Noah glowered at him. “Yeah, I’m sure it’ll keep you up at night.”
Adam just stared as the boy turned and walked away, shoulders slumped, head down. He reminded Adam of a dog who’d been beaten.
Noah’s face was a constant companion on Adam’s walk home and even hours later as he lay in bed. What had happened to him after his father died? Was he fed? Did he have a roof over his head? Was he somewhere alone, two seconds away from swallowing a bullet?
Adam knew better than anybody that childhood trauma came back to haunt you at the most inopportune moments, in the most incongruous ways. And once somebody turned the key on that part of the brain where those memories lived, it was almost impossible to stuff them back down again.
When the sun came up, Adam hadn’t slept a wink. He ground his palms into his eyes until sparks danced behind his lids. He was supposed to meet his father and Atticus at the club for breakfast. He knew he should tell them about Noah. They needed to know that someone out there knew who Adam really was. But he didn’t want to tell them. He didn’t want to tell anyone. Some weird part of him wanted to keep Noah all to himself.
He stumbled to the shower, letting the molten water blast along his back and shoulders, thinking of big, brown eyes and freckles sprinkled over pale skin. He felt weirdly responsible for the boy. He didn’t know why he kept thinking of him as a boy. They couldn’t be more than six years apart, but Adam felt like he’d been born an old man—had lived a hundred lives in the twenty-seven years he’d been alive. Noah’s life had clearly not been easy, but there’d been a vulnerability, a quiet desperation that had tugged at something buried so deep down inside Adam. Something he didn’t know even existed inside him. His conscience.
Would it bring Noah any comfort knowing he had, in fact, kept Adam up all night?
He was watching him again. It was an almost nightly occurrence now. At first, Noah thought he was going crazy, imagining phantoms in the shadows. But no, it was him. Adam Mulvaney. The man who killed his father. His father…the child predator. Noah’s stomach lurched at the thought, the images from that video trying to claw their way back into his brain. But he wouldn’t let them in and had found a million creative ways to keep them out.
Noah could feel his eyes on him even now. Despite the throbbing bass of the dance music, the dizzying display of neon beams shooting across darkened walls, and the sea of bodies moving in one cohesive wave, Noah could feel Adam’s eyes on him. He had no idea what Adam wanted.
At first, he thought maybe he was coming for his revenge or maybe just taking out a witness, but Noah had given him a million chances to end his misery, and the bastard never took them. Instead, he just watched him. Maybe he got some kind of sick thrill seeing Noah suffer. The joke was on him, though, because Noah was too high to feel anything but good.
He fell out the side door of the club into the brisk night air. He didn’t bundle up. The synthetic happiness coursing through him made him hot all over. The alley smelled like rotting garbage and piss, but Noah twirled along the alley like a ballet dancer, stumbling when he heard the alley door open and slam shut behind him. He didn’t look, didn’t acknowledge his stalker in any way. Just stumbled out of the alley and into the parking lot.
It was early enough that others still lingered on corners, in parking lots, outside the bodega. But Noah had never felt so alone. He was always alone, even when people were packed around him. No matter what he tried, nothing filled the hollowness inside him. Not drugs, not alcohol, not meaningless hookups. His lip curled at that last one.
He’d left his friend, Bailey, and her girlfriend at the bar to follow a random stranger into the bathrooms, but the guy was too wasted to get it up. Noah had left him passed out in the stall.
He couldn’t help the laugh that escaped, the sound startling in the still of the night. He was destined to be alone. He wished Adam would just do it already. Shoot him in the head, slit his throat, shove him in front of a moving car. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be worse than living with what he’d seen.
Maybe he needed to help him along. Maybe Adam didn’t want to take him out with a crowd around. The thought of death was a balm that soothed Noah’s frayed psyche. It didn’t make him sad or scared; it just gave him a sense of peace, a peace he’d never experienced before. He giggled once more, blinking back tears. He retraced his steps, hopscotching over puddles and cracks in the sidewalk. Two blocks over. Three blocks down. The screech of protesting metal as he pushed open the heavy door.
Did he follow? Was he curious? Noah had come to the building a lot after their first encounter, but he never found anything. Whatever Adam had hidden there that kept him coming back again and again had been moved after that night. Not that Noah blamed him. Just because he hadn’t killed Adam didn’t mean he wouldn’t turn him in to the cops. But he hadn’t. After the video—after he’d seen what his father had done—it all came back to him in a rush. All of it. A shiver ran through him as he tried to drive the thoughts away. What would he do when the drugs stopped working?