“Your parents must do well to support y’all, with college and all.”
“It’s just my dad,” I tell her, giving her more about me than I have anyone else since I got here. “Mom passed about seven years back… Non-smoker her entire life, and she died of lung cancer.” Which is just one of the reasons the God theory is bullshit. Either that or God gets to pick and choose, and that doesn’t seem fair.
She clucks her tongue. “Well, shit, baby,” she huffs, making a show of stubbing out her lit cigarette on the ground. “I’m sorry.”
I chuckle at her response. “It’s okay.”
Like myself, Miss Sandra doesn’t seem to mind the silence between sounds. After a minute or so, she asks, surprising me, “What’s your name?”
I laugh. All this time she’d been taking care of me, and I never once told her my name. “Leo.”
She nods. “Short for Leonard? Leopold? No. Leonardo?”
“Nope, just Leo.”
“Leo, the lion,” she muses. “King of the animal kingdom.”
“I’m far from a king,” I murmur, looking down at my hands.
Miss Sandra hops off the table and moves toward the door. “Someday, Leo, you’ll be a king in someone’s kingdom.”
She pushes open the door, and I ask, stopping her in her tracks, “What did you mean before? About my darkness returning?”
Dropping her hand, she props the door open with her back. “The first night you came here, you said you were waiting for your darkness to fall… Miss Mia Mac—she was what you were waiting on, right?”
Shaking my head, I get to my feet. “Mia’s not my darkness,” I tell her. “She’s my sunrise.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mia
When I wake up, Leo’s already gone. Not surprising. I wait an hour for him to return, and when he doesn’t, I take the ATV to where we’d left his truck the night prior. We deemed it safer to walk back to the house than to reverse the entire way, only having the rear lights guide us. I know exactly where the truck is: the halfway point between my house and Holden’s. We’d been to that exact spot so many times I could find it with my eyes closed.
When I get there, Leo’s truck is gone.
And when I get back to the house, Leo’s already here.
So is Holden.
Sitting on one of the beams of the porch, the first thing Holden says to me is, “Why are you on my ATV?”
“My battery’s shot.” I shrug as I hop off. “What are you doing here?”
He doesn’t get up, as if he’s found his spot for the day, and that’s where he’s staying. “Came to see how you guys were.”
You guys. As in Leo and me. As in the two of us. Together. But apart.
Leo hasn’t turned to look at me, too busy fondling his wood.
“I’m good,” I say, walking toward them. This is… unchartered territory. Having the only two boys who mean anything in my life in the same space—it’s… awkward.
And that awkwardness only worsens when Holden says, as if they’d been talking without me, “Is it, like, a travel team?”
Leo lifts a shoulder. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s not a travel team… or whatever?” I ask, climbing the parts of the porch I know are safe. Leo doesn’t move his head, but his eyes shift, watching my steps, watching me. He doesn’t look away until I’m safely seated on another beam.
“Leo was telling me he was going home this weekend.” Whatever look washes over my face has Holden quickly adding, “Just to watch his little brother play, and then he’ll be back.”
Could he sense it? The sudden dread I felt in that one statement, at the thought that Leo was leaving? After last night, I kind of didn’t want him out of my sight, which is going to be hard, considering we’re still trying to keep our distance.
I think.
My phone rings in my pocket, and I ignore it. It’s been going off all morning.
“When are you leaving?” I ask Leo. I can see Holden watching me, confused.
“Thursday,” he deadpans, then rifles through a paper bag in front of him. He pulls out a handful of different colored paint swatches, and without looking at me, holds them out between us. “Your grandpa wants you to pick the paint color for the new siding.”
I take them from him—all different shades of grays and blues—and ask, “When are you coming back?”
“Maybe Sunday.”
“Maybe?”
His eyes flick to mine, but he doesn’t respond.
“Do you play baseball?” Holden asks him.
“I used to,” responds Leo. “And basketball. Football. Wrestling.”