WhiteSpace: Season One (Episodes 1-6 of the sci-fi horror serial) (40 page)

She set her palm on the cover above his knee, and started lightly brushing her hand back and forth. She seemed determined, but uncertain. “So what happened at your brother’s? Did he finally admit to being the world’s biggest dick?”
 

Jon laughed. “Yeah, he sure did. Though he didn’t use those exact words.”
 

“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it.”

Jon shook his head, eased himself up on the bed, accidentally pulling his knee from the brush of Cassidy’s palm. Her hand dropped to the covers, and Jon took another sip of coffee. “No, it might feel good to hear the truth out loud, get it out of my head and into the air.”
 

Jon took one more sip then set his mug back on the nightstand. “I was drunk when I got there, drunker than drunk actually. Downright polluted. And madder than I’ve probably ever been. I felt like I could kill the fucker. Especially after he called me Hamlet.”

“He called you Hamlet?” Cassidy tried not to laugh, but sputtered a chuckle anyway.

“Yeah,” Jon admitted, cracking his own smile. He looked down, then back up at Cassidy. “Warren told me everything. He told me all about
the deal
.”
 

“You mean about the rehab center, Promises Kept?”

Jon nodded, “He didn’t say the place by name, but yeah, he told me all about it. And about your charges, and about Sarah. He told me everything.”

Cassidy swallowed, her voice cracking. It looked to Jon like a question hovered on her lips. She swallowed, then said, “I’m sorry. We never should’ve done that. It was a mistake.”

Jon tried not to cry, and measured his words, knowing he was just one wrong sentence away. “It hurts so much, Cass. More than I imagined.”

Cassidy put her hand on his shoulder. “I know,” she said. “Sarah regretted it every day. I don’t know how many times she said she would’ve given anything to take it all back. If that makes you feel any better.”

Jon shook his head. Of course it didn’t.
 

He could barely get the words out. “Why didn’t she ever tell me? Even after you were clean and sober and the charges long since dropped and forgotten?”

Cassidy said, “I actually asked her once. But I’m not sure you’re gonna like what she said.”

Jon swallowed. “Tell me.”

“She said too much had changed between you both. I think she would have forgiven the model, though I doubt she ever would’ve forgotten. Sarah was the sweetest person ever, but stuff like that, she never completely got over. Anyway, after Emma was born, you were making the rounds on the news. A lot.”

Jon looked down, embarrassed.

“No, I mean, A LOT! Wow, some of the shit you did,” Cassidy said, laughing, obviously trying to inject some humor to lighten the pain of what she was saying.

“Thanks,” he said. “I get it. We’ve all got our demons.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we do. Anyway, she thought you were living it up, and having the time of your life. She didn’t want to be a burden. She didn’t want to mess up your life.”

“What?!” Jon said. “Damn it! I would loved to have known I was a father. I would loved to have had a chance to start a family with her! Hell, it’s all I thought about when I wasn’t getting drunk. But I thought she was happy without me. With her kid from some guy I didn’t know. Jesus, this could have all been so different.”

“You’re right,” Cassidy said. “Of course, I would’ve gone to jail if Sarah hadn’t taken the deal. But hell, maybe if I’d done my time, I would’ve gotten my shit together sooner.”

“He used you to drive a wedge between me and Sarah. Between me and my child.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t kill him.”
 

Jon almost laughed. “I wanted to. For a minute I thought I might. I don’t think I’ve ever been angrier. He was taunting me, too.”
 

“Why didn’t you?” Cassidy said, her voice suddenly teasing. “You didn’t want to be another Hollywood bad boy who had to buy his way out of a murder charge?”
 

Jon laughed, finding odd comfort in the womb of Cassidy’s barb. “I don’t know if I ever would have had the balls to do it, but when I was seconds from something, the asshole gutted me to nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

“Warren said Dad was the one who orchestrated it all, made everything happen.” Jon’s voice cracked. “He said Dad was behind it all.”
 

Between chewing his lip and imagining Houser making fun of him, Jon managed to keep the tears from falling. And for a second, he actually managed to smile, thinking it was easier to lose it for a scene than hold it together in real life.

“What’s the surprise?” Cassidy said “You didn’t know your dad was capable of that? Do you not know your own father?”

Jon admired how Cassidy could stare into the center of his pain and twist the knife anyway. He nodded his head. “Sure, I knew he was capable. But that didn’t mean I thought he was capable when it came to
me.
”

If Cassidy wanted to say anything, she kept her mouth shut.

Jon looked into her eyes, and asked, “Why would
you
do it?” he said. “Why would you make a deal with my family if you hate us all so much?”

Cassidy was quiet. She was fighting to stave off tears of her own.

“I didn’t know all the details about the deal until I came back from rehab. Warren went straight to Sarah with the deal. God only knows what he said to convince her. She wouldn’t ever tell me. I guess she didn’t want me to feel any guiltier than I already did, but I’m guessing he bullied her, told her all sorts of shit about you.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Just things she said, indirectly, but never fully,” Cassidy said, losing her battle against her tears. “Sarah wanted so much for me to be off the pills. Hell, she wanted it for me, more than I did — more than she wanted you for Emma Ryan.”
 

“Emma Ryan?”

Cassidy wiped her eye. “Yeah, Emma Ryan. That’s what Sarah called the baby until she knew for sure it was a girl. If it had been a boy, he would’ve been named Ryan.”
 

He shook his head. “I don’t know what to say. I wish I’d known.”

“Don’t say anything,” she said, nuzzling into Jon and laying her head on his chest. “I’ll be sorry enough for the both of us.”
 

Jon started stroking her hair, so much like Sarah’s. Within two minutes, his lips were again on hers as his hands rubbed her breasts through her shirt.
 

“No,” she moaned, squirming against him.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No,” she whispered, rubbing her body against him.
 

Cassidy pulled herself from Jon, tore the boxers from his body, then rubbed her half-naked self against him.
 

Fourteen minutes later, Jon was ready to start snoring again. Cassidy lay breathing beside him, her inner thighs, now sticky, braided in between his as she grazed her nails along the length of his chest.
 

Jon drifted off, thinking of the life that could have been with Sarah, a life all the more painfully evident as he lay entwined with her doppelganger.
 

* * * *

CHAPTER 8 — Milo Anderson

Saturday morning…

Milo was reading
Imajica
on his Kindle when the nurse came into his room, trying to ignore the itching beneath the bandages on his arms.

“You have a visitor.”

Milo looked up smiling, hopeful for a moment that his dad had returned.
 

It was Alex, not his father

Alex had a backpack slung across his shoulder, his face was bruised like he’d been in a fight. The nurse left the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Milo to face Alex alone.

“Hey,” Alex said awkwardly. “I heard about the accident. Sorry to hear about Beatrice.”

Milo said nothing, keeping his eyes on his Kindle, pretending to read the words on the screen.

“Are you okay?”
 

Milo said nothing, unable to release the anger and rage he felt for what Alex’s dad had done.
 

Alex stayed rooted between the foot of the bed and the door, as though afraid to come closer uninvited.

“I just want to say I’m sorry about what my dad did. I know that no amount of words will ever make up for it. And I know you must hate me. But I don’t want to lose you as a friend. You’ve been my best friend forever, man.”

Tears stung Milo’s eyes, but he refused to let them flow in front of Alex.
 

Alex continued, sniffling back his own tears, “I’m sorry he killed Manny. I’m sorry he killed Jessica. I wish it would have been me, instead of either of them. If I could go back in time, I would take the bullets. I’d take all of them!”

Milo looked up, finally moved to speak. “Yeah? How about Katie? Would you let Katie take one of those bullets instead of Jessica?”

Alex looked at him, confused.

“What? Why would you even ask that?”

“Real convenient that your dad killed the girl
I
liked, but not
your
girlfriend!”

“What the hell are you saying? That I’m glad he killed Jessica? That he killed her for me, like he was trying to help me out or something?!”

The accusation fell from Milo’s mouth without logic or sense.
 
Yet, there was something that felt right about this path. Felt right in attacking Katie’s fate versus Jessica’s.
 

Milo suddenly saw the center of his anger. Sure, some of it was directed at Alex for what Mr. Heller had done. But there was something else, something ugly, and surprising for Milo to see in himself — jealousy.

Jealousy that Alex — once again — got the girl, while Milo’s first true shot at love, was dead and buried. And before he could stop the rest of the words from coming, he spewed them like black bile in a stew of vomit.

“It should’ve been Katie! Then you’d know how this feels! To lose someone you love!” Milo screamed, anger and tears mixing into an embarrassingly volatile concoction.

Alex’s face turned an angry shade of crimson and he stepped forward. “
I
don’t know how it feels to lose someone I love?
I
don’t know? I lost my dad! Yeah, he went nuts or something and shot up the class, but before that, he was my fucking dad! And now he’s gone, and I’m burying him this week. So don’t fucking tell me I don’t know how it feels to lose someone
I
love. I’d say on the scale of deaths, dad is a bit higher up there than a girl you had a crush on!”

Alex unzipped his backpack, reached in and grabbed a thick black spiral, then threw it at Milo.

“I brought this so maybe we can finish it together, but fuck it. You’ve already decided our friendship is finished.”

Alex turned toward the door and stormed from the room, leaving Milo alone and crying, their last unfinished screenplay sitting in his lap.

* * * *

CHAPTER 9 — Brock Houser Part 2

Saturday morning…
 

Houser woke up from the blackness feeling like he’d been hit by a truck.

Light slowly bled through his blurred and sleep crusted eyes as he tried to turn his heavy head, and make sense of his surroundings.
 

He couldn’t move.
 

Houser’s arms were bound by straps.

A machine was beeping behind him.
 

“He’s waking up,” a woman’s voice said.

What the hell?

“Where am I?” he asked. Or tried to ask. A tube in his throat kept the words in his mouth.
 

An overwhelming feeling of being trapped seeped through his brain. Houser struggled, trying to get up, craning his neck to see what the hell was happening.

Several hands held his body down.

What’s happening to me?

“Please don’t move, Sir. You’ve been in an accident and we’re operating on you.”

Operating?

What happened?

That’s when he saw the surgeon sawing his right leg off below the knee.

Houser fell back into the blackness.

* * * *

CHAPTER 10 — Warren Conway

Warren’s house

Saturday afternoon…

The phone rang.
 

The screen said Jones, but that wasn’t the man’s real name.

“Warren,” he said into the phone.

“Hello, sir. I just wanted to report that the operation was a success.”

“Good. And the flash drive? Did we recover it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And? What was on it?”

“We’re not sure. It was damaged by the water. I’ve got my guys trying to recover it now. What should we do about the mother?”