Staying Grounded [BXB]

No Lie

CRAIG:

As soon as I enter the house, I feel there's something off. I've gotten pretty skilled at sensing tension, and right now, the air is practically crackling with it. Gut clenching uneasily, I kick off my shoes and line them up beside the welcome mat. My jacket, I leave on.

Generally, on a Saturday, I'm not expected to emerge from my room much before lunchtime, and Dad remains shut away in his office until mid-afternoon. Mum spends her morning meeting Kathryn for coffee or shopping or beauty treatments. But today, the soft sound of the front door clicking shut at my back is drowned beneath the muffled voices of both my parents, speaking heatedly in the lounge.

Taking a deep breath, I force myself past the lure of the stairs.

And any glimmer of hope I held that I'd misread the atmosphere dissipates into the intense silence that greets me the instant I push open the lounge door.

Dad locks his eyes to mine immediately, and he sinks back into his armchair. Anyone who didn't know him could be excused for interpreting the slow curve of his lips as a mellow smile, but I'm not so green. "You're up and about early today, Son."

I stop just inside the doorway on faltering feet. My clothes may be freshly laundered, but I'm all-too-aware of the layer upon layer of sweat and filth coating my skin as his gaze burns through me. I've helped demolish a barn down to rubble and firewood this morning. I still can't quite understand how Sebastian manipulated me into it, but every single muscle of my hungover body has been tested and abused. The adrenaline rush that came from wielding a sledgehammer depleted quickly on the car ride home when Alex spoke little beyond insisting he drive. Now, I can muster only enough good sense to hold my tongue.

"Or perhaps," he continues in the same deceptively easy tone. "You've been up and about all night." It's not a question.

Mum's sat, perched and rigid, on the edge of the couch cushion with Christopher on her knee. She's yet to acknowledge my entrance, her attention, instead, remaining trained on my baby brother, whose bright smile and nonsensical chatter chimes a discordant tone of warmth to the scene. His pudgy hands grasp out for me, imploring, and I bite hard into my lower lip.

But Dad doesn't indulge my non-response for long. "Good party, was it?"

Instinctive denial starts my head shaking, and I'm too slow catching it — a careless slip.

"No?"

He already has his answers, my gut warns with an ominous churn, and something cold and horrifying spreads through my veins as the implications of that soak in.

"No, you weren't partying, or no, it wasn't good?" I'm prompted, his facade cracking ever so slightly. "I'd strongly advise you don't bullshit me here, Craig."

I swallow thickly. My voice grates past the lump in my throat. "I" — will not be baited into dooming myself — "I went to see Alex for a bit, that's all."

"Oh, but of course, Alex would be involved. Only, I've already gone to the trouble of speaking to Lorraine, and she's not seen you. He didn't return home last night either." Leaning forward, like a predator ready to pounce, he steeples his fingers. "You're going to have to do better than that, Craig. You've had your mum worried sick."

Another flicked glance at Mum finds her adamantly tight-lipped, and she's angled herself further away from me, clutching Christopher to her chest as if protecting him from a threat. The expression on her face is not one I'd describe as worried. Not for my sake, anyway.

Their issue isn't that I was out all night partying, but who I was at that party with. And there's only one source that information could have come from — the virulent source of my every undoing.