Chapter 57 - Bones Don’t Burn [https://cdn.midjourney.com/b6a74fce-a3d7-4268-9806-fa443b081b25/0_0.png]
Chapter 57 - Bones Don’t Burn [https://cdn.midjourney.com/b6a74fce-a3d7-4268-9806-fa443b081b25/0_0.png]
Full of venison roast, sliced garden tomatoes, and homemade biscuits, Kennedy stepped out onto the porch to talk to Red and thank him for cooking such a fantastic meal. The aroma of cigarettes lingered in the air, and his truck was still in the yard, but there was no sign of him. She turned toward the tree line. The lamps had been lit in the barn. Curiosity pulled her down the porch steps. What was he doing out there?
The heat of the day was burning off and a cool breeze was coming up from the valley. Using her fingertips, she opened the barn door enough to peek in. With his back toward her, Red crouched on the floor as he filtered through the trash. An upended can lay next to him.
“Looking for something?”
He abruptly stood up, like a kid caught stealing change. “It’s nothing. I just thought.”
“You won’t find it in there.” She pulled her wallet out of her back pocket.
He used the tip of his boot to spread some of the smaller scraps of paper. “Did you tear it up?”
“I did not.” She drew four rings out of her wallet and placed them on her pinky finger, one after another.
His face softened for the span of a heartbeat, and she saw a more youthful version of him, a ghost of the boy he might have once been.
“When I got back from town, I dumped that can, just like you did.”
“Why?”
“Because it was the right thing to do.”
“So, I’m an obligation.”
“No. We lay together. This baby and I, we are your obligation.”
“You know damn well that what we didn’t knock you up.” His gaze narrowed, and he raised his stubborn chin. “I don’t want your pity.”
Holding her ground, one after another, she tucked three of the rings back into their safe spot. “You weren’t with us when we blessed the mother’s room.” She held up his ring. “Stay tonight. Unless you’d like this back.”
His throat worked. “You don’t need me.” He folded his arms across his chest. “You refused my offer the other night.”
“You surprised me and then snatched the ring back before I had time to think.” With his ring on her finger, she went to the barn door and closed it. “I can’t make you stay.” She tugged her shirt over her head as she turned toward him. “But I am asking you to.”
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“Turn off the lights.”
“Why?”
He dampened his lips. “Some women find my scars unsettling.”
“I won’t. Show me.”
He rolled his shoulders, uncomfortable.
Kennedy said, “We are too far into this thing, for something like that to be important.”
His gaze scorched across her bared skin. “When I was a kid, our family couldn’t afford suppression meds. Splitting skin can be as unpredictable and as random as erections when you are a teenager. Sometimes there were fights.”
“Between you and Jeremiah?”
“Between me and his father.” He grimaced. “The man whose bad choices killed my mother.”
“You weren’t afraid in the moonlight when the three of us were rolling around in the grass.”
“I never thought I would see you again.” He shrugged and tugged the bottom of his shirt out of his jeans. “And it was dark.”
“So I can keep the ring?”
“Get over here, woman.”
*
They lay in the bed together. A thin thread of smoke floated up toward the ceiling.
As she pushed damp tendrils of hair from her face, body still humming, she said, “You aren’t supposed to smoke around a pregnant woman.”
With a disgruntled growl, he swung his legs off the bed and sat up, exposing the deep tangled scars that patterned his lean muscular back.
“Wait,” she said before he left her. Red froze in place. Covered in his scent, sticky with sweat, she reached her hand out and rested it on the raised texture of his layered scars. “How did you survive this?”
“I almost didn’t. Our ma…” He corrected himself, “Jeremiah’s ma, used to say that I was too stubborn to die. She stitched me up a bunch of times.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his work-roughened hand. “Stitched her man up, too. And Jeremiah when he ended up in the fray.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “She used to tell me to just be quiet, to hide when he drank, but he hit her.”
“And did he hit you?”
He snorted. “What do you think?” Instead of getting up, he reached over and crushed the glowing tip of his cigarette against a metal bar and tossed the butt onto the dirt floor beyond. “He was a cruel and selfish man, but she loved him. He never hesitated to remind me that I was in his house and that without him, I’d be living wild in the woods and, most likely, dead. He made things so hard, I considered that an option.”
“Did you kill him?”
“She did. High on whatever drugs he shot her full of. Jeremiah and I dug the hole where I burned the body to ash.” He shook his head. “That is fucking hard to do, burning a body down. I made Jeremiah go inside while I took his father apart. I still can’t eat pork.” He took a deep breath, his ribs bellowing under her hand. “Three days. I kept the hole burning, and even then I wasn’t done. You have to pound the bones to break them down. They don’t just burn to ash.”
“How old were you?” Kennedy slid across the bed and settled her body against his from behind, wrapping her arms around him.
Red settled his hand on her wrist. “Fourteen. Jeremiah was only 12, and it was his pa, so I wouldn’t let him help me.” He sighed as she pressed her chest and belly against the back of his body. “It made him mad at the time. He didn’t speak to me for a week.”
Cheek resting on his shoulder blade, she asked, “And your ma?”
He shrugged. “She was in the woods for four days before she staggered home and changed in the driveway. The bus driver called CPS.” A chuckle came from deep inside his chest, dark with bitterness. “Didn’t do much for our social status at school. The gossip that our ma had been seen naked in the front yard lowered our status from the shit place it was already at. After that, she had to go into treatment to keep us.” He slid his hand over hers and pressed it briefly against him before he pulled her arms away. “Enough of discussing the pitiful bullshit of my childhood.” He pushed away from her to stand up, proud and scarred. There was something wild about him, unpredictable.
“Red.”
Without responding, he picked up his jeans. “I got work tomorrow. Who is watching you tonight?”
“David.”
“I’ll tell him to come on.”
“Wait. I want to talk about this.”
As he tugged his t-shirt on over his head, his mask of arrogance fell into place. “I don’t.” He strolled out of the mother’s room carrying his boots without looking back.