Chapter 5 – Asher
“Come on, faggot. You’re nothing but a piece of white trash!”
“Such a crybaby, trailer trash!”
“Where is your big, bad brother now, little boy?”
“Expecting a flood soon? Huh? Can’t even get clothes that are clean?”
“How bad do you want this apple? Want it bad enough that you’ll kiss my feet, gay boy?”
I can hear them taunting him before I even round the building. I know what I’m going to find. It’s the same thing that I found last week after Coop came home from school with a black eye. He looked terrible, which really isn’t that hard for us.
Coop started high school this year, and I knew it would be bad. It was bad for me too—until I taught those bully shits what taunting me will get them. I had to fight for my respect, but no one messes with me now. I might not be wearing name-brand clothes. I can’t even buy my own lunch without government assistance. And I will never be a kid in this school who drives a brand-new BMW. But I will demand respect that, at even fifteen, I know means more than any name-brand item I could ever own.
Coop and I don’t have nice things. Hell, we don’t even have kind of nice things. We have shit. We have filth. We have nothing.
But we have each other, and we will always have each other. My piece-of-shit excuse for a mother doesn’t even try to take her hands to Coop anymore. Not since the last time I scared her so bad she pissed all over herself. I tower over the woman who gave birth to us. She tried to take a shovel to Coop last year when I had snuck him a piece of cake I’d stolen from a local baker. She came home, saw us laughing and eating real food, and went nuts. All it took was my getting in her face and threatening to flush all of her pills. She took one look at me, big for my age, vibrating with years of hate, and backed down.
These days, she is gone more than home, thank Christ.
I can still hear them when I finish the remaining steps that will take me to what I know will end in a lot of fists flying and blood spraying.
It’s time to teach these motherfuckers that they don’t touch my brother.
My gut clenches when I see him, my brother, curled into his small self. He’s small for his age, but then again, when you lack the proper nutrition needed to actually grow, I guess that’s normal. His bony arms are wrapped around his head. His head is tucked into his bent legs, and he is rocking back and forth.
And it breaks my heart.
I wish I could take all of the pain and all of the hurt away from him. I wish that I could make it so that he never suffered. I wish I could save him from the world.
“Get the hell away from my brother!” I roar.
All five of the bullies who are walking circles around my brother’s huddled form turn their heads at my voice. When I see the evil gleam in their eyes, I know that there is no way I’m going to walk away from this fight without feeling it.
“Come on, shitheads. You want to pick on someone, then pick on someone your own size.”
“Oh we will be happy to,” Dillon Sharpton grunts.
“My pleasure, fucker,” Drew Cardy snarls.
I hear the others chime in, but I only have eyes for Coop. I see him peek through his folded arms and I mouth the only thing I can before ten fists are flying towards me.
“Run.”
I know this won’t be pretty. I know I’m going to feel every second of this. But I’m going to fight these jackasses until I can’t fight anymore.
I watch Coop struggle to his feet, giving me one more look of fear before he runs as fast as he can around the way I came.
Safe.
And then…I fight.
“Wake the hell up,” I hear, followed by a hard kick to my ass.
Before I can stop my body, I’m rolling over the side of the guest bed in Maddox’s apartment and landing hard on the wood floor.
“What the fuck!” I slowly climb off the floor because every damn inch of my body is screaming in protest.
“Yeah, what the fuck would be a good question, seeing as my whole fucking apartment looks like a tornado came through here. Not to mention how you look.”
I look up and meet the pitch-black depths of Maddox Locke’s cold, hard stare.
“What are you doing here?” I question, trying to wake myself up.
“Uh, news flash—I live here.”
“Oh, right.”
“Yeah, oh right. What the fuck, Asher? I ask you to stay here and watch the damn cat. Watch. The. Cat. Did I say to make yourself comfortable and re-fucking-model while you were here?”
I’ll be the first one to admit that I’ve spent the better part of the last…I’m not sure how long…stuffed in the bottom of whatever bottle I can find, but I honestly have no damn clue what the hell he’s talking about.
Maddox called me last week—that much I remember—and asked me to come stay at his apartment and keep his cat fed and shit. But the rest of that… Nope, no idea. And clearly with how hard his stare is getting, he knows I’m clueless right now.
“You need to lay off the booze, brother. I understand you. Trust me, I do. But you can’t keep drinking away your grief. Scream, yell, fuck it out, but do not sit here and drink yourself into a grave right next to Coop. You know damn fucking well he wouldn’t want that for you.”
He looks at me for a few more beats before he walks away from where I’m standing, mouth gaping, and shuts the door with a loud click echoing throughout the otherwise silent room.
He has no fucking clue—none of them do. No one knows what it’s like to lose the other part of your goddamn life. No one. They all look at me with pity and it makes me sick. My brother was my reason for living. For as long as I can remember, he was the reason I woke up, and now that he’s gone, I have no clue how to move on from this darkness I’ve been drowning in. Every time I close my eyes, I see his smile and it kills me to know that I wasn’t there to save him when he needed me.
For the first time that I can remember, I let him down.
And I have no idea how to move on from that.
***
After taking a scalding-hot shower, I’m finally feeling human enough to join Maddox. Judging by the noises coming from the living room, that’s where I’m going to find him.
Coming around the corner, I feel my mouth drop. What the hell happened to this place? He wasn’t wrong; it looks like a tornado came through. Hell, there might have been an earthquake as well.
Maddox isn’t big on the whole decoration shit, but then again, being a single guy myself, I completely get it. There’s no need for accents and shit when it’s just going to be you looking at the shit. It isn’t barren, which my old apartment was, but it damn sure is lacking anything personal. Just white walls and black furniture. It’s pretty much your typical bachelor pad. The only thing making it a step up from college dorm life is the lack of naked women posted on the walls with thumbtacks. It’s not much of a step, but at least there’s that.
I had my reasons for keeping my old apartment void of personal touches. I didn’t even have pictures of Coop out around the place. It just had the bare minimum needed for me to come, eat, and sleep. It was, hands down, my fuck pad. More importantly, there were no reminders of the life I’d left behind when I got out of the Marines.
I wasn’t enlisted long. I went in and got the fuck out. Don’t get me wrong; I respect the hell out of these guys. I respect the hell out of anyone willing to risk their lives for our country. I saw things and did things that can never be unseen or undone. I’ve killed, I’ve helped others kill, and I watched half of my unit blow up right in front of my face.
So when it came time for me to reenlist, I declined.
And then every day that I sat at home while my little brother was overseas on some unknown mission, I felt like I was dying a little inside.
I suspect that Maddox has his own demons that follow him from his time in the Marines. I know he’s highly decorated, but I also know that he suffered the worst out of all of us over there. The kind of shit that sticks to your skin and never, never lets go.
“Are you just going to stand there or do you actually plan on helping me clean up your shit? And where the hell is Cat?”
“Look, Mad, I know it looks bad—”
“Looks bad? This is what you think looks bad? My fucking flat screen is shattered! Want to tell me what in the hell happened?”
“Uh…okay.”
He just stands there, his hands on his hips, and waits.
I’m not afraid of much. I’ve stared down the barrels of more guns than I can count. I’ve fought hand to hand with terrorists. I’ve defused bomb after bomb. But looking into the stone-cold depth of Maddox Locke’s soul… Yeah, I’m man enough to admit that he scares the ever-loving shit out of me.
Not knowing the best way to even start explaining the clusterfuck of events that led up to the destruction of his pad, I start the best way I can—stuttering. “I… Well, you see. I…uh.”
He looks at me, his jaw twitching with frustration, his eyebrow cocked, and his nostrils flaring with what I’m sure is pure, unleashed rage. Shit.
“I might have brought a chick home the other night. She may or may not have gotten a little upset when I basically told her to leave.”
“You bought a chick home. To my house? A chick you don’t know? To MY HOUSE!?”
“I know you’re pissed, Mad. I’m sorry. I just…forgot.”
“You just forgot?” he mimics. “When you just forgot, did you happen to be swimming in one of these many bottles that I keep picking up off the floor?”
Really, what’s the point of responding to him? He knows—he fucking knows—how hard it’s been. If anyone knows what it’s like for me right now, it’s him. Which is the reason I left Beck and Dee’s place to begin with. I couldn’t handle the looks of pure pity that would come from Dee or the talks Beck would try and throw my way.
I’m lost right now. Trapped in a black hole of nothing. Coop was the last thing I had, the last something real. With him gone, I just don’t know what to live for. It sounds ridiculous even to me, I know, but he was everything I’ve ever lived for since the day our piece-of-shit mother decided that she loved being a cracked-out whore over a mother.
“This shit needs to stop.”
I was so lost in my head I didn’t even notice Maddox walking right into my space. We’re both evenly matched in body and bulk, but I know he could snap me in half if he wanted to.
“Brother, I don’t know how,” I whisper.
“You don’t know how to what?”
“I don’t know how to move on. I don’t know how to escape this...this darkness.” My voice cracks, and even though it’s the last thing I want, I crack right along with it. “He’s gone, Mad. He’s fucking gone and I don’t know how to get past knowing that he’s never going to come back. That my brother is dead. He’s dead and I wasn’t there to do a goddamn thing about it. You know where I was when I got that call? When I got the call telling me that I needed to get my ass here because it didn’t look good? I was balls-deep in some bitch I’d picked up. While I was screwing around, my brother was bleeding out, and that is fucking killing me.”
With tears falling down my face, my fists clamped tight, and my body rigid with anger, I crumble. I can’t even meet his eyes, because if I see the same pity that everyone else has thrown my way in the months that have followed Coop’s murder, I know I’ll snap.
“Do you honestly think you’re the only motherfucker who knows loss? Don’t get me wrong. It fucking sucks that Coop is gone, but do you think he would want you wasting your life away, swimming in bottle after bottle and whore after whore? I know darkness, Asher. I know what it’s like to live the same goddamn nightmare over and over again, but at some point, you need to wake the fuck up and realize there’s more to live for.” He shakes his head, looking off to the side and out the window of his apartment, where the sun is blazing bright.
Another reminder that life goes on.
“You’re killing yourself for what? To keep your mind on some continuous loop of grief? Constantly beating yourself up over something you have no control over? He’s dead, Ash. He’s dead and there isn’t anything you can do to bring him back. We all miss him—trust me on that. And pretty soon, if you don’t turn yourself around, you will successfully drink yourself to your own death, and please tell me what the hell that will fucking accomplish?”
“What the fuck do you know about loss, Maddox?” I scream, losing my tight hold on the control that’s been my only weapon against crumbling into nothing the last few months.
“I know every-fucking-thing about loss, Asher Cooper. I know what it’s like to lose your family, your friends, your life like you’ve always known it, and yourself. I fucking know what it’s like to have NOTHING, and trust me, what you feel right now is heavy, but it doesn’t hold a fucking candle. Work out your shit. Talk it out, fight it out, but stop fucking drinking it out. When you’re ready to take that step, you let me fucking know, but meanwhile, stop bringing sluts back to my house…and find my damn cat!”
He storms past me, knocking my shoulder so hard I fall right on my ass in the middle of his living room, and the only think I can think of is that he’s fucking right, but I have no clue how to fix my life.