CHAPTER SIX CONTINUED
Casey looked at him strangely, and then said, “Fine. Come by tomorrow. But… you have to go right now. Because despite what you think you know, this time belongs to Chay. Chay first and me second. Good night, Sheridan.”
Sheridan Klasko nodded, turned his back and left, hearing the door shut behind him. Why had he left knowing that his best friend was going to be having sex with a thirty year old pornographer? What was he?
He walked to the car. He should have threatened Casey with the police. Or with Noah. Or… something. He sat in the car before turning the key in the ignition. Coming down the long driveway, he stopped for the sudden whir of ambulance and fire truck, red and blue lights twinkling as they sped up the road. In the darkness again, coming out onto the state road, Sheridan knew that Casey had glamored him from day one, and he wanted to be in his world far more than he wished to destroy it.
Dena Affren gripped her stomach and got up.
“Put that damn cigarette out, Milo. You’re making me sick.”
“Since when?” Milo wondered, but he put it out as Dena went in the direction of the bathroom. She came back a moment later.
“I seriously thought I was going to throw up.”
“You’re as bad as Claire,” Mathan said.
Dena tilted her head.
“Maybe you’re both pregnant,” Meredith suggested from her seat on the edge of the sofa.
“You’re an evil bitch for wishing that on me,” Dena said. “I feel better now, anyway. I’m going to go make some popcorn.”
Meredith yawned. “None for me. I think its almost bedtime.”
The show was interrupted by a station banner reading: SPECIAL REPORT
“Oh, shit!” Dena put a hand on her hip.
Charlie Palmer materialized, and she said, “I’ve seen enough of him to last my whole life.”
“Good evening, Rossford,” Charlie said, soberly, “This just in…”
Face to face, Chay’s legs wrapped about Casey’s waist, they rose and fell together, bodies moist, Casey’s mouth was open, and so were his eyes as he held Chay’s face in his hands. They looked into each other, shaking and gasping before, with a gentle signal, Casey turned him around and pressed his stomach into Chay’s back. He pressed himself over and over against him, eyes closed, burying his face in Chay’s shoulder so that Chay could feel the stubble. He kissed him up and down, reaching under the boy to run his hands over Chay’s chest. Quickly Casey reached for the condom. Gently and with tenderness, he inserted his shiny finger, making Chay groan as Casey opened him. Casey’s hands lifted the boy by the hips and both of them gasped as, gently, he pushed his penis inside of him.
“Off of Old Hickory Road there was a train accident tonight. A freight train bound for Indianapolis was stopped in its tracks when it killed a young girl,” Andrew Palmer reported.
Meredith began to tremble, and she looked to Mathan while Andrew continued…
The bed creaked first a little, and then a lot, and then it groaned with the danger of breaking as Casey fucked him harder and harder. Chay reached his hand back to feel the solidness of Casey’s neck, the knot of his neckbone. He wanted to pull him deeper in while Casey kissed him over and over again, fucking him against the bed, sweat raining from him, Casey kept saying “I’m all for you, baby. I’m all for you. Everything…”
“What makes the accident that much more tragic is that by all reports the victim is one Robin Netteson, the same girl who only a few weeks ago was the center of media attention in the Rossford High School rape trial.”
They shook. He moved in him like a piston. He was one vibration as Chay’s body lifted and lifted up to heaven, the lights swirled, the bed shook, the world trembled and the lights went out. He shot out and out from himself, Casey’s hands were slick on his back, trying to hold him to earth as they both went into blackness.
Blackness and blackness, swirling in blackness, all the lights fainting as the couch, and the earth dropped from under Meredith Affren, and on the edge of everything she fell and fell, the scream of a train roaring in her ears.
DRIVING BACK INTO TOWN, everything was quiet in a hellish sort of way. By the time Sheridan got to his house he was glad to see the olive green siding and the screened in porch. He just wanted to go to bed.
He parked the car in the driveway and walked tiredly across the brown lawn, up the steps and into the house.
Mom and Dad were sitting on the sofa, and so were Layla and Will, and they were all looking at him.
“What?” he said.
Will just kept looking at him.
“What’s going on?” Sheridan became more irritable.
It was Layla who stood up. She came across the room, put her hands on his shoulders and looked at him tragically, like Layla never looked, and then she pulled him forward and held him.
At Saint Agatha’s Father Frank got up and, with the help of his great nephew, began turning the lights on, lighting candles and preparing for arrivals. As the lights of the old church came on, first over the altar, and then in the corners of the sanctuary, next all the way down the nave, Frank thought of saying something darkly sober about how good Robin Netteson was for the Catholic Church of late. But he left off. Unconsciously he was fingering the large beads of his rosary and in place of his own clever words he began to pray the Hail Mary.
Soon the bells were tolling from high above, and it was Sean who came running down the long aisle.
“It’s Dan Malloy on the phone. Over at Saint Barbara’s.”
“I know who Dan Malloy is,” Frank said and, making a small reverence at the altar, he turned, and holding the long brass lighter like a banner, went through the sacristy and back to the house.
“Yes, Daniel,” Frank said. “I know. I’ve opened the church. It’s a real mess is what it is.”
“Some days I want to give up the God business,” Dan said.
“Is that what they’re calling it these days in seminary?”
“I dunno. I haven’t been in seminary for twenty years.”
“I’m just waiting for folks to arrive,” Frank said. “Maybe if I left it open all the time, then I wouldn’t have to open it just tonight because it would make people different.”
“I don’t know what to say to them when they come,” Dan said. “What am I supposed to tell people?”
“The truth.”
“That I don’t know? That I don’t understand?”
“Yes.”
In the distance, Frank could hear Sean begin to play the organ. It wasn’t Catholic. It was from the Anglican requiem. I Know That My Redeemer Liveth. Frank resisted the urge to hum along and returned his attention to Dan Malloy.
“I don’t think uncertainty is what people want to hear,” Dan said
“I don’t think it’s your job to tell people what they want to hear,” Frank Slaughter differed. “As a priest of Christ, you are a witness to truth. Every Christian is. Forgive my preaching, I know you feel old and wise. But I’ve been a priest longer than you’ve been alive.”
“The truth will set you free,” Dan murmured.
“Yes. That’s right. It will. Jesus wasn’t bullshit when he said that. He was never bullshit.”
“But the truth is that I am confused and disheartened.”
“The Lord did not say happy truth will set you free, or what you wish was true will set you free, Daniel.”
Frank shook his head though, of course, Dan Malloy couldn’t see it.
“Truth is truth,” the old priest concluded.
When Bryant’s cell phone rang, Chad picked it up because it was on the table before him.
“Hello?”
“Where’s Bryant?”
“Nice to talk to you too, Sean.”
“Sorry. It’s nice to talk to you, Chad.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“You’re the one who started it with what you said around the Christmas tree last week.”
Sean took a frustrated breath then said, “And what I said still stands. The only difference between you and me is I’m not harping on it. Now can I please talk to my big brother?”
Chad flipped the phone shut.
A second later it rang.
“Sorry,” Chad said. “I do that all the time.”
“You’re lying and that was petty, and—”
“Bryant!” Chad put the phone down and called his partner.
Bryant came into the living room from down the hall and Chad told him, “It’s Sean.”
“Oh,” Bryant leapt over the couch like someone fifteen years younger, all arms and legs, and Chad commented, “if you’re not going to keep your phone with you, what’s the point in having it?”
Deaf to it, or simply ignoring him, Bryant said, “What’s up? No, we’re listening to Christmas music and… what?” Bryant’s face changed. Chad wanted to grin for a moment. Bryant always looked like a boy, and he was so beautiful. That was the thing; he seemed to have only gotten better in the last decade.
He turned around and told Chad: “We gotta go to Saint Agatha’s.”
“What for?”
“You don’t have to. You have to teach in the morning.”
“No,” Chad got up, walking toward the closet for his coat.
“It’s horrible. One of the students at your school died. Maybe you know her?”
Sean’s conversation had made Chad irritable, and while Bryant handed him his coat and pulled out his own, Chad said, “Not if you don’t tell me.”
“Robin Netteson.”
“Bullshit,” Chad dismissed this. “Lightning can’t strike twice.”
“It can,” Bryant said, knowingly. “In nature and in life.”
Chad was incapable of tying his own scarf or buttoning his coat.
“And that,” Bryant told him, “is why we’re going to Saint A’s to be with our family.”
After that, phones began ringing all over town. It became important that everyone know where everyone else was. The only one unaccounted for was Chay, and Sheridan said to Will and Layla:
“If anyone asks where Chay is, he’s with me.”
Layla opened her mouth, but Will said, “Where is he?”
“He will be with me,” Sheridan said, heading out of the house.
“I think that’s the only answer we’re gon get,” Layla told Will.
“And…” Sheridan added. “When Meredith and Mathan get here, if they get here, tell them I’m going to be out a little while myself. Tell them me and Chay are out.”
“You want us to lie?” Will said.
“To the appropriate people,” Sheridan said. “Yes. Besides, it won’t be a total lie. I’m bringing Chay back.”
Before they could ask him any more questions, Sheridan went out the door.
His mother came back into the kitchen with a tray of tea.
“No one’s going to sleep tonight, are they?” Mrs. Klasko said.
“No, Ma,” said Will.
It was Layla who thought it made sense to tell Meredith and her cousin Mathan not to come, seeing as Sheridan and Chay weren’t there. But Dena told her that they were already on their way.
“Meredith is a real mess,” Dena said. “She fainted at the house. And she just spent the afternoon with Robin. She watched after that girl so carefully. I think she thought that the only way to make sure nothing ever happened to her again was to watch her at all times.
“And then this happens.”
When Meredith and Mathan arrived, the very tall boy led his girlfriend in carefully, and the blond girl sat down on the sofa beside Will, her eyes clearly some place else.
“It just seems impossible that so much tragedy could happen to one girl so quickly,” Will was saying, and, “How in the world did she not see the train? What was she doing at that time of night?”
“Of all the awful accidents,” Mrs. Klasko said.
Meredith looked up at them. She came to life enough to say: “You’re joking, right?”
They looked at her.
“Getting attacked by a group of boys she didn’t understand was an accident,” Meredith said.
“Walking to the train tracks when you knew the train was coming and getting run over?” Meredith shook her head. “She told me goodbye before we parted. Only I didn’t understand. She told me I love you and goodbye. This was no accident.”
When Sheridan arrived at the house he parked further away and then walked close to the porch before deciding against knocking, and simply seeing if he could get in.
It was open, and so he walked through the large old house, following the noises, heart palpitating to the feeling of being an intruder. It made sense. Nothing was right this night. Everything was wrong. He followed the sound and went down the side hall. Gold light came down the corridor and led to the bedroom.
He lay against the lentil, lightly. Not even believing he would be caught, entranced by what he was watching. Though he was larger, and though he was older, on the bed Casey was on his hands and knees, his head down, and little Chay, on his knees, his small buttocks flexing and unflexing, his hands planted on Casey’s perfect ass was fucking him. Sheridan felt his mouth dry. He was harder than he’d been in a long time. He watched and watched, his balls aching, his penis throbbing, and then he turned around, very slowly, while Casey gave a high, soft moan, and Sheridan left the house.
I think Sheridan is right about Casey manipulating Chay. That whole situation is very complicated and I am interested to see how it turns out. Great writing! I am going on a short holiday for the next few days so won't be able to check jub as often but ill try to get on occasionally. Hope you're having a good week!
