Wes pushed the front door open with knuckles still raw and bleeding, the street fight still humming under his skin like current, and he felt alive and untouchable, six foot of borrowed confidence and split skin, and the high lasted exactly four seconds, because the kitchen light was on and Walt was standing at the counter spreading mustard on a sandwich.
Walt heard the door and turned around, and his face twisted into a sneer in real time.
“Look what decided to show up,” said Walt.
“Where the hell have you been since yesterday?”
“I was out,” said Wes.
“Out? Out WHERE? This place isn’t a goddamn hotel, Wes!” Walt shouted, slamming the butter knife onto the counter.
“You don’t just vanish for twenty-four hours without saying a word, so you think you can come and go whenever you want, eat my food, sleep under my roof, and not answer to anybody?”
“I didn’t ask you to wait up for me,” said Wes, and his voice came out too calm, which was the problem, because calm was not a register Walt knew how to process from him.
It stopped Walt cold for a beat, long enough for Wes to see the confusion flicker through the rage.
Then the confusion lost.
“Don’t you use that tone with me, you ungrateful little shit!” Walt roared, coming around the counter and getting right into his face, and up close Wes could smell the beer and the mustard and eight years of this, and Walt’s face was going the dark red of a man who has just discovered that his furniture has opinions.
“You’ve been a weight around my neck since the day you got here. A useless, lazy parasite. I swear to God, it would be better if you just didn’t come back at all! It would save us a lot of trouble, and a lot of money!”
The kitchen went quiet.
Somewhere in the walls the fridge hummed.
On the counter, the mustard dripped slowly off the dropped knife onto the tile.
And Wes stood there and felt eight years of that word land on him all at once, parasite, parasite, the line in the budget that didn’t balance, every dinner, every rent speech, every time Colleen slipped him bus fare and got nothing but a look for it, and the thing inside his chest that had been running scripts all week reached for one and found, for the first time, no character at all.
Just Wes.
And out of patience.
“Is that what you really think?” said Wes.
“YES! That’s exactly what I think!” Walt screamed, and the scream tore something loose, because once men like Walt start screaming in their own kitchens they can’t stop, and his face went a dark dangerous purple, and the spit flew off his lips and hit Wes’s cheek.
“You think I want you here? You’re a leech! You contribute nothing, you ARE nothing, and you’ll never be anything! You’re just a parasite bleeding us dry!”
Wes stepped forward and shoved him.
Hard, two-handed, flat in the chest, and Walt crashed back into the counter so hard the iced tea glass jumped and spun.
Walt grabbed the counter edge and stared at him with his mouth open, because in eight years Wes had never once touched him, had never raised his voice above a mumble, and now his charity case was standing in his kitchen with bloodied knuckles and murder in his posture.
“Then fuck you, Walt,” said Wes, and his voice echoed off the walls, loud, huge, a voice the Alden Playhouse had spent four years building.
“You think I WANT to be in this miserable house with you? You think I give a shit about your roof or your pathetic food? You’ve got your money, you’ve got your trips you cry about every night, and you’ve still got nothing, because everything you had, you already spent being like this!”
“How dare you shove me in my own house!” Walt screamed back, and his voice cracked on the fear underneath the rage.
“You’re a guest here—”
“I’m not a guest, and I’m damn sure not staying!” Wes yelled, chest heaving, staring his uncle down across the kitchen like a stranger.
“I am out of here! I am leaving right now! You can take this house, and you can take your insults, and you can shove them up your ass! Fuck you, Walt! You’ll never have to look at my face again!”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
He turned on his heel, slammed his fist against the hallway wall hard enough to leave a mark, and stormed down the hall, and he didn’t go upstairs, didn’t pack a single shirt, didn’t grab a charger or a jacket, because packing was for people who were coming back.
He marched straight down the hallway to the front door, grabbed the brass doorknob, and yanked the door open.
“Fuck you!” Wes roared back into the house.
Then he took one step out onto the porch and stopped dead in his tracks. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Standing on the porch with the car keys dangling from her hand was Colleen, and right behind her, half hidden in the doorway with her phone still lit in her hand, was Paige.
Both of them with their mouths half open and their faces completely pale, because they had heard every single word from the yard, the parasite, the never coming back, all of it, carried out through the open door into the night.
“Wes? What… what is going on? What happened?” said Colleen, and her voice came out tiny and wrong, and her eyes were already running down to his split knuckles and coming back up white.
She reached out with her fingers and caught the rough fabric of his sleeve, and her eyes were wide with a mix of panic and confusion as she tried to pull him back toward the house, toward her, and some huge locked part of Wes wanted nothing on earth more than to let her.
But his mind was a complete war zone, all of the day’s masks fused together and burning at once, the Shepherd and the Lead and 714 and the Hollow Graduate all screaming the same word at different volumes, and he couldn’t play the victim in this house one more night, not even for her.
He wrenched his arm out of her grip with a violent snap.
“Colleen, let go,” said Wes, and it came out flat, and that was the worst thing he could have said, because he watched the word Colleen land on her like a slap.
Not Aunt Colleen.
Colleen.
The thing a stranger calls you.
“Wes, wait! Please, talk to me!” Colleen called out, her voice cracking as she took a step after him down into the dark yard.
“Wes!”
Wes didn’t look back.
He kept his head down and kept walking, his heavy steps cutting through the quiet street, past the mailbox, past the neighbor’s hedge, past the end of the block.
The last thing he heard behind him was Paige saying something low and sharp to her mother that he couldn’t make out, and then the wind took even that, and Wes vanished into the night, and the house, the whole house, and everything inside it, went dark behind him.