Page 75 of Even After Sunset

She reaches toward me and I let her this time. She cups my face in her hands and her palms feel cool against my skin.

“It was not your fault, Silas…You are not a killer,” she says softly. Her fingers press firmly against my jaw, and I feel her breath on my lips. “You are not a bad person: you were just a scared, traumatized kid.”

And I know that some of those things are true, but some of them are not. They can’t be. Because that would be too easy. And my life has been a lot of things, but never easy.

So maybe she’s just got everything mixed up. But I’m too exhausted right now to untangle it for her. I’ve used up all my courage for the night and the only thing I can think about right now is how good her touch feels and how close our bodies are right now. Her hands have trailed from my face, down my neck, down to my shoulders. And yeah, I feel like a jerk for noticing something like that when I’ve just hit her with something so heavy. But also, I’m feeling such a huge sense of relief—thatI finallytold her.

It’s so liberating to have it out in the open, regardless of how she ends up reacting to it. At least it’s no longer my secret to carry.

I feel a shudder of disappointment when Jackie drops her hands and shuffles a couple of feet over.

Smart girl…

“I’m glad you told me,” she says, laying down on the blanket and folding her arms behind her head. The casual, almost relaxed stance is such a contrast to how I pictured this conversation ending. It puts me on edge.

“I should have told you a long time ago.”

She turns her head to look up at me. “Maybe you just weren’t ready.”

Now there’s the understatement of the century.

“Yeah, maybe.”

She turns to look back up at the sky and I reach over and grab the last log and throw it on the fire.

“I think it’s better you told me now,” she says softly. “I probably wouldn’t have been ready to hear it before. I didn’t understand so many things about my mother until a couple years after it happened.” She pauses. “I was too young to get it, I think.”

I don’t say anything to that. I’m not surewhatto say because honestly, I’m confused as hell. I still don’t totally get it. I guess I never stopped to re-analyze the situation from a different perspective than the one I had when I was ten. Maybe that’s what people pay shrinks the big bucks for: permission to think about stuff that happened when they were a kid, from an older person’s perspective.

So, maybe she and Richard are right… Maybe how I reacted in one bad situation when I was ten doesn’t define who I am seven years later.

“Lie down next to me,” Jackie says, patting the empty space beside her. “Let’s just look at the stars for a few more minutes before we go in.”

I poke at the log in the fire until it takes. The flame crackles, heating my forearm, and I toss the stick beside the blanket. Then I stretch out beside her, tucking my palms beneath my head.

I try to control my breathing, because I’m suddenly aware of how erratic it is. My heart is beating fast, too. Like I’m about to rob a bank or something. Orlike I just finished robbing a bank, and I’m still waiting to find out if I got away unnoticed.

The sky is perfectly clear. Full of stars, too. And so insanely vast… I don’t hate the feeling it gives me: a reminder that maybe all the crap I’m dealing with isn’t nearly as huge as it seems. I try to hang on to that feeling because it helps slow my breathing. It only works a little though, because it isn’t just about that. It’s more than the last hour of conversation that’s messing with my head. I have the physical alertness of a thirteen-year-old right now: aware of every place where Jackie’s body is touching mine.

Heel… Side knee… elbow…

I inhale another slow breath. I need something to ground me right now, because my thoughts—hell,my feelings—are starting to scatter again. And apparently my hormones are jumping on board for the ride now, too.

I just want a break from it all. I need something to distract me, and without liquor, I suddenly realize, I have no idea what that might be.

There’s a long, weighted silence where we’re both lost in our thoughts. If I’m this messed up right now, I can’t imagine what Jackie must be thinking.

“Geez,” she says after another few minutes, her voice low and breezy beside me. “I still can’t believe you bought a used cotton candy machine today.”

And I laugh out loud because it’s so random and so unexpected.

But also the most perfect thing she could say.

Chapter Twenty-One

Jackie

Iwake up in the middle of the night, confused and cold.Really cold. And then I remember last night. The fire and the smores and Silas’s confession.

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