CROSS (A Gentry Boys Novella)

by Cora Brent

  My fists unclenched. I was being childish.

  “I would have been fine,” I informed him coolly.

  “Really?” Stone raised his eyebrows and zeroed in with a penetrating stare. “I’m not sure you’re ever fine, kid.”

  That comment, casually tossed out of his mouth like it was nothing, knocked the wind out of me. Stone Gentry had just accidentally summed me up in one thoughtless sentence. I wasn’t someone who walked around with an arsenal of witty comebacks ready to use. I had no answer for him. So I put my head down and started to walk back in the direction I’d come from.

  “Erin.”

  I could hear him, right behind me, his stride much longer than mine. I quickened my pace.

  “Erin, come on.”

  He caught my elbow but I wrenched out of his grip and started to climb up the embankment. I’d chosen badly; it was a particularly steep spot. A layer of parched sand gave way beneath my weight and the rubber soles of my sneakers were not enough to keep me from slipping. My left knee scraped against jagged rock and I probably would have toppled the last several feet and landed in a messy heap of humiliation if Stone didn’t have quick reflexes. He caught me around the waist and helped me down gently, backing off when I scrambled away, brushing the dust off my clothes.

  “You okay?” he asked and for once his voice wasn’t dripping with mocking arrogance. For some reason this sent me to the verge of tears. If Stone Gentry was going to change direction and be all sincere and nice I just couldn’t handle that right now. I took several deep breaths and noted that my scraped knee was bleeding slightly. Just a trickle. Barely more than nothing. But the sight of the blood went straight to my stomach. I bent over and promptly dry heaved into a bed of smooth river rock.

  Stone was at my side instantly, pushing a bottle of water in my face. “Drink it,” he ordered.

  My first instinct was to argue but in the last few minutes my instincts had not proved particularly helpful. I drank. The water was warm and tasted vaguely of tobacco.

  “Thanks,” I said weakly, handing the bottle over. “I didn’t eat breakfast.”

  “Just as well,” Stone said, rather good-naturedly. “You would have made a much bigger mess if you had.”

  “True.” My hair was sticking to my neck. Impatiently I twisted it into a long black rope and piled it atop my head, securing the knot with an elastic band I’d absently left around my wrist. I’d been meaning to get it cut; the length was a nuisance. Conway loved my long hair though. He loved to comb it through his fingers and gather it into his fists when he gently pulled me toward him for a kiss.

  Stone had left my side, either bored with dealing me or at a loss for more conversation. He stood apart, staring at a distant horizon ringed by mountains that were much farther away than they seemed.

  “Thanks,” I called to him.

  He didn’t turn around. “You said that already.”

  “I thanked you for the water. But you were right. I should have thanked you for looking out for me when I was about to get an ankle full of snake fang.”

  “Well, I have my faults, but generally I don’t enjoy watching young girls get eaten by snakes.”

  I kicked a rock. “Aren’t you tired of this, Stone?”

  He turned around then, eyeballing me warily. “Tired of what?”

  “This back and forth, an incessant tug of war over the one thing we have in common.”

  Stone said nothing. He seemed to be waiting for me to continue. So I took a deep breath and did exactly that.

  “He loves both of us and we both love him. That should be enough to get us to figure out how to get along. You don’t have to like me. I’m not sure I like much about you either. But it’s not fair. It’s not fair to Conway to keep forcing him to defend one of us to the other.” My hair had come loose from its knot. I shook it out with irritation and then pushed it behind my ears. “Look, Conway told me last night wasn’t your fault with the car-“

  “It was my fault,” he interrupted with a devilish grin. “Of course it was my fault. You know what I’m like, Erin. Everyone knows.”

  I shook my head, feeling suddenly weary and rather miserable. “No. Actually I hardly know you at all.” This conversation had veered off into an uncomfortable place. I braced myself for a volley of Stone Gentry’s trademark sarcasm.

  Instead, as his eyes searched my face, something softened in him. He looked down and nodded.

  “You’re right,” he said quietly.

  “Oh.” I almost fell over from shock. I really hadn’t expected mature agreement. “Really?”

  “Really.” He broke into a grin. It had a sheepish quality. “I can be a dick. I know that. But you make Con happy and I’m happy he has you.”

  “Oh,” I said and swallowed hard, lowering my head. A tiny gecko scurried across the rocks and then disappeared into a dusty crevice.

  “Erin?” Stone prompted.

  “Do I?” I asked, snapping my head up and looking him in the eye.

  Stone was confused. “Do you what?”

  “Do I make Con happy?”

  He gave me a funny look. Then he shifted position and stared out into the distance again. “That’s a bullshit question. You know you make him happy.”

  I did. Mostly I did. It wasn’t hard to recall the countless times Conway Gentry had looked at me with tender love in his eyes. Girls threw themselves at him all the time and he never gave them the time of day. If Con was tired of me he wouldn’t have stuck around for two years. I should know all this without being told. But it still meant the world to hear it from the guy who wouldn’t blow sunshine up my ass to spare my feelings. Not when it came to his brother. Stone, for all his flaws, cared about Conway very much.

  “I do know,” I said and smiled. Stone relaxed and smiled back.

  “Well,” I said, clasping my hands together, “in the spirit of this new semi-friendship, can I offer you a glass of fresh homemade lemonade? It should be cold by now.”

  Stone considered. “You made it yourself?”

  “Yup. Measured the mix and everything.”

  He laughed. “Well then, you’ve got a taker. I’m a sucker for over sweetened beverages.”

  We walked slowly, almost leisurely, back to my house. Now that Stone had let his cocky façade slide a bit he opened up a little. Mostly he talked about Conway and all the trouble they got into when they were kids. Many of those incidents I knew about, some of them I didn’t. It had always seemed like the earliest sounds of my childhood included Tracy Gentry screaming their names at the top of her lungs as she hunted the neighborhood to make them answer for something or other they had done.

  A half forgotten memory suddenly bubbled to the surface and I nudged Stone. “Remember when my mother found you guys hiding in our pantry? You couldn’t have been more than four or five. She opened up the door to grab some cake mix and you both popped out, howling like wolves. She screamed, fell over backward into a kitchen chair, and laughed until she could hardly breathe.”

  “I remember that,” Stone chuckled. “Our hands were all filthy because we’d attacked our parents’ new Egyptian silk sheets with magic marker and we were hiding because we knew there’d be hell to pay. Your mom was always cool whenever we showed up, although that time she did make us dunk our hands in a sink of soapy water to get all the ink off. Then she sat us down at the table with you and gave us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Finally our dad came by to haul us back home.”

  At the end his voice kind of fell away and he sighed. A strange shiver rolled up my spine and we walked for a moment in silence, the mood turned grim over the mention of lost parents.

  “You look like her,” Stone finally said. “Your mom.”

  “I know.”

  No one needed to tell me that. I had pictures. I had memories.

  “I don’t talk about her much,” I said slowly. “My dad certainly isn’t up for daily trips down memory lane. I can’t blame him. And I never know what to say to my sisters to
make it all not as bad as it really is.”

  Stone was silent for a minute and then exhaled loudly. “A shitty deal for all of you. I mean, with her accident and all,” he added quickly.

  An accident. That was what everyone called it, at least to my face. I was tired of pretending. “It wasn’t an accident, Stone. You know that.”

  He didn’t argue with me. I had to give him credit for that. By this time we’d climbed beyond the wash and had nearly reached my house. It should have felt strange, having Stone by my side as I unlocked the side door. And for a moment I did suffer a twinge of shyness. But then as I poured the lemonade Stone started talking about Conway and boasting with pride about how good his brother was when it came to fixing cars.

  “He’s good at everything,” Stone bragged. “Smartest guy I know.”

  The teachers at Emblem High had long ago thrown in the towel where the Gentry boys were concerned. Their mother certainly never offered much in the way of encouragement. Conway usually shrugged it off whenever I told him he could do much better. Maybe he didn’t believe me because no one else in his life understood how wonderful he was. But now, listening to Stone, I had to admit it was a warm relief to hear someone else appreciate Con’s potential.

  When the rusty hinges of the screen door howled open I figured it was Penny, escaping from day camp like she’d been threatening to do every day. I was in the middle of a laugh and had managed to snort lemonade through my nose when Con appeared. From the look on his face, it seemed he would have been less surprised to walk into my kitchen and discover a pair of basset hounds making pancakes.

  “Hey,” he said, looking at me and then and Stone and then back at me. The guilt that pricked at my conscience was illogical. There was absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. Maybe I was just feeling out of sorts because of that rare argument this morning right before Con stormed off. But he was here now so everything must be all right. Yet somehow I couldn’t make my mouth cooperate with words.

  “Hey.” Stone waved at his brother casually.

  I’d seen Conway Gentry every day ever since I could remember. We’d been in a relationship for two years and I’d loved him far longer than that. I could translate his moods more easily than I understood my own. But as he walked into my kitchen and we coolly locked eyes there was nothing familiar about his flat expression. His thoughts, his feelings, were suddenly all beyond my reach.

  He was, for once, a mystery.

  CHAPTER TEN

  CONWAY

  “Where the hell did you get all that?” I asked Stone when I emerged from the shower and found him counting a pile of green bills and loose change on his bed.

  “Robbed a bank,” he said, not pausing in in his counting.

  “Banks don’t deal in dimes.”

  “Robbed an ice cream truck.”

  “You mean the one that parks over by the high school and does equal business in bubble gum and crystal meth?”

  Stone grinned. “That’s the one.”

  I dropped my wet towel in favor of boxers. “Really, what’s going on? You turned your nose up at Carson again when he offered you a job at the garage.”

  “Janitor,” Stone snorted. “Washing out garbage cans and scrubbing the staff toilet. And he only made the gesture because you kept pestering him.” Stone abandoned his counting and swept all the money into a large mason jar. “Professional gambling is more lucrative.”

  “No way did you score all that from Saturday’s poker game.”

  “Indeed.” Stone shook the jar and held it up to the light. “Looks impressive, huh? Actually there’s only about fifty bucks here. Most of those guys had more tissues in their pockets than cash.”

  Caleb Marist, who graduated last year and happened to be a distant cousin on our mother’s side, hosted the game in the paneled, shag carpet living room of the house he still occupied with his grandmother. It might have been better if I’d just stayed for the game instead of taking off with Erin because we ended up having one of those ‘Why are you mad? I’m not mad, why are you mad?’ pointless fights that most couples typically suffer through at least once a week.

  Finally, Erin complained of a headache and said she just wanted to go home so I walked her to her front door and then took a solitary night hike along the wash. That turned out to be a bad idea because my bladder was full. I’d just started to piss on the rocks when a light shined in my face and a man’s voice shouted at me in Spanish. Since I didn’t want to know what it was I’d stumbled into, I took off running and managed to leak piss all over my underwear. Things got even better when my dick got caught in a zipper as I tried, en route, to shove everything back where it was supposed to go. Like I said, I should have just stayed at the poker game.

  “What are you up to tonight?” Stone asked as he searched through his side of the closet. Funny thing about Stone; he took excellent care of his clothes. He hated when I borrowed his stuff, complaining that I always looked like I’d fished something out of the bottom of the hamper no matter what I wore.

  “Taking Erin out to eat at the diner and then whatever. I don’t know. She’s been in kind of a funky mood lately. Maybe we’ll find something to watch with her Netflix subscription.” I threw a pillow. “You even listening?”

  “Sorry.” Stone yawned and then started buttoning a short sleeve blue shirt. “I nodded off during that rousing description of your wild evening.”

  “Fuck you. That shirt makes you look like you work in an electronics store.”

  Stone smoothed his hair and winked at his reflection in a small mirror that hung over the dresser. “Eat your heart out, baby brother.”

  I didn’t laugh. I didn’t toss back some witty insult. Vaguely I heard Stone’s voice calling me and realized I’d started staring out the window in one of those waking trances.

  “What’s with you?” he asked. “You’ve been all spacey and shit for the last week. Gaps said not to worry about the charges. We’ll end up with community service or something.”

  “Yeah, about that. You need to back me up when I tell them that you lied about driving the car.”

  Stone smirked. “Can’t do that. “

  “Why the hell not? It’s the truth.”

  “Don’t matter. Fuck with my rep.”

  “This isn’t a movie, you jerk. I’m not letting you take the blame for something I did.”

  “I could give a shit about the blame. I’m just interested in the reward.”

  I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “What reward?”

  “Kasey Kean is practically panting for a reason to strip and spread.”

  “What about Courtney?”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind,” I grumbled. I hadn’t said anything to Stone about my poolside molestation at the hands of Kasey Kean. Usually I wouldn’t have hesitated to share a story like that but Stone would have guessed at the guilty truth, that a part of me had wanted to stay there and let her keep stroking whatever she wanted to stroke. No way in fuck was I going to risk having Erin find that out so it was better not to admit it out loud, not even to my brother.

  Stone was watching me curiously. “What’s wrong with you now?”

  “When you and Erin hung out last week-“

  “I already told you we weren’t exactly hanging out. I saved her from a rattlesnake and she gave me lemonade and we talked about you the whole time.”

  “Fine, whatever. What did she say about me?”

  “Huh? I don’t remember. A bunch of googly-eyed girly things.”

  “You guys seemed like you were having a pretty deep talk.”

  “I was nice to her and she was nice back.” He gave me a hard look. “You think I’d cross over into your territory or something?”

  “No.” I shook my head “I don’t think that. It’s just that we’ve been kind of clashing lately and I was just wondering if she’d told you anything I needed to hear.”

  Stone didn’t blink. He was in a rare serious mood. “Conway, if yo
ur girlfriend had said even the smallest thing I thought you needed to know, I wouldn’t hesitate to repeat it.”

  “I know.” It was a stupid thought.

  “I’m your brother for fuck’s sake.”

  “I know.”

  “Blood before bitches.”

  “Erin’s not a bitch.”

  “She’s not,” Stone agreed. Then he turned back to lavish some more awe on his own reflection. “Look Con, it’ll be all right. Girls get moody and Erin’s no exception but you guys will turn it around.”

  I watched my brother watching himself. “You’re right.”

  “Always am.”

  “Can I borrow your black polo?”

  “Fuck no.”

  The only clean shirt I could find had the Carson’s Garage logo on it. Erin didn’t seem to mind. She smiled and leaned in for a kiss when I picked her up. As I stepped back from her lips I noticed a middle-aged, chubby guy glaring at me from an overstuffed armchair.

  “Hi, Mr. Rielo.” I waved energetically. He looked at me like I was sidewalk gum. He’d been doing that a lot lately.

  “Hi, Con,” he finally muttered. His voice turned much more gentle when he addressed his daughter. “Not too late, Erin.”

  “I’ll be home by ten, Dad. I promise.”

  Emblem wasn’t a exactly a hotbed of choice eateries but the diner in the middle of town wasn’t bad. Erin looked cute in a denim skirt and a pink long-sleeved cardigan over a matching tank top. We held hands on the walk and she started talking about the college application essay she was struggling with.

  “How come you’re worrying about that now?” I asked. “You won’t be applying anywhere for months.”

  She gave me an arch look. “Doesn’t hurt to be prepared, Con. You can’t always live for the day and refuse to think about tomorrow.”

  I rolled my eyes. I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t understand why she had to take every comment so damn seriously. “You also can’t live only for tomorrow because it might not ever come.”

  She dropped my hand and stopped walking, staring at me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”