“She didn’t already tell you what a monster I am?”
The words trip me up, catching me off guard. “All she told me is that the two of you used to ate and it ended badly,” I answer.
He snorts. “That’s one way of putting it,” he says drily.
“And how exactly would you put it, then, Shaun?”
He looks away, not saying anything, so I decide to keep pressing him. “What the hell happened, Shaun? What the fuck did you do to that girl that would make her call you a monster? What did you do to make her look at you like that?”
He turns to look at me slowly, and his eyes look almost…hollow. Like everything’s been carved out from behind them and the very soul of the man has shattered.
“I killed her brother.”
Chapter Six
Shaun
Elliot looks every bit as stunned as I’m expecting him to. “Wait a second, run that one by me again?”
“You heard what I said.”
“Well, explain, then,” he demands, “Because you can’t just fucking drop that kind of a bomb without giving me some kind of elaboration.”
I sigh, knowing that there’s no getting out of this. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“Owen was my best friend,” I say finally, “From the time we were ten. And Lena was his twin sister. Which didn’t matter until we were teenagers, and suddenly she wasn’t just his annoying sister anymore.”
I wander over to my bed and sit down on the edge, tugging a loose thread on the blanket to distract myself while I talk. “The three of us were inseparable, and we had a whole future planned out. We’d already all gotten accepted to school here, and we were talking about the three of us getting our own apartment.”
Elliot leans in my doorway, letting me speak without interruption. But I have to pause for a moment to gear myself up for the next part.
“I’d even gotten Owen’s blessing to ask Lena to marry me,” I say, and it’s taking all of my effort to keep my voice steady, “But the night of our graduation, everything changed.”
I can still see it, crystal clear in my head, every moment. It’s like a movie I get forced to watch sometimes, and it feels like watching that idiot blonde in a horror movie. But no matter how many times you scream “Don’t go in there!” at the screen, she goes in and inevitably meets some gruesome fate.
I’ll tell myself a thousand times to let Lena & Owen’s parents drive them home, but it doesn’t change the memory.
“We were in that wooded area on the south side of town with that sharp hill and that stupid, curvy road,” I say finally, “And my brakes quit halfway down. I tried to slow us down, but even with the emergency brake, I couldn’t stop us, we were going too fast.”
My throat tightens. “Went right over the edge of this cliff thing down into the trees. Rolled over a few times and Lena hit her head, she was unconscious through everything. We finally stopped when we slammed into this massive oak tree, and the impact killed Owen instantly.”
“Jesus,” Elliot breathes, but I press on.
“I got out with a broken arm and a couple of cracked ribs. But the first time I went to see Lena in the hospital while she was still comatose…I couldn’t live with what I’d done,” my voice cracks, “How was I supposed to look her in the eye again after I killed her brother? How could I still expect her to love someone who took her twin and nearly killed her, too?”
I scrub roughly at the tears spilling from my eyes. “So I left. I just…took off, and we haven’t spoken since.”
“Dude…your fucking brakes failed, you’re not some murderer,” Elliot says gently, “You made it sound like you killed the kid in cold blood, but it was just an accident.”
I can’t bring myself to answer him.
“Shaun.”
I ignore him, picking at the loose thread again.
“Goddamn it, Shaun, look at me,” he snaps.