The Boy Who Knew Me When (From Boys to men Trilogy) (9 page)

“So, tell me about him?” I looked up at Brandon with half a cookie in my mouth.

“Axel? I am pretty sure you don’t want the sordid details of that disaster.” Brandon’s lips puckered up as if he had bit into a lemon and he closed his eyes.

“Not Axel, Jem,
him
, your brother’s friend, the guy Brea seems to think you are in love with.”

 
I put down the cookie that was in my hand. Was I in love with Julian, Ford, after only knowing him a little while? Because at this very moment I was sure I loved Brandon. True, my heart was throbbing at the thought of sharing Ford with Brandon. It was also throbbing for the fact that Ford felt just as dead to me now as Nicolai and my mother, but was I in love with him?

 
I could not bear the thought of watching Brandon leave again. Watching him go the first time made me wish I would just die so that I didn’t have to fight this cruel fucking world without him. He was always my knight in shining armor, the prince in all of the fairy tales I read as a child. The first time I fooled around with Axel I was just a confused young girl. I had a hard time understanding why I turned to him when Brandon was not there. If I loved Brandon so much why couldn’t I manage to be without him for more than a few hours and still be faithful?

 
During my weekly therapy session, Dr. Schneider, who had been my diagnosing psychiatrist, asked me if I could see myself functioning without Brandon. I contemplated the question for a long time, trying to will the answer to change based on the different scenarios he was offering me, but it always remained the same, there was no way that I could.  He later asked me if I thought my feelings were love or if I had just grown to need him because he allowed himself to be there, if perhaps he could have been anyone. I refused to answer. I knew that I loved him, I wasn’t sure the depth of that love but I was positive that there was love in my heart for him.

 
By the end of the session Dr. Schneider had explained that he felt as if I had allowed myself to grow mentally attached to Brandon because he was so willing, basically because he was an easy target. He said that he thought Brandon had become my crutch, an appendage that wasn’t really necessary but I insisted on having around for fear of falling. When my crutch left my side I fell to the ground, thus explaining my behavior with his best friend, it was me latching on to the closest thing. He explained that until I learned to let go of him I would never truly understand the depth of my feelings, I might not actually love him at all. That was the last time I visited the great Dr. Schneider. 

 
I never shared the doctors thoughts with anyone for fear that saying them out loud might actually make them true. Would he tell me the same thing about Ford? I didn’t want to know. Of course it no longer mattered because Ford was no longer available to me. I am not so sure he never was.

Chapter Seven

Julian

  She was gone. One minute she was standing right in front of me looking sexy as hell and the next minute she had left me standing alone unable to explain myself. I told Heather coming here would be a bad idea but she insisted on it, promising that she would be completely hands off. I should have known she was full of shit. She usually was.

 
We broke up two months ago after I went home for a few weeks and found out she was slutting around with Benicio the guy who mowed her dad’s lawn once a week. I don’t put up with that kind of shit. Once a girl decides to be with me I expect them to be with me and only me.

 
My gran had practically begged me to fly with Heather back to Austin where she’d decided to transfer after years of studying at home. I knew she was only moving here to be near me but she was a grown woman and there was nothing I could do about it. The only reason I agreed was because gran feared for her safety.

“A pretty girl should never fly alone Ford, there are all kinds of deviants out there just waiting to get their hands on someone like her.”
she argued. 

 
I never told her what happened between me and Heather, I knew that it would break her heart, she truly loved the girl.

 
When Heather decided she wanted to leave San Juan early, I was not going to argue with her. I had filled out all of the required paperwork at home health and they had someone coming out to help gran starting Monday morning so I was free to head back. The plan was to drop Heather off at her sisters and head straight over to Jemma’s apartment. She had been all I could think about for the last 24 hours and all I wanted was to crawl back to her and figure out what this thing was between us. But after hearing about the Omega Pledge BBQ, Heather asked that I drop her off  there, which later turned into “Walk me in.” The only reason I caved was because as President I figured it might be best if I at least made an appearance. Boy was I wrong.

 
I never thought it was possible that Jemma and I would ever cross paths again. Over the years I had wanted to visit her family more times than I could count. I’d even been back once or twice while gran and I sold off the old house but guilt plagued me and I never gathered the courage to visit the Hales.

 
There were days that I wished I would have just let Nick have the fucking eraser he tried to steal from me in Kindergarten. Perhaps we would have never become friends and at the very least Mr. And Mrs. Hale would not have lost a son. I could only imagine how horribly they had suffered the loss. I can only imagine that losing a child is one of the worse things that could ever happen to a person. Kids were destined to eventually lose a parent but a parent should never have to mourn their child. How could they not blame me for the pain inflicted on them? I was the boy who lived and I hated myself for it.

I remember the events of that horrific day as if they happened yesterday. We were sitting in a middle booth, laughing and carrying on about the fact that Nick was too scared to take a photo with Bugs Bunny during our trip to Six Flags. He downright refused to go anywhere near the seven foot rabbit. “Rabbits should never grow that big! He will probably try to eat me for killing his cousins.” he joked, however I knew that he was completely serious. As buff and tough as Nick pretended to be I knew he was still just a kid.

His dad had taught him how to shoot the day he turned five and several times a year they would both go hunting for some kind of animal or bird. I had always wanted to trail along but my dad had a “No guns around kids” rule that he stuck by at all costs. Even so, he never turned down the side of deer meat Mr. Hale gave up because between the hogs, quail, deer and rabbit they never had room for more than half of their kill in the deep freeze. Since my dad was Mr. Hale’s closest friend we also got the freezer overflow which usually included a little bit of everything else.

I loved Mr. Hale, where my dad was smart and level headed, Mr. Hale was resourceful and wise. I turned to him all things related to sports and outdoors because he always had the best answers. My dad would usually just shrug his shoulders and say “Ask your mom, kid.” As if my mother would know anything about jock straps.

No more than two minutes after we all calmed down from poking fun at Nick, who laughed right along with us, a man bolted through the front door screaming “Where is that bitch! Janet fucking Cardenas. Where is she?” He wasn’t shouting to anyone in particular, I guess he was just shouting to be shouting. I remember thinking about how funny the man looked. His legs were spread apart in an odd gape, he was bald and he was abnormally short. The long black trench coat he was wearing no doubt made him look shorter than he actually was. He reminded me a little bit of The Penguin from Batman.

He turned into the restaurant and found his intended target sitting about three tables over to our right. He ran to her , jerking her up out of the seat by the hair of her head and began shouting at her in Spanish while she begged and pleaded for mercy. After slapping her a few times he pulled out a small revolver and shot the man who had been sitting beside her in the booth before turning the gun on her. The man in the booth had never moved an inch from his seat.

I remember everything else in slow motion. He started shooting wildly, emptying the rest of the bullets from the revolver into ordinary unsuspecting patrons before getting to our booth. My mother had her hand out in front of me trying to shield me; my dad was shielding Nick with his entire body. They were both pleading with him, “Please, not the children.” my dad begged and my mom over run with tears was crying to him “Don’t hurt my babies! Do anything you want to me but please don’t hurt my babies!” Every word out of their mouths seems to fuel the demon lurking inside of him more and more. He dropped the empty gun and pulled a larger one out of his coat. He shot my dad first, once, twice through the head, then my mom. I was too caught up watching my dad fall over halfway onto the floor to notice where those bullets went. I later found out he shot her dead, straight between her eyes.

Then he moved the gun on me. I remember opening up my mouth to ask him not to hurt me but when I saw death in his eyes I knew there was no point in giving him the satisfaction of listening to me beg, so I just closed my eyes and waited. Before I ever realized what was happening, Nick had turned my direction and threw himself on top of me. The bullet hit his face first, caught him mid air. It went straight through him, piercing me in the right arm. And the second bullet, fired consecutively, hit him directly in the middle of his stomach. That bullet also went straight through and hit me in the leg. Both of us lay on the seat of the booth bleeding to death.

My best friend had just sacrificed his own life to save me. I lay as still as I could underneath him because I refused to allow that sacrifice to be in vain. A second before he could put another bullet in me, ending my life along with everyone else’s, a man came from behind the counter with a knife in his hand and threw it straight into the gun mans leg. He shot the man, knocking him to the ground before the restaurant filled with the deafening sound of sirens. A few moments later, realizing his reign of terror had come to an end, the man shot his self in the mouth sending a bullet through his skull. He fell dead no more than a few inches from where my dad lay slumped over the side of the booth.

I wanted to scream but I remained silent, refusing to move until I felt Nick’s lifeless body being lifted off of me. They say he was still alive when they put him on the gurney and was dead before they ever pulled out of the parking lot, my mother and father were carried out of the restaurant in body bags. I was the lucky one, I spent a week in the hospital recovering from only superficial wounds thanks to the only real friend I have ever considered myself having.

And now here I was after spending my entire life trying to keep from inflicting any more pain on his family by staying away, only to find that I broke his baby sister’s heart because I am a total moron. I don’t know what I can do to make it up to her but I want to try. Unfortunately I cannot get her to answer her cell phone, judging by the fact that it goes straight to voice mail I don’t even think she has it turned on.

A few minutes after my final attempt I see Axel stumble through the door looking like someone beat his face in with a two by four. Scared something might have happened while driving Jemma and Brea back to the apartment I approach him and ask what the hell happened. He started mumbling some shit about how he fucked up, I could not make out a single word he was saying so I slapped him in an effort to get him to relax enough to make even a little bit of sense.

Apparently it worked because after the blow he apologized and explained to me that Jemma had seduced him. He tried to convince me that he had not meant to sleep with her but she was standing in front of him “all needy and shit;” afterwards he started shouting.

“I always had a thing for her in high school but she was Brandon’s girl so she was off limits but when she walked her tits right into my hands, fuck man what could I do? A guy can only take so much.”

I tried to comprehend everything that he was saying but my head was nothing but a jumbled mess. Jemma and I had never made any type of commitment to one another, she was not my girlfriend by any stretch of the word but I couldn’t help the fact that I was pissed. Commitment or not, Jemma was mine, to hell be damned anyone who tried to take her from me.

“After we both got off she freaked out man, I don’t think she even knew she was coming on to me, it was like she was someone else. She is fucking nuts!”

And with that statement what little sense I had left abandoned me, my eyes saw nothing but darkness. Before I knew it, James and Jonathan, the Omega’s Co-President and treasurer were pulling me off a nearly unconscious Axel begging me not to kill him. I looked down at my throbbing knuckles, finding them split open and covered in my and Axel’s blood. It was then that I decided to head upstairs. I would worry about the consequences of my actions later. I took two steps before turning to James.

“Get his sorry ass out of here. Don’t let him back in or he won’t live long enough to see his next sunrise.”

Legacy or not, he took what was mine. 

I tried to sleep after taking a hot shower to wash the blood off of my hands and burn away the knowledge that Jemma had spent the night in the arms of another man in what sounded like a total breakdown. I could not bear the thought of another man’s hands on the body of the girl who had me so tied up in knots that I did not even recognize who I was anymore.

But every ounce of it was my fault, had I been up front with her about my trip she would not have felt so betrayed. I was supposed to protect her just like Nick had protected me but I didn’t know how, I fucked up everything I had ever touched.

I sat up in bed and put my hands through my hair. Something I had a tendency to do when I was out of sorts with the world.

“Nick, dude, please help me. I pretty damn sure that I am fucking in love with your sister and it is killing me right now.” I pleaded into the air praying to my dead friend for some kind answer to a question I never even asked.

So many times in my life I had seen Nicks face. For once I was actually hoping I would see him and he would guide me in the right direction. I didn’t want to lose Jemma again. I was not sure exactly what we had, I didn’t know how she felt or, considering what had happened with Axel, if what we had was even real but I had to do something. She was Nick’s sister. Nick, who had done everything to insure that I would live to see another day. I still had no plans to let his sacrifice be in vain and though I might die trying I was going to fix this, I was going to fix her and God willing if there ever was an us, I was going to fix that as well.

I got up early, eager to get over to the apartment to try and talk to her and let her know how sorry I was. It was almost nine in the morning when I knocked on the door, a little early by most people’s standards but I had no more wait left in me.
Brea flung the door open telling me that Jemma was
n’
t home but I paid no mind to her and walked inside hoping to find that she had been lying.

“Where is she? Did she leave for class already?” I turned to Brea who was shutting the door behind me.

“
I told you, she is not here Ford. She went to the admissions office to discuss postponing until next semester, and then she has a docto
r’
s appointment
,”
she stated calmly. I wondered why she was not angry with me.

“Is she sick? What’s wrong with her? Is there anything I can do to help?”

I felt myself start pacing back and forth before Brea ever asked me sit down.

“
The first thing you should do is sit the fuck down because your pacing is driving me bat shit
.
”

She held her hand out to an overstuffed flowery arm chair sitting beside a small couch and I took a seat in the chair resting my elbows on my knees. Brea sat down across from me on the couch.

“
Second, you need to calm the fuck down. Third, she is not sick, not in the sense you are asking anyway. She has an appointment with her Psychiatrist
.
”