Dreams - Kate Hawthorne Page 0,1

timer on the oven went off again, and his mother ignored it, answering the phone instead.

“Hello?”

She twirled the long, tangled phone cord around her fingers. Jackson had never understood why they still had a corded phone, and in the kitchen of all places, but his mother had told him she liked being able to talk when she was cooking. His father had offered to buy a cordless one she could put on speaker, but she’d waved him off. She didn’t want those things.

“Mom,” he choked out, and she looked over her shoulder at him. When her gaze landed on him, her eyes softened and she reached a hand toward him.

“The cake is going to burn,” she said.

“Mom,” he tried again, but he wasn’t really in his childhood kitchen, his mom wasn’t really on the phone, and Sherriff Higgins wasn’t really about to tell her that her husband of sixteen years had been killed in a car accident.

The first part couldn’t be true, and the last part had already happened.

His mom began to cry and the phone clattered against the wall and then the floor. The cake burned, and Jackson couldn’t do anything to change any of it.

Jackson woke up slowly, blinking the popcorned ceiling of his bedroom into focus. The room was dark, just tiny slivers of light breaking in through the slats of his horizontal blinds. His face was wet from crying and he swiped at his cheeks, wiping his fingers dry on his sheets.

He hated when he dreamt of his mother. Hated when he dreamt of the day his father died. Hated that after that phone call, he never had the courage to confess the secret that had faded out before it had reached the tip of his tongue.

It was his birthday today, and that was why he had the dream. He always relived his thirteenth birthday every time he had another. It was always the same. He loathed its recurrence. There wasn’t ever anything he could do to make his father not take the long way home, leaving him right in the path of an out-of-town drunk driver. Nothing he could do to make it so the phone call didn’t connect. Nothing he could do to stop her from answering. Nothing he could do to tell her he was gay before their lives were turned upside down.

And now he just…couldn’t.

Jackson rolled over and flicked on the bedside lamp. He grabbed his phone and tapped the screen. Five-thirty in the morning. His alarm was set to go off in another fifteen minutes, so he flung his legs out of bed and stood, stretching his arms over his head.

He padded into the bathroom and turned the taps on hot, then stripped down while he waited for the shower to steam. The water burned, and he liked it, gritting his teeth while the droplets scalded the sensitive skin on the back of his neck. Jackson dropped his chin against his chest and braced his hands against the wall until he had acclimated to the temperature.

He washed his body, but not his hair. He had his mother’s unruly curls, and they only got worse if they were stripped of their natural oils, so he conditioned and rinsed, stepped out onto the bathmat. Jackson dried himself off and returned to his bedroom. He stared in his closet before settling on a pair of dark blue pants and a red and white checkered button up. With one final look in the mirror, he grabbed his phone and his wallet, slipped his feet into his favorite worn leather boots and locked up his apartment.

Since he’d woken up early, he had time to stop for coffee, so he pulled into a small strip mall about a block away from campus. There was a coffee place there some of the students liked to frequent. He’d been there once or twice, finding he enjoyed the smell of the fresh cakes and pastries. After getting out of his car, he crushed the cigarette he’d smoked beneath his heel, then pulled the coffee shop door open.

He waited in line until it was his turn, and swallowed thickly when he made eye contact with a new barista. Not a kid, probably closer to Jackson’s age than the students, but he still looked young, like he wasn’t jaded by life. The smoothness of his features had Jackson rubbing the heels of his hands over his eyes. The motion did nothing to erase the easy attractiveness of the barista, and Jackson swallowed,