Audition (North Security 4)

I shift my body on the sofa. “Yeah?”

“I can’t fall asleep.” She says this in the same tone that she used to announce that she had to pee last night at her apartment. The matter-of-factness makes my heart ache. “I thought I’d sit out here. If…that’s okay.”

“I never took you for the type to ask permission.” Christ. I could have said of course, that’s fine. Come sit here. I’ll go. I’ll stay. Whatever you need. But instead I throw my arm over the back of the sofa. “Not like I was sleeping, either.”

The sofa bows underneath her when she sits, tucking one leg up and letting the other one dangle. Her toes brush against the carpet. The flames in the fireplace, steady and strong, are echoed in her eyes. Silence draws itself over us like a throw blanket. Bethany lets it come down. After a minute she shrugs it off with a deep breath. “I didn’t picture you living in a house like this. I thought it would be…” She searches for the next word on the ceiling. “Less nice.”

I huff a laugh. “To match my dead, withered soul? You know better than that.” Her brother loved the finer things in life, too. In the end that’s what made him vulnerable. He wanted more than men like us could ever have.

“I do,” she admits softly, not looking at me.

The question fights its way past my lips in spite of every instinct screaming that to ask it is to admit to some…connection…with Bethany. Some intimacy. A past. “Why? Why did you ask me to spare him, knowing what he did?”

Her expression looks stricken. She turns to her lap for answers. “I didn’t think we were going to talk about that. Not ever again, honestly.”

“It would be easier that way,” I admit, turning toward her, closing the space between us on the sofa. Every breath is laced with her scent. “Sometimes I don’t pick the easy route. Sometimes I’m fucking allergic to it.”

The flinch tells me I’ve hit a nerve. “Yeah,” she says on a sudden gust of breath. “Yeah, me too. It’s almost scary when things are too peaceful.?

??

My heart ricochets across my chest. “I know the feeling.”

The silence stretches out and then compresses, thickening by the second. When Bethany speaks, it’s a terrible relief. “When I was six years old, my dad came home. Drunk.” The fire flickers in her brown eyes. “He came after me. He started raving about how I was just like my mom, and how I’d turn out like her, how he’d kill me before he let me do that. I was so scared and…I thought that was it. I thought I would die that night.”

I dig my nails into my palms. Motherfucker.

Bethany clears her throat. “Caleb was only twelve and he wasn’t—he wasn’t like he is now. Not that strong. Not that ruthless. But he stood up to our dad. He protected me. In the process…” Her voice has taken on a wooden tone. “In the process my dad fell and hit his head.”

“What happened?” I ask the question to break the new silence before it digs in and swallows us both. And I ask it because I have the sense I know what’s coming.

Why Bethany still loved her brother. Why she asked me to do the impossible.

And why, for some reason, I actually did it.

My skin hums with the electricity of anticipation. Memories, one after the other. Her face, desperate and flushed. The way she said, please. And the way I said, I wanted to fuck you. That’s it. Tears she wouldn’t let fall in the corners of her eyes.

“It happened so fast. One minute he was hollering, and the next minute he was lying there, bleeding into the grass, not moving.”

Fuck. “He died.”

“You don’t understand how scared we were, that Caleb would get sent away or locked up. We didn’t know if they’d understand that he didn’t mean to kill him—or if they’d even care. No one we knew trusted the cops.”

She’s wrong about one thing. I do understand the fear. That’s something we have in common—an abusive father. No matter how much his fists hurt, I was more scared of the system, of the paperwork and the pity, of the wild unknown. My father was pain—and we understood pain very well.

“What did you do?”

“We covered it up. It took both of us to drag his body to the bayou behind our house. Pushed him in and left his fishing rod tangled in the weeds. Got our stories straight so when they principal came and took us out of class, we’d act surprised.”

“No wonder you weren’t spooked by a few letters. You grew up with a monster.”

“We fought him together. We killed him together. We covered it up together. You can’t do that with a person without tying a piece of your soul to them.” She twines her fingers through each other and drops her hands into her lap. “I owed him my life. I still do.”

“You don’t owe him shit.”

“That’s why I asked you to spare him. Not because he deserved it. I know he doesn’t. There’s nothing that can excuse what he’s done, but—”

“But what?”