Midnight {*COMPLETE*}

E I G H T

****** It was actually pretty easy to figure out what happened to the three guys who attacked Jamie. In the weird way the universe worked, they had all kind of paid for it in some way.

The first guy, Peter, the one who had actually killed Jamie, kind of went crazy after that night. Who knows if it was the guilt, or if he had always been unbalanced. He ended up in the mental hospital, where he stayed until he died sometime in the eighties of cancer.

Neither one of his two accomplices faired much better. Brian, Pete's roommate, had gone to Vietnam a few years later, having never really finished enough credits to graduate. His helicopter was bombed out of the sky somewhere outside of Da Nang. No one survived. Mike, the last guy, didn't have a particularly violent death. Just a slow decent into oblivion. He ended up as a used car salesman at some seedy lot out on the highway. He drank himself to an early grave about five years ago, leaving behind a sour wife and a few kids.

I felt a little thrill of vindication when I finally dug up the details on the last guy's life and death. They deserved to be miserable. They deserved every thing they got.

To Jamie's credit, he didn't cheer and holler when he found out the fates of his attackers. It showed how amazing of a person he was that he could still feel some pity for people who had done something so awful to him.

The one mystery was Gray. He had left the fraternity the night of Jamie's murder and never returned. There wasn't any record of him graduating from the college, no record of him getting married, dying. Nothing. I had thought that he would be the easiest to find, since his family was so rich and well known. That turned out to be the opposite of the truth. I really hoped he was still around. I knew I needed to find him if we had a chance of resolving Jamie's issues.

*******

After the night he told me about the murder, Jamie started coming to my room every single night. I'm sure, looking back, that the other guys in my house probably wondered what the hell happened to me. I spent every night holed up in my room 'talking on the phone'. I had made up some bogus story of a long distance girlfriend, so they wouldn't think I was in there talking to myself. They must have thought I was the biggest lovesick whipped loser in the whole world. I just didn't want to spend any more time away from Jamie then I had to.

We had so much fun together, talking for hours, watching movies, playing games (the brat was amazing at chess!). I felt like I had a real honest to goodness boyfriend for the first time. I loved it. I knew in the back of my head as soon as I found Gray it would be over and Jamie would be gone. I tried to push that fact to the furthest back corner of my brain.

There were other nights like that first one, when he would touch me with his hands and his lips until I was biting my pillow and coming so hard I nearly blacked out. I loved those nights too. It was hard to say what my favorite part of Jamie was. I didn't want to admit it out loud, but I was falling in love with him.

Of course I should have known It was too good to last. Of course.

I don't know if it was bad or good, but through some twist of luck, I eventually did find Gray Turner. I guess it had less to do with luck, then with me running into one of the Kappa Pi girls who loved to flirt with me. Turned out she worked at the alumni association, and was more than happy to help. I felt a little guilty for using my status to get what I wanted, but then I figured most of the guys did it all the time. And I really didn't know how else to find him.

For a moment, when I was standing in the alumni office with his current address and phone number on a slip of paper in my hand, I thought about pretending I hadn't found him so I could keep Jamie. I felt horribly selfish, but I honestly didn't know what I was going to do without him. The thought made me sick to my stomach. The part of me that was happy for Jamie fought against the part of me that wanted to cry out in pain. Gray Turner meant Jamie's departure.