.”
Jem appeared curious. “Not the response I was expecting.” Turning around, he grabbed at his notepad and pen and began jotting something down. “I’ll give you her home address, but she’s not there right now. She’s somewhere else, and I’ll write that down too.”
“Where is she?”
Jem shook his head, reluctant, tearing off the page to give to him. “No, my friend, I’m not going to bear witness to your reaction. You go there and figure it out yourself. You’re unpredictable, and while I love you like a brother and missed the fucking shit out of you, I’m also operating very strategically with my life. I can’t have bad attention, or broken bones in my business. Nothing that’ll get the cops sniffing around.”
Thames took the paper from him, pocketing it straight away. “There’ll be no broken bones, Jem.” It came out like an oath. A promise that held weight somehow even though Conor Thames was the last person you would ever believe to keep his hands to himself in a fit of rage.
Jem didn’t look sceptical. He stared hard at Thames for a long moment, assessing him like he couldn’t figure him out. “What the fuck happened in there, Thames? You’re all wrong.”
He didn’t look away. He let Jem in, let him see the human wreckage staring back at him. Finally, he answered, “I’m not all wrong, Jem. I’m just dead.”
Jem’s eyes dimmed. Sadness replaced his curiosity. He stiffened a single nod, refusing to answer or else the emotion might escape him. Like Thames, Jem too seemed altered. He seemed…far too feeling than before.
“Give me a hint of what to expect,” Thames urged quietly. “Don’t let me walk into something I’m not prepared for.”
“It isn’t that,” Jem tried to explain, sympathetically. “It’s that a lot of time’s gone by and things aren’t the way they used to be. She’s not the Charlotte you left behind.”
“Is she…happy?”
He frowned. “Charlotte is a lot of things, Thames.”
He waited for Jem to elaborate. He sensed Jem had gotten very close to Charlotte, and he felt relief at that. He had trusted Jem explicitly.
“I did my best with Charlotte,” he finally said, as if he needed to explain himself. His words came out in a rush, a light flush accompanying his cheeks. “She’s stubborn, Thames. She’s emotional and impulsive, and I’m not going to lie, buddy, she was also the best fucking thing to happen to me when you went away. And her daughter…your daughter…Thames, you burned Charlotte by shutting the two of them out. Penny is the most beautiful little girl I have ever seen, and you should have been there to see it, bud. That’s my two cents, and I know you don’t want to hear it, but I’ve kept this buried in my chest for years now and, fuck, it needed to be said. You have a lot to make up for.”
Thames felt like his chest was caving in all over again. “Does she hate me?”
Charlotte could have moved on. She could have had more kids. She could have been with anyone, and none of that would have hurt him more than if she hated him.
Jem snorted, looking at him like he was crazy. “Charlotte could never hate you, but…I’m pleading for you to be cautious. You were a wrecking ball back in the day, and she’s reached a level of stability that I don’t want to see jeopardized because you’ve come back into the picture still angry at the world.”
“I’m not angry at the world, Jem, I’m just angry at myself.”
There it was again; Jem was trying to figure him out, trying to understand what the fuck had happened to Thames to make him this…altered.
Suddenly needing a moment, Thames turned the stiff chair around and collapsed into it. Elbows propped on his knees, he ran his hands over his head, closing his eyes to temporarily block out his fresh surroundings. It was sensory overload. He was so used to blank walls and grey colours. He would have been staring into the darkness this very moment in his prison cell, mute and cold.
Still, it was all he knew for so long.
The faces he was used to seeing, he wouldn’t see anymore.
The abrupt change was slowly sinking into him.
“Dominic slept in a cell not far from me,” he said quietly, deep in thought. “He needed me, and I abandoned him.”
He didn’t want to look up to see Jem’s reaction. Jem carried the guilt when it came to Dominic. Thames heard him shuffle around, but he offered no response. Maybe the guilt had muted him.
“Jem…” he pressed, needing some sort of acknowledgement. “He’s alone in there. No crew. Nothing.”
“I’m going to make it up to him,” Jem promised, his voice eerily monotone. “I haven’t forgotten him. I send him money every month. Did he tell you that?”
“It isn’t enough.”
“What do you mean? How expensive is shit in commissary?”
Thames forced himself to look up, giving Jem a heavy look. “He’s buying his life off every month at a time since he got jailed up in that hellhole. He owes every major gang an x amount of money. Your money barely grazes the surface.”
Jem’s face fell. He crossed his arms, looking defensive again, but also troubled. “How was I supposed to know that? Dom’s blocked us all out, the way you’ve done. How’s he…how’s he surviving then?”
“He inks mostly.”
That was the best response to give to Jem for the time-being. He wasn’t going to get any more specific than that. Judging by Jem’s stillness, he was aware there was more to it, but he didn’t want to prod. Jem lived with far too many regrets, and this one was probably at the height of them all.
Aside from Addison, that is.
Although, now that Thames really watched Jem fidget, he wondered just how much weighed on him.
“I’m just asking you not to discard him the way you’ve always discarded Locke,” he then said, unable to hold back.
Jem’s eyes dimmed. “Now we both know Locke is entirely another thing.”
Thames frowned. “Do you ever miss it, Jem?”
“What?”
“The togetherness. The way us four boys used to be.”
Jem wouldn’t meet his eye now. “I miss it,” he admitted. “But we were kids, Thames. We
were destined to go our own way, no matter how hard we tried to keep it together.”
“When Dom is out, I think he’ll need to remember what it means to have brothers again.” Adding tightly, “And I think Locke needs to be part of that, too.”
Jem offered no response now.
They sat in tense silence for some time, the weight of the past heavy on their shoulders.
Gathering his thoughts, Thames finally stood up on a sharp exhale. He went to the door, and, just before leaving, glanced back at Jem. “Don’t tell her I’m coming.”
Jem didn’t look happy. “You expect me to keep quiet?”
Thames nodded. “For me, yeah. Please, Jem.”
On a heavy sigh, he conceded with a forced nod. Thames hurried out of the room, out of the bar, away from the music and the loud noise. He sat in his car and removed the paper from his pocket. Splaying it out on the dashboard, he read both addresses, frowning slightly at the latter one.
Why was Charlotte in downtown Blackwater at night?
Chapter Three
Thames
He came to a stop outside a non-descript dark-bricked building. There was no name on the front. No lights to suggest it was open. It was too dark to see anything more than bodies occasionally leaving or entering the establishment.
He remained in the car for a good thirty minutes, watching carefully, studying every person that left or entered. The door would open at the side of the building and a giant bouncer would appear. There would be an exchange of words before something was produced from the person for the bouncer to look at. Then he would be let in.
Thames noted several things. One, they were all men coming and going. Two, they drove expensive cars, parked discreetly half a block from the establishment, and would come walking up dressed in expensive clothing. Three, they had a card of entry. Thames couldn’t freely go in there unless he bulldozed his way past the bouncer, and that just screamed trouble.
No. More. Trouble.
Thames let out a frustrated sigh. Jem would have known Thames couldn’t gain entry. Asshole set him up to just wait around outside, or maybe he was testing his oath. Whatever it was, Thames wasn’t happy. He found himself nervously bouncing his knee up and down, stifling an angry growl every time he watched these men come and go, wondering… wondering many things.
