Jeremy had found the last bit of her request unnecessary and a bit annoying, but he had responded enthusiastically. He had been friendly. Jeremy was always friendly, it was bad for business if he was not. If he told the people who purchased his art quilts or placed custom orders that he found them all to be fantastic bores, which was the polite version of his opinion, then that would reflect badly on him. In a way, he supposed he did like them; they kept him busy and provided him with an outlet to showcase his compulsion. Art quilting was not a thing he would have ever thought he’d enjoy, but he did. His aunt had introduced him to the craft when he was fourteen, had given him a new medium to work with. He sold sketches and paintings, too, but his real passion had been found in quilting. It led to mockery and bullying during his school years and even still, some people would laugh when they found out what he did. Jeremy did not look like the type to quilt or sew or really do much of anything creative.
The mockery had never stopped pissing him off though he had learned not to show it. Mostly.
He completed a stitch of silver, another line of thread to tether the ethereal butterfly to its backing. The hand-stitching was the most time-consuming part, but he found it meditative and liked it the best. Jeremy kept one foot in the present, his obsession, his grieving need, pushing him on into the future. The other foot dangled in a deep well of many pasts where sometimes things in the dark water threatened to seize him and pull him under.
Life upon life was stacked inside of Jeremy’s head, each face and name, each curl of hair or flick of tail, all bricks in the fractured house that was his internal world. It was the place he truly lived, growing, becoming. Knowing. It was overwhelming, a tentacle on the thing that threatened to yank him down into that well completely. So many missed opportunities, countless dead dreams, endless broken hearts. Eternal waiting. It made him dizzy and irritable; the only times the gyre inside his mind fell still was when he was quilting or when he was high. He never did both at the same time, to ruin one of his artworks could leave him in a horrible temper for days afterward and he had long since figured that out.
He made another stitch, working the heavy silver thread through the velvet, leading it from the edge of the square to the butterfly. It would jag across its left wing at an angle and pierce its head. Trephination on fabric. What a beautiful thing.
“Hey.”
Jeremy looked up from his work to gaze at the tall, willowy, achingly beautiful man standing beside the sofa. He had eyes the color of tanzanite, startling in their blueness, unreal in the hinted illusion of violet lurking in them. His lashes were long and black, his cheek bones almost painfully high and finely razored. His lips were pink, shaped into fine arches that created the bow of his upper lip and a gentle curve rounded the lower lip. When he moved it was like a piece of art come to life.
Jeremy reached out, laid his hand on his bare arm and stroked over the black lines of the tattoos there. The man smiled and sat down on the arm of the sofa, looking down at him, lashes lowered, brilliant eyes a glare and a promise peeking from the shadows. There was a fading bruise around his left eye, still purple, but a more delicate shade now, not the rich overripe plum it had been. The darkness of the bruise against his pale skin only made his eyes brighter, more beautiful.
“Hello, yourself,” Jeremy smiled. He touched the man’s lower lip. “Mooncricket.”
Mooncricket smiled, shy, a little skittish as Jeremy stroked his hand down his throat.
“Do you wanna maybe go into town or… something?” Mooncricket asked.
“Not today, no,” Jeremy said.
“Then um… Well… Can I borrow your car?”
“Do you have a valid driver’s license?”
“No,” Mooncricket said. “I didn’t get it renewed last year. I mean I… I couldn’t really… You know…” He trailed off and looked uncomfortable.
Jeremy smiled and twined a lock of Mooncricket’s long black hair around his fingers. He tugged playfully.
“I know,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”
“Can I borrow it then? I won’t wreck it or nothing,” Mooncricket said. He looked so hopeful sitting there.
“No, you cannot,” Jeremy said, letting go of his hair. “Are you tired of me already? Want me to take you back where I found you?”
“It’s cool, I’m fine,” Mooncricket said.
His voice was calm though the words came too quickly and he couldn’t hide his look of alarm at the prospect of being taken back across Lake Ponchartrain, of Jeremy leaving him outside the bar where they had first met. He had been practically homeless, dividing his time between crashing on friends’ couches, sleeping in shelters or bedding down in the abandoned buildings that littered that haunted city like the skulls of refugees. Jeremy had brought him home, given him warm food and good drugs, not the dirty black shit Mooncricket could only seldom afford for himself. He gave him a bed to sleep in, warm hands to touch him and arms that would hold him while he nodded. Mooncricket was grateful to Jeremy and he knew it very well; Mooncricket wanted to keep him as happy as he could.
“But…?” Jeremy prompted. Mooncricket hadn’t said the word, but he heard it clear as a bell.
Mooncricket shifted on the arm of the sofa, looked down at his lap, the hole in the thigh of his faded black jeans revealing pale skin lightly furred with fine hairs. He plucked at those hairs, an unconscious, self-conscious habit.
“But I am kinda bored,” Mooncricket ventured at last. He hastened to add, “I’m not tired of you though, no. You’re great and all, but… I’ve been here almost two weeks and the only time I ever even saw more than your house and the yard was when we drove through.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. “Like I told you, maybe tomorrow. I’ll take you into town, give you the grand tour of our little burg.”
“Yeah, all right.” Mooncricket sounded disappointed, but he did not argue.
Jeremy went back to his work, but could feel the boredom coming off of Mooncricket in waves. He sat quietly and watched Jeremy work and he tried not to fidget, though when Jeremy cut his eyes to the side, he could see his anxious fingers plucking at his leg hairs. A few shone in the light from the table lamp, stuck to the whorls of Mooncricket’s fingerprints.
“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 Mooncri
cket 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 her 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 th
em 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.
Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2) Page 2