Page 78 of Freak Show

“What happened?” she asked.

“I got sick. As in, sick, sick. Like, almost died from fevers over a hundred and seven, sick. I spent eighteen days with a fever over a hundred and three, two with it over one hundred and five.” He grimaced. “The doctor flat-out said that I was going to have a lot of trouble when it came to having kids. Temperatures that high…they don’t do well with sperm count.”

She looked so tragically hurt by my sickness that I couldn’t stop myself from pulling her in for a kiss.

“I think that’s why my mother loves Briley so much. She was a miracle that shouldn’t have happened.” I grimaced back. “And she’s not mine.”

She whipped her head around to stare at me.

“Though, that’s not totally true.” I sighed. “In all sense of the word, she’s mine. She’s my child. I raised her. I love her. I held her when she was sick and I’ll continue to do that for the rest of my life.”

“I think you have some info to fill in, buddy.” She patted my hairy chest.

I shifted us so that she was leaning on my chest, my arm solidly wrapped around her naked ass.

Then started to tell his tale.

“So you know the story about Abilene, right?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Yes, you told me that.” She paused. “Though you also told me that you had sex with her and six weeks later she was pregnant.”

I rubbed my face along her shoulder.

“It didn’t matter if she was biologically mine or not,” I admitted. “I…when all the stuff went down with us, with her, and finding out she was pregnant, my brain didn’t really go to the whole ‘you could possibly not be the father because when you were fourteen you had a fever that boiled all your sperm.’ There was this epiphany in the hallway when I was facing off with the school resource officer, when he saw the baby and said it was his, that I finally thought to myself…they told me I’d have a lot of trouble having babies.”

I continued, my voice monotone as I did. “Toomey told me he was sleeping with Abilene. He said that she and him had a thing, but something happened and he had to back off. When he went to pursue her again, she’d started hanging with me. I knew that she was fucked up…knew it the second that she asked for me to fu…make love to her. I don’t know why I did it. I just…shit. I felt terrible. So I did.”

She blew out a shaky breath. “That was when he died? When he was shot in front of you?”

I bobbed my head.

“Hayes, he was the officer that shot Officer Toomey,” I explained. “But he told me after everything happened, he said, ‘She’s yours, man. You can tell by the dimples. Neither Toomey nor Abilene had them. Dimples are hereditary.’” I let my head fall back to rest against the headboard. “That didn’t cause me to feel any better about anything, though. Because what he didn’t know was that Abilene had dimples. Her brother and mom do, too. So me having them…that’s not really reflective on whether or not she was mine or not, you know?”

She pressed a kiss to my cheek.

“And the kid’s a freakin’ genius. God, is she smart. And I’m not dumb, but I’m definitely not MIT material like she is. And though Abilene was smart, she wasn’t just godforsaken smart, either. A few months after the ordeal, I just felt like I really had to know, you know? I had to know. So I went behind my mom’s back, went off to Dallas, and got a DNA test. I found out six weeks later that she wasn’t mine.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, unsure what to say to make it right.

She couldn’t say anything.

“But even though I knew that biologically she wasn’t mine, I decided that it didn’t matter. She was mine, no matter what a silly DNA test told me,” I said.

“And that’s all that matters, Slone,” she whispered. “She’s yours, and that’s that.”

I closed my eyes as I felt a weight lift off my chest.

I’d never told another living person that in my life. But it was the most exhilarating feeling ever to know that I didn’t bear that secret on my own anymore.

CHAPTER 16

Can anyone tell me if the skulls of your enemies are dishwasher safe?

-T-shirt

CARISTONIA

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