Finding North (24 page)

“I can’t walk away either,” he says, shifting in my lap so he can glance up at me. He touches cold fingertips to my lips, and I close my eyes. “I don’t want this to—”

“What the fuck?” Rob Underwood shouts. My heart hammers out a staccato beat. North’s eyes fill with dread as he sits up, and we both clamber to our feet and face his father.

“Dad.” North’s voice is thin with fear.

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Rob staggers toward us. He’s drunk.
Very
drunk. No surprise there, but I’ve seen that look before. It’s the same way North looks when he’s spoiling for a fight. “I knew there was something fucking faggoty about the two of you, and what do I come home to find? My son, cuddling a fairy on the beach in the moonlight.”

“Will, get outta here,” North says, stepping his right foot back.

“I’m not leaving you here with him.”

“You get the hell off my property, Tanner,” Rob sneers.

“Go,” North shouts. I shake my head again, but he pushes me. I fall back into the sand and scramble to my feet when North’s dad takes several wobbly steps towards me. “Go!” North screams, shoving his dad back, and copping a blow to the ear for it. “Get the fuck outta here, fag.”

I get to my feet, torn between wanting to beat the shit out of them both and wanting to run and pull North along with me, but his expression is as murderous as his father’s. I turn, running up the beach and through his yard. I don’t know what else to do. I lost my thongs when I dove into the water after him, so I run barefoot through the graveyard, over wooden debris, past the old hull where we built our forts, in and out of sea-ravaged fishing boats where we lay and dreamed and lost ourselves in each other. I run until my feet are bloody and my heart feels as though it’s about to burst.

Hard to believe it could rupture when it’s already been shattered completely
.

I
wake with a start and meet a pair of blue eyes that have been both my solace and my torment for thirty long years. Now, they remind me of the man who almost killed me, and that is a tough pill to swallow. I take in my surrounds: annoying machines beep every few seconds, wires stem from almost every inconceivable place in my body. There’s a saline drip, flowers and get-well cards on as many surfaces as I have tubes stemming from my orifices, and North, hovering over me like a motherfucking hen.

Jesus. Someone needs to up my morphine.

“You’re awake.” He takes my hand, squeezing it too tightly.

I flinch and clear my throat. It feels like shit. My whole body feels like shit. Worse than shit. I feel like I’ve been kicked by a fucking mule … Oh, right. “What happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember the attack, dumbarse.” I claw at the catheter sticking out of the back of my hand. It itches like a motherfucking bitch. Inwardly, I laugh at myself. Beaten almost to death and a tiny needle bothers me. “Just not what came after.”

“Cops came after. And surgery. You’ve had some work done to your nose—specialist came in and repaired the damage. Your left cheekbone was fractured; you have a lot of bruising and a couple broken ribs. You’re supposed to take it easy—”

“My dad?”

“He’s okay. A little busted up. He was in earlier; he’s been here the whole time actually. Went straight from his hospital bed to this chair, but he got up to get coffee and almost ended up on the floor. Sal demanded he come home with her to get some sleep.”

“Who are all the flowers from?”

“From Red Maine,” He points to an obnoxiously bright bouquet of yellow and pink gerberas. It has a big silver balloon poking out the top that reads: In Sympathy. North opens the tiny envelope pinned to the bouquet. “That one’s from Josh.”

With trembling hands, I take the card from North and I read it carefully.

Now you’ll never be a teen model. — J

I chuckle. It hurts. Everywhere.
Arsehole
.

“He came by earlier. He was pretty shaken up.” North leans his forearms on the bed beside me and I slowly extend my hand toward his, careful not to yank out the line running to the drip. North turns his palm up towards me and I place mine in his, taking comfort in the rough callouses pressed against my flesh. “I’m so sorry, Will—”

“Don’t.” My throat scratches like hell every time I open my mouth, and my cheek feels like it’s going to explode. I’m tired and heartsore. I ache all over, and I can’t even begin to process what he must be feeling. We both knew who led that little “beat the fag” expedition, and there’s nothing more to say about it. “Just don’t.”

He nods, but I know North. I see the guilt, the fear behind his eyes. I also see the need for revenge, the way this will dog him until he’s settled the score. I recognise that bloodthirsty glint to his eye, and I want it gone.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” I say. He ignores me.

“Sal dropped this off for you before.” North pulls an envelope out from the top drawer beside my dresser. I’m too tired to take it. I don’t care about a fucking envelope. I want him to acknowledge what the hell I just said.

“North.”

“It’s money. A fair bit, if the weight is anything to go by. She said it’s to help pay for your medical bills or repairs or whatever. It’s from her and a couple of the barflies, and that under no circumstances will they take it back so don’t even try.”

“North.” I raise my voice, but it breaks over his name.

“What?” he snaps.

“Promise me.”

He won’t look at me. His eyes roam over the door like he wants to flee through it. “I don’t make promises I can’t keep.”

“Don’t go after him.”

“What the hell else am I supposed to do?” he says through his teeth.

“Let the cops handle it.”

He just looks at me, because we both know Johnson will sweep this under the rug, just the same as he always does. Rob Underwood and the Sarge have been fishing buddies for years; even I know it’d take a fucking miracle for him to actually charge his friend. Johnson knew about the beatings from when North was a kid. He had a moral obligation as both a man and an officer of the law to do something. He knew, and he did nothing.

“I can’t do that.” North draws his hand away from mine and rakes it through his hair. Tension rolls off of him in waves. He’s not the only one who’s agitated. I turn my head. All my synapses fire like the burn of acid eating away flesh. A lump constricts my throat. Fat tears spill over my cheeks and run down my busted up face, the saltwater stinging my wounds, and my whole body gets in on the action. My lungs burn; my hands shake and curl in fists. I don’t know if it’s all in anger or frustration or fucking sadness. All I know is I feel like shit, and my heart hurts just as badly as the rest of me.

“Hey,” North says, and his voice is gruff too. He takes my hand, but I can’t look at him. I can’t see through my fucking tears anyway.

Even now—after surgery, after having the shit kicked out of me, after broken bones and a busted up face—I won’t hide who I am or take back anything I’ve done. I can’t. I like men, and no amount of beatings will change that.

It’s not in me to run away, because I’d spend the rest of my life running from who I’d become. That isn’t how my dad raised me. That isn’t the person I want to be, always hiding, never able to say and do what you feel.

Fuck that shit. It’s gonna take a lot more near-death experiences to make me apologise for who I am.

North comforts me as my tears turn to salt on my cheeks and I calm a little. He kisses the top of my head and he whispers that he’s sorry, and that he wishes it’d been him. I don’t respond. My words are stripped away from me by grief, anger and regret, but the truth is it doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. It can’t be undone, but I can make sure it never has to happen to North. I lived for twelve long years without him; I can do it again if it means keeping him safe. I’ll do anything for this man, including push him away. But I know him, and he won’t go without a fight.

Not now.

T
he choking cough of the engine in Dad’s Ford Ute sputtering to life wakes me. I blink up at the blue and orange sky with grit-filled eyes. My whole body aches. There’s a five-year-old attempting to play the drums inside my head, and my eye socket feels like it’s going to explode. I’m no stranger to bruises, but this is the hardest my dad ever beat me. He’d said he wanted me to remember so I would never be tempted to turn poofter again. It’s not like I could forget. All he’d had to do was say a few little words—
“If I catch you with him again, I’ll kill the both of you.”
—and I’d never want to talk to Will again for the rest of my life.

The beating was a bonus.

Soon he’ll show up on my doorstep. The man I shared my body with, the man who showed me what it was to love, the only person who tames the darkness inside of me, and when he comes to me—despite how badly I treated him last night—I have to find a way to break his heart so my father doesn’t kill him.

I shift against the wooden plank beneath me, and my entire body screams its protests. After the beating, I waited until Dad had gone to bed, and I’d tiptoed inside, grabbed a bottle of booze and a clean handtowel and came out here to Butt Rusted.

My heart gives a painful lurch, and my throat tightens at the thought of never having that again. The words my father called me ring in my ears, and I roar and beat my fists against my head. Grief for what I’ve done, who I am, and for what I’m about to do swallows me up.

Fuck. I punch myself in the head over and over until it takes some of the pain away and all I feel is numbness.

“North?” Will stands before me, his eyes are wide with worry, his beautiful mouth agape in horror. “Holy shit.”

He reaches out to touch my face. I reel back as if it could burn me. In a way, I guess that’s true—every touch, every glance, every whispered word in the dark is seared into my memory forever. And now that’s all I’ll have of him. Memories. Because if I try to make it more, if I ignore my father and be with Will anyway, neither of us will survive it.

“Did he do this to you?” he demands.

“No, I did this.”

I snatch up the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam from the floor of the boat and crack it open. Taking huge gulps, I wince as it stings the cut on my lip and burns its way down my oesophagus.

“You have to go to the police.”

“And do what exactly? You know Johnson won’t do fuck all. He’d likely kick my arse too, once he found out why my father beat the shit outta me.”