Mongrel [bxb] | Bad Moon Book III

Chapter 19: between the eyes

Matt sat in the dirt at Bailey's bluff, the city lights strobing blow him in pops of sporadic, distant color. The trees rasped in the night wind. An owl somewhere nearby purred into the amalgamating whispers of the forest.

His father's voice cut hoarse through the speakers of his phone. "Matt, I'm sorry. Come home. We'll talk about it, alright?"

Matt let the next voice mail play on.

"Where you at, boy? I'm serious, Matthew. Call me."

By the next message, Jack was off his ass, slurring and sliding to every liquor-slick consonant. "I know, alright? I know I've been a shit dad. It was never meant to be this way. Was never meant to be just me and you." There was a moment of silence, a clatter of glasses bumping into one another. "Forget about all that. Everything I said, forget it alright? Just come home. Don't just...leave like she did."

Matt laid back and turned his gaze from the stars of the city to the ones in the sky. He didn't want to go home. He wanted to stay here with the dirt and bugs, the ghost of Bailey on the forest floor beside him. He laid there now, a beautiful figment—black lake eyes wet with stars, the soft round of his nose and the natural curl at the edges of his lips that toned each sardonic smile.

He was born from the shadows and in the shadows, Matt saw him—gone again in the blink of an eye or the washing headlights of a car. Matt chose not to look at Bailey's ghost this time. It always seemed to disappear when he did.

The world's a vampire and it'll suck you dry if you let it, the ghost spoke, his voice was so palpable, Matt reached instinctively to the dirt beside him where Bailey had laid that night. The earth was cold and gritty beneath his fingers.

Sleep deprivation.

The Wrangler was a hot box even at night, and twice now he'd woken with a terrible kink in his neck. Sleep was hard to find and when he did find it, Matt dreamed of Ricco's gnarled face and Bailey's bite mark, and the way the desert ground tasted when dozens of bullets were poured into his body. So Matt had stopped sleeping. But every time he thought of going home, he felt the burning in his arm. He thought of the empty barn and the bruise on his shoulder where Bailey had thrown him to the ground. He thought of the tan skin against his alabaster flesh. The skinny bones. The dented rib.

Think fast, sweetheart, Raven said. Before Daddy files a missing person's report.

"You told me to keep moving," Matt said. "So I'm moving."

That what you been telling yourself? Look at you. You're not moving, you're giving up.

"I'm not giving up anything."

You're giving up everything, Raven said.

What exactly, Matt wanted to ask, but he knew the answer would be too real, too indigestible. He'd felt several things when Bailey was around—bad things and strange things and things that sometimes still brought his blood south when he laid on the hood of his Wrangler at night, watching the stars and satellites blink across the sky.

Bailey's voice had a way of crawling back into Matt's bones. Echoes of their night together set him afire—the soft Fuck, Cowboy, that seemed to escape him like a beast from its chain. Every night, he thought of it and shivered. He thought of the sound and the way Bailey looked beneath him. His head curled to one side against the arm of the hot leather sofa, his face tensed and aching. His fingers wanting. His body taking and moving and giving. Fuck, Cowboy.

But if Bailey had felt those things too, would he have done what he did?

There are two sides to every story, said Raven. And a million truths on every side.