This Is a Dark Ride

by Melissa Harlow

  “I’d give you anything too, Brody, you know that. Anything…”

  “Angel…” Brody said. His mind still felt like a mist swirled there. “She’s not dead. She’s not dead. She’s not dead,” Brody chanted, half to himself and half to Sam. “Tell me I didn’t dream her. Tell me she’s real.”

  “It’s okay,” Sam whispered. “You didn’t dream her. She’s fine. She’s just not here right now. She was scared when you fell. I told her she should go for a while. She went down to Carl’s Diner. I guess she put a job application in there, and since we don’t have a phone, she wants to keep checking back with them. I think she’s afraid she’s causing trouble between us.” Sam kissed Brody’s cheek. “She probably doesn’t know there was plenty of that before she came along.” Sam swept away tears from Brody’s face with his fingers. “Is that what you want, Brody? You want Angel to come and sit with you?”

  Brody shook his head. “No, I mean—I don’t know.”

  “Well, we need to keep an eye on you for the rest of the day. Something happens again, I’m gonna take you to the hospital.”

  “Look at me,” Brody said, resting his hand on Sam’s cheek.

  Glittering, dark eyes met his.

  “I don’t need to go to the hospital. I’ll get through this.” For the very first time since he’d ever tried to quit doing drugs, Brody realized he wasn’t lying. He would get through this. He might feel like it was going to kill him, but he understood that exactly the opposite was true. The drugs would kill him. The quitting part would give him spells when he might wish he were dead, but the end result would be good for him. Yeah, his fucking head hurt and he always felt like he was going to puke, but that would go away. Wouldn’t it?

  “I love you, Sam. I always have. I never meant for it to end up that way, I never thought I’d fall in love, but I couldn’t help it. There is nothing about you that I don’t love.”

  A low sob escaped Sam’s throat.

  “There’s a lot about me not to love,” Sam said. “I’m such a fucking hypocrite…jealous of you…jealous of you wanting her.” Sam shook his head. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  Sam drew his breath in. “I want you to be with her, Brody. I want you to be nice to her and make her happy and show her there’s more than ugliness in this world.”

  Sam rubbed his eyes. “That’s all she’s ever known.”

  “Maybe you could show her there’s more to the world than that, Sam,” Brody said. “But I’m not sure I am the right man for that job.”

  Sam shook his head. “I can’t…I just can’t. And you’re different with her…maybe because of her. I don’t know. You’re different now.”

  “She gave me a dollar once. I remember thinking when I saw her in the snow that night that the world would be better with her still in it.” Brody swallowed hard and blinked back tears that had formed.

  “She is still in it,” Sam said. “And I think something inside of you has changed because of that.”

  “Tell me you don’t want her too. Look me in the eyes and tell me that.”

  Sam swallowed hard, but he didn’t speak.

  “You can’t say it because it isn’t true. You do want her. You want her so much that it’s written all over your face. It’s okay. Tell me. Tell me you want her, Sam.”

  Sam shook his head. “I don’t want to want her, Brody. I don’t! I’ve tried to change it, tried to make it go away, but I can’t.” Sam’s body trembled.

  “Don’t. You don’t have to. I just want you to be happy.” He stroked Sam’s hair and hugged him closer.

  “I’m happy with you. I don’t know what this is I feel about her.”

  “I love her too,” Brody whispered before he could censor the words.

  Sam didn’t reply, but those words hung there in the air between them. Brody waited for a confirmation or a denial, but neither came. Sam remained silent.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. The sound of Angel coming back into the apartment made Brody turn and look at the bedroom door. He studied the peeling paint, wishing Sam would speak.

  “Sam?” Angel’s voice had a sweet little tremble as she called from the other room. Brody couldn’t help but smile.

  “I know you guys need some time alone. I just wanted to make sure Brody’s okay.” Her voice was timid through the closed door.

  “He’s okay,” Sam said. He didn’t move.

  “Good. I was just worried. I’ll go now.”

  “No,” Sam said. “It’s okay. You don’t have to go.”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll…I’ll go for a walk or something.”

  “Don’t go,” Brody said. His voice was hoarse and weak, and the words came out like a croak.

  Angel must not have heard, or if she did, she had no reply. Brody clearly heard the sound of her letting herself back out of the apartment. “Aren’t you going to go after her?”

  “I don’t know what to say to her.”

  “Do you want her gone?” Brody let his eyes slip closed.

  “No,” Sam whispered.

  “Good.” Brody smiled and stretched, aware that right now he felt good. Really good. “Then go after her.” The cramps in his stomach had eased, and the pounding in his temples had ebbed to a slight thump. “Please? Bring her back here. Where she belongs…with us.”

  “I’ll bring her back,” Sam said quietly. “For you. I want you to be with her.”

  Brody opened one eye and stared up at him.

  “Be with her,” Sam said. “You two need each other.”

  Brody smiled at him. “We all need each other. This isn’t about you or me. It’s all of us.”

  Sam stood up and shook his head. “I’m so exhausted I don’t know how I feel anymore. I’m going to go get her.” He kissed Brody’s cheek. “Get some rest.”

  Brody didn’t realize how exhausted he was too, until he let his eyes slip closed again. He let sleep take him for just a while, for just long enough that he woke up feeling more refreshed than he had in a long time.

  He blinked, trying to clear the haze in his head. Angel was there. She sat in a chair Brody had long ago forgotten existed because it had always been covered by laundry.

  Her eyes were red and swollen, and she sniffled as she stared blankly out the window.

  “Hey,” Brody said.

  She turned her head and faced him, but her eyes avoided his. “Hey. How you feeling?”

  “Better. What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t think they are going to hire me at that diner. I know the man who spoke to me today has seen me before. He knows what I am.”

  “That’s not what you are. It’s not even what you were. It’s just something you did.”

  “It is what I was, and I was supposed to get a real job but it doesn’t seem like there’s much chance of that ever happening. Not here, not in this town. Most places I don’t want to go in and apply. I see people everywhere, and I know that they know.”

  “Okay…so what if they know?”

  “That’s easy for you to say because you don’t have to live with it.”

  She was probably right, and he was supposed to get a real job too. They were supposed to do this together, but he hadn’t even put in a single application yet.

  “I guess I need to get busy trying to find work,” he said sheepishly.

  She shrugged. “If that’s what you want to do. I just…I don’t think this is working out.”

  Brody frowned at her. “Look…I’m sorry about earlier. I don’t even remember all of it, but if I said shit, well, I didn’t mean it.”

  “This isn’t about what happened earlier. You two fight all the time because of me.”

  “We fought all the time before you. We aren’t fighting because of you.”

  “Really? Both of you play head games. I don’t know if you do it with each other, but you both seemed determined to confuse the fuck out of me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

 
“You and Sam! Do you two want to make each other jealous, or are you just trying to humor me? You both pretend like you care about me. I almost believed you.”

  Brody didn’t like the hurt in her voice. “We do care about you.”

  “I’m so tired of hearing that you want me. Sam keeps telling me that. Meanwhile you tell me that he wants me. I think both of you just want me…to leave.”

  “Neither of us wants that. Trust me. That’s the last thing we want.”

  Angel finally met his gaze, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. “You don’t want me.” She shook her head. “Neither of you do, and I understand. Okay? I get it. Why would you? You have each other. I just wish you’d both quit acting like it’s the other one who wants me. Neither of you can just come out and say the truth.”

  “Are you so accustomed to people using you that if no one does, you think you’re not wanted?”

  Angel looked away. “I’m going. It’s better for everyone.”

  Brody noticed the small duffel bag near her feet. She wasn’t kidding. This wasn’t a cry for attention; she was dead serious.

  “Did Sam say something to upset you?” Brody felt powerless. He didn’t want her to go, but he wasn’t about to beg her to stay. It simply wasn’t going to happen. Not now, not ever.

  Angel rolled her eyes. “Stop it, okay? I don’t like this game. You say he wants me, he says you want me…and both of you tell me how much you love the other one? What the fuck is that? You don’t see something really wrong with this scenario? You know, it didn’t have to be about sex. That’s not something I ever wanted anyway. I really cared about you, Brody. I wasn’t lying when I said I loved you. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. I cared about Sam too. I appreciate you two letting me stay for a while, but it’s time to move on. The longer I stay the more confusing things become.”

  Cared. Past tense. Loved. Past tense.

  “Come here,” Brody said. He kicked the sheets away, forgetting he was naked, and when he remembered, he didn’t really care. She wasn’t leaving, and that’s all there was to it.

  Angel ignored him, pulled on the puffy down coat Sam had bought her, and picked up the little bag.

  He rose too quickly, and the room seemed to spin. Swaying, he clutched the edge of the dresser to steady himself.

  Angel paused, and that pause was all he needed. Brody grabbed her in a clumsy bear hug. Her hair moved with the force of his breath against it, the only outward betrayal of the turmoil inside of him. “You’re not going.”

  Angel twisted in his arms, pulling her head back to look at him. She jerked fiercely, trying to escape his grasp. “I am going.”

  “So you are going to run away, again?” Brody asked.

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “I know you ran away from home.”

  Her lips pursed. “That bastard.”

  “Who?”

  “Sam! I trusted him. I told him about my stepfather in confidence! He had no right to tell you.”

  “Sam didn’t tell me anything. He didn’t have to. Why else would you have been out there? I don’t know anything about your mom’s husband, but it isn’t hard to guess the rest of that either.”

  She glared at him, and he gave her a gentle shake.

  “Listen, you think you’re the only one who had a fucked-up life? I got news for you: you’re not!”

  “Did your stepdaddy start fucking you when you were eleven, Brody?”

  He didn’t breathe for a second. He’d known all along that something bad had happened to her, but that was worse than anything he had imagined.

  “No, Angel,” Brody said. “My dad beat the fuck out of me when I was little because I wanted to take piano lessons and ballet.”

  Her mouth opened, but he silenced her with a cold, hard stare.

  “And when he caught me kissing another boy—I guess I was about thirteen then—he broke my jaw.” Brody closed his eyes, remembering all the hate-filled things his father had said to him. There were so many, but one in particular he could still hear his old man shouting.

  “He wasn’t going to have a goddamn faggot for a son. He’d see me dead first.”

  “That’s a horrible thing for him to have said,” Angel whispered.

  “He’s not the only father who’s ever said it. Life isn’t fair, Angel. It never has been, and it never will be. You take what you get and try to make the best of it. You can’t always run away from things.”

  “So I was supposed to stay there?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying. Maybe everything that happened to us—all of us—maybe it really happened for a reason. Maybe we were meant to be together.”

  “You can’t really mean that.”

  “Think about it. There are so many things, tiny, little things, that if just one detail was different, we wouldn’t be here together. If I hadn’t become what I’d become, I would never have found you. I’ve spent so much time wishing I’d never left home, wishing I hadn’t thought life was going to be so much better, so much more exciting than it was back there. There were a lot of times I wished I’d have never started getting high in the first place. Things got crazy, and I thought I’d never be able to quit, to get clean, to get my life together.” He shook his head. “If I wasn’t a fucking nothing—a nobody—I wouldn’t have been out wandering around in the snow in the middle of the night. I would have never found you.”

  He thought of how she’d looked lying still in the snow. The magnitude of what would have been if he hadn’t found her made a lump rise in his throat. “Stay,” he whispered. “Please? For me…for Sam. Stay?”

  “For Sam?”

  Brody nodded. “For Sam. He likes you, and I guess you’ve sort of grown on me.”

  She smiled a little. “What’s going to happen if I do?”

  Brody kissed her forehead. “You’ll fly again, Angel, I promise. We’ll all fly together.”

  “It will just give you two something else to argue about,” Angel said, her bottom lip curved into a sexy pout.

  Brody studied her face for several minutes. Beautiful… He’d thought that the first time he’d ever laid eyes on her, but the most endearing thing about her was that she had absolutely no idea just how beautiful she was. Since her arrival here, she was usually the last thing he saw before he went to sleep and the first thing he saw in the morning, and he was getting used to things being that way. About the only thing he couldn’t stand about her presence was the fact that Sam was still stubbornly sleeping on that lumpy old sofa every day. That needed to change.

  “I don’t think—”

  Brody raised his hand and cut her off.

  “Good. Don’t. Quit thinking about shit. You and Sam give me a headache with all the thinking you two do.”

  That little half smile of hers was edging closer and closer to being the real deal.

  “What should I not think about, Brody?”

  “Us. Me, you, Sam. Together.”

  “We are together,” Angel said.

  It wasn’t so much that she said it but that she meant it that got to Brody. How in the hell could a girl who’d been a prostitute be so damn naive? She leaned back against the wall, still wearing that god-awful down coat, looking at him all wide-eyed like some sweet, untouched virgin.

  He supposed in a lot of ways, she was just that. For all her bold talk about sucking him off when she was feeling obligated to him for bringing her here, she didn’t seem to have noticed one little bit just how bad Sam was drooling over her.

  Or maybe she did. Maybe she was worried about overstepping some kind of invisible boundary or wearing out her welcome. Brody put his hands on the wall above her head and leaned toward her. She was close enough that her breath tickled his chin.

  He pressed his mouth against her ear. “We aren’t together. Not yet. But we should be. We will be.”

  The darkness that clouded her green eyes could have been lust, but more than likely it was fear. Brody had only one advantage, and he knew t
hat. She trusted him.

  “You’re so used to people fucking you over, using you, shitting on you. That’s not going to happen anymore,” Brody said. He pushed closer to her, aware that she was trembling. “What are you afraid of?” He pressed his forehead against hers.

  “I’m not afraid. I don’t like being in the way.”

  “I’ve felt like I was in the way. I think if it wasn’t for me, you and Sam would be together,” Brody said.

  Angel’s head tilted up, so close. He could kiss her again. It wouldn’t be like the first time, and he knew damn well he wouldn’t want to stop at a kiss.

  “You’re not in the way,” he said. “You being here is the best thing that’s happened to us in a long time.” He ran his fingers down the curve of her jaw. “You are your name. Our Angel.”

  “No. I’m not a good person,” she said, looking away.

  Brody put his hand beneath her chin and tilted her head back up. “Why would you say that? It’s not true.”

  “It is true.” Her gaze connected with his momentarily, and then she looked down. “I don’t like sex. I don’t like anything about it.”

  The statement didn’t surprise him. She had plenty of valid reasons to say that, to feel that way. “That doesn’t make you a bad person.”

  “Why am I thinking about it all the time now? Wondering…what it would be like to…”

  “To what?”

  “To be with Sam.” She took a tremulous breath. “And you.”

  He closed his eyes, listening to her breathing, hearing Sam’s deep breathing from the other room as he slept on the sofa.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice was so hushed he could scarcely hear what she’d said.

  “Don’t be sorry. Don’t ever be sorry for what you feel.” He opened his eyes and looked into hers, wanting to say what he felt in his heart. I love Sam…and I love you. The words were there, in his mouth, waiting just on the tip of his tongue to be released.

  He took a deep breath and tried to speak them.

  “Redlinger!”

  Brody jumped at the loud voice and let the words go silently in a heavy exhale. He wasn’t sure if he was relieved or disappointed that he hadn’t said them. Perhaps a little bit of both.