Page 3 of The One Decent Thing

I grabbed his duffel bag and slung it in the back seat of my car, relief flooding me and making me a little weak in the knees. Fuck, what if I hadn’t happened to drive by? We had people in common on Facebook. I probably would’ve seen ‘Share this post about a missing high school student’ in my news feed within a day or two.

Once Sebastian was settled in the passenger seat, I jogged around and jumped in myself. I didn’t have enough money to get us both a burger, and I had no idea if Sebastian had any money and didn’t want to ask and make it sound like I thought he owed me, so I headed for my apartment. We’d need to eat ramen. Wouldn’t be the first time, wouldn’t be the last. But at least Sebastian was safe.

Four hours later, I staggered out of bed to a thunderous pounding on my front door, shouting voices and the crackle of radios, muffled whoops and blips from the cars outside, and Sebastian’s worried, “Aidan? What’s going on?”

I should’ve stopped to think about that question before I flung the door open, but I didn’t. I was thrown to the ground, my cheek pressed into the gritty carpet, a knee on the small of my back, cold air flowing in over my bare legs. All I could see were boots and the edge of Sebastian’s sleeping bag. He was arguing, yelling, while the cops rattled off my rights and tried to talk him down.

I didn’t find out the answer to Sebastian’s question until later, but what was going on was pure shitty luck. The car that’d slowed down? The driver was a woman who worked with Sebastian’s dad. She’d seen him, in the dark at a bus stop and about to get in a car with a bigger and older guy, and she’d written down my license plate and called his parents and the police.

As I was dragged away in handcuffs, with two cops telling me that a sick kidnapping gay rapist fuck like me was going to have a great time in prison, all I could hear was Sebastian shouting my name and that I hadn’t touched him, hadn’t hurt him, hadn’t anything.

Chapter One

Aidan

Outside sunlight was brighter. It didn’t make any sense. The yard was totally open, with only a few corrugated roofs set over a couple of areas for a little shade or to keep the rain off. The sun was the same.

But it wasn’t. Stepping out of that gate and into the parking area was like walking onto the surface of the sun, not just into its light: glaring, merciless, overwhelming, with the heat shimmer off the asphalt rippling reality into a blurred hellscape. A blast of hot wind hit me in the face and pelted me with tiny specks of grit. I could barely see the bus across the lot, the prison transport that was going to take me to the bus station in a town ten miles away.

From there, I had no idea. In my pocket I had a state ID card and a prepaid debit card with one hundred and ninety-five dollars and thirty-seven cents loaded onto it, the leftover allowance from my jobs inside after deducting what I’d spent at the commissary. Since I’d been in boxers and a t-shirt when I was arrested, with no personal possessions, all I had in my clear plastic bag of personal items was a book left over from getting my useless associate’s degree in whatever the fuck communications studies was, and three pairs of socks.

Not a lot to start a new life with.

The two burly guards flanking me stopped as they approached their counterparts in the parking area, and I stopped with them. The handoff was yet another exercise in waiting, after the ten million signatures and clipboards and interviews I’d already gone through that morning and the day before. Finally they’d exchanged all the paperwork in the universe, again, and I was one step closer to going out the final gate and into the real world.

I knew better than to start walking without permission, but sweat started to trickle down the back of my neck at the thought of that bus leaving without me. For some reason I was convinced it was going to zoom away while I tried to get to it, unable to move fast enough, like a nightmare where your feet were lead weights. I’d be stuck here. I’d never get out. They’d take me back inside…

“Hey Morrison, pay attention!” The guard’s voice snapped me back to the present.

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I…sorry. I’m paying attention.”

The guard huffed at me, rolling his eyes. I couldn’t really blame him for being a little impatient. It had to suck standing out here in the sun, and the guy wasn’t exactly built to be in the heat. He was a few inches shorter than me but had to outweigh me by forty pounds. And I wasn’t small. “Like I said. Your ride’s the red Honda.”

My what? I blinked at him. “Someone’s pick—” Fuck, fuck,fuck. I didn’t know anyone was coming to get me. My parents had written me off the minute I got arrested; they hadn’t even shown up to my trial. The only parents present had been Sebastian’s, glaring at me with smug smiles, like they had the whole trial sewn up in advance. And the couple of sort-of friends I had left after being publicly tried as a predator wouldn’t come get me, not after they didn’t bother to write or visit for the last four years. But would the guards get suspicious if I spilled that I didn’t know who my ride was? Would they let me leave at all? The sunlight closed in on me like compressing walls and the little rivulet of sweat became a full-on waterfall. Fuck it. Whoever it was, I was getting in that car. “Yeah. Thanks,” I choked out. The Honda was about twenty yards away, and the guards weren’t moving to escort me. “Can I just walk over there?”

Both of the guards were staring at me now like I was losing my mind. “Go ahead,” said the other guard. “We’ll meet you at the gate to sign you through.”

Picking up a foot and moving it in front of the other felt like the biggest thing I’d ever done, and that included the first step I’d taken inside the prison’s walls.

One foot. Then the other. The slight crunch of each shoe touching the ground, the smell of exhaust from the idling bus, and the distant slamming of metal doors and banging of lunch trays. Or maybe that last part was only my imagination.

The car was ten yards away, and then five, and then one, and then my hand was on the passenger-side door. I took a deep breath, opened it, and leaned in.

And then I froze. Sitting in the driver’s seat was Sebastian Peach.

Sebastian

My throat was so dry I had to swallow twice before I could get a single word out of my mouth. “You should get in,” I managed. Aidan stared at me, his face bloodless and ashen in spite of his tan. His massive shoulders filled the door.

Oh God, what the hell was I doing? He’d been a jerk in high school, sneering and laughing at me and at anyone else who had something about them that tickled his fancy. He was a loser: got bad grades, played sports enough to get some jock cred but never practiced enough to really shine, and ended up in a dead-end job right out of school with no prospects and no ambition.

And now he’d been in prison for four years. Who knew what he’d seen and done? What he’d become in there. He might kill me the minute he had the chance. Beat the ever-loving shit out of me for the way I’d ruined his life before he even got it started.

Which was why I was there, of course. It was my fault. I owed him. And maybe I’d been too much of a coward to ever get in touch while he was incarcerated, but in spite of everything he’d done to me in school — well, he was here because he’d offered me a ride and a place to stay when I had nowhere to go. When I had worse than nowhere to go; when I was about to make the kind of mistake you heard about watching one of those missing persons TV shows with the grim-voiced narrators. So here I was, to give him a ride and a place to stay.

Symmetry. It appealed to me, even though getting myself here had taken two panic attacks and half a Xanax, and it looked like I was about to have a third attack, plus the other half of the pill.

If Aidan wanted to beat me up, I probably deserved it.

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