Blood Noir - Laurell K. Hamilton [40]
He smiled again. “I guess it does.” He reached out as if to touch the scars, then hesitated. He wasn’t the first to want to touch them. I moved closer so he could.
His fingertips were very rough, as if his day job had been something with his hands. There was a gasp behind me. I turned and found Mrs. Schuyler with her hand to her mouth and her eyes a little surprised.
Jason moved up to lift my jacket into place. “She saw the gun.”
“Gun,” Julia said.
Jason helped me on with my jacket, and the scars were invisible again. Well, except for the one in the palm of my right hand. It’s a smaller cross-shaped burn scar. That one I got because a very big and bad vampire was trying to possess me and someone shoved a cross into my hand. The vampire hadn’t given up until the cross had sunk into my flesh.
“I don’t go anywhere unarmed,” I said quietly.
Jason kissed my cheek, and I moved back to stand with him. “I’ll take Anita back to the hotel. We’ll leave in the morning.”
“Stay a day, or two.” His father said it, flat, almost no emotion. But the two other women in the room all tensed, as if that one small statement meant more than you’d think.
Jason put his face next to my neck and breathed in the scent of my skin again, as if he needed another hit. I felt him use that touch and scent to help his voice be calm when he said, “We won’t leave tomorrow, but beyond that I’ll have to see. We both have jobs.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” his father said.
Jason nodded. “I guess you will.”
We went for the door. His father said, “Glad to see you cut your hair.”
Jason looked back, and it was not a friendly look. “If I’d known I’d be coming home, I’d have started growing it out again.”
“Because you know I like it short.”
“No, because you think when it’s long I look too pretty to be a boy. Anita likes long hair.”
“Then why did you cut it?” his father asked.
“For a change. I’ll see you tomorrow, Dad.”
“I’ll be here.”
His mother started to follow us out, but his father said, “Iris,” in a tone that called her back. She waved at us, and called, “Bye…I love you.” Jason didn’t reply.
Julia followed us out and hugged us both very thoroughly. Jason hugged her back; I did my best.
Peterson and the suit fell into line around us. Jason put my left arm through his so he could touch my hand and arm with his hands. He was icily calm in the elevator going down and in the lobby, and perfectly calm as we slipped into the limo.
Peterson closed the door. We were alone. Jason held on until the motor started, and then his shoulders started to shake. He put his hands in front of his face and cried. He cried with his whole body, shaking, shivering.
I touched his shoulder, and he flinched. I tried one more time and he fell sideways into my lap, so that I held him while he wept. I held him while he cried in huge racking spasms, but he wasn’t loud. His body felt like it was being torn apart with grief, but he didn’t shout with it. He cried like someone who’d been taught not to attract too much attention with his grief. Too much noise and they come find you, to find out why the tears.
Call it a hunch, but I was betting that Franklin Schuyler had thought boys weren’t supposed to cry, especially his very small, very pretty, very-unlike-him son.
18
THE TEARS BEGAN to slow, and finally he just lay in my lap, very still, as if the tears had emptied him of everything. I stroked his hair; I made the noises you make when you know that the pain is so vast that nothing you can do will fix it. The soft It’s all right, when you know that it isn’t all right, and never will be again, and perhaps never had been.
Peterson opened the door for us. Jason wiped at his face and sat up. If he’d been a woman he would have asked if it looked like he’d been crying, but he was a man, and he didn’t ask. We got out, hand in hand again. They’d taken us around to the parking garage again. I hadn’t even noticed. The world had narrowed down to the man in my lap and his grief.
Peterson led us up the back stairs, which meant there was probably some real Summerland newsworthy