Page 25 of A Sea of Unspoken Things
“You want to talk about it?” he asked, keeping his back to me.
The sheer number of possible things he could be referring to almost made me laugh. There was a long list. “About what?”
“About whatever made you text me.”
He picked up the drinks, setting one in front of me before he pulled out the chair next to mine. He was only inches away, and I instinctively inhaled, catching his scent drifting between us. He still smelled the same, and I didn’t know how that was possible.
He raked his hair back carelessly, not bothering to mess with it when it fell back into his eyes. It took a moment for me to realize that he was still waiting for my answer.
I hadn’t figured out exactly how I wanted to do this. I hadn’t even let myself imagine how this first conversation might go. There were countless unfinished things we could discuss, and I wasn’t prepared for most of them.
“I want to talk about Johnny,” I said, finally.
“Okay.” Micah’s tone was careful. “What about him?”
“I want to know what was going on with him before he died.”
Micah’s eyes moved over me again, as if he was trying to read me.After a long moment, he picked up his glass and took a drink. “All right. But it’s probably all stuff you know.”
“I want to hear it from you.”
“Hear what, exactly?”
I let out a frustrated sigh. “Anything. Everything. I show up here, and it feels like he had this whole life he didn’t really tell me anything about, and I just…”
Micah cut me off. “This was his home, James. Of course he had a life.”
I gave him a look that bordered on exasperation. “I get that. I just— I’ve been back for barely forty-eight hours, and that’s all it’s taken to make me feel like my own brother was a stranger. It almost feels like he was…like he was hiding things.”
“That’s Johnny,” he said. “That’s what he did.”
“He didn’t used to hide things from me.”
This time, Micah said nothing. But the set of his mouth told me that he wanted to.
“What?” I prodded him.
He shrugged. “Maybe there were things he thought you didn’t want to know about.”
In an instant, a swift and familiar anger rose up in me. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Come on, James. You left Six Rivers the second you could and you never looked back.”
“Are you serious? You’re going to make it about me?” I gaped at him.
“I’m not the one who made it about you.” Micah’s tone took on the slightest edge. “You show up in town after all this time, pretending to give a shit about this project he was working on—”
“Idogive a shit about it.”
“But that’s not why you’re here,” he said. “You tell me what you’re really doing in Six Rivers and I’ll tell you what you want to know about Johnny.”
We stared at each other, and I fought to push down that rising heat that ignited when he looked at me. I wasn’t about to tell him about the pain still throbbing in my chest or the voice I’d heard in the darkroom. I wasn’t going to tell him that I was convinced that the Johnny we knew wasn’t quite gone from this world or that he might actually be trying to communicate something to me. That was a bridge I didn’t want to cross. Not even with myself.
“I think there was something going on with him,” I breathed.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Like something was off. I’ve just had this feeling since he died that maybe there’s more to it than a hunting accident. Like maybe there’s something missing.”