Page 34 of A Series of Rooms
Jonah held up his hand, trembling, to the faint stream of light: He had to blink once, twice, again to make sure they were real: the deep red stains on his skin.
Horror shuddered through him. He scrambled back into the darkness, wiping his hands against his shirt, the mattress, the wall, but he couldn’t escape the blood. It was all over him.
He remembered now.
A muffled, metallicclunkdrew his attention upward just as the door at the top of the staircase swung open. Jonah squinted against the sudden burst of light, pulling his body into a defensive curl.
Two sets of footsteps thundered down the wooden planks. The light clicked on with the tug of a string, a single bulb flickering overhead. Jonah looked up to Shepard standing over him. Marcus, always his trusted shadow, stood back with his arms crossed.
“It’s taken care of,” Shepard said.
Jonah uncurled himself, forcing his body to sit upright despite the pain. A glance up the stairs told him he was in the basement of the halfway house.
“What’s taken care of?” His voice was just as broken as the rest of him. “Why am I down here?”
Shepard swiped the back of his arm across his forehead. There was an erratic tick to his movements that made him all the more volatile. “I couldn’t let the others see you like this, could I?”
Jonah looked down at himself and felt bile rise in his throat. In the light, there was no mistaking the blood on him.
“I killed him,” Jonah whispered before he could stop himself.
It was a statement, not a question, but Shepard bent down, hands on his knees to meet him at eye level. “Yeah. You did,” he spat. “And you created a real fucking mess for me to clean up.”
He hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t, he hadn’t, he...
It was an accident.
Mr. Becker was—he was hurting him. He had both hands around his throat. He was going to kill him. All Jonah had meant to do was push him away, but the man was wasted, several shots in and high on whatever he had forced Jonah to snort off his coffee table, and then his head was cracking against the side of the nightstand. And then there was blood. So much blood.
He never meant to kill him. Jonah just wanted him to stop.
He couldn’t keep the vomit down. Shepard and his hired muscle watched silently as he lost his meager stomach contents on the basement floor.
“I didn’t mean to,” he pleaded, as if somehow hoping for absolution from the monster in front of him.
Shepard dropped into a crouch beside him, reaching out to trace a palm over his face. Jonah was too stunned to even recoil from the touch.
“Do you think anyone’s actually going to believe that?” he asked gently. “With your history?”
Jonah didn’t know when he had started crying. “No,” he whispered, an answer and a plea all at once.
“No,” Shepard echoed sympathetically. “You’re lucky I was there to clean up after you.”
“What did you do?” Jonah’s eyes flicked to Marcus, who stared back at him unchallenged.
Shepard turned his face back to him. “You don’t need to know the details,” he said. “But you owe me for this, kid. And I always get what I’m owed.”
He stood, leaving Jonah shivering on the mattress at his feet. He waved a vague gesture to Marcus, who followed like a dog called to heel.
“Get him a bucket of water and a change of clothes,” he ordered. “We need to burn these.”
The bathroom was hazy by the time Jonah turned the handle, cutting off the spray of water. His body tingled in the immediate absence of the heat, tiny pin pricks over the surface of his skin. It was proof that the temperature of the water was probably higher than what was healthy, but Jonah didn’t care. These showers were one of the parts of their Friday night routine he was most thankful for.
The rings on the curtain screeched along the rod as he pushed it aside, grabbing a towel from the shelf above the toilet. He pressed his face into it first, appreciating the softness, even at the lower end hotels. He dried himself off quickly, aware of the slight sting of friction across his irritated skin, and hung the towel on the hook on the back of the door.
Liam’s pajamas were folded in their usual stack on the counter. He brought the sweatshirt to his chest—the same as always, maroon and over-long and tattered from years of wear—and dropped his head to inhale the comforting scent. He had yet to put a name to this feeling, the one he was slowly losing himself in beyond all control, but it was getting harder to stave off.
Perhaps because there was a much larger part of him that desperately did not want to.
