Burn for You

“Do you have any idea how unfair it is, what you just did to me?” I said. “Leaving me totally clueless, acting like a gold star idiot in front of your parents? This agreement isn’t only about your inheritance, Jackson, it’s about my mother’s situation, too! We’re supposed to be in this deal together! Why aren’t you helping me out at all?”

Jackson filled a glass, tossed it back, raked a hand through his hair, and poured another glass. Staring down at it, he said, “Because you’re doing fine on your own.” He chugged back the second glass of liquor, grimacing as he swallowed.

“Are you blind? Even the servants are laughing at me! What’s the big secret here? What is it that you and everybody else knows that I don’t? Just tell me what on earth is going—”

“I killed my brother,” he said flatly.

My words died in my mouth. I stared at him in cold shock while my stomach made a slow, twisting roll and my heart tried painfully to reboot.

Jackson glanced at me. His face was hard, his eyes were dark, and his hand was white-knuckled around the empty glass. “Or at least they all think I did. They blame me for it.”

All my outrage disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. I whispered, “Oh my God. What happened?”

Jackson went back to staring at his empty glass, like he was searching for answers in it. After a long time, his voice low and halting, he began to speak.

“Lincoln and I were twins. He was older by two minutes. Two minutes,” he repeated bitterly. “You wouldn’t think one hundred and twenty seconds could make such a difference, but it did.”

He fell silent. I crept over to the bed and sat on the edge because I didn’t think my legs could hold me up any longer. Jackson lowered himself to a chair and poured himself another drink. His energy was dark and electric, like thunderclouds before they disgorge their burden of lightning and rain.

“Linc was the golden child from the beginning. The heir and the spare, they jokingly called us, only it wasn’t a joke. He could do no wrong. He was better than me at everything. Sports, school, girls . . . everything came easy for him. And I . . .”

Jackson closed his eyes. His voice a low rasp, he said, “I hated him for it. I hated my own brother. Which made me hate myself.”

I covered my mouth with my hands. His pain was so palpable, his guilt so raw, I wanted to run and put my arms around him, but I stayed where I was and listened in horrified fascination as he continued his story.

“He looked like an angel. Literally, like a Raphael painting of an angel. Blond hair and dimpled cheeks, this smile everyone went crazy for. I was the dark one. The problematic one. The one with a learning disability and a temper so unpredictable they had to put me on medication when I was barely a teenager. I just . . . never . . . fit.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed. His face was a grimace, full of anguish and bad memories, ruddy with alcohol, a sheen of sweat on his brow.

“Linc was being groomed to take over the company. It was the logical choice, him being eldest and so nice.”

Jackson said the word nice like an accusation. His dark gaze flashed up to meet mine. “But the thing was, he wasn’t so nice. He was like this perfect, shiny red apple that was riddled with worms and rot on the inside. Only no one could see it. No one could believe that something so pretty could be so corrupt. Except me.”

Goosebumps erupted all over my arms. Jackson blew out a hard breath and downed the liquor in his glass. Between the wine he’d consumed at dinner and what he’d thrown back since we entered the bedroom, I didn’t know how he was still standing.

He set his glass on the table with a crack and leapt to his feet. He began restlessly pacing back and forth, breathing erratically, his hands flexing, looking like he was on the verge of breaking something or having a serious cardiac event.

He said, “Linc used to tell me I was adopted, that I was abandoned by the side of the road by beggars and left to die because I was so ugly and stupid that not even my real parents wanted me. He said Brig and Clemmy were getting tax credits for taking care of a homeless runt. He said I should just kill myself and stop being such a burden.” His voice broke. “Such a useless, stupid burden. But whenever I complained to my parents, they’d look at each other with sad eyes and sigh and talk about adjusting my meds.”

I wanted to run downstairs and smack them both across the face. How could they treat Jackson that way? He was their son!

“On our fifteenth birthday, our parents threw us a party. Linc got all the attention, of course, and by then I was used to staying out of the way, so I went to the pool house and hid. I guess Linc decided I was embarrassing the family by hiding, because he came to look for me. We argued. It got heated. He called me names, I called him names. He took a swing at me but missed. I stepped out of the way too quickly. He stumbled and fell, cracked his head against the cement coping, and rolled into the pool.”

Now Jackson was talking fast, the words pouring out in a cascade. His body movements were jerky, angry, and he was sweating, his hair sticking to his forehead in dark clumps. His eyes were bright and wild.

“I couldn’t swim. I was terrified of the water because the one time I’d tried to learn, Linc held me under when no one was looking and I almost drowned. So I couldn’t help him, I couldn’t get to him, I couldn’t—I didn’t know what to do.”

He broke off with a sob. I stood, helpless and horrified, already knowing where this was going.

“I ran to get my parents, but by the time they got there it was too late. They found him on the bottom of the pool. Later the doctors said he’d been unconscious when he went in, there was the mark on his face where he’d fallen, and they all thought . . . they thought I . . .”

I pressed a hand over my heart to try to stop its frantic pounding. “They thought you hit him and pushed him in the pool,” I whispered.

He propped his hands on his hips and swallowed convulsively, looking at the floor, his face red and pinched. He was trying not to cry.

“No one ever said that directly, of course. But they never looked at me the same. People started avoiding me. Dozens of kids and their parents were at the party, and from that time on I was shunned. The word got out. You can’t be alone with Jackson. Stay away from Jackson. He’s capable of anything. Then my parents sent me away to boarding school. From there I went directly to college. Which is where I met Christian, by the way, the only real friend I’ve ever had. By the time I came home from college, my parents and I were basically strangers.”

“Oh, Jackson,” I said, my voice wavering. “I’m so sorry. That’s terrible.”

He laughed. It was dark and ugly, one of the most disturbing sounds I’d ever heard.

“It gets better,” he said, and poured himself another drink.

THIRTY

BIANCA

A few minutes passed before Jackson spoke again, minutes in which my heart ached and I fought back tears, thinking how it must have been for him all those years growing up, and ever since. How lonely he must’ve been. I thought now I understood why he was the way he was, so surly and standoffish, but I hadn’t heard the rest of his story.

“Her name was Cricket.”

That’s all he got out before he had to take another swallow of booze. He sank onto the sofa and stared blankly at the coffee table, his face white, his hands trembling, like a man suffering from shell shock.