What No One Knows or Would Guess

Jimmy’s travel to find his family and maybe make one along the way.

Nick was a widower. That much Jimmy knew. What he didn’t however, would make a huge difference in how they interacted.

They were already inseparable. Nick had nowhere to go back to and instead stayed close to Jimmy, who was looking for his family. It make Nick vomit inside, knowing that even if his wife was back from the dead, the chances of her loving him were slim to none. The scars on his face were a constant reminder that he was marked forever as the Devil’s puppet.

He tried not to cry, but it always ended the same. He’d enter the reception room for a motel and the person around the counter would look up and immediately back away, disgust and fear writ across their face, as easy to see as the wind in the trees outside. He marked their names down and payed for the room, leaving quickly before the clerk could take a picture of him and he become the next “ugliest person ever” on YouTube.

They slept in the same bed because money was a serious issue and them together never really was. Whispered “Are you ok’s?” and “Where to next?’s” until Nick started crying somewhere in the night, soft and pitiable. Jimmy never said anything to try and make it better or even easier to deal with, in fact Jimmy wasn’t overly sure why Nick cried at all; he’d never asked and never would, but still he found himself crying silently with him, pressing his back up against his scarred compatriot as a weak form of comfort. The occasional car passing outside on the highway and the sound of wind through leaves, forced them into a sad excuse of sleep, filled with dreams of the atrocities their bodies had done without their permission, and more tears that neither of them would remember in the morning, both tangled in each others arms and never making eye contact as they set out once again for Jimmy’s tragically divorced family.

If this was what life would be like for me for all eternity, Nick thought, then I might be able to live on. Maybe.

What Jimmy didn’t know about his most trusted confidante to be, was that Nick couldn’t bear the sight of children, not after losing his own. Jimmy just didn’t know, but really, how could he?