by Ace Gray
Free.
I leaned forward and snapped, biting off the end of the fry in her hand then leaning back with a crooked smile on my face. My eyelids sagged even as my chest soared, and I took a moment to breathe in the world around me. The world of french fries and milkshakes, chili and thick gravy. The fry oil that permeated the air, that mixed with fries themselves, smelled so…good.
“What are you going to do now?” Max interrupted my reveling in simplicity with something so complex.
I’d thought about going home but my family hadn’t been there in years. They’d been those boys, my fucking brothers, the ones that I’d chosen…Part of me wanted to look them in the face when they found out I was a free man. Another part just wanted my things. But the new part that beat to a wicked drum, that was cutting its teeth on vengeance, held me back.
It left me to navigate the straightaways and curves of a giant question mark.
“No thoughts? None? Most people have a list.”
I mean, I couldn’t tell her what I wanted to do. Not really. Not yet anyhow.
“I didn’t ever expect to be here. I wouldn’t let myself imagine.” Nothing besides making them pay.
“Well believe it, baby.” She waved another fry in front of me, her lightness filtering into my dark, bringing a playfulness back to this day. This moment. When I lunged for the fry, she snapped it back and bit off the end with a giant smile.
I laughed big and bold and brash, and her shoulders shook with matching giggles. The moment felt good. Good enough to push the need for retaliation aside and bask in the beauty of the day. In the sunshine filtering in through the massive diner windows.
My skin warmed beneath it, and the slow spreading flush that only comes from the beating sun itself blanketed my skin. I closed my eyes and relished it, remembering the days before when the sun was my constant companion. The only one I could still trust anyhow. Apparently, those days weren’t as simple as I thought but one thing about them always had been.
“I wanna go surfing,” I opened my eyes and answered Max with the only thing that felt right.
“You would be a surfer.” She rolled her eyes.
“What does that mean?”
Her eyes went wide behind her glasses and that irresistible blush crept up her neck.
“Just that you…well, that you’re…” She gestured up and down my torso. “The smile…muscles…attitude.” Every single moment was pure torture for her but her stuttering and stammering warmed my heart just because they reminded me I had one. “Come on, you know what I mean.” She curled in on herself.
“You’re hot enough to be a surfer girl too, Max,” I said softly.
“Me? What? Hot? Pffffttttt.” She scrambled and waved me off. “Stop. I’m not…Shut up.”
“I mean it. Good heart. Great ass.” I winked.
“I’m going to kill you,” she muttered as she tossed a fry at me.
“They put you away for that. For years actually.”
She blanched and her eyes almost bugged out of her head. I laughed as I picked the fry up from my lap and ate it with a lightness in my chest that I hadn’t felt in years.
I had missed the water. More than I’d been able to comprehend. The first plunge into the salty brine of a crashing wave was better than the first breath I’d taken outside of the California State Penitentiary system. More grounding. The ocean was my home and its rhythm settled me into my bones. The equal weight and weightlessness surrounding me seemed to reshape my skin.
The sun spread across my back, heating my skin, drying the beads of water into small crusted circles. The board dug into the crook of my knees, and I wouldn’t have traded either feeling for all the money in the world.
“I think I swallowed half the ocean.” Max coughed as she splashed more than paddled up beside me.
“You did really well.” I tried to hide my laughter as she tried to sit upright on the board next to me.
“Liar.”
I was lying but it was the simple and good-natured kind. The kind given away with a wink and a smile. The world was simpler out on the water.
“What if I say you looked great instead?”
I squinted in the late afternoon light to find that blush roving freely across her skin. Her skin that I could see so much more of in a tiny bikini. She twisted from me but didn’t try to cover herself up. And honestly, a part of me was grateful. The part of me that was south of my belly button and hadn’t been used in almost three years.
“Do you have a boyfriend, Max?” I asked mostly out of curiosity. Mostly.
“Um, ugh, a boy? That’s a friend? Who like I do date and sex and non-date and non-sex stuff with?”
“Yeah.” I laughed loud and wild. “One of those. Someone to do date and sex and non-date and non-sex stuff with.”
“No, nope. Ah, not right now.”
I loved the way she tripped and fell over her words.
“Not since, Jessie.” Her voice changed, low and steady, neither of which Max ever really was.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I effortlessly swirled my legs to slip closer, right up next to her.
“Not really.” She was picking at the skin around her cuticles. “Do you want to talk about why seeing the girl wasn’t your first move?”
I sighed as the weight of Mercy—of my adoration and her betrayal—fell on my chest. “Not even remotely,” I finally answered.
The silence between us was easier with the lapping ocean and crashing waves behind us, filling up the negative space between the words we wouldn’t say. We sat for a moment more, twins in some sense, bobbing on the water, staring at the sinking sun.
“Where are you staying tonight, Dantè?” Max asked as her leg drew close enough to become tangled up with mine.
“God, I haven’t thought about where I would sleep in years…”
“With me. Shit.” Max squealed. “At my place, I mean. On my couch. Shit, shit, shit!”
I grazed my leg up hers, and she shivered just before she went tippy canoe and almost turned herself upside down and into the ocean.
“Whoa, whoa,” I soothed her as I reached for her board and helped to steady it. “Do you mean it, Max?” I kept my hand on the board in case she went tits up again.
Though that might not be the worst thing. She wanted it. I think she had since the first time we met. Her wildfire blush and tripped up words. From here, I could lift my finger and brush the curve of her ass. If she didn’t freak and flip us both, my rough hands could keep sliding up her curves.
I knew I could slide into the water, swivel her hips and eat her out right there. I’d done it before. And no matter how long I lived, no matter how Mercy had broken up my insides, I’d remember the way the sunset colored her tanned skin that day with me treading between her thighs. The way she giggled and moaned. The taste of her…
“Did you hear me?” Max cut through the haze.
“No, sorry.” I pulled my hand back from her board. “I got sidetracked.”
“Well, airhead, I said yes. I’m sure. Stay as long as you’d like.”
I was not watching Dantè sleep. I was not watching his shirtless chest rise and fall in time with his soft breathing. Nor was I counting his 8,000 abs or imagining what I’d find at the end of that happy trail. I was definitely, definitely not doing any of those things.
Dantè and I had been up late last night playing quarters and cards—a Friday night my sister would be proud of—and now he was draped over my couch like an oversized cat. I’d have to figure out a better place for him to sleep because here was not an option. Here I would become Echo to his Narcissus.
I was already balled up on my armchair, knees tucked into my chest, sipping coffee and staring—or not, ya know, well trying not to, but still—and it was only the first morning. The first morning I’d had a man in my house in, well, years.
A heavy sigh shook my chest as I thought about Jessie. He would be happy about this, right? That I’d used my powers for good and saved
someone. Even if that someone was super hot and staying with me. He’d want me to move on, right?
I pressed my coffee cup to my temple and smiled. The answer was an unequivocal and resounding no. Jessie would have been fine if I pined for him until we met in eternity. He would have liked Dantè just not that he was in my thoughts or on my couch.
He shifted in the sun rays, a gentle snore rattling his throat just before my remote crashed to the floor beside him. He swallowed his snore as he jumped up.
“Morning sunshine.” I took my coffee from its perch against the side of my head and sipped. “Sleep okay?”
“Haven’t slept that well since…In years.”
“Coffee?” I offered, letting my smile spread.
“Hot coffee?” His words were more the purr of a cat coiled in the same warming sun. “Did I die and go to heaven?”
“Don’t joke about that.” I shot him eyebrows as I stood up. The death penalty was too dark a shadow in my world. “Sugar? Cream?”
“I can make it.”
“I’m already up. And I don’t mind.” Especially when he sat up, shoved his hands through his hair, and I got a view of his chiseled muscles rippling there on my couch.
I went through the motions in the kitchen, my thoughts still with the man in the other room, comparing him to the one that had come before. My thoughts never wandered that far from Jessie. Not really.
Dantè’s coffee swirled caramel colored as I added cream then stirred in sugar. I grabbed two of the mini scones I’d picked up yesterday and artfully slipped them onto his saucer. When I stepped back out to the living room, I almost dropped it all on the floor, so I quickly set it all down on the coffee table. Dantè had uncovered one of my smutty paperbacks from beneath case notes sprawled on it.
“What are you doing?” I squealed.
“Reading.” He waved me off. “You’re fucking filthy, Max.”
My hand darted out quickly to rip the paperback out of his grasp. My temperature skyrocketed with embarrassment as I lunged. He stiff armed me, then cocked his head as his lips moved faintly, trying to finish reading.
“Not that.” I scrambled over his thick arm and dug into the pages before I pried it loose and tossed it across the room. “Anything but that.”
“That’s porn, Max.”
“It’s not, it’s a romance novel,” I protested as the blush across my chest turned to fire patches.
“If I were on the internet watching a video of a guy as he “threaded his fingers into her long blonde hair and yanked as he positioned his thick cock at her slick slit” I’d be watching straight porn.” His voice crescendoed as it mixed with husky laughter.
“You need a hobby,” I muttered as I turned my back on him, collected my precious paperback off the floor, and tucked it safely back onto the shelf.
“I have a hobby.”
“Fine,” I huffed. “You need a job.”
His laugh died, and I spun to find a darkness marring his beautiful face.
“What did I say?” I asked softly as I folded my hands in on each other and bit my lip.
“Oh, no,” he shook his head and his features lightened, “nothing. I just realized that it’s all gone. I might be free, but it’s not like before and it never will be.”
I sidestepped the coffee table and took a seat next to him, reaching for his coffee, and handing it over. Hot beverages always made things less awkward.
“Maybe that’s a good thing.”
He took a sip of coffee and sat back. “A fresh start?”
I sat back with him and let my eyes rove over my apartment, my life. In all the corners there were pieces of Jessie. A bookshelf with our initials carved in, his leather-bound copy of The Three Musketeers, his deep blue bandana, still tied around a vase of dried flowers he’d given me, that signified so many of the reasons he was gone. I sighed.
“I don’t think we ever get to start fresh, but we get to rebuild. And when you build, you’re in control of what you make.” I supposed that was why I couldn’t call Mercy Graves back. Her name caused him real physical pain and I didn’t know why. I didn’t want to presume. The least he deserved was to be in control this time around.
He didn’t answer but he took another sip of his coffee. I twisted toward him and saw the wheels whirring in his mind. Something about him called to me on a soul-deep level. Something about him made me want to fight for him.
“I’ll help you make it, Dantè.” I shrugged, remembering the feeling of being lost in the rubble myself.
He turned toward me and gave me a once over that wasn’t laced with want, it wasn’t mean either, it simply sought to strip me and understand the things I wouldn’t say out loud. I offered him a shy smile in their place.
“So I start with a job, huh?”
“You start with some sort of normalcy.”
“Job it is.” His smile grew back under the warmth of the sun shining into my living room. “Now who hires ex-cons?”
“You’re not an ex-con, Dantè. Your conviction has been erased.” I shifted so I could face him, tucking my leg up so I could sit comfortably.
“I still have to explain where I’ve been for almost three years.”
“Well if you want…” I reached over and shuffled papers around on my coffee table until I found what I was looking for. “These are where I start with my clients.” I handed him the list of employers that I had relationships with. “You don’t need to start here—I mean it—but you can.”
His eyes darted across the page just as they had on the pages of my romance novel. When they froze, a smile curved his lips. This wasn’t his beautiful, easy, sun-filled smile, but rather something cold and calculating. Shivers crept along my spine. Part of it was because something wicked hid behind that smile. Part of it was because I liked that side of him—it reminded me of Jessie.
“I think working with my hands will feel good, make me feel like I really am building something. Toward something.”
“Okay.” There was something lying in wait beneath his words but I didn’t need to press him. I knew I needed to support him.
“Roofing. I think I’ll be a roofer.”
“I know them well. I’ll make the call.”
“You don’t know what this means to me. What this all means to me.” Again, his words seemed to have a double meaning, some edge that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
But then he leaned in. And the salt brine that hung on his skin mixed with his natural musk and filled my senses. His hand found its way to my skin and toured up my knee, then my thigh. I tried to swallow but my throat was dry, and I almost choked. The heat of his skin boiled the blood in my veins beneath his hand. And then he softly sighed, so quiet it was almost imperceptible except in its utter intimacy.
My heart started jack-hammering as he moved closer, the whole world moving in slow motion except for my heart. He was going to kiss me. He was going to slow-motion kiss me like in my romance books. He was going to show me that a kiss was something that could set my being on fire in a way that sex just couldn’t. He was going to teach me the pages of that novel I’d ripped out of his hands.
I couldn’t think about the way his words had made my blood go cold. Not when his touch had lit it on fire with anticipation and want. I honestly couldn’t think at all.
But then he pressed his lips to my forehead. It was tender, touching, but made my heart plummet to the floor.
“My patron saint,” he whispered against my skin and goose bumps rose in waves down my arms in response.
“The patron saint of bad boys,” I answered, my voice a mix of breathy devastation and resignation. I would protect him. To my own detriment if my past was any indication.
He pulled back and smiled, twisting my stomach into odd, awful, and delicious knots. “Oh you have no idea.”
I rearranged the frames for the fourth time, hoping that the busy work would keep more than my fingers busy. Each held a stock photo in pale pastels of a couple or a fam
ily or a child. Each held a reminder of what I’d lost. I choked back the sob as the shop door jingled.
“How’s your head, sweetheart?” Patty asked as she thumbed through the mail and walked into the shop.
“Much better, thank you. A couple days off made a big difference.” She looked up and smiled at me, always that same soft and sad smile, as if she saw what was happening inside of me.
She stopped behind me and inspected the small patch of skin that held Diego’s mark and, if I knew her at all, she tried to hold in the wince that hissed in my ears.
“You need a man that will take care of you,” she said as she had so many times since Dantè went away.
“The boys take care of me.”
“Humphf.” She shoved her hands on her hips, and I didn’t blame her, even I didn’t believe that anymore.
“I keep thinking he’ll come back to me. Somehow. Some way.” The words were barely more than a whisper, the truth of them my only prayer. “It’s the only way I can afford to keep that hope alive.”
Patty simply sidled up to me and wrapped her arm around my shoulder. She leaned her head against mine and peered at the photos I was still aimlessly rearranging as if she could see the future I should have had too. Patty had known Dantè, had fallen victim to his effortless charm just like the rest of us.
“Just go in there, Mercy. Just go in there and ask,” Dantè encouraged me from the driver’s seat.
“I don’t know, Tey. What if she says no?” I wrung my hands in my lap at the idea of showing my art to someone and being denied.
“What if she does?” He posed the question as he turned in his seat and reached for me, cupping my cheek, then letting his fingers trail along my jaw before running his thumb along my bottom lip. “That doesn’t change that they are incredible. That doesn’t change that you amaze me. We’ll drive to the next gallery, and I will tell you the same thing. I’ll tell you the same thing over and over, every day if I have to.”