The Truth Within (Pelican Bay 3)

“I’m right-handed,” I said. “And if it starts bothering me too much, I’ll just ask you to kiss it and make it better.”

I saw Ford grin. “Deal,” he said.

We painted in silence for several minutes before I heard Ford say, “Cam?”

“Yeah?”

Another beat, then, “Do you think someone can change the bad things about themselves if they try hard enough?”

It was all I could do not to stop and look at him. “You mean like bad habits?” I asked, though in my gut I knew that wasn’t what he was asking about at all. I just didn’t know how else to keep him talking.

“No, like… like if they’re a bad seed. They’ve got bad blood.”

This time I did stop. “Ford, your brother—”

“Not Jimmy,” he cut in. He was painting faster now and didn’t pause to look at me. “Not Jimmy,” he repeated more softly.

It took everything in me to start painting again. “You don’t have an evil bone in your body,” I said. “I don’t care what you did that makes you think that—”

“I hurt people,” he responded.

“Your friend?” I asked. “The boy you had feelings for when you were a kid?”

I risked a glance at him. He must have known I was watching because he nodded. “Theo,” he supplied. “Someone else too… that same day.”

“I think we all make mistakes, Ford,” I said carefully. “I think people cross that line into being evil when they just don’t give a fuck who they hurt. Bad blood or bad circumstances… I don’t know if there’s really a difference. Anyone who finds pleasure in other people’s pain is someone who won’t change. Did you enjoy hurting your friend and that other person?”

When Ford didn’t answer me, I turned to look at him. I saw that he was staring at the wall, the paintbrush now dangling from his hand. The paint was dripping onto the tarp that was spread out beneath our feet.

I put my own paintbrush down and went to him and took his from his lax hand. I curled my hand around his and led him back to my room. He didn’t protest when I undressed him and got in the shower with him. I kept my touch light and gentle as I washed the paint off him. He didn’t react as I got us out of the shower and dried us off, and when I tucked him under the covers, he kept silent. It wasn’t until I pulled him against me that he reacted in any kind of meaningful way and that wasn’t more than him pressing his hand to my chest like he’d done when I’d gotten home tonight. I wondered if he was feeling for my heartbeat.

“I first met him at bible camp,” Ford whispered. “We were both fourteen. We instantly hit it off and it wasn’t until a few days after we met that we realized we only lived a few towns apart. We spent pretty much every weekend having sleepovers, and in the summers we were constantly begging our parents to drive us to each other’s houses. Whenever I was with him, I just felt so… alive.”

Ford began tapping his finger on my chest in a rhythmic pattern.

“But I started feeling other things for him that I knew were wrong. He did too. We’d both read the same bible passages, we’d both heard the same sermons… we didn’t want to burn in hell for eternity. But we just couldn’t fight it, no matter how hard we tried.” Ford paused for a moment and then said, “I don’t even know which of us kissed the other first. I’d just turned sixteen and he was still fifteen. It was…”

Ford shook his head.

“I know what it was,” I said softly. “My first kiss was like that too.”

“Who was it with?”

“Adam Dreyer. High school, freshman year. We were walking home from school and all of a sudden he just grabbed me and tugged me behind this tree in the park and then his mouth was on mine and I’d thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

“Yeah,” Ford agreed.

I could hear the smile in his voice, but I knew it was a sad smile.

“Theo and I kept telling each other we couldn’t do it again but once we’d lit that fuse, the fire was just impossible to put out. We never did more than kiss, though. Theo was the one who started to question if maybe what we’d been taught about God punishing us by damning us to hell wasn’t true. He was someone who questioned a lot of things. If someone would have told him the earth was flat, he wouldn’t have been satisfied until he had proof that it was.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“We don’t ask things like ‘why’ in my family. Things are just the way they are and that’s it. There’s no gray, just black and white. That made things harder between me and Theo as he tried to convince me that what we were doing wasn’t wrong… that it was who we were and we shouldn’t be ashamed or afraid. He wanted us to tell our families but I knew that just couldn’t happen.”