Page 32 of Obey

We can spend the next ten hours sniping at each other, being absolutely miserable, or we could—I could—just fucking suck it up.

“Whatever,” I mutter. “Change it, then. A place like this won’t have any other decent station.”

Even though he sighs, he doesn’t change it. The silence settles over us as he continues to drive.

The song changes, and I falter for a moment. Since he’s not going to be the mature adult, it falls to me to try to get us through this long fucking drive without wanting to kill each other.

I don’t like having all this time with my thoughts. If I were at home, I’d distract myself with work or video games. I could hit up a hookup app and find some sort of distraction. New Bristol is large enough that there’s always somebody available, even this early in the day.

That would probably work out as well as it had the last time.

My usual anger at Maddox deflates, and I’m left with this fucking awful pain in my chest. It’s familiar, a pain I’ve felt often over the past years. It used to bring me to tears, until I learned how to bury it in rage.

If I don’t hate Maddox, I have to fucking deal with the fact that I’m a pathetic, hurt little boy.

We keep driving, and the rock music fades away into nothing. The trees give way to flatter plains.

Traffic also gets heavier, until we’re going at a slow fifteen miles an hour.

“Why the fuck is there traffic?” I mutter, pulling out my phone to check—only to find that we’re in a dead zone. I make a sound of frustration and fiddle with the radio to try to find a local station with traffic info.

I stop on the first station with talking. It isn’t a traffic report, though. It’s two people talking about local politics. We’re in one of the backwater counties by this point, far enough away from New Bristol that I don’t recognize any of the names.

“It’s honestly a travesty that we have all these New Bristol liberals trying to dictate how we run things around here,” one host says.

“Right? They think they’re the only ones who matter in the state. Most of them aren’t even real Americans. Illegals who hop the border?—”

For fuck’s sake.

Maddox makes a disgusted sound.

“There isn’t even a border to hop in this state!” I argue at the radio.

“If it wasn’t for those ‘New Bristol liberals,’ they wouldn’t even have half the shit they do,” Maddox grumbles. “They do realize the entire state’s economy is based there, right?”

I let out a startled laugh. “They probably don’t. Let’s see them do all the work the immigrants are doing for them, at the same wages—” I cut myself off and shake my head. “Never mind. We don’t need to listen to this crap.” I change the station until I find an actual traffic report, telling us there’s fucking construction happening. Great.

After a few minutes, Maddox asks, “Your parents doing all right?”

I stare out the window, wondering how to answer that question. “Guess so. My mom refuses to talk to me though. Because of the whole…” I shrug. “Doesn’t matter. I send her money regularly.”

Maddox nods.

I debate internally, wondering if it’s too intimate a question for us, before I ask, “Are you still… uh… on speaking terms with your parents?”

He snorts, pausing long enough to where I’m not sure he’s going to respond at all before he finally says, “I guess? I don’t know. I’ve gone to a few family dinners, but they’re always just waiting for me to ‘clean up my act,’ and when they find out I haven’t gotten a girlfriend and quit the mob—” He rolls his eyes. “—they’re quick to shoo me off.”

“They can’t honestly expect you to give up the family that cares about you in favor of those dickbags,” I say, like I’d often said back in the day.

It’s not an excuse. I know that we hurt people. But the entire world is out there, trying to hurt us, so why the fuck shouldn’t we take what we can for ourselves?

The mafia is more of a family to us than our own blood relatives.

“Dad tried to pull a gun on me the last time,” he says.

Knowing Maddox, he’s been holding this in, like he holds everything in. It’s as exasperating now as it’s always been, knowing he can’t just talk about what’s bothering him.

“Hope you turned it on him instead,” I answer darkly. “He’d deserve it.”

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