by Heather Levy
As soon as he was out of sight, she ran to Arrow’s side, crouched down and made herself look at his left leg, at his jeans saturated with blood, her sweater wet with it.
Grandma Haylin kneeled as best as she could next to Sam.
“Eric. Eric, honey, wake up,” she said, nudging him.
He stirred enough to open his eyes a little. Grandma Haylin went to work inspecting his leg wound. She took off Sam’s sweater and removed Arrow’s belt from his jeans. She tightened the belt around his upper left thigh and the bleeding seemed to slow down some.
Sam stood up and looked around for Isaac. She couldn’t help but feel as if he would come running back to attack them.
“Sammy, I need you,” Grandma Haylin said. “You have to be my strong girl now.”
Sam looked down at Arrow and he didn’t look good.
“Okay,” she mumbled.
She listened, numb and obedient, to everything her grandma told her to do. A low earthquake rumbled through Sam’s body as she helped Grandma Haylin lift Arrow up, both on either side of him. He couldn’t hold himself up, but he was semi-aware.
“Sammy, Isaac was hurt. Stabbed,” her grandma said. “Did you do that?”
She swallowed and sucked in more cold air.
“We both did.”
She saw worry in her grandma’s eyes.
“You have the knife?”
Sam scanned the ground and saw the iridescent handle of Arrow’s knife.
“There.”
They held onto Arrow as they shuffled over to the knife. Sam picked it up and kept it in her gloved hand, wanting to be ready in case they came across Isaac in the woods.
It seemed like hours getting back to the house, Arrow falling in and out of consciousness and making it harder to hold him up. Along the way, Grandma Haylin asked a dozen questions, many Sam didn’t want to answer but she did. When they made it to the house, she didn’t see Isaac’s white Chevy parked in the driveway, and relief flooded her body.
“Call 911,” Grandma Haylin said after they had carefully lowered Arrow onto the kitchen floor.
Sam didn’t know what to do with the pocketknife. She made the call and placed the knife on the highest shelf in the pantry where her mama couldn’t reach.
She turned to see Arrow watching her, his eyes wide and confused. He looked like a little boy, not a tall sixteen-year-old. Grandma Haylin had elevated his leg with a pillow and covered him with a blanket.
Grandma Haylin motioned to the pantry. “You were protecting yourselves. The police will understand that, they’ll know.”
Sam looked at Arrow and she knew that wasn’t true. Whatever she told the police, whatever Arrow told, it couldn’t be the entire truth. It couldn’t. Their lives would be destroyed.
“Eric will be okay, Biscuit. We need to get your hand bandaged.”
Grandma Haylin wrapped Sam’s hand, telling her the hospital would need to stitch her up.
“What in the world is going on?”
Sam turned to see her mama standing at the kitchen doorway, a few snowflakes salting her hair and shoulders. Her mama looked down at Arrow on the linoleum floor, her face going pale.
Before her mama could speak, Grandma Haylin went to her and held her shoulders. “Jeri Anne, Isaac did this.”
Her mama looked at Arrow again and then to Sam, her eyes wide with shock.
“No. No, he didn’t.”
“Yes, he did. I saw him with my own eyes.” Grandma Haylin pointed to Sam. “And he…he was the one who hurt Sammy, just like I told you.”
Her mama’s mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed and gazing at Grandma Haylin like she couldn’t focus. “No. He—he couldn’t.”
“He did, Mama.” Sam couldn’t look at her mama’s face, the disbelief in her eyes. It made her want to scream. “I—I was scared to tell you.”
Her mama stared at her for a long moment and then at Grandma Haylin’s hunting rifle leaning against the wall by the back door.
“Where is he?” her mama growled out. Sam had never heard her mama’s voice sound like that, like she was about to chew through flesh.
“I ran him off. He won’t come back,” Grandma Haylin said, low and authoritative. “He’s not that stupid.”
Arrow moaned a little, his voice weak and breaking with pain. “Is he really gone?”
Grandma Haylin and her mama looked at each other, some unspoken fear passing between them.
“Yes,” her mama said to him, and she sounded more confident than Sam felt.
Chapter 54: Eric, 2009
Eric gently held Sam’s hand, afraid to do anything else. Her hand was freezing, her skin a gray hue, a death color he never wanted to see again.
He knew he was lucky to be here, to see her and touch her, even covered in tubes with various monitors constantly beeping, but how he got here was what destroyed him inside. If he had just told the detectives the truth from the start, Sam wouldn’t be on life support.
The Anadarko police had been monitoring Vickie on the drug circuit. She apparently frequented larger towns to replenish her meth supply to sell, but Oklahoma City was unusually far for her, which interested the homicide detectives working his father’s murder case. When Vickie went straight to Sam’s house, the police waited in a nearby neighborhood. They heard reports of shots fired and entered Sam’s home just in time to prevent Vickie from putting a bullet in Sam’s head.
All this Eric learned through bits and pieces of information, some from his lawyer, some from Jeri, and some from the police. As it stood, the detectives had no choice but to release Eric since prosecutors didn’t charge him. Detective Eastman went to Eric’s jail cell before his release, standing there watching him for a long time, saying nothing. When the detective finally spoke, he hardly blinked.
“The truth is a funny thing, isn’t it? Sometimes, it’s too crazy to be real. We start changing things around in our heads to make a new truth, a believable truth.” Then Detective Eastman said something Eric would puzzle over for many years afterward: “I suggest you appreciate the truth you believe in now, Mr. Walker, before it changes on you.”
Jeri skittered across the hospital room mouse-like while carrying two cups of coffee. She handed one to Eric and he thanked her.
“How long do you think she can stay like this?” she said and took a sip from her cup.
“I don’t know. Until she’s ready.”
Sam had been in an induced coma for three days since her abdominal surgery, which had complications, but doctors were supposed to wean her off the sedatives that day. He saw her for the first time the day before, and he hadn’t left her side since, even when Jeri prodded him to sleep and eat. She rarely left the room herself.
Jeri placed a hand on his shoulder and smiled. “She’s going to get through this.”
He fell asleep sometime in the late afternoon. He woke up to Sam weakly pressing his hand. His mind switched back on, his heart racing. Sam’s eyes were open, but she couldn’t speak because of the ventilator. In his excitement, he hit the red call button several times on the side of the hospital bed, and a nurse came to the room looking annoyed until she saw Sam’s open eyes.
A different nurse came in, checked Sam’s vitals, and removed the ventilator. Then a doctor came into the room, checked Sam’s vitals again and asked her a few yes/no questions before leaving the room.
Sam croaked something Eric couldn’t hear. He leaned in closer to her.
“You shouldn’t talk yet. Just rest.”
He squeezed her hand and she spoke again.
“You’re out?” she whispered.
“Yeah, I’m out.”
She smiled a little.
“Good.”
“Not good. You could’ve died.”
“Worth it.”
“I think you’ll change your mind once the painkillers wear off.”
“Look forward to it.”
He grinned, shaking his he
ad.
“Goddamn masochist.”
“Worse things to be.”
He nodded. There were many worse things to be.
Sam tried to lift her hand, the one with the IV line taped to it. Eric saw the IV line pull taut since it tangled on the bed’s railing, and he lowered Sam’s hand.
“Lips,” she said, barely audible.
Her lips were chapped to hell and gone. Eric found the tube of hospital lubricant on the moveable tray. He rubbed a generous amount on her lips, which looked ready to crack and bleed.
“Thank you.”
“Welcome.”
He twisted around to put the tube back on the tray.
“I love you.”
He turned back and stared at Sam, thinking he’d imagined her speak.
“I love you,” she said again, slower and softer, her raw voice running out and her eyes glinting with tears.
His heart was too big for his chest. He was sure it’d keep expanding and he’d fall over, dead, a grin on his face.
“Kiss me, stupid man.”
He did, and he didn’t care that her lips were coarse and flaky with dead skin. It was the best damn kiss he’d ever had in his life.
Chapter 55: Sam, 2009
Sam was ready, but she knew Eric wasn’t. Every nervous tic he had—the constant leg bounce, the fists clenching and stretching out, him popping every knuckle again and again—was driving her nuts. She knew he needed something to do to keep his mind busy, so she broke her garbage disposal.
“How in the hell did screws get in here?”
“I have no idea,” Sam said from her dining table.
Zeus sat next to the kitchen sink as if he were inspecting Eric’s work and keeping him in line.
Sam leaned forward, breathed through the sudden pain in her abdomen. It’d been about four weeks since she was released from the hospital, and she had to remind herself to take it easy. Her medical leave would run out soon and she’d have to return to work, but for now she enjoyed watching Eric, wearing nothing but old, holey jeans, fixing her disposal.
“You ready?” she asked when he was done.
He took his time washing and drying his hands at the sink. “I think it’s impossible to be ready.”
He walked over to her and she slowly stood up from her chair. She wrapped her arms around him, savored the warmth of his naked chest when she pressed her ear over the thrum of his heart. She looked into his eyes and she didn’t see a younger version of Isaac; she didn’t see the shadow of a scared little boy either. She saw a different person, a stronger person. It made her feel stronger too.
“I just hope he doesn’t hate me.” He smiled, and it wasn’t his usual shy grin.
“I think all teenagers hate everyone, brothers included.”
“Well, we better get dressed and go before Meredith and Caleb beat us there.”
Eric drove them to a small Guatemalan restaurant Sam had suggested. She held his hand the entire way. It was early enough on Saturday morning, she didn’t think the popular restaurant would be too busy yet. She was wrong. There was a thirty-minute wait. Meredith and Caleb weren’t there yet, so she and Eric sat on a bench.
Two weeks before, Meredith surprised them by allowing a paternity test. She had said whatever the outcome was—father, half-brother—she would be open to letting Eric into Caleb’s life as long as Caleb was okay with it.
Sam looked out to the street, saw Meredith’s red Ford Focus pull into the parking lot. Anxiety gurgled up in her from nowhere. Eric took her hand.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she lied.
“You don’t look fine.”
“I feel a little dizzy is all. I’m going to get some air—I’ll be right back.”
She ran into Meredith and Caleb as she left the restaurant. They both paused to watch her pass.
“Just have to get something from my car,” she told them.
She walked through the September heat to her car parked further down on the residential street. She locked her car doors when she got inside, welcoming the suffocating air. It distracted from everything she was feeling. Eventually, not even the heat worked, and her mind went back to that day, the day Eric almost died, the day she might’ve died if not for her grandma.
Then every other thought, like dominoes, collapsed one after the other—her baby, dead, Isaac’s face when he knew he was betrayed, the pain on Eric’s face when he knew his father ran off and left him to die, the way Eric’s eyes lit up when Sam told him she loved him at the hospital. She thought of her mom’s secret and Vickie’s confession about calling the farmhouse, and how Sam knew her gut was right. Her mama killed Isaac.
She would never tell the police. She would never tell anyone. She would’ve done the same thing in her mom’s place.
Everything hit her at once.
Eric inside the restaurant, sitting across from a brother he hadn’t known existed, and everything that would mean.
She lost it, her sweat mingling with her tears.
She’d now have this boy in her life, this stranger, and she was scared. She was scared Eric wouldn’t have enough in him for her too because she barely had enough for him. And he’d be around Meredith again, and she knew it was stupid to think about because he didn’t have feelings for Meredith and Sam knew she had a boyfriend, it was stupid, but she couldn’t stop the thoughts from sparking in her head.
She had pictured helping Eric restore his historic house, maybe moving in with him and making it a home once everything settled. Maybe get another dog. When she imagined a child, her stomach twisted, and she swore the doctors missed removing the bullet from her.
Eric told her he’d stay by her side, no matter what, and she hoped she could do the same for him. She knew he loved her, was trying to accept what she needed from him, and she loved him for it, loved him for being equally damaged.
She looked at her car’s clock. Almost fifteen minutes had passed. She picked up her cellphone. Eric had texted: We’re in the back right. And a few minutes later: You okay?
She would make herself okay. Something she was used to. She was good at it.
She flipped down her visor, checked her face in the mirror, making sure her makeup wasn’t smeared and she looked somewhat normal. She did.
She walked back to the restaurant as slowly as she could. Before she entered, she looked through the glass entrance and saw Eric sitting across from Meredith and Caleb. Eric had a mug of coffee waiting for Sam, one creamer next to it, how she took it. How Isaac took his.
She studied his face and Meredith’s. They both seemed weightless. Not at complete ease with each other, for sure, but there was something on their faces that spoke of deep relief. They could do this; they could be okay around each other. And Caleb appeared more engaged than she had seen him before, smiling at something Eric said to him. He looked nervous, but he also looked happy.
A little happiness. It was exactly what she wanted, for Eric, for herself. No matter what. And she felt weightless as she stepped inside the restaurant and walked toward the back table, toward everything that could be.
Acknowledgments
First, I want to thank you, the reader, for taking a chance on a new author. I knew going in this book wouldn’t be for everyone, but I also knew this story deserved to be told. Whether or not you relate to Sam’s sexuality, my goal was to shed some light from the perspective of someone who understands her lifestyle and to hopefully remove some of the stigma of enjoying pain. However, any sexual activity, including BDSM, should always be consensual and with safety in mind.
Thank you to my wonderful agent, Sandy Lu, for taking a chance and seeing my vision for this story. I’m so glad you requested my manuscript during Pitch Wars! Speaking of Pitch Wars, I’m endlessly thankful for Layne Fargo and Halley Sutton for selecting me to mentor. This book would not have been what it is now without their sharp editorial eyes and support. And thank you t
o the entire Pitch Wars team for helping so many writers reach their book dreams and to my 2019 Pitch Wars class for being such a creative, positive force.
Big thanks to everyone at Polis Books, especially Jason Pinter, who’s editing sharpened the story even more. His team is outstanding, and I absolutely love the cover and jacket design by Mimi Bark.
Before this book found it’s way out into the world, my MFA mentors, authors Lou Berney and Allison Amend, offered invaluable feedback and encouragement. I’m forever grateful for them both and for all of my Red Earth MFA family. You are all truly my heart. Special thank you to past Red Earth MFA director Dr. Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, for teaching me so much about life, including how to two-step.
There are so many writers and editors I admire who’ve offered support, advice, and fantastic blurbs on this journey, and I thank you all. A special shoutout to S.A. Cosby, Kellye Garrett, Alex Dolan, Jamie Mason, Cynthia Pelayo, Jess Lourey, J.D. Allen, Gretchen Stelter, Sara Spock-Carlson, Melanie Hooyenga, PJ Vernon, Kelly J. Ford, Megan Collins, and Jennifer Pashley. Another special thank you to my good friend Mer Whinery, one of the best writers more people need to know about.
My heartfelt gratitude to my family and friends who’ve been there every step of the way, in particular to my younger sister, Kelli, who lifts me up more than she knows, and to my good friend Dr. Jim Sturgis, who gave me helpful psychological insights into my characters. Although both of my parents have passed, I know they would be proud. I miss you, Mom and Dad.
To my two beautiful babies, being a mother is and will always be the core of who I am, and I’m thankful every day I get to watch you grow into curious, creative, and empathetic people. I love you, my Biscuit and BooBoo.
Finally, thank you to my husband and most brutal first editor. This book much less my life wouldn’t be the same without your love and support. You believed in me long before I did, and you’ve never wavered. Through pleasure and pain, you are my Bambi and I’m forever your Cougar.