“So… You sew?” Mooncricket said a few minutes later.
“I do,” Jeremy said. “Though technically, this is quilting.”
“Isn’t that like sewing?”
“Not exactly.” Jeremy finished off another silver stitch to bind the butterfly and stopped to take in his work. He thought one more stitch would do the trick and he would be done with the square.
“Do you, like, knit and crochet and all that other old lady shit, too?” Mooncricket asked.
Jeremy could hear the smile in his voice and felt the tightening knot of responding irritation in his gut. He looked up and found Mooncricket trying to bite back a smile, hand reaching to cover his mouth against the laugh he was about to cough up.
With one quick back-handed blow, Jeremy wiped the smile off Mooncricket’s face. He fell off the arm of the sofa with a cry and hit the floor with a hard thump. Jeremy set his quilt square aside and stood up to walk around to where Mooncricket lay stunned, beautiful eyes blinking back shocked tears, red smeared across his mouth like popsicle syrup. It trickled from the corners of his lips in little rivulets and when Mooncricket took a shaking breath, his teeth were gory red-orange-pink, the blood turned to a melted sunset in his mouth when mixed with his saliva. He liked Mooncricket’s mouth best when it was full of blood.
Jeremy smiled as he crouched down beside Mooncricket and pushed the long strands of black hair back from his face.
“Does that look like something an old lady would make?” Jeremy asked him. “Hmm?”
“No. No, I swear it doesn’t.”
Mooncricket flinched back and blinked up at Jeremy, his eyes swimming with tears. He had hit Jeremy back the very first time, but Jeremy was stronger than him, bigger and meaner. He had taught Mooncricket a lesson about why that was a bad idea so well he hadn’t been able to lay on his back for three days. The welts and bruises were almost gone and frankly, Jeremy kind of missed them.
“Good,” Jeremy said. He leaned forward and kissed Mooncricket’s red mouth. He made a soft sound of pain, but he kissed back, lifting his head from the floor to deepen it, to show Jeremy how sorry he was.
Jeremy pulled out of the kiss and stood up a moment later so he could unzip his pants. Mooncricket was a smart boy and he rose up on his knees to follow. When he started to wipe the blood from his mouth, Jeremy grabbed his wrist.
“Leave it,” he said.
Mooncricket looked up at him with wide eyes, but he nodded and did as he was told.
Fifteen minutes later, Jeremy tucked himself away again, rusty smears marking his flesh like intimate secrets. Mooncricket licked his lips, blood-flecked and glossed with a droplet of come. He was breathing heavy and when Jeremy stroked a hand over the back of his head, Mooncricket shivered. While he caught his breath and rubbed his throat, sore from being fucked so hard and rough, Jeremy got his wallet and counted out fifty bucks. Mooncricket deserved a treat and Jeremy owed him an apology. He liked it when Mooncricket bled, but he always felt a little bad about it afterward. One did not break their toys, after all, especially not ones as exquisite as Mooncricket.
“Here,” Jeremy said, handing Mooncricket the money. “Go into town and do whatever. Have some fun, baby. I want you to.”
Mooncricket took the money and put it in the pocket of his jeans. He was still kneeling on the floor and that was fine in Jeremy’s book.
“So I can borrow your car?” Mooncricket asked.
“No, but you can walk,” Jeremy said as he sat back down on the sofa to finish his work. “It isn’t that far.”
He gave Mooncricket directions and ten minutes later, he was gone into the sweltering summer heat, armed with two bottles of water and a borrowed pair of Jeremy’s sunglasses. In the quiet that followed his departure, Jeremy made his final stitch and let the worlds inside of him well up and drown him for a little while. Above all, he thought of the one constant, the source of all his miserable love. The one who almost always arrived too late. Jeremy was tired of being overlooked and left behind and for the last twenty years, he had been trying to call that one back to him. He knew he was out there somewhere, ears forever opened and turned toward the sound of Jeremy’s voice. He would listen and he would come, if only Jeremy could get the words right. He had to believe that because if he didn’t, if his faith faltered even for a second then he would surely go mad.
3
The person who invented ranch dressing had to have made a killing. It was the perfect condiment, marinade and salad dressing. Ketchup did not hold a candle to the diversity (or tastiness) of ranch dressing. People did not, after all, pour ketchup on their leafy greens; they did not use it as the glue which held breadcrumbs on baked chicken parts. It could even be said that ranch dressing had effectively usurped ketchup’s throne as the crown royal of condiments.
Tobias dipped another French fry in the puddle of ranch dressing in his little food tray. He probably spent too much time pondering the importance of ranch dressing in the condiment hierarchy. Hylas said he had a ranch problem, which to Tobias sounded like he had lost fifty head of cattle on the way to the mailbox one day or some such thing.
It was a lovely day in Laylie Park, two hours before he and Dawn Marie had to be at the funeral home for work. She was across the street at Glynn’s, sitting at one of their outdoor tables, fanning herself with one of the take-home menus they kept stacked by the counter window. She looked hot and bored, but when she caught Tobias watching her, she lifted her hand to her head, index and thumb in the shape of a gun and pretended to pull the trigger. He shook his head and smiled then went back to his pile of French fries and copious amounts of delicious dipping sauce.
As he ate, he looked around the park, taking in the few people who were out for a stroll. The heat was disgusting, the humidity so heavy in the air it felt like every breath was mostly water. People in the south should have been born with gills instead of lungs, Tobias sometimes thought. He wasn’t hot, even in his suit and he seldom ever got cold either. When he was little and his father first noticed he hardly ever sweated, nor did Hylas, he had grown even more worried than he already was about his odd children.
By the time he was three, Hylas’s narcolepsy was severe enough that it was a risk to leave him unattended for even the five minutes it took to field a quick phone call. By the time he was born, no one had liked Tobias much, simple as that. Mitchell Dunwalton, a widower strapped with twin boys he didn’t quite know what to do with had been understandably concerned when his children didn’t turn into sopping, be-diapered, bawling little heathens sitting in the scorching noonday heat. Instead, they went on about the business of being toddlers like it was a perfectly pleasant seventy-two degrees out. The doctors had found nothing wrong with the two of them; all Mitchell had gotten out of his fretting was a pile of medical bills to pay. Thankfully, police officers were well-insured.
Tobias felt the heat, just as he felt the cold, but one extreme or the other was of no bother to him. He was as comfortable sitting half in the sun wearing a full suit in June as he would have been if it was winter and he decided to lose his mind and go out in board shorts and flip-flops. Hylas was the same, though he did go out in board shorts and flip-flops in December. Tobias stuck with his suits, thank you very much. The shocking paleness of his legs was nearly offensive when poking from a pair of brightly colored shorts. He liked his suits, he was comfortable in them; he had an excellent selection of ties for all occasions and not a single one with a golf theme.
He laughed at the image of himself wearing a suit coat and board shorts, dunked another fry in some ranch and continued his perusal of the park’s visitors that day.
Across from Tobias near the barbecue pits, Mrs. Kimiko Busby wandered the park. She tipped her wizened little face back as she went, cane tapping along the concrete pathway for anything that might trip her up. The wedding ring she still wore though she’d been a widow for the last fifteen years glinted in the light when she pushed her grey hair, still streaked with black, off he
r forehead where it had stuck in the sweat. When she smiled up at a squirrel scolding her from a branch overhead, Tobias smiled with her.
Kimiko was a happy woman, she always had been. She was civil to Tobias when they crossed paths, looking at him with her pretty dark eyes, smiling despite the flinching he saw in her face, near her jaws. She was old though and Tobias was concerned; something seemed off about her to him. He couldn’t put his finger on what, but it felt gloomy though she looked happy as ever and healthy as a horse even at ninety-two years old. He still felt that Kimiko should see her doctor soon. It might be a tumor.
Tobias grimaced and swallowed his bite of French fry by reflex alone. He hated that his thoughts had an unsavory tendency to turn morbid on him though he didn’t think of himself as a particularly morbid person. He also hated that such thoughts about specific people were never wrong. No matter how much it bothered him, Tobias’s hands were tied. He couldn’t very well run around town, scaring people more than he already did simply by existing; Excuse me, Mrs. Busby, but you have a stomach tumor you need to have seen to. Though he could not always claim a totally “hands-off” take on such things either. Tobias was the sender of many an anonymous letter and postcard. He supposed he would have to send Kimiko one as well, much as it pained him to do so; he really liked her a lot. He hoped it was not too late.
“Okay, enough.”
Tobias looked away from Kimiko, turning his head to the left to watch Aaron Talley menacing yet another squirrel with a stick. Tobias was familiar with Aaron, he’d been around him his entire life, not traveling in exactly the same circles, but inhabiting the same solar system at least. Hylas, Nick Lange and the violently departed Hunter McAllister had all been big friends with Aaron Talley in high school. The four of them spent most of their formative years getting high and/or drunk and generally misbehaving. With Hylas’s charm, Hunter’s resourcefulness, Nick’s raw, but easygoing sex appeal and Aaron’s honey badger ferocity, they’d been a whirlwind of pals, a force to be reckoned with.
Tobias had stood quietly by on the sidelines and observed what antics he could since Hylas was always and forever reluctant to leave him out of things. What Tobias did miss, Hylas told him about later, regaling him with wild stories about the four of them, even wilder boys. Hylas could spin tales so vividly that it was like Tobias had been there; listening to his brother speak like he was living a waking dream of derring-do and delinquent hijinks. When Tobias heard of their antics, Hylas talking softly to him from the lower bunk in the room they shared, he didn’t feel so left out of everything.
Be that as it may, Tobias never had cared for Aaron much. He was as paranoid as he was fearless, damaged in some deep way that did not give him anything like the so-called “wounded charm” some people possessed. He was abrasive and off-putting on his best day, though Hylas still remained friends with him and seemed to just love the guy. His partner, Jason, apparently felt the same way and at present, he looked on, smiling at his aberrant behavior of swashbuckling with one of the park’s many squirrels, pestering little panhandlers each and every one.
Aaron looked up, saw Tobias watching them and jumped like he had been shocked. He saved face by flipping Tobias the bird with both middle fingers then stomped off, yanking at Jason’s shirt sleeve in a clear let’s move this along gesture.
Tobias looked toward Glynn’s to check on Dawn Marie who was still waiting on her order. She blew smoke rings up at the merciless blue summer sky, rivulets of sweat running down her cheeks and the side of her neck like clear, dripping lacquer. She casually reached beneath her shirt and scratched her left breast, unaware of the leering man that walked by her just as she did so. Tobias pressed his mouth into a thin line, attention turning toward him. Like Aaron, the man jumped then hurried away, looking over his shoulder as he went. Tobias tilted his head and made an ugh sound in the back of his throat when brown recluse bite to the left eyelid skittered through his mind on itching little legs. That’s what you get for going hunting, getting drunk and passing out next to a deadfall though. November looked to be a bad month for that unsavory gentleman.
He turned his attention back to the scarred top of the picnic table; he’d had his fill of people-watching for the time being, there was nothing good on and he found he would rather enjoy his large order of fries, aka, supper, in peace from there on out. Tobias only had a few fries left to eat and was working on that with steadfast contentedness when a shadow fell over him.
“Hey.”
Tobias ignored the voice; if he didn’t recognize the voice of Dawn Marie, Hylas or their father and occasionally one of the former two’s friends, Tobias understood that it was a waste of time. He ate another fry instead, compared the stack of fried potatoes to the ranch and realized the ranch-to-fry ratio was uneven.
“Excuse me, dude. Hello?”
A light touch on Tobias’s shoulder drew him up and he turned his head to look at the young man standing behind him. He was soaked through with sweat, long hair matted and clinging to his wet, flushed cheeks. The well-worn black wife-beater he was wearing clung to his thin body, the wet cotton molding itself to his shape. The bare skin between the tattoos on his arms was lobster red and would soon be painful. He was holding an empty water bottle and licking at a split in the corner of his mouth.
“Are you talking to me?” Tobias asked. People crossed the street to avoid him and would not even look him in the eye nine times out of ten, so he was taken by surprise.
“There’s no one else around,” the man said, waving the hand holding the water bottle to indicate the immediate area of the park.
Tobias looked around and saw that he was right, everyone in the near vicinity had moved on. He was not surprised, that sort of thing happened all the time.
“So it seems,” Tobias said. “What can I do for you?”
“Can I sit down?” the man asked.
Tobias raised his eyebrows; there were quite a few unoccupied tables to choose from, two on either side of Tobias, in fact. Still, he gestured to the bench opposite him.
“If you’d like,” he said.
“Thanks.” The smile that lit up the young man’s face was very pretty, there and gone again almost as soon as it arrived.
When he sat down across from him, Tobias realized he had cracked the scab on the split at the corner of his mouth. It oozed red, violently bright against his fair skin. Tobias passed him one of his napkins. The guy took it and started to blot the sweat off his forehead with it, but Tobias shook his head.
“It’s for your mouth,” he said. “It’s bleeding.”
“Oh,” the man said. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize to me,” Tobias said.
“Okay,” the man said as he gingerly blotted his mouth. He closed his eyes, swaying in his seat. “Jesus. I feel sick.”
“What’s the matter?” Tobias asked. It seemed the polite thing to ask, after all.
“I’m so fucking hot,” the man said. “Like, I feel like my insides are melting and getting all gooey and crap. I walked for… I dunno. A long time.”
“Where did you walk from?”
“From uh… out around Stony Point, I think,” the man said. “That’s what the sign on the road leading to the highway said.”
Tobias raised his eyebrows. “That is a long way to walk in this heat.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s wasn’t supposed to be that long. He said it wasn’t. Guess he, whatchacallit, underestimated. Over. Whatever.”
“Clearly,” Tobias said. “Yet you carried gamely on.”
“Shit,” the man said. “By the time I realized how far it really was, I was already halfway here, so I said fuck it.”
“Intrepid, too,” Tobias said. Foolish as well, he thought.
“I don’t know what that means, but… Thanks, I guess,” the man said.
“You’re welcome,” Tobias said. “Would you like some more water?”
“You got some?”
“Here.” Tobias passed him one
of the bottles he had bought earlier to take with him to work that evening. They weren’t cold, but at least they were wet.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.” The man grabbed the bottle of water with shaking fingers and unscrewed the cap. He spilled it all down his chin and neck, water soaking through his already wet shirt.
“Do you have a name?” Tobias asked.
“Yeah, of course,” the man said. He was still gasping after his long drink, breathless, mouth wet and shining in the bright sun. “Everybody’s got one of those.”
Tobias smiled and tilted his head. “And what is your particular name?”
“Mooncricket,” the man said, smiling back.
“Moon… cricket…” Tobias steepled his fingers beneath his chin, still smiling, but now at the absurdity of such a name. “And what is the name you were born with? You look like a Tristan to me.”
Mooncricket stared at him, throat working, fingers clenching against the plastic water bottle so hard it crackled and the sides popped as they dimpled inward.
“What the fuck? No one’s called me that in years,” Mooncricket said. “I mean… like… years, for real. How the hell did you know that?”
“Useless talent,” Tobias said with a shrug. “I didn’t mean to alarm you.”
“You didn’t,” Mooncricket said. “I mean, it’s freaky as shit, but not alarming really. Just. Damn. I knew you looked interesting when I saw you sitting here.”
“That is a rather uncommon reaction to my presence,” Tobias said.
“Why? I mean, shit, dude, you don’t even look real. I’m all over that, ya know?” Mooncricket said. “I thought you were a carving or something at first, like one of those public art piece things.”
Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1) Page 42
