Stone by Sawyer Bennett

Author:Sawyer Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
Publisher: Big Dog Books, LLC
Published: 2022-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

Stone

The sun rose about an hour ago, and I’m exhausted.

Tired to my bones, sick to my heart, my gut full of volcanic fury at my father.

There’s some mental self-flagellation going on for being so passive the last few years, and reading Brooks’s journals has only made that burn brighter.

And I’m still not done.

I push up from the floor where I’ve had my back propped against the side of Brooks’s king-size bed. I haven’t left the room all night, alternating between lying on top of the bedspread while I read to pacing around with a notebook in hand as I absorbed his memories. Occasionally, I perched on one of the two chairs near the window, and this past hour, as my eyes grew heavy, I moved to the floor and leaned against the bed with the frame digging into my back, hoping the discomfort would help keep me awake and on task.

I’ve got a handful of pages left, but I take a moment to push up off the floor and ease my cramped muscles and aching joints. I stretch, the last notebook in dark purple still in my grip, and then yawn deeply as I glance at the bedside table.

Almost seven thirty a.m., and I’ve got to be at the arena by ten.

I’ve absorbed so much information in the last several hours, I feel like my head is about to explode.

There was a lot of good—so many entries where my brother memorialized moments we spent together. Calls I would make from college when we would spend hours on the phone talking. Brooks wrote that it was “one of his favorite escapes” when I called because things seemed normal.

He wrote about his excitement as summer approached after my first year of college, knowing I would be coming home and of all the trouble we would get into.

I devoured the words with a smile plastered on my face about how ecstatic he was when I got drafted by the Boston Eagles. It wasn’t nearly the same level of enthusiasm as when he got accepted into college, but he was determined to follow in his big brother’s footsteps.

When I was with the Eagles and won the Cup, it was the one and only time he made drawings and doodles in the journal. He wrote of his pride and joy and punctuated it with rough sketches of the Eagles’ logo and of my jersey number.

There was a touching entry about his realization that he was gay. He’d suspected as much since he was a young boy, but he chronicled his first kiss with a guy who went to our high school who, in a million years, I never would’ve thought was gay. But then again, I never suspected Brooks either.

That entry was quite detailed, and it moved from a fumbling kiss to roaming hands, and I had to stop reading. I didn’t want or need the details. That was private to Brooks, and I’d no more read his accounting of his first time if it was with a woman than I would with a man.

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