“Your hair’s like mine,” I said. Asher stilled. “You got a Mohawk,” I added, as my hand lifted to run through my own.
Asher’s face went bright red. “Yeah. I… everyone keeps telling me I look like you.” He shrugged. “I needed it cut, because poppa never cut it. So I asked for it to look like yours.”
“I don’t understand. Why the fuck would you wanna look like me?” I asked. Asher’s expression changed. I didn’t know why his expression changed either. I couldn’t fucking read him.
“Because… because you’re my brother,” he said under his breath. I froze and could feel my pulse slamming real fast. “I… I never had a brother before. I was always on my own. But I often wondered what it would’ve been like if I’d had someone else there with me. Poppa always talked about you. He said horrible things, things that he believed in his warped head, things Pastor Hughes had told him, but I never heard them. I never believed them. He said horrible things about me that I knew weren’t true, so I thought that was probably true of you too.”
As his words sunk in, a question came out my mouth. “Did he fuck you? In that dirt cell, did he fuck you?”
Asher froze, and his head dropped.
“Tell me,” I pushed. “I need to fucking know.” I tapped my head. “I need to know because it’s all I think about up here.”
“He tried.” Asher whispered, “Every time he came into that cell, he tried. But he couldn’t ever do it.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, my stomach uncoiling in relief at the fact he didn’t fuck him. He hadn’t fucked Asher.
Thank fuck.
“It was the drink, I think. He could barely walk after my mama died, when he put me in the cellar for the first time. He couldn’t get it up, Flame. He’d get mad, he’d beat me.” He held out his arms. “He even tried to cut me at first, but he’d almost drunk himself to death by the time you arrived.” Asher sighed, then said, “Mostly he just kept me in that cellar and called me a sinner, preached his bible talk to me from above. Don’t think he had the strength to do much else.”
I inhaled a sharp breath, then slowly exhaled, feeling all the concern I’d had, leave my body. “That’s fucking good,” I admitted. Asher lowered his head again.
He lifted his hand and ran it through his hair. Just as I’d nearly finished my beer, he said, “I want to look like you because I wanna be like you.”
My head snapped to the kid. “Why the fuck would you wanna be like me?”
Asher pointed at me. “You’re huge, strong, can protect yourself.”
“I lift a lotta fucking weights,” I replied.
Asher shook his head. “I saw what you did to our poppa. I know what you did to Pastor Hughes and Elder Paul.” Asher threw a handful grass to the ground, and said, “I used to dream of being able to do that to Poppa, what you did. After my mama died, when he beat on me with a bat in that cellar, I wanted to hurt him back. Because he took my mama from me. My mama, Flame. She was such a good woman. But too weak to cope with him.” Asher sniffed, and quickly used his forearm to wipe his face.
My head twitched, not knowing what the fuck to do. But Asher pulled his shit together, and choked out, “Then the older brother I always prayed would come back and get me, did. And you killed that fucker. You killed him so that he couldn’t hurt anyone ever again.” Asher started pulling the grass again, and said, “That’s why I wanna be like you. I don’t want to be hurt by anyone again. I wanna be able to defend myself, like you. I wanna be able to protect myself, from people like him.”
I looked at Asher’s size and knew that when he was my age he’d be a big motherfucker too, but all I said in response was a promise. “No one will fucking touch you again. You got me, and a fuck load of Hangmen, at your back. And no one fucks with us. No one.”