A shiver ran through me as another breeze blew through.
Orion looked up. “Oh no, you cold? I have your sweatshirt.” He started to take it off, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“No, it’s okay. Let’s go inside, we can talk in there.”
Orion stood. “Can we make a fire?”
I smiled. “Sure.”
I snuffed out the tiki lanterns and we moved our operation indoors, and while I made a fire, Orion went out to his car and brought in his bag. He disappeared into the bathroom for a while, and returned in plaid, cotton pajama pants and a black tee shirt. My world shifted again. He was so gorgeous, and I was already off-balance after his comments outside about me being ‘his type’. Seeing him in his PJs felt extremely intimate. I reminded myself he was opening up to me with his past, allowing himself to be vulnerable, and that I’d said he could trust me.
Lusting after him this way felt like a betrayal of that trust, if not downright predatory. He smiled when he noticed me staring, and I quickly turned back to the fire, poking at the logs. “There we go,” I said. “For a beach town in July, Hillock gets damn cold at night.”
“That’s one of the things I love about this place,” he said. “The air’s always so fresh.”
I stood and moved to the chair instead of the couch, where Orion curled up, hugging a throw pillow. I felt it best to put some physical distance between us. “You need a drink?”
“Water?”
“Sure.” I got us each a bottle from the fridge, and returned, handing him his. “So. The bodies in the ground.”
He reached an arm out. “Will you come sit on the couch with me?”
“Why?”
Orion gave me a ‘what the fuck’ look, which was unsurprising considering my flippant response. And likely the look on my face. I probably had a neon ‘panicking bisexual’ sign flashing over my head. “Because you’re all the way over there and we’re talking about scary stuff. I want you closer.”
“All right.”
“Oh wait.” He waved his hands in front of his face. “Are you wigging because I told you I’m gay and you’re hot and shit? I’m not trying to get in your pants, Kurt. You don’t have to worry about that, ever. I might tease you a little but the last thing I want is to make you uncomfortable. Shit, I fucked up, didn’t I?”
“No, of course not, I wasn’t thinking that.” I hurried over to the couch to make my point, even stretching my legs out with my feet nearly touching him. See? Look at me not panicking.
“Now tell me more about what happened when you were a kid.”
He took a sip of water, then sighed. “My friends didn’t believe me about the bodies, and that pissed me off. I said, let’s dig then. Prove me wrong.”
“Ah, shit.” I settled back on the couch. “I think I see where this is going.”
He nodded. “All that summer, every time we camped, we brought shovels and did a little digging. It became a fun thing to do. I don’t think they cared if I was wrong, they liked the excitement of it. But one night…yeah. We uncovered them. Two bodies, wrapped in plastic.”
I watched as he took another sip of water, and found myself unconsciously rubbing his foot to comfort him. “What happened then?”
“My friends freaked the fuck out. Told their parents. They called the police. Long story short, was friends of my father’s that killed the men in that grave in the woods, over a money dispute. I didn’t know that at the time. No one did. My dad didn’t even know about it. But…”
“But you, his kid, had pointed the cops directly to the bodies.”
“Exactly. So of course, everyone thought my dad was the one who did it. How else would his kid know the exact location of that grave?”
“You didn’t tell them about your…abilities?”
“Ha! Please. You think they believed me? Course I told them. So did my parents. Made no difference. Might as well have told them leprechauns did it.”
“Christ.” I shook my head. “Did they arrest your father?”
He nodded. “He was awaiting trial when he was killed in prison. Those pricks, the real murderers, they had it arranged. Then they killed my mom.”
I went still, then continued massaging the ball of Orion’s foot with my thumb. “I’m sorry.”
“It was public knowledge I was the one who told my friends where to dig. The men who committed the murders thought my father knew it was them, must have been spying on them or something. And they assumed he told me. My mom was the only one home when they came by. I was out in the woods. I liked to sit by the fish pond. Fish have really nice energy. Simple thoughts in their heads. It was soothing. When I got home, found my mother dead. They cut her throat.”
“Jesus, Orion.”
He looked up at me and smiled. “I’m okay. Really. Are you?”
“Me?” I scoffed. “I’m fine. I’m just…I’m sorry.”
“I know. I learned later her throat was cut. I didn’t know when I found her, cause of all the blood. I never seen that much blood before. Covered the whole floor.” He wrapped his hands around my foot, rubbing it as I rubbed his. “So in theory, I’m responsible for both my parents’ deaths.”
“No,” I said. “You can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I don’t, not anymore. Jaz drilled that into my head way back. That the only people responsible for that brutality was the monsters that did it. Not me.”
“He’s right. You couldn’t have foreseen any of it. What happened to you after…after you lost your mother too?”
“My first safe house. It sucked.” He rolled his eyes. “Sucked so bad.”
“How come?”
“They wouldn’t let me outside, and I love fresh air. They wouldn’t let me do nothing. I just wanted to go off on my own, figure it out myself.”
“But you were so young, how would you survive on your own?”
“I probably wouldn’t have, but I was thinking like a kid. I’d lost my parents and now these strangers were telling me what to do and ordering me around, and I hated it. So I used my abilities to fuck with their heads. My handlers, I mean. They hated me. I was a real asshole to them.”
“Well, you’d been through an awful ordeal.”
“Yeah. I was still a little asshole. Eventually I tricked them and ran away.”
“Where did you go?”
He chuckled. “Not far. They were professionals; they caught me fast. Then I got shifted to another safe house somewhere else. These two cops, a man and a woman, they hated me even more than my first handlers. Had it in their head I wasn’t gonna screw with them the way I did the others, so they were mean to me. Strict. I retaliated with my abilities. When I told the woman cop that I knew she lost her virginity to her first cousin, that was it. She freaked out and quit. Suddenly, I was being moved again. That’s when Jasper came into my life.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there, listening, watching the firelight flicker across his face.
“I was sitting in a room, just stewing in my own rage. Some police station, I don’t even remember where. They left me alone in there for almost a whole day. Eventually, the door opens, and this guy walks in. Your dad. He looked different then. Buzzcut and he was all buttoned up and official, you know?”