Chapter 66

“At the same time, there was this kid, this scrawny little…Lewis Callahan. Gay as a maypole, but not out. Not to his parents, who were the worst kind of born-again bigots. Lewis was…fifteen? Maybe? Had a crush on Scooter the size of a Cadillac. Used to follow them around. Scooter got him a fake ID, so Lewis could hit the bars with them. He tell you he used to like to sing karaoke?”

Aaaand we’re back to dork…”Yeah.”

“They go in one night, and Scooter’s singing. He gets done, and Lewis and Brad are gone. Scooter wasn’t worried, thought they’d gone to have a smoke or something. They didn’t come back. So he went out looking for them.”

Jason scrubbed a hand over his face, considering his words carefully.

“The papers know what they could find evidence for. Lewis was terrified of his parents. It wasn’t his fault, but he was more scared of them than…well. Brad was in the process of…he…” Jason swallowed hard. “Brad Ripton raped that fifteen-year-old boy in a filthy alley.”

Andy shuddered, couldn’t even think of words.

“Scooter pulled him off, made him stop what he was doing. Broke his arm. Punched him in the head a few times. Lost control. Lewis ran away, scared his parents would find out. Refused to testify. Lied to the police, got one of his friends to back him up. No other witnesses. Brad was the one bleeding. He never got a hand on Scooter. Told the police that Scooter attacked him, tried to…turn it all around. Scooter…well, he and I got up to some stupid shit when we were younger, and that was held against him. Scooter’s assigned lawyer convinced him to plead it down to assault. A non-felony charge. He spent sixty days in jail and two years on probation.”

Andy pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes until he saw stars behind his eyelids. “It was defense,” he breathed. “He didn’t—” He dropped his hands, peering at Jason with mingled hope and doubt. “You’re so sure…But he’s your best friend. If he lied to you…”

“I would have believed Scooter no matter what,” Jason said. “But as it happens…the friend Lewis asked to back him up? Is Elaine’s brother, Arthur. Arthur had…call it a nervous breakdown, after the sentencing. Tried to come clean, but the prosecutor threatened him with perjury. The conviction looked good on the record as it was. Scooter’s dad didn’t have the money to pay for a lawyer and a retrial, still paying off all Lorraine’s hospital bills.

“Arthur will tell you, if you ask him about it. He’s…God, Arthur’s fucked up about it. Felt terrible. Scooter’s tried to tell him that he understands, but it was still hard all the way around. I know, it’s still circumstantial. I understand how you—how it looks. And a lot of the locals, they…well, there’s a lot of homophobia. Even the ones who don’t think Scooter’s a bad guy, they think maybe he made too hard a pass at Brad, or something, and it got violent. There’s a lot of underlying dirt. Scooter lives with that, every day.”

“Let me guess,” Andy said. “Brad conveniently turned up with a girlfriend shortly after the arrest. Certainly during the investigation. Someone who fawned over his injuries and made a lot of noise and above all made him look less gay.” It’s how his father would’ve done it. Controlling the spin, Dad had called it.

Jason’s bitter smile said a lot. “You…that’s why I was weird when you first showed up. It’d been years since Scooter…you should have seen. Not that you would have known what you were looking at, but it was the first time since Ripton that I’d seen him show interest in anyone who wasn’t Sharpe. I was worried it was…You were so helpless and lost. I thought…Never mind what I thought. I was wrong.”

“You thought I was a plant, a con.”

Jason nodded. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. If I had a friend, like you two are friends, I’d want to protect the hell out of them, too.” Andy poked at his drink.

Jason coughed, a little uncomfortably. “You do, Andy. You have at least two friends who’d like to protect the hell out of you. You held up your end of the bargain. Where do you want me to take you?”

“Jason, I—” His vision blurred. “God, I fucked up, didn’t I? How the hell do I apologize for this? How do I tell him I thought I had to run from him without breaking his heart?”

“You know that we all knew about this, right? I mean, not the specifics, but…Kat put some of it together, and she told the rest of us, because you were so scared, and we wanted to help you, but we didn’t want to scare you more, or…The point I’m trying to make—badly, I admit—is that Scooter knows you’ve had a hard time of it. Yeah, he’s gonna be upset. But he’ll understand, he’ll get over it. He loves you.”

Of courseKat had figured it out. Of courseshe’d told them. And suddenly Scooter’s wildly cautious lines of consent made sense. His determined reminders about Andy’schoices and freedom. God, Scooter had been trying so fucking hardto avoid tripping over Andy’s landmines, and he didn’t even have a map. It was—

Andy’s whole brain stuttered to a halt as it finished processing Jason’s words. No, no, that wasn’t possible, they’d only known each other for a couple of months, and Andywas the one who’d gotten too attached far too quickly. He took a breath and tried to give Jason a hard glare. He didn’t think he was very successful, but he tried. “This is enough of a mess without you getting melodramatic about it.”

Jason did not appear melodramatic. He looked tired, lines in his face showing the strain. With messy hair and his sunglasses askew on top of his head. “What?”

“You can’t just tell me that he loves me to try to make me stop panicking about feeling guilty! That’s. That’s not helpful at all.”

“I can see that,” Jason said. “It’s certainly not working. As it happens, getting people to do and feel what I think they ought to is not my skill. I leave that to my extremely horrible girlfriend. I’m just telling you what I see.”

“Fiancée,” Andy corrected automatically.