Today's Promises (6 page)

Flynn

I
can’t bring myself to share with Jaynie
everything
that happened during the time I spent over in Forsaken today. I want to tell her, I do. But I can’t, not just yet.

See, that promise I just made to stay off the Lowry property? Well, it’s already been broken. In fact, it’s the events that occurred this afternoon that have me craving a smoke, to the point now that I may lose my goddamn mind.

Reaching for another stick of gum, to prevent what I fear is about to become inevitable, I check the bathroom door to make sure it’s still closed.

It is.

No surprise there.

Jaynie went in a couple minutes ago to take a shower before bed. Or that’s what she claimed she was doing. Though water is running in the bathtub, I suspect it’s all a cover. She’s probably sitting on the floor, chowing down on multiple candy bars.

We all have our demons.

“Yeah, like you and cigarettes,” I remind myself.

When I start taking off my jeans, readying for bed myself. I come upon the small card, a business card, in the back pocket.

Shit, I have to hide this from Jaynie, or she’ll flip.

It’s bound to come out eventually, though. Yeah, soon enough I’ll have to confess where I went after lunch with Crick.

Most of what I told Jaynie was how it really went down. Just not
all
of it.

The interview went well, as I expressed, but it took far less time than I expected. Afterward I had a lot of time to kill, before the evening bus was due to take me back to Lawrence. I considered walking home, for about a minute, but then I ran across Crick.

My old friend kept me sane during my time away from Jaynie. And despite his past—he was once addicted to meth—he’s a stand-up dude. I was happy to see him again, as the only sad part when I left Forsaken to return to Jaynie, was me thinking I’d never again see my good friend.

But there he was this afternoon, driving down the main drag in a cable company truck. I was standing in front of the job center, a spot where we used to hang out and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes before work.

I started waving like a madman, hailing him down. “Hey, Crick!” I called out. “Whoa, man, hold up.”

He slammed on the brakes when he saw me. And then he pulled over to the curb, to just beyond where I was standing.

Smiling, I ran up the sidewalk and skidded to a stop by his truck.

Reaching over the front bench seat, he rolled down the passenger-side window.

“Flynn, my man,” he said, breaking into a genuinely happy smile. “You look glad to see me.”

“I am, man. I am.”

“So, I gotta ask,” he went on. “What the hell are you doing back in this goddamn dirtbag town?”

“Looking for work,” I replied, chuckling.

“Really, huh?”

“Yep.”

He nodded to the job center, his stringy, dishwater-blond hair moving right along with his bobbing head. “They have anything for you in there?”

“Actually, they did. I saw an ad in the paper the other day, and it said, ‘come to the job center, interview on the spot.’”

“Great. How’d it go?”

Smiling, I informed Crick. “I got hired on the spot. You’re looking at one of the newest workers on the construction crew that’ll be putting up those fancy apartments out on Route Nine-Ten. You know the ones, right? There’ve been signs everywhere, bragging about how nice they’ll be.”

“Yeah, I know the ones you mean,” he said. “So, when you start?”

“Tomorrow.” I rapped my fist on the roof of his truck. “But enough about me. What’s this new ride all about? You work for the cable company now?”

Crick looked proud as ever when he said, “I do, kid. Right as snow, I do.”

I chuckled. Damn, I’d missed this guy. Crick’s a trip, always spouting off his own crazy-ass mixed-up versions of well-known sayings.

Instead of correcting him and saying
I think the saying goes ‘right as rain,’
I said, “That’s great, man.”

Crick then mentioned how it was his lunch hour.

Since I had plenty of time to spare, I said, “Well, I got nothing to do right now.”

He then asked if I wanted to join him, and I said, “Hell, yes.”

When I hopped in the truck, he warned, “Now, it ain’t gonna be nothing fancy. I only got ‘nough money for one of them cheap fast food value meal deals.”

“Hey, I hear ‘ya. Cheap works for me.” Sighing, I added, “I’m kind of low on funds myself.”

We ended up rolling through the drive-thru of the local McDonald’s. Crick ordered two of those value meal deals, and he asked for them to be super-sized. To this day, it cracks me up that he stays skinny as fuck when he eats like a horse. I had to give him some good-natured grief about it, of course.

After I finished my burger, I said, “Dude, you are a machine. Where do you put it all?”

“Fast metabolism,” he replied, polishing off his extra-large fries.

“Hell, you must’ve been skin and bones when you were on meth,” I remarked.

“Fuck, kid, I looked like one of them there skeletons you hang on the door at Halloween.”

“Shit.”

Crick lowered his voice. “I remember you looking like a bag of bones at one time too. And it wasn’t all that long ago.”

“Yeah, I know.” I blew out a breath. “Only thing different was my days as a bag of bones wasn’t from drug use. Allison Lowry was literally starving me and Jaynie before we got out of that place.”

Crick knows all about our past, and he shook his head, disgusted. “Yeah, I remember you telling me about that crazy bitch and the things she was doin’ to y’all. That was some fucked-up shit right there.” He gestured to my jeans and flannel shirt, to the clothes that no longer hang on my body but instead showcase how bulked up I’ve become. “Look at you now, though, kid,” he said. “You’re big and strong and healthy. And those are the things that matter. You beat that bitch, yeah?”

“Yeah, it’s amazing what good nutrition can do,” I deadpanned.

Crick, fumbling with his smokes, nodded.

Lighting up, he held the pack out to me. “You want one?” he asked from around the filter of the cigarette he’d wedged between his lips.

“No.” I shook my head. “I’m good.”

And I
was
good, at that time.

It was the events that followed that freaked me the fuck out.

Jaynie

W
hen I emerge from the bathroom, fresh from the shower I eventually got around to taking, my hair is wet, and my skin is damp and sticking to my oversized sleep tee.

Since he didn’t check on me, not once, I know for certain something is up with Flynn. He’s still so damn distracted, in fact, that he doesn’t even notice that I’m back in the room.

Seated on the edge of the bed, in just his boxer briefs, he’s peering down intently at a small piece of cardstock in his hand.

A business card, maybe?

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Oh, hey, you’re back.” Flynn quickly opens the drawer of the nightstand next to our bed and tosses the card in. “And that”—he gestures to the drawer—“was nothing.”

I let out a little snort. “Since when do we save ‘nothing’?” He shrugs, and I add, “That’s not a very good hiding spot if you plan on keeping whatever that is a secret from me.”

He falls backward onto the bed and covers his face with his arm. “Jaynie,” he says on a sigh, “can you just let this one go?”

“Not a chance, bud.” I walk over to the bed.

As I stretch out next to him, lying on my stomach, I remind him, “We don’t keep secrets from one another, remember?”

He groans, then sneaks a peek over at me from under his arm. I touch the little crescent-shaped scar beneath his right eye, a present from his biological father, when he got too enthusiastic with his belt.

“If something’s going on, Flynn, you should want to talk to me about it.”

“Fuck.” He jumps up from the bed and heads over to the closet where he hung his coat when he first came in. After a few seconds of frantically fishing through the pockets, he pulls out a slightly crumpled cigarette.

I sit up, alarmed and surprised. “Flynn, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

He ignores me as he scans the room. “Where’s that lighter we use to light candles with?” he asks.

“No, no, no.” I wave my hands around as I jump up. But when he gives me a look to not go ballistic, to let this one slide, I sit back on the edge of the bed.

Giving up, I say, “The lighter’s in the bathroom, next to the candle on the toilet tank lid.”

“Thanks,” he murmurs.

Flynn disappears to the bathroom, and less than a minute later, he reemerges with the cigarette, now lit, dangling from his lips. The tip glows an angry orangey-red in the dim lighting of the room.

“I’m only smoking this one, babe,” Flynn assures me.

“Okay,” I whisper, not convinced.

He walks over to the window in our room and starts fidgeting with the latch. “I promise, Jaynie. This is it.”

“Flynn…” I shake my head. We have a thing about promises—don’t make ones today that you can’t keep tomorrow.

When I open my eyes, Flynn has the bottom half of the window pushed open, though it’s just a crack. Still, even that tiny bit is enough to allow the cool breeze to drift in. When winter’s icy fingers reach me over on the bed, I’m filled with a sense of dread.

Flynn gestures that I should come over and sit next to him on the hardwood floor.

“Come on, Jaynie,” he says softly. “I’ll blow all the smoke out the window. We can even light some candles afterward to get rid of the smell. But, really”—his steel-gray eyes implore me to understand him on this one thing—“I need this smoke to calm my ass down.”

“Why are you so on edge?” I ask, treading carefully. Sometimes it takes a little extra patience to get Flynn to talk. He’s not like me. I always tell him everything. Well, unless not telling him is my only option.

“I want to come clean with you on what actually happened today over in Forsaken.” He looks away. “The whole story, that is. Not just the part about the interview and running in to Crick. Those were good things.”

“So…there is something bad.”

He looks away. “Yes.”

Folding my arms across my chest, I blow out a breath. “Damn it, Flynn, I knew there was more to this.”

“Jaynie, just be quiet and get over here.”

“But, it’s cold,” I murmur, resistant.

He reaches for a hoodie that’s on the floor, some piece of clothing one of us discarded and never bothered to pick up. “Here,” he says, “put this on. It’ll keep you warm.”

Before I give in and go to him—because I will, in fact,
always
go to Flynn—I say in a soft voice, “You went up there, didn’t you? You went back to that goddamn place where we endured so much torment.” My voice rises, as does my frustration. “You returned to the place where I lost my baby.” I stifle a sob. “…the place where we lost
our
baby, Flynn.”

“Jaynie, just come to me, please.” His voice is a whisper, a comforting caress. God, I need him. He’s the only person who can ever understand my pain, especially when it comes to this subject.

So I go to him.

And I let him slip the hoodie on me.

I then sit on the floor, across from him.

I also let him smoke his damn cigarette in peace.

Flicking an ash into a discarded paper cup, he tells me how after lunch, on a whim, he asked Crick to drive him up to the Lowry property.

“Why in the world would you ever want to go back up there?” I ask, truly perplexed.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I just kind of wanted to see it today. That place where so much bad shit went down. It just seemed… I don’t know…”

He’s trying to explain, but this is clearly hard for him to put into words.

Flynn puts the cigarette to his lips and inhales, sucking smoke deeply into his lungs.

On his exhales, he says in a tight voice, “Hey, at least I didn’t break any promises.”

“What do you mean?”

“You hadn’t yet asked me not to go up there. That didn’t happen until tonight.”

He has a point, so there’s no good reason to dwell on promises that weren’t technically broken. He went to the Lowry’s and that’s the end of it.