Nothing Less

Chapter Twenty-Eight.

Songs for this chapter are:

Hallelujah- Jeff Buckley

Skinny Love- Bon Iver

Breathe Me- Sia

Fix You- Coldplay

...

(This chapter contains content that may be triggering to some)

Nora's POV.

"Do you think we should go inside?" He asks me after another two rounds of our game. I have come to love this game and he still hasn't skipped a question. He thinks I don't notice.

I notice everything about him. My head is now in his lap and his fingers are on my scalp, softly rubbing. I could fall asleep on his lap like this. When you go so long without being touched, you forget how important it is to just be touched by another person. It's ingrained into our brain, that we need the touch of another from our first day of life to our last.

"One more round." I suggest. I saved my planned questions for the last round.

Landon gently pats the top of my head. "One more." I close my eyes and brace myself for the turn in the conversation.

"Did you believe me when I told you that Dakota cheated on you? Did her brother disappearing make you feel like you had to protect her?" Landon's fingers freeze on my scalp. I force myself to continue. "And-"

"Her brother didn't disappear," he puts his hands under my shoulders and lifts me off of his lap. This is it. This is the trigger on their loaded gun.

"That's what I know," I carefully explain. That's the story she told me the night that I found her screaming his name in her sleep. I can't imagine what could be worse than that?

Landon's face is turned away from me when I look at him. I sit up, facing the door to the staircase behind us. "You don't know anything then." He says, his voice flat.

"Well, then tell me. Because this is a wall between us. You want answers to all of my questions, but you don't want to give me anything in return. That's convenient."

He shakes his head, still not looking at me. "It's not my story to tell."

"Yes it is. You were a part of the story, it's yours too." I tell him. I could be more understanding if I knew what happened.

"Landon, you can trust me. I just want you to open up to me." The irony of my statement is not lost on me.

He seems to be taking this in. He looks uncomfortable and I feel like a bitch for pushing him this far. I have my share of secrets around my ex and I divert his every effort to get to the bottom of it. I will share them with him one day, one day soon. I just need a little more time to make sense of what's happening. I thought I had my mind made up, but Landon is clouding everything, making me unsure about my future.

His voice starts out quiet and I keep my mouth closed and my hand close to his, in case he wants to take it. "Carter was having a rough time at school. He was the target of a lot of people in our plat. His dad included. Our plat was the worst of them, all families from Kentucky and West Virginia. Stuck in their old ways and bigotry. It was one of those neighborhoods where you would see a rebel flag hanging from the window where there should be a curtain. Everyone of the grown-ups lost their jobs and had nothing better to do than gossip about what the young people were doing. It was rumored that Carter and his best friend Julian," he pauses, gazing straightforward. His eyes aren't focused as he continues. "It was said that they liked to kiss."

"Did they?" I ask. My stomach is tying into knots and as much as I don't want to hear this, I know I need to. I wish I was magical like him and could take some of this pain away, the way he does for me.

"They did. The grownups could ignore it for the most part, make their jokes about Carter's clothes being a little too tight and his voice being a little too high for their liking. Those were all jokes, their ignorance shining. Everything was fine until a little boy down the street said that Carter tried to touch him. Then the grownups and the kids turned on him."

My mouth and heart fall to the pit of my stomach. My insides echo and rattle, not used to the commotion. It's been a while since I've felt this aware of myself, of how I feel about the things happening around me. I seem to care a whole lot more about what's going on in my world now that Landon is a part of it.

"And did he?" I ask, anticipating his response.

Landon's head shakes furiously. "No. He would never. The people around us were so toxic, so disgustingly vile, and too simple to even understand how simple minded they were. They were the kind of people who would claim they were-" he hooks his fingers into quotes in the air, "okay with gay people as long as they didn't hit on them", yet when asked if they are homophobic, they say no."

I know people like that. Most of the barbies at my school were like that. They would say the most offensive things to me, but in their case, I suspect they knew exactly what they were doing. I literally had a girl ask which gas station my family owned, even though my dad had saved her mom's ass when she got skin cancer from sunbathing for too long.

"So then Carter went from the plat joke to the plat villain. It was like a witch hunt. Just how many of the young boys had been around Carter? Out of all the boys he rode bikes with, how many did he try to touch? Out of all the boys he had helped with their homework over the years, how many had he tried to force himself on?

Even though no one else came forward against Carter, it became a thing. And his dad didn't need another reason to take his anger out on him. When the whispers turned to shouts and the shouts turned to three big, black letters painted on the side of the house, his dad had enough. It took me and Dakota to get his dad off of him that night. He missed school that morning," Landon's voice crumbles and I move to his lap. He wraps his arms around me, holding me to him like it will somehow comfort him. I wipe at the tears on my cheeks and can't remember when they began to fall. Landon's words are painting too vivid of a picture for my mind to grasp. I remember the night Dakota was hiding under the kitchen table. My stomach lurches. That poor girl.

"We came home and found him. She didn't want to leave," he clears his throat and I wrap my arms around him, holding his head to my body. "I had to drag her out of that room, Nora. She snapped, she wasn't even in her body when I pulled her out of his bedroom. She screamed and screamed and even tried to claw her way back in there before the police came and got him down." I shiver takes over his body and I'm sobbing into his hair. I can't imagine their pain and the trauma that came along with such an event at a young age. No wonder the two of them are the way they are. If Dakota didn't have Landon, where would she be today?

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," I tell him, rubbing my hand down his back. I shouldn't have forced him to tell me. This was much more than I expected to get when I began this sick little game.

"I shouldn't have forced this out of you," I apologize profusely over his head. Images of the unfair treatment of a teenage boy because of who he liked to kiss break my heart. Suicide in any form is awful, but suicide among teens is especially hard to come to terms with. When you're young everything feels so important, it's your whole world and it's impossible to see a light at the end of the tunnel. There's no comfort when thinking of the empty future of an innocent child.

"Shh," his arms hook around my back and he repeats, "Shh. It's okay."

He's comforting me?

I move my hands to his jaw and lift his face to mine. "I could live a thousand lives and never deserve you."

The truth sits heavy with me as he pulls me tight to his chest. I'm falling in love with him and he doesn't even have to do anything. I'm going to fall in love with him and he doesn't even have to love me back. 

(Author's note: suicide is something very, very close and important to me and my life, if you or anyone you know if suffering from suicidal thoughts or acts, please seek help. Sometimes life feels too heavy and too bright to navigate alone and it's okay to feel that way, if you need to talk there are so many resources out there <3)