“Do you like her?”
“I guess.”
“Ox.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. Elizabeth and I met when I was seventeen. She was fifteen. There has never been another one for me.”
“But… Joe. He’s….”
“Joe….” He sighed. “Joe was upset. I’m not saying that to make you feel bad, Ox, so please don’t misinterpret my intent. Joe is… different. After everything that has happened to him, he can’t be anything but different.”
“Gordo said—” I stopped myself, but the damage was done.
Thomas cocked his head at me. “And what did Gordo say?” he asked, sounding more dangerous than I’d ever heard him.
“That someone hurt him,” I whispered, looking down at my hands. “I didn’t let him tell me any more.”
“Why?”
“Because… it wasn’t his right to tell me. It’s not my right to be told anything at all. And honestly? I don’t know if I care. And not because I don’t care about him. But because I want to be his friend no matter how he needs me.” I scuffed the dirt a bit with the tip of my boot. “And I’ll be his friend as long as he lets me.”
“Ox, look at me.”
I did. I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.
His dark eyes were bigger than I’d ever seen.
And he spoke, his voice even and soft. Words that washed over me like a river and I couldn’t stop him, no matter how much I wanted to. No matter how hard I wished he would shut his fucking mouth.
Joe was taken by a man who wanted to hurt Thomas and his family. The man kept him for many weeks. He hurt him. Physically. Mentally. Broke his little fingers. His little toes. His arm. His ribs. Made him cry and bleed and scream. He would call them sometimes. The bad man. He would call them and they would hear Joe in the background saying that he wanted to come home. All he wanted to do was come home.
Eight weeks. It took them eight weeks to find Joe.
And they did. But he wouldn’t speak.
He knew them. His family. Mostly. He cried silently, his arms and shoulders shaking.
But he wouldn’t speak.
Even when his nightmares were at their worst and he would wake screaming in the night, thrashing on his bed, trying to escape the bad man, he still wouldn’t speak.
They tried therapy. It didn’t take. Nothing would make him speak.
“Not until you,” Thomas said.
I must not have been a man yet, because under all that rage, a tear worked its way out and rolled down my cheek. “Who?” I asked, and that one word sounded like an earthquake.
“A man who wanted something he couldn’t have,” Thomas said.
“Did you kill him?”
His eyes grew darker. “Why?”
“Because I will if you didn’t. I will break him and make him suffer.”
“You would?”