Page 48 of Beautiful Nightmare
I pause a beat, taking that in. She’s never going to forgive me. But I think she still deserves the truth. “Landon and I… we were both kinda troublemakers. We were tight. And I love my brother.” My eyes crash shut for a few seconds, pain washing over me. “Loved him, I mean. We had that twin bond that you hear about. It’s hard to understand unless you’re a twin yourself.”
“I get that.” She studies the water bottle in her hand. Swallows. She looks like she’d rather be anywhere else.
I nod.Fuck. None of this is going to be easy for her to hear.I may as well get it over with. “Anyway, when we were younger, we did a lot of dumb shit. We acted out. Shoplifting. Stealing Dad’s Porsche and going for joyrides. Spray-painting lockers at school. All sorts of bullshit.”
“Why?”
I shrug. “I don’t really know. Boredom? Restlessness? Our parents paid no attention. We were essentially raised by our nannies. We saw our parents briefly on weekends, and sometimes even then they’d be traveling, and we’d be mostly left to our own devices.”
She frowns, and I can tell her mind is processing what I’m telling her. “So… call this a wild guess. Did you do something really bad? And got sent away or something?”
I look down at my hands. “I was accused of something, yeah.”
When I glance back up, I find her eyes are pinned on me. “Of what?”
This is so fucked.But I have to tell her. If I don’t— “A girl accused me of assaulting her—of threatening to rape her if she didn’t keep quiet. Something about how she’d seen me graffiti a building, and I was trying to shut her up about it.” My eyes lock with hers. I see fear there. I fuckin’ hate it. Like maybe she thinks I did it. Like I’d be capable of it. It burns me up inside because that’s not me.
Her breath stutters out. “D-did you do it, Gage?”
“No. I swear to you, I didn’t.” I get up and shift so I’m right next to her, using the lightest touch of my fingers on her chin to make her look into my eyes. “I didn’t. But apparently, for my parents, it was the last straw. They sent me away to a military school when I was fourteen, paid off the girl’s family, and then moved to a different town. They wiped their goddamn hands clean of the entire shitty situation. And that was the end of it. Embarrassment handled.”
“But they sent you away. So, itwasn’treally the end of it at all. They got a new beginning. You were stuck answering for something you didn’t do—for four freaking years of your life.”
I smirk for a second and shake my head. “True. You’re right. They made me the fuckin’ black sheep of the family—the son no one knew existed after they started over in a new town. I wasn’t allowed to come home on holidays—or ever, really. I guess they didn’t want to chance that any of what had happened would follow them to their new life—the one where they only had one son. From what Landon told me, he became their perfect son, and our parents never spoke about me again.”
She draws in a shaky breath. “But you had contact with him?”
“Yeah. We didn’t think it’d be fucking wise to tell Mom and Dad that we were communicating. My school allowed me a phone call home once a month. We had big plans. We were going to play football here together. Live together again. Try to wipe away all the bullshit of the years we were forced to spend apart.” I huff out a breath. “Don’t know how we were going to decide who got to be called Hawk because we both picked up the same nickname at our respective high schools.” I pause for a second, shrugging. “Anyway, when we were eighteen, I was allowed a cell phone. He started texting me about you.” My eyes flick to hers as she visibly flinches.
“H-he told you about me?”
I clench my jaw for a moment before letting out a harsh breath. “Yeah. He said there was this girl he’d heard was an easy lay.”
“Wait,” she says sharply, “who’d he hear that from, do you know?”
My teeth grind. I don’t want to fucking upset her … but I did look back through my texts to see if I could find the exact exchange where he’d told me that. “It was a girl named Evie. He said she was your—”
“My best friend,” she murmurs before covering her face with her hands and leaning forward to rest her elbows on her thighs.
I don’t know how much more she wants to hear, but… better to put it all out there. No more secrets between us. “He said this Evie was trying to warn him away from you, but little did she know—an easy lay was exactly what he wanted for prom night. So, he doubled down on the idea of taking you to the dance.” I wait patiently, but finally put a hand on Lux’s back. “Are you okay?”
When Lux sits up again and removes her hand from her face, she wears a grim smile. “I kinda got the idea when Landon first showed interest in me that she might have been crushing on him. She fucking abandoned me after the accident. It really hurt at the time. But I guess I can stop worrying about why. She was never my friend after all.” Her face crumples as she leans back into the couch cushions and draws her legs up.
“Lux.” Just saying her name makes my chest constrict. “I’m—” I grit my teeth. Seeing her like this is killing me. “I’m sorry. I wish I didn’t have to tell you.”
She shakes her head. “Nope. Better to know, I guess.” She takes an unsteady breath and meets my gaze. “Gage… what are the odds it was Landon?” She studies me, her face contorting again. “He never talked about you. Ever. What if he was afraid the truth would come out about what he did? I hate to ask, but—”
“Wait.” Something’s not connecting in my head. “What are the odds thatwhatwas Landon?”
She swallows hard. “The girl. The one who accused you. The reason why you were sent away.”
Awareness prickles at the back of my mind. My sore jaw tenses. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Her hands are visibly shaking as she reaches up to tuck a few strands of loose hair behind her ears. Anxious, she whispers, “I need to tell you something about Lan—”
“Lux.” I’m suddenly fucking terrified of what she might say, so I cut her off. “He’sdead.”
The hurt look in her eyes is more than I can take. I get up and walk out of the suite without a backward glance. I don’t know how much more I can handle, but I feel it coming. I know she’s going to tell me something I don’t want to hear about Landon. There’s a very real possibility that whatever it is will destroy the tiny piece of me that still misses my twin.
