“Well, I am pretty concerned with my dick,” he admits.
We pass the tattoo shop that Mav’s brother owns and step into the 1950’s style greasy spoon diner. It smells like French fries and cigarettes, since this is the kind of place where you can still smoke inside. We slide into a corner booth and order pancakes and coffee. When the waitress leaves, Colt racks his laminated menu and fixes me with his guarded, cornflower blue gaze.
“What you want to talk about, Teeny?”
“I thought out here, we were going by real names.”
“You said you wanted to talk about life.”
“Yeah,” I say, dropping the bratty attitude. “Thanks.”
“What do you want to know?” he asks. “Now that I know you’re not lusting after my dick, my patience might wear thin a little sooner, so ask me now.”
“Okay,” I say, liking his direct approach. “I need some insight into the rich side of Faulkner, I guess. You didn’t tell me you were a Darling.”
“Born and bred,” he says, accepting his Coke from the waitress.
I take mine and thank her before going on. “So, Dixie says you ran this town until the Dolces came along a few years ago.”
“Sounds like you know everything already.”
I snort. “Hardly anything.”
For a minute, neither of us speaks. Our tall, clear, red plastic cups sit on the checkered tablecloth between us.
“So, what happened?” I press. “That wasn’t like, three generations ago. More like three years. You were part of it, right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “We were all part of it. They came to town, those three guys at Willow Heights, plus one more and a sister. My cousins and I thought we were big stuff, you know? And they proved us wrong.”
“How?”
Colt sighs and shifts in the booth, pulling at the knees of his jeans. “Well, one of my cousins fell for their sister. Hell, I guess we all kind of fell for her. But she fell for him back. Our families weren’t having any of it, though. They hated each other. They wouldn’t let them be together. My cousin and her ended up going missing during that flood on New Year’s a couple years back. The cops and the whole town looked for them. We thought they’d run away at first, but they found the car a few days later. Said they died fucking in the back seat.”
“Damn.”
I remember that New Year’s. In passing, Zephyr mentioned he was having a couple people over if I wanted to join. I was crushing on Maverick, so I’d walked over, hoping he’d be there. Because it was freezing cold and raining, no one but Mav and Zephyr’s girl showed up, but I remember the electric high of hanging out with cool older kids and realizing they thought I was cool, too. We couldn’t do a bonfire in the backyard, but his dad said we could burn shit in a barrel on the front porch.
At one point, his dad left to get beer and came back without the car. He said he’d sold it to get more beer. He and Zephyr got in an ugly fight about it, and I left with Maverick to save Zephyr the embarrassment. Mav asked if I wanted a tattoo, and we went to his house.
“That was just the beginning,” Colt says, bringing me out of the memory of my world and back into his.
The waitress arrives with our pancakes and a carafe of syrup. We thank her and busy ourselves unwrapping the gold foil from the butter patties and spreading it.
“So, what’s the rest?” I ask at last, drizzling syrup over the pale stack of pancakes.
“Our families had been feuding, but when we lost Devlin, it kinda crushed us,” Colt says. “You know, he was the golden boy, the favorite son. Our grandpa had it all set up for him to be mayor one day. Maybe he would have been, I don’t know.”
I want to touch him, to take his hand, but I don’t.
Colt goes on. “When he died, we were ready to throw in the towel, call a truce. It’s all fun and games until your brother winds up dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, stacking the tiny white containers of creamer while he talks.
“We didn’t have any fight left in us,” Colt says, his expression darkening. “At least most of us didn’t. Gramps would have kept going, but the rest of us were done. We just wanted to grieve.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, because what else do you say when someone tells you they lost a brother and weren’t allowed to grieve? One look at the guy says they were close—more than close. They were family. Blood.
Colt shrugs and slices viciously into his stack of pancakes. “That wasn’t good enough for the Dolces. They blamed us for Crystal dying, for pretty much all the shit wrong in the world. And they made us pay.”