Page 55 of Guitars and Cages

“How?”

“I tried to jump my skateboard over a car and ended up crashing through a plate-glass window. I tried to ride a bull like my old man, and got thrown into a fence. I used to race dirt bikes, so I crashed a time or three doing that. I’ve fallen off horses, jumped into a pile of hay without noticing the pitchfork was still in it, and been in more fights than I can count. The cuts on my arms are minor compared to all that.”

“And yet you still felt the need to put them there.”

It was a statement, not a question, which sucked because it’s hard to lie to a statement. Guess that was for the best; I wasn’t supposed to be there to lie. So I took a deep breath, and I looked him in the eyes. “I still feel the need to put more there.”

“Is it a constant need?”

“Sometimes. It comes and goes.”

“Is there something that triggers it, a time when it comes more frequently?”

“Whenever I need to feel.”

“Feel what?”

I shrugged, because explaining wasn’t easy.

“Feel too much, too little—something different, maybe?”

Ahh, choices. I could deal with choices. “Something different.”

He nodded, made a note, and studied me. “And how long does it last? How long before you have to do it again?”

I gripped the arms of the chair, my temper flaring a bit. “Look, you’re not gonna sit there and chip away at me with questions that don’t matter. Who gives a fuck about the scars up my arms? They’ll heal and fade, but all the goddamned lies I’ve told will still be sitting there, this big, tangled mess that I don’t know how to fix. So if you can help me fix them, then great, we can keep on talking, but if you’re gonna keep focusing on what I did to myself, that shit don’t matter, and I’m goin’ home.”

Dr. Hozman regarded me for a moment. Then he took off his glasses and folded his hands in front of him on the desk. “All right, Asher. If you’d like me to help you untangle your lies, then first you need to tell me what it is you lied about.”

“So goddamned many things,” I admitted.

“All right, let’s start at the beginning. What was the first lie?”

I had to think about that, because one lie had always called for another lie, and things had snowballed pretty out of control from there. “I guess the first one would have been before I ran away from home.”

“How old were you when you ran?”

“The first time, I was almost fifteen. I’d been living with my oldest brother, Chase, for about two years; he was married to his high-school sweetheart, Kimber. We all lived down the road from the house we’d grown up in, on our family’s ranch out in Nebraska. One of my other brothers, Cole, he lived there, too. My younger brother, Alex, lived with my next-to-oldest brother, Michael, but they didn’t live anywhere close to us.”

I paused and turned to look out the window; it was easier to talk to him when I was looking at the sky.

“Kimber paid more attention to me than my own mother ever did. She’d help me with my homework and school projects when I brought them home. She always made sure my brother and I had breakfast before we went to school, clothes that fit us even if they were hand-me-downs, school supplies, money for movies, just…whatever, you know. She was awesome, and man, was she hot. She’s the first girl I ever wanted to fuck, but she looked at me like I was this kid, like a little brother.”

I sighed then, and let my eyes follow a bird as it dipped down to land in a window box of dead flowers.

“The older I got, the more I’d hit on her, trying to get her to give in. She never did, and she never told my brother. She kept trying to get me to go out on dates with girls my age, and I’d try, but I wasn’t really interested in any of them. They weren’t anything special. Kimber was special.”

I frowned and glanced back at Dr. Hozman; saw him patiently listening, waiting for me to go on. “I guess what I loved was that she was the first person outside of my brothers and Morgan who ever gave a shit about me. I wanted to keep that; I wanted her to always take care of me. I guess maybe that’s not love the way my brother loved her. I never thought of it that way before.”

I looked back at the skyline. It was a nice day out. “This one night I was in the kitchen with her, helping to do the dishes, and I pushed her against the wall and I held her there, and I kissed her and put my hand up her shirt. She, uhh, kneed me and slapped the hell outta me, and I ran. The thing is, she thinks I ran because she rejected me—and I did, sort of. I just, I needed her not to reject me that night; I needed her to make things all right.”

I looked down at my jeans, and then the carpet below the chair, studying the pattern, wishing I could get lost in it.

“That year I’d—well, I’d started to look at guys as much as I looked at girls; sometimes more. I just, I thought if I could have her, if I could make her want me instead of my brother, then I’d stop looking at guys and no one would ever find out that I had been. I figured she’d tell my brother about what I’d done in the kitchen, and then I’d have no choice but to tell him why, and either way he was gonna hate me, so I ran. I lived on the streets here and there, stole, did a ton of shit I’m not proud of, and every now and then I’d wander home, and eventually the same thing would happen all over again and I’d be back on the road.”

I rubbed my fingers up and down the cast, hating the memories and the tightening in my chest as I told him about the things I’d done.

“I came home this one time and she was pregnant with my nephew Rory, and still, after all the shit I’d pulled, she hadn’t ever told Chase, and she let me stay there and never once treated me like shit while she did. That just made me want her more, especially when things sort of grew between me and Gage. I mean, he’d always been my friend, even though I’d come in and out of town like a goddamned yo-yo, and I’d always looked at him like, well, in ways that weren’t about being friends. We started doing things together that I’d only done with girls or for cash, and I got scared. We were always together, like always, and sometimes we’d forget in public that it wasn’t okay to walk so close or touch each other without thinking. That’s when I hooked up with Eve.”

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