Home is a Four Letter Word

chapter thirty-nine

Early June

"That Connor kid's actually pretty cool." Aaron said out of the blue on the drive home.

It made Jake's heart skip.

The air was cool as it settled over the town—a blessing left behind by the rains that fled overnight. The sky was still cloudy. A gentle gray covered everyone and everything beneath it, and for a moment, Jake wished the clouds would fall low enough to swallow him too, completely cutting him off from all the things that threatened his own little gray area of peace. The wind whistled in through the opened quarter glass windows, cutting through the air like a knife as it blew into Jake's eyes and made him squint at the road.

"Yeah, he's alright." He pretended to seem disinterested with the hopes that it might make the conversation go away.

"Why you think Hunter was always pickin' fights with him?" Aaron asked genuinely while looking out the window—tufts of his overgrown auburn hair disorganizing themselves among his tired features.

Jake knew the blatant answer to the question; he thought Aaron did too.

There's no way he could've gone all these years thinking Hunter was bullying Connor for a legitimate reason, right?

It was hard to say it, partially because it was hard to come to terms with it. Jake and Connor had led vastly different lives in high school because of it. Because Connor Morgan was authentic, honest, and brave, and Jake Holmes was a silent coward who rejected the idea of authenticity when it presented confrontation.

"Because Hunter is an asshole." Jake said, his words thick with the anger he still felt in his heart for the boy he had watched torment Connor the last few months—and who knows how many months before that.

Because Hunter is an asshole, and I am the coward that didn't stop him.

"Yeah, sometimes." Aaron sighed, pushing his hair back from his forehead so his hazel eyes shone out from underneath it all.

"Sometimes?"

Jake didn't think he had spoken out loud, but when Aaron turned his head to look at him, he realized he had. All he could do was stare off onto the road he had driven a thousand times and pretend to find the Miller's run-over mailbox interesting.

"You guys never made up huh?" Aaron sounded almost confused.

Jake didn't think there was anything confusing about the matter.

"No."

"Why?"

When Aaron asked, his voice was only laced with question, not the ridicule Jake half expected from him. Aaron wasn't one to hold a grudge, and Jake thought he wasn't either until now. But he couldn't make an exception for Hunter anymore—high school was over and Jake didn't owe him a damned thing. He did, however, owe his best friend an explanation.

"Because I don't want him in my life anymore. Simple as that."

"Bullshit. He never did anythin' to you. You don't cut people off without a reason."

You're right.

He hated how well Aaron knew him. Aaron could tell Jake his life story as if it were his own, but in a way, he supposed it was. Jake's silence lent him time to think of his answer, as if he still had to carefully craft it to sugarcoat his reasoning to Aaron even after everything they had been through together.

"I didn't like how he treated people. I just couldn't get behind that anymore."

Jake glanced over to Aaron for a second before he turned into the long gravel driveway that led up to his house. As the tires slid into the rocks that shifted underneath them, Jake swore he almost saw a smile forming on his best friend's face. It was unsettling really; the smile was not genuine and its intentions were not good. This was the smile Aaron gave when he purposefully asked a dumb question in class, or held something just barely out of McKenna's reach. There was something going on in that curious little brain of his, and for once in his life, Jake didn't know what it was.