Page 56 of His to Cherish
It was a miracle rats hadn’t taken up residence in his house with the mess piled all over the counters and sink. Dirty dishes and food boxes were strewn all over the place. Some of them I recognized as food dishes I had helped him with the night of the funeral.
Tears fell from my eyes. I didn’t even bother stopping them or wiping them away.
How long had it been this bad?
“Aidan, you fucker!” David shouted again, and I jumped, unable to peel my eyes away from the disaster in front of me. “Where the hell are you?”
A loud crash came from the back and my head snapped to David. “This way,” he said, and stared back at me.
“I think I should go.” I whispered the words and cringed at my suddenly dry throat.
I knew I was right. There was no way, absolutely no way in hell, Aidan would want me to see his house like this.
“No. He needs you.”
“David.” I shook my head and took another step back. “He won’t want me here.”
He got the same odd look on his face that he’d had earlier, grabbed my hand, and pulled me toward the back of the house.
“Bullshit. He’s barely spoken to any of his friends. Won’t tell us fucking shit except he’s been hanging out with you. Don’t know why he won’t talk to us when we’ve been fucking with him since that crazy bitch took off when Derrick was too damn young to remember her, but we were the ones with him on campus, helping him raise his fucking kid. Derrick was all of ours, and he’s shut down on all of us completely. But you,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “he talks to you. He hangs with you when he wants not one damn thing to do with us no matter how hard we’ve been trying. Don’t know the pull you have on him, but we know he likes it. So you’re here and you’re not leaving.”
My mind couldn’t even process all of that, what with the disaster we saw when we reached the living room. It was a thousand times worse than the front room and impossible to miss.
Cushions thrown. A couch tipped over. A broken television. Glass and picture frames that at one time had probably hung on the wall in a collage were shattered all over the floor.
“Holy crap,” I muttered to myself more than to David. Had the Incredible Hulk broken in here? It looked like the disaster that creature could create in a nanosecond, and even while I wanted to pretend it was the force of some Marvel comic character, it only made the tears fall harder.
David was wrong. By hanging out with me, I’d allowed Aidan to ignore dealing withanything.
He made a grunt of acknowledgment, but didn’t stop moving.
When we reached the back door he finally turned to me and placed both of his hands on my shoulders. “You’re insane if you think you mean nothing to that man. I’ve listened to him talk about you for years. Why he’s finally started hanging around you now, I’m not completely sure, but he’s wanted you for a long time. He’s going to be angry out there, and he’s going to take it out on us, but I need you to be strong. He lets loose fast and hard but it boils over quickly.”
My eyes grew wide with the warning and I stared at him, tongue-tied, while I forced everything he’d said to make sense.
I was way too startled by everything we’d seen, and everything he’d just spewed at me with determined eyes, to object.
He didn’t give me a chance anyway.
David let go of my shoulders, reached for my elbow, and opened the door that led to the back patio.
And I followed, heading to the place where I’d had my first conversation with Aidan after the accident, knowing that this one was about to go completely differently.
