Page 40 of Sever
I climb the stairs to the house I lived in for most of my life.
When we get to the top, Connor pulls out a key and unlocks the door.
Does he live here?
I pause in the doorway but Connor nudges me inside with the barrel of the gun against the small of my back. He steers me toward the living room.
It hasn’t changed at all.
“What are we doing here?”
“You still don’t get it?” He stares at me as if I should be having some great revelation. “After all these years, you don’t even recognize me. I get it, though. I probably weighed just as much then as I do now. Years of depression and abandonment will do that to you.”
I search my brain but come up with nothing.
“I’m sorry, I have no—”
“Do you remember what you said to me that day?” He starts to laugh. “I’ll come and visit. I promise.Bullshit! You are a fucking liar!”
Oh my God.
“Timmy?” I whisper, my eyes running over his face, looking for any trace of the boy I left behind all those years ago.
“Ding, ding, ding. You finally fucking got something right!”
The entire situation is so fucked up, I don’t even know where to start. I drop down onto the dirty floral couch and stare up at him. He looks so different from the overweight, acne-ridden twelve year old I knew. But as I look harder, I see glimmers of softness where there are now hard planes. His hair is different, but I remember the twinkle in his eyes.
Timmy.
“You left me here with these assholes. You promised you'd be back. You said you loved me! But it was all a fucking lie.”
I reach for him, wanting to take the gun from his trembling hand and put it down somewhere safe so we can talk properly. “No, after I left, they told me I couldn’t come back. Mom and Dad, they—”
He flinches away from me, taking a step back and lifting the gun higher, the tremor more pronounced now. “Don’t you call them that! They were never parents to me, not to any of us.” His free hand scrubs his face. “They didn’t give two shits about what happened to us, but they’ll regret that now.”
He sits down across from me and looks out the window, the gun resting on his knee but the barrel now directed at the floor.
“Mommy and Daddy are going to get one hell of a homecoming when they walk through those doors.”
I close my eyes, saying a silent prayer that somehow, some way, I can figure a way out of this mess because if Timmy has a gun trained on me now, I have no clue what he has planned for when Mom and Dad arrive.
Maybe I can talk him down.
Or maybe Ryder will figure out I’m gone and come looking for me.
Fuck, I hope he finds me.
