Page 43 of Evil King

“Follow me. I know a park nearby,” Sicily replied, then tapped my shoulder and passed me by to head to his own car.

Sicily led us to a park a little outside of Postings Proper with a playground and a few picnic benches surrounding it. He walked over to one of the vending machines situated near the building that housed the bathrooms and grabbed a couple of bottles of soda and a couple of bags of chips. Then we walked over to the bench that was furthest from the playground and sat down. It was getting cold outside—November in Maine could borderline be considered the beginning of winter—but it didn’t bother me much, and Sicily didn’t seem to mind either. We each tucked into our drinks and chips before I finally started my story.

“All right, I’m about to give you a whole lot of pretty sensitive information for me, so I think it goes without saying that if you tell anyone this shit, Iwillhave to kill you.”

Sicily’s nose turned up like he smelled something terrible. “Who am I gonna tell, Dee? You’re myonlyfriend.”

I snickered. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re my only friend.”

“I don’t know. The Royal Court seems to like you,” he replied.

“Yeah, well, that’s what I have to tell you.” When my tone dropped, Sicily leaned in. “I actually…know a few members of The Royal Court from a long time ago. Kyle and Nikita, I guess you could say we were friends coming up. Only for about a year, though.”

“You were friends with ‘em? How’d you even run in the same circle?” he asked.

I took a deep breath in, held it, counted to ten in my head, and then let it out. “I spent a year living in South Postings with my brother, dad, and step-mom.”

Sicily’s jaw dropped. “Get the fuck outta here. Your dad is one of them rich, hoity-toity types?”

I looked him straight in the eyes. “My dad is Connor Loche.”

Sicily’s eyes went so wide that it looked like they were going to pop. He sat there staring at me as though I’d just spoken a foreign language to him. “Y-your dad…is Connor Loche. As in Nathan’s dad, Connor Loche?”

“Yep,” I said, nodding. “He hired the cleaning company my mom worked for back in the day and met her. They were”—I winced—“involved until she realized he was both married and having affairs with several women. She called it off, but not before she got pregnant.”

“Holy shit,” Sicily huffed. “So Nathan’s your brother?”

I fake gagged. “It sounds even worse hearing it from someone else.”

“Jesus,” he said. “Is that why you’re so interested in his girlfriend?”

“Actually, that story should be told the other way around. Cherri was mine first,” I said. “We grew up in the same neighborhood, and we were attached at the hip. On our first date, we saw this guy. I don’t really know. He killed himself? His body just dropped on the ground in front of us. The cops thought we had something to do with it, and I got caught. Four years behind bars, and I come out to see the love of my life has moved from the Northside to the Southside and has been dating my brother.”

Sicily held up his hands. “You have officially earned your right to have an attitude problem.”

“Yeah, so they don’t really like me. They just know me. I mean, Cherri and I, I thought that may go somewhere again, but she tried to sleep with me while she was still with Nathan, so…”

“Does she know that you two are brothers?” Sicily asked.

“No, but that doesn’t change the fact that I told her I wouldn’t share with him. I’m not about to be someone’s fucking side-dude, not even for her.”

“No, hey, I get it, man. You’re not wrong.”

“I really only had Cherri as a friend from my old neighborhood, and the friends I made from that year in South Postings stayed back with Nathan when I left, so when I say I don’t have any friends other than you, I mean it,” I finished.

Sicily gasped. “So wait!” He stabbed a finger out at me. “You telling me you’ve never had a sleepover before?”

My jaw dropped. “That’swhat you took away from all this shit?”

“It’s a fucking right of passage, buddy!” He slammed his hand down on the table. “Come to my place tonight. My mom thinks I’m a loser, so she’ll be happy when I bring a friend over.” I thought of my own mom and related to the feeling. “I have a lot of siblings, like, a fuck ton, but they’ll leave us alone mostly. Except my immediate younger sister, Annika, but she’s only a couple years younger than me, so we get along all right.”

“I…” I hesitated for a moment, unsure of how I felt about mixing myself into someone’s family, but then I thought about everything I’d just told Sicily and how it didn’t shake for a moment the fact that we were friends. He was someone I wanted to hang on to, for sure. “Yeah, man. That sounds fun.”

“Yes!” Sicily said with a smile. “I’ll call my mom on the way. Let’s go!”

Once we were back in the warmth of our cars, I led Sicily to my house to drop off my mom’s car. I let her know what I was doing and grabbed a few things for the overnight, and then he drove us back to his house, right on the edge of North Postings and Postings Proper. It was a nice-sized house, bigger than mine, but nothing like the houses down in South Postings. It was a two-story, ranch-style home with tan siding and a dark brown roof. The front porch was covered in toys, bikes, balls, and just about anything else a kid would use, and a couple of swinging benches were occupied by two girls that were difficult to distinguish from the distance.

“Now, I told you that I have a fuck ton of siblings,” Sicily said as he parked his car in front of the home. “I didn’t lie. My parents, I don’t know, they were like frickin’ jackrabbits or something.”

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