East West Sunset - A Darry Curtis Fanfiction

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I closed my eyes for a second, the realization washing over me. Of course! I remembered the first time I had seen him, how I had felt instant connection, how I had seen myself in the color of his eyes. It made sense. As I sat in the Curtis kitchen for who knew how long, feeling Darry's eyes on me. I didn't know what he was feeling. I didn't know if he even really wanted me to know.

"Does he know?" I asked Darry, opening my eyes and looking at him, slightly afraid of the answer.

Darry shook his head.

"Does Pony?"

"No. It's best if they don't know. I don't want..." He hesitated before continuing. "I'm worried it will... I don't want him to feel like he doesn't really belong here."

I shook my head. "How could he? You both love him as if he was your brother. I can see that he belongs here. He... this is his life now." I took Darry's hand and looked at him hard in the eye. "I won't tell him anything about this, I promise."

"That would be best, thank you," Darry said gruffly, placing his other hand on top of mine and looking back at me with gratitude and something like sadness in his eyes.

I felt a wave of some warm emotion that spread from my chest with the ferocity of a gunshot and traveled to the tips of my fingers and toes as I looked at him. I blinked quickly and glanced away, but the feeling didn't go away. It was so paralysing that I felt disconnected from the room for a few seconds, floating up by the ceiling like a goldfish in a bowl. Darry had gone through so much in his twenty-two years of life; he was strong and self-assured. And yet, he still had the ability to feel things the way I felt them. The emotions in his blue eyes were real, and the energy I felt pulsing through our touching hands was real, too. He hadn't allowed himself to be hardened and cemented by this cruel world despite the trials he had faced. he wasn't like the Shepard boys, whose eyes glittered like cold, lava-hardened obsidian. No, he was radically different from them.  He let his experiences shape him instead of letting them toughen him. I knew that he was the most incredible man I had ever met.

"Are you alright?" Darry asked me softly, scooping me back into my consciousness. "I know it's... it's kind of wild."

"I'm okay," I tried to say, but my breath was gone. It was hard to imagine that just a few minutes ago I had thought I had lost all of my family, that my mother and I were all alone in the world, but sleeping right in the next room was the living, breathing, piece of me that I had lived apart all these years. My brother was in that room. But I could never tell him the truth: that I, Diana Jean, was his twin sister.

We headed off to bed soon after, my voice still lost somewhere down near my heart. I headed into Darry's room, but I stopped at the door. I took a deep breath and turned back to face Darry. "Can you stay with me tonight?"

He stared at me before slowly nodding. I don't think either of our hearts beat in the silence that followed, folding in and over us like sun dried linen fresh from the summer wind. He slipped into the bedroom after me without saying a word. I didn't bother changing into my pajamas, I just climbed into bed fully clothed. Darry did the same, and I curled up in his arms. He smelled sweetly of cigarette smoke, beer, and chocolate; his arms were firm and sure around me. I forgot about any of my misgivings and closed my eyes.

"Is this it?" Darry whispered to me. I felt his chest rumble with the vibrations of his voice, and I opened my eyes and looked up at him.

"What?" I asked.

"Is this the end? Now that you've gotten your answers, are you going back to Stanley?"

I didn't know what to say. I had never really thought about that before, but I supposed he was right. Now that I knew why my mother had left Tulsa, what had happened to my father, and where my brother was, there was no need for me to stay any longer. But there was something that kept me longing to stay, and that something was this moment right here. Darry.