Page 50 of Steady Stroke
“I told you back then I didn’t remember the party. You said nothing bad happened.”
“Nothing bad happened at the party.” Adrian collapsed into his desk chair, like a puppet whose strings were cut. “Fuck, dude. I didn’t want to tell you this. Ever.”
Genuine fear curled around Emmett’s heart and squeezed air out of his lungs. He shoved his hands into his pockets soAdrian wouldn’t see them shaking. “What happened after the party?”
Adrian flinched, genuine sadness creeping over him. “We both got super wasted there. Wasted enough that we should have just crashed on the floor, but you’d done some coke, too, and it was giving you a fucking Superman complex. You were totaled, but insisted you could still do anything. I’d never seen you so confident, man.”
You’d done some coke, too.
Emmett’s brain frazzled out at that one. He’d done drugs at this party he didn’t remember. Drugs that had, apparently, made him a little nuts. “What did I do?”
“You insisted you could drive us home, and me being just as fucking wasted as you, let you. Drive us home.”
A connection he refused to acknowledge began to form in the deep recesses of his brain. A connection to something he’d never consciously put together, and he didn’t want to put it together now. He wrapped his arms around his middle, his entire body starting to tremble. His stomach twisted so tight he thought he’d never eat again.
“What did Ido?” Emmett didn’t recognize his own voice.
Misery dripped off his cousin now. “You sideswiped a car and it hit a telephone pole.”
The entire world grayed out. He didn’t register movement, only suddenly being on his ass, Adrian crouching in front of him.
That horrible, inevitable connection strengthened.
“No one died,” Adrian said.
“This can’t be real. This isn’t true. Why are you lying about this?”
“I’m not lying. Fuck, Emmett, I wouldn’t make shit like this up. I was trying to protect you.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Yes, you do.” Adrian disappeared then returned a moment later with his phone. He scrolled through until he found what he wanted. Showed the screen to Emmett.
A video.
Emmett shoved it away. “No.”
“Emilio, please.”
The use of his given name fractured his resolve. No, Adrian wasn’t making this up. Something terrible happened that night, and Adrian had proof.
“I recorded parts of the party to show you later, because I’d never seen you like that,” Adrian said. “Confident and having fun. Letting loose. Forgetting all of your loss for a little while. In the car you started singing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ without any music, and it was so funny I started recording again.”
Emmett kept fumbling the phone, so Adrian held it and pressed play. The video was shaky, but clearly showed Emmett behind the wheel of Adrian’s truck. His own voice burst out, singing familiar lyrics, hitting all the right notes—and a few wrong ones. Adrian’s laughter overtook the song a few times.
“Dude, I think we’re going the wrong way,” Video Adrian said.
Video Emmett kept on singing. He turned the wheel sharply. Lights flashed. The video jerked hard.
Bile rose into Emmett’s throat.
“The fuck, dude? Look where you’re going,” Video Adrian said. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
“Dunno.”
The video stopped. Adrian lowered his phone.
