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diogeluIt's not that he remembers being Eric Gaines. He doesn't.
Cadogan Thomas has lived his entirely own life, after all. He's struggled his way valiantly into exactly the person he is today. He's pulled every fiber of his being through to the life he's settling into now; into liking himself well enough to feel he deserves the stability and contentment.
That doesn't mean he isn't living with another man's face.
It isn't a change he notices. It isn't abrupt or violent, after all. His own mother barely notices the difference when she kisses his cheeks in the morning. The fact is, all the same, that a piece of the man who had been Eric Gaines gets stuck in him, stubbornly refusing to leave the world after finding the last flicker of Cassie in a woman who had actually understood how to care. How to love.
So after Eric Gaines' body fails him completely following a sharp rain of lead (why had he thought he could get away? why had he fucking tried to promise Teresa a good, 'clean' life when he knew he'd always get drawn straight back in to the world he came from?), Cadogan Thomas wakes up with his nose a little narrower and his cheeks a littler ruddier and his shoulders a little broader and a clinging piece of a soul that isn't yet wholly his stuck deep into the folds of his own.
It's more than a month later--more than a month getting used to the little changes he can barely see in himself--that he walks into a coffee shop, fingers already tapping in an agile flurry over the keys of his phone for a simple order of tea.
Cadogan Thomas has lived his entirely own life, after all. He's struggled his way valiantly into exactly the person he is today. He's pulled every fiber of his being through to the life he's settling into now; into liking himself well enough to feel he deserves the stability and contentment.
That doesn't mean he isn't living with another man's face.
It isn't a change he notices. It isn't abrupt or violent, after all. His own mother barely notices the difference when she kisses his cheeks in the morning. The fact is, all the same, that a piece of the man who had been Eric Gaines gets stuck in him, stubbornly refusing to leave the world after finding the last flicker of Cassie in a woman who had actually understood how to care. How to love.
So after Eric Gaines' body fails him completely following a sharp rain of lead (why had he thought he could get away? why had he fucking tried to promise Teresa a good, 'clean' life when he knew he'd always get drawn straight back in to the world he came from?), Cadogan Thomas wakes up with his nose a little narrower and his cheeks a littler ruddier and his shoulders a little broader and a clinging piece of a soul that isn't yet wholly his stuck deep into the folds of his own.
It's more than a month later--more than a month getting used to the little changes he can barely see in himself--that he walks into a coffee shop, fingers already tapping in an agile flurry over the keys of his phone for a simple order of tea.
