Chapter Fourteen
Callum
The sound of soft singing brought Callum out of conflicted dreams.
He opened his eyes, and for a second couldn’t make sense of the trees outside his window. Where were the lights of the 24-hour market outside his apartment? Where was— And then he remembered, and he felt at once heavier and lighter as the danger they were in hit him at the same time as the knowledge of his newfound freedom.
The trees outside were bathed in half-light, the sky through the leaves an unearthly purple-gray. A lone bird let out a mournful three-note cry, but his fellows must have all still been asleep, because no one answered. Callum had forgotten about dawn at the retreat—how, if he had woken up early enough, he had always felt for a while like he was the only person in the world, and the sun was coming up just for him. He was a die-hard night owl the rest of the time, but if he lived out here, he could almost see the appeal of taking up Tom’s daily schedule.
He could no longer hear the singing that had woken him. Maybe it had been nothing more than a memory, or his sleeping brain trying to make sense of the bird outside. But even as he thought that, the sound came again. It was too soft for him to make out the words, but he could recognize the voice. It belonged to Tom.
He padded down the hallway to the kitchen. Tom stood in front of the sink, swaying gently from side to side as he sang under his breath. “What do you do with a drunken sailor, what do you do with a drunken sailor…” He held an empty glass in one hand, and a mostly-empty bottle stood on the counter behind him.
Callum stepped out into the kitchen. “Tom?”
Tom set the glass down and gave Callum a slightly wobbly nod. “Callum.”
Callum looked from Tom to the bottle. “I thought you didn’t drink.”
Tom looked out at him through unfocused eyes. “I don’t.”
If the bottle had been full when Tom had started, Tom would be on the floor right now. On the other hand, he had definitely had more than the single glass. “How much have you had?”
“Just enough to help me sleep.”
Now that Callum was looking closer, he could make out the dark circles under Tom’s eyes. “Have you slept at all?”
Tom shook his head. The effort threw him off balance, and he caught himself on the kitchen counter.
Normally whenever Callum saw people very drunk it reminded him of his mother. He knew that feeling well—that combination of pity and disgust, maybe tinged with a little sympathy as he wondered what they were trying to run from. He didn’t feel any of that when he looked at Tom. All he felt was the desire to help him somehow, to bring him out of whatever dark place he had fallen into.
Tom swayed on his feet again. Callum caught him with an arm around his waist. The weight of the other man made him stagger, but he managed to keep them both on their feet as they crossed the room. “Come on, let’s get you to the couch.”
As they reached the couch, Tom slid bonelessly out of his grip and half-collapsed onto its sagging cushions. “I have to…” He stared up at Callum intently. “I have to accept what comes.” Even drunk, his voice was steady, almost thoughtful. If Callum had just met him, if he had nothing to compare against, he might have almost thought the other man was sober—at least if it not for the fuzzy look in his eyes.
Callum shook his head. “We’re not going to accept any of this. We’re going to fight it. We’re going to keep your daughter safe.” He ignored the shaky fear his own words dragged up from his belly. Fight his father’s plans? Since when had he ever thought that was possible?
Tom shook his head. “I have to accept what comes. Because none of it… none of it matters. It all comes out the same in the end.”
He tried to shake away the shadows that Tom’s words sent over his mind. Tom didn’t know what he was saying right now. “You’re tired. You’ve had too much to drink. You should rest. We can talk about this when you’re feeling better.”
Tom blinked up at him. “What are you going to do with your life after this is over?”
“Um…” It took Callum a moment to process the subject change, and another moment to figure out how to answer. “Run, I guess. And keep running, until…” Until my father finds me. He didn’t know whether that thought was a product of Tom’s drunken nihilism infecting him, or simply him accepting the reality of the situation. “Until I can stop,” he finished belatedly, knowing it wasn’t what he had meant to say, knowing Tom would be able to see that.
But while a sober Tom might have seen it, this Tom didn’t, or didn’t comment on it. “No. I mean after that. What are you going to be, if you’re not the person your father tried to make you?”
It wasn’t the question he had expected. Not from Tom in his current state, not from anyone at this hour of the morning. But as he tried to think of an answer, he realized that even if he had anticipated the question, his mind would have been just as blank. Even when he used to concoct elaborate fantasies of getting as far away as possible from the Syndicate, even before he had determined that he wasn’t brave enough to try, he had never gotten any further than, Run, and keep running.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. For the first time, he saw the expanse of his new future stretched out before him, a future that had nothing to do with his father or the Syndicate. And he saw… nothing. Only blackness. What was out there for him besides the life he had left behind? Who was he if he wasn’t his father’s failed son?
Tom nodded as if he understood. “I thought I could move on, once. I thought I could leave my old life behind and become someone new.” He blinked slowly, and for a moment Callum thought he would fall asleep right there, but he kept talking. “But it always ends the same way. It always comes back to the same thing.”
“What does?”
“Life,” said Tom, as if this was something profound. “We try to control our lives. We try to find meaning. But there’s no control. There’s no meaning.” He shook his head vigorously, as if to emphasize his point. “Remember that. You’ll always be helpless, in the end. You’ll hurt the people you love, and you’ll lose them, and there’s nothing… nothing you can do to stop it.” His voice was starting to slur. The last of whatever had been in the bottle must have only just started to kick in.
“You won’t lose Leila,” Callum assured him, even though he was no longer sure he believed it. The despair in Tom’s voice had begun to sink under his skin. The half-light of dawn, which had looked so magical a few minutes ago, now felt ominous, as if the dimness of the forest hid countless dangers.
“I lost Mary.” Tom might have been right here on the couch next to him, but his voice was a thousand miles away. “My parents told me to watch her. Just for a couple of hours, they said. They told me to help her with her homework while they were gone. And I did. I did what they asked. And when she heard scratching at the door, I told her to focus. But she kept talking about stray cats, and what if it was hungry out there, and…” Tom took a ragged breath. “I told her to go check on it herself. I went upstairs to play a game. She was eight, she could handle a stray cat by herself.”
Callum took one of Tom’s hands in his. It was a purely instinctive gesture of comfort—he didn’t realize he was going to do it until it was already done. Tom’s hand was cold in his. Their fingers interlaced, and Tom held on to him like a lifeline as he continued to speak.
“Even after I heard the shot, I didn’t know what had happened. Not at first. I ran downstairs, and there she was, not… not moving. Red all around her. And a figure in the distance, running away. The police found him later. He’d been trying to rob the house. He saw my parents’ car leave and thought nobody was home. But my parents didn’t blame him—they blamed me. It should have been me and not her. That’s what they thought. I was older, I was… was taking care of her.” Another broken breath. “Maybe they were right.”
Callum’s heart clenched at the pain in Tom’s voice, the naked grief, the quiet despair. At that moment, he would have paid any price to take that pain away, to erase the lines of sorrow from Tom’s face. But it was many years too late for that. All he could do was squeeze Tom’s hand tighter—since when was he the one taking care of somebody else, and not the other way around?—and say urgently, “No. Of course it wasn’t your fault. What could you possibly have done?”
“I could have stopped her from going outside. I could have gone out myself. I could have stayed downstairs with her. They told me everything I should have done differently, and they kept telling me, right up until I moved out. You know they never touched me again after that? No hugs, no goodnight kisses, not even a high-five. My great-uncle was the only one who didn’t blame me. It’s why he left me the shop when he died—because I was willing to go strip furniture with him for hours after school. It was better than sitting at home and listening to the silence.”
As much as Callum wanted to stay where he was and tell Tom again and again that none of this was his fault, a nagging voice had begun to speak up at the back of his mind, a voice reminding him that Tom had kept all of this to himself for a reason. Callum and Tom were still practically strangers—only a couple of days ago they hadn’t even known each other, as hard as that was to believe. And Callum got the impression that this wasn’t a story Tom shared even with his closest friends. If Tom hadn’t been drinking, he never would have told Callum any of this—and soon enough he would sober up and realize he had confessed his secrets to someone he barely knew. Callum didn’t want that moment to be any more painful for Tom than it had to be.
So Callum drew back. He unfolded the tattered afghan that had been sitting on the back of the couch for however many years since his family had last been here, and carefully spread it over Tom. “You should rest,” he said gently. “You don’t want to regret telling me all this later.”
“It’s okay,” said Tom fuzzily. He smiled up at Callum. “I trust you.”
Tom’s blurry words made Callum feel warm around the edges, like he was wrapped in the same blanket he had just draped over Tom’s body. Tom probably didn’t mean it, he reminded himself. He was only saying any of this because he was drunk.
“We can talk when you’re feeling better. For now, try to get some sleep.” He started to stand, but Tom stopped him, grabbing his hand and tugging him back down to the couch.
Callum didn’t resist. His pulse beat out a fast rhythm against the spot where Tom’s fingers curled around his wrist.
Tom’s other hand moved up to cup his cheek. He ran a finger along Callum’s jawline and smiled. “Soft,” he murmured. “Your skin is as soft as I thought it would be.”
“This isn’t… you’re not yourself right now.” But Callum didn’t move.
“I’ve wanted to touch you since you kissed me. No. Before. Since the moment I first saw you.” Tom’s hand slid through his hair to cup the back of his head. But when Callum started drifting in toward Tom, it didn’t feel like anything Tom was doing. It felt like… gravity. Inevitable, irresistible. Callum’s lips parted—
And with a sharp motion, he pulled away. He stood, disentangling his fingers from Tom’s.
Tom looked up at him with an expression like someone had taken his cookie away after only one bite. “Why… what… where are you going?”
Callum couldn’t meet Tom’s eyes. If he did, he didn’t know whether he would be able to keep on resisting. “I don’t want you to do anything you’ll regret when you’re sober,” he said, because it was the easiest answer. It was even true. It just wasn’t the whole truth. But how could he tell Tom the rest of what he was feeling when he wasn’t sure he understood it himself? How could he explain how wrong it felt to want this so badly, or how giving in to his feelings for Tom would be like giving up? If he let himself do this, he would be the person his father had always said he was. Weak. Wrong. Not a real man.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tom said. At first Callum thought Tom was answering his inner thoughts, until he remembered what he had said aloud. “I told myself I shouldn’t drink, and that I should never be with anyone else, but it doesn’t matter, in the end. I’m going to lose—”
“You won’t lose Leila,” Callum insisted. “That’s why I’m here. We’re going to keep her safe.”
But that wasn’t what Tom had been trying to say. “I’m going to lose myself,” he finished, almost in a whisper.
“You won’t,” Callum promised him, even though he wasn’t entirely sure what Tom meant by that. “Now rest, okay? Get some sleep. We can talk when you wake up.”
Callum received only a soft snore in response. Tom was already asleep.
Callum tucked the blanket a little tighter around Tom, and tiptoed away.