The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,27

how I’m probably going to get diabetes and fall into a diabetic coma and no one will find me and cockroaches will eat their way into my stomach and breed inside me while I’m still alive.”

Tean nodded, but in his mind, he kept seeing Ammon, the windows glazed with warm light, the feeling of his hand. He’d never done heroin, but he thought this treacherous warmth, the unbearable need to believe that this time, finally, things would be different, that it must be something like this. What real addiction feels like.

Then Jem let out a single, hissing breath and muttered, “Fuck this.”

“What?” Tean said.

Jem’s mouth narrowed out into a thin smile and he just shook his head. “All of this. Every last fucking bit of it. Let’s go; I want to go home.”

10

But Jem couldn’t go home. Instead, after leaving Tean at his apartment, Jem drove to the Apollonia again.

Jem didn’t have a home. Not anymore. Maybe he never had, if he looked at things squarely. Was a shithole where you squatted a home? What about Decker—the dormitory rooms, the group showers, Blake and Antonio holding him down while Tanner forced his legs apart? What about LouElla’s place, the antenna flaying open his back, cutting down to the bone, or the dog in the basement? What about the place before that, with the old diddler who had tried to force the lock while Jem was in the bathroom? What about before that, before that, before that? The closest he had come were the Jenkins, who used to let him and Benny stay the weekends so they could get away from LouElla. Certainly not his mother, Mary B. Berger, the cipher on his foster paperwork. Jem remembered her mostly in a series of impressions: a chemical smell that he associated with window cleaner—he still got the sweats when he picked up a bottle of Windex; her hand, chapped and rough, on the side of his face while they sat on the couch, her stoned out of her mind, him absorbed by Darkwing Duck; the burst of salty chicken flavor, what she called eggy-droppy, just an egg cracked into boiling ramen.

Jem picked up a guy at the Apollonia that night, a meal in exchange for a blow job, but that was as far as it went. He was a cardiac surgeon from Houston who had a framed picture of Jesus in his suitcase, propped up by a pile of dirty socks, the Good Shepherd watching while Jem went down on him. He refused to let Jem stay the night; his wife was coming back from a late dinner, he said, and she’d murder him if she caught him with Jem. Jem managed to squeeze an extra two hundred bucks out of the guy, but what he wanted was a bed and a warm body and not to feel so fucking awful about himself.

He rode the Kawasaki east, into the foothills near the University of Utah campus. The mountains were jagged black teeth taking bites out of the stars. The streets were wide and empty, the streetlights placed far apart. The cones of milky light made him think of bowling pins, like the universe was one big bowling alley, and he was just one more fucking bowling ball hurtling along: emptiness, emptiness, emptiness, and then, no matter what he did, one big mother-fucking crash at the end. He stopped at a red light, staring at the double lines on the road, seeing Ammon, seeing Tean, seeing how most of the conversation—all the important parts—happened without words because they’d known each other for so long. Because Ammon had mindfucked Tean for so long.

A horn startled him out of the black hole; the green light was so bright that he had to blink. He hit the gas too hard, braked too hard, overcompensated, and the bike slewed, spilling him into the gutter. The Kawasaki lay on its side, sputtering, and then the engine died. When a white van rolled up beside him, someone cranked the window down. A middle-aged man with bad teeth leaned out, adjusting his trucker cap.

“You all right?”

Jem stared up at the dome of stars, barely visible through the light pollution. For a moment, the anger, the hurt, the loneliness—they were overwhelming. In Decker, he had lashed out when he’d felt this way, and he had spent a lot of the time in isolation as a result. He had learned the hard way it was better to shut things down, better not