by Ace Gray
“Not enough,” I muttered.
One Month Later…
“Don’t touch me.” I pressed myself back against the wall. “Please.”
Diego studied me for a minute, the cruelty I’d been seeing hints of behind his eyes taking over completely. He wasn’t supposed to be back until tomorrow. It was the only reason I’d snuck into his room for a good night’s sleep on a soft mattress. Regret balled in my throat. About so many things.
“But you’re mine, Mercy. I should get to touch what’s mine. We talked about this before I left.”
“I’m not yours,” I sobbed. “I’m not anyone’s.”
The truth of the statement hurt, like a dull knife shoved into the depths of my stomach.
“Be. Mine.”
Tears started down my cheeks.
“You already are.” He stepped toward me again, almost pressing himself to me. “You live with me. Your things are scattered about my room. I called dibs.”
His hand slid up toward my yoga shorts. On the inside of my thigh. “I’ll scream.” My tears trembled on my lips.
“They won’t come running.”
“Bert will.”
His hand froze. “You wouldn’t.”
“Don’t touch me,” I repeated.
He stepped back, his hands fell from my body, and I almost dropped to my knees with relief. It was only the wall I’d pressed myself to that kept me standing.
I could get my stuff out of this room, live out of a suitcase for the night. And tomorrow, I could use the Nikon money to get out of here. The thought sent a singular, rough sob through my body. That was Dantè’s money. And I was Dantè’s girl.
Except…
Well, except everything.
“I’m not going to touch you again, Mercy.” Diego stepped back and pressed himself against the door for a better view. “But I’m going to watch you touch yourself.”
No. Oh holy, God no.
Each day the feeling that I was being unfaithful grew inside me and crawled along my skin. Even if I was doing this for Dantè. For us. To stay steadfast. But this was too much. Too far. His touch was bad enough. Seeing me?
“Pull your fucking shorts down and show me your starfish, Starfish.” His wicked smile turned ravenous.
“No,” I said with as much backbone as I could muster.
“I will see your finger tease your clit.” He stepped back to me. “I’ll watch as you tease and torment yourself to orgasm.”
“You will not.”
“I will or I’ll do it myself!” His scream sprayed in my face.
My fingers twitched toward the waistband of my shorts. Fighting him off wasn’t like my dad, he wasn’t a drunk with bad balance and bloodshot eyes. He was a wall of muscle.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” Danger opened the door, languidly leaning against the wood.
“What are you doing in here?” Diego wheeled on him, and I breathed for the first time in about one hundred heartbeats. My hands settled at my sides.
“Sounded like my kind of party.” He winked but it wasn’t reassuring. I’d learned to read Danger long ago and he wasn’t saying you’re welcome, he was saying you owe me.
“You know that part in Inception when Tom Hardy says ‘You mustn’t be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling’? That’s how I feel,” Max said. “God, don’t mention Tom Hardy. My loins are drooling.” She panted and fanned herself.
I cringed. “Please don’t ever say loins and drooling in the same sentence again.”
“Fine.” She laughed. “Danger dealing is a good start but we’re not building a legal case.”
I settled back into the couch, turned on the TV, and started flipping channels.
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“Maybe you need to knock the roofing off? It’ll get the better of your temper before it gets us anywhere productive.”
I arched an eyebrow as I kept scrolling. “We need a way in. You have a better idea?”
“A way in…” she mused. “Wait, wait, wait. Go back. That was a Gilmore Girls marathon.” She scrambled over me for the remote.
“No.” I stiff armed her. “Not again.” I settled on a movie.
“Kill Bill?” she whined.
“We’re talking revenge…” I shrugged.
Kill Bill was the next movie on a long list of revenge films, most of which favored Max’s outlook. Behind bars or six feet under. The art of vengeance was gone. I wanted Danger, Diego, and Rousse to beg for death in the end. I wanted to smile down on them and say no. I just needed a way to start unraveling that thread.
“So mowing them down with Ninja swords, huh?” She humphed, as she huddled into her corner of the couch.
“Samurai swords,” I corrected. “And no.” I let my ruthlessness edge my words.
“Okay, so what are you going to do?”
And there, as I watched Bill wipe blood off Uma Therman’s face and sheer terror color her features, I realized something very important.
“And here we are,” Max drug out her words, “surfing… Again.”
I sat on my board watching the ocean lap against the beach. Our beach. Max was right; I needed to do something different. So here I was, doing different, but also staring at so many memories from just beyond the sand bar.
There was a lone kid on the shore but in my mind, he was surrounded by Danger and Diego and Rousse. He was feet from where I’d first fell to my knees in front of Mercy. Where we’d held every midsummer night bonfire. The sound of the waves echoed the cavern of my heart.
I sighed.
“Not today, Max,” I said softly as I twisted to count the waves, a cadence that my muscles knew as easy as breathing.
When the right wave barreled in, I paddled, knowing that each slice of my hands through the water took me a little closer to the place my heart had called home. And when I popped up and carved into the wave, freedom ruffled the feathers of wings I didn’t know I still had. For just a second I wondered if all this was really worth it. If taking my revenge was worth it. I mean, the old me wouldn’t have wanted any part of it…
I rode the board into the shoreline, and effortlessly jumped off onto the wet sand, then bent down to grab it. I unfastened the leash at my ankle and shoved my board into the sand exactly where I had that first day with Mercy. The sixteen-year-old bombshell was still a faint ghost outlined in front of me.
The very real guy from minutes ago had disappeared.
I walked over to the cliffs and laid down beneath the sandstone overhang that made a bit of a cave. There it was.
mg is MINE
~dr
I’d carved it for her not long after I’d tasted her for the first time. I’d been so sure. And today…Here…Maybe I needed to talk to her. Confront her. Maybe there was an explanation. Maybe she’d tell me I was wrong, I still hadn’t remembered right.
Maybe she’d tell me she still loved me…
“Dantè!” Max’s blood-curdling scream had me shooting straight up and bolting from the sand to the surf. “Dantè, help!”
I caught sight of her just before I dove into the waves and started swimming. She’d drifted toward the rocks I’d explicitly told her not to go near. Each fresh wave pummeled against me, my chest getting tighter because I could hear her screaming over the break. I dove under the ripple and opened my eyes, barely able to see as I was cocooned in the momentary calm.
But then there was an outline of a drifting body, vague and blurry. I almost screamed. I had to break the surface and gulp in air instead.
“Help him,” Max shrieked. “I don’t even know where he went! Help him!” Frantic tears coated her plea.
“You’re okay?” I asked, still trying to catch my breath were I treaded.
“Yes. Dantè come on!”
Without another word, I dove back under, toward where I had remembered seeing the form. Visibility blew and his body wasn’t there anymore, a slave to the current. I pulled and kicked in the direction of the swi
rl weaving around my body. Nothing. I shot up for another breath.
“Anything?” She was hysterical.
I just dove back in.
And this time there was a body. I reached for him, finding flesh and bone in my hands. I swam for the surface. As soon as we broke the surface, I yelled.
“Max!”
“Did you find him?”
“Get off your board.”
She scrambled off and shoved it at me as I hauled the boy from the beach onto the board. I didn’t take the time to study him, but at first glance, I didn't think he was breathing.
“Grab that side and swim your ass off,” I commanded. Not even a heartbeat later, I felt Max pulling her weight.
The second I could touch, I started running, pulling both of them behind me. Max’s shorter legs wheeled but she barreled on. The second we were out of the water, I fell to my knees and started chest compressions.
“He was over by the rocks. You told me not to go over there,” Max said in a tizzy. “I paddled over to warn him but before I got there, he tried to stand. He slipped and fell. I don’t know what happened next, but I saw blood in the water and he didn’t come up.”
I nodded and kept hammering at his chest.
“Should I do the breathing thing?”
“I don’t think that’s a thing anymore,” I snarled, determined to bring this kid back.
“Should I call 911? Dantè, what should I do?” She was answering her own question by leaning in, lowering herself to his lips, when he puked up water and wheezed. “Oh my God!” She reached for his shoulders and helped me turn him.
He gagged a little more, and his whole body seized and shook until his coughing took over and made his whole body go rigid. Max rubbed at his shoulders as I sat back on my heels and surveyed for someone on the beach who could call for EMTs. We were alone.
“I owe…you guys,” the guy wheezed, “my life.”
“Are you okay?” Max bent down and brushed his hair out of his eyes.
“No.” He curled up. “But I’m not dead, so that’s something.”
Max tugged on him and he seemed to curl around her knees, molding to her shape. She kept soothing him with her hands, her voice, her presence there beside him, and I just watched. I watched the way her hands were so gentle but so sure. The way he turned to that touch.
“Thank you,” he murmured first to Max and then shifted his gaze and repeated it to me.
“Just glad you’re okay,” I answered.
“You are okay, right?” Max slid down into the sand to look directly in his eyes.
“I will be.” He smiled weakly.
We were all silent a little bit longer until the guy pushed himself up to sitting. Max was the mirror of his movements.
“My roommates are going to kill me,” the guy rasped.
“If the ocean doesn’t beat them to it,” I said. Max smacked my shoulder in response.
“They take surfing seriously. Diego lives to surf.”
I stilled completely, my whole body hinged on his words. My stomach roiled.
“Danger developed this app for surf spots too.”
Max shot me a look. I nodded. Once. Somehow, this guy I’d just dragged from the ocean knew my friends. Or rather, my enemies.
“I think they’ll just be happy you’re okay.” Max scooted closer to him.
“That board…” he groaned.
“If it’s the board you’re worried about, have mine,” I offered. “I have more where that came from.”
“Save me twice in one day?” He smiled a miserable smile.
“Really just protecting my investment.” I managed a genuine one. “Come on, let’s get you home.”
“It’s just at the top of the cliffs then down a little ways.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. I knew the house. And the little wooded path that connected it by trail to this beach. I knew each root and rock. The clearing…Years played in my mind, and I got lost in shit of their making. In the steaming pile of shit that was those memories.
When I shook loose, Max had propped herself under the man’s shoulder and was helping him toward the trail. Her hands splayed across his skin, and a slight smile hung on her face. Her chocolate eyes were wide with some sort of surprise.
I collected our surfboards and watched them from behind. Something about the way they interacted, about the way Max clung to him even though he was the wounded one, made me turn back and look at the sandstone cliff that still held my claim on Mercy. Something about Max and the drowning man made me smile.
He was beautiful. Not like Dantè, who was so rugged and gritty and dirty and pretty he hurt to look at sometimes, but quirky and cute and tall and…and…well, dreamy. I could imagine him with round rimmed glasses, and a Harry Potter scar beneath his wild dark hair. I could imagine those glasses fogging as I snogged the everliving shit out of him. And I couldn’t keep my hands off him. Not only because he needed help, but because I couldn’t stop.
“So…” I started then found I didn’t have the rest of the sentence.
“You gotta name?” Dantè found my lost words as he followed us up the seaside cliff trail.
“Bert,” he answered.
Bert. I repeated it. Over and over. And started replacing the E with a little heart as I wrote it in my mind.
I was an idiot.
He was ass-deep in our revenge plot, well not my revenge plot, but one I felt strongly about, so ya know, samesies. I mean, what was an afternoon with Bert when it was also with the people who’d destroyed Dantè? He didn’t do it. He wasn’t there then. He didn’t know. He doesn’t know. He wouldn’t ever. My mind sped through justifications to keep a hold on him.
“I’m Row and this is Jordan.” Dantè pulled me from my thoughts, using a fake name for himself and my sister’s name to introduce me.
My mouth fell open and I shot him a pinched look. We were getting better at unspoken communication but I don’t think he interpreted What the fuck are you giving the guy I’m crushing on the wrong name for? How am I ever supposed to recover? Or explain? Or live up to being a sex kitten like Jordan? in that one little look. He shrugged and sent me his own look, which confirmed he hadn't understood a single one of my rattling questions.
“A boy’s name?” Bert asked as he looked down at me. He was tall. So tall. Muscular, but wiry, like a swimmer. I could climb him like a beanstalk if given the chance. “I like it,” he added, and I couldn’t help but smile. And try telling myself he was talking about my real name. It was a boys name too, after all.
“Is Bert short for something?” I found something to say, even if it was dumb.
“Believe it or not, no. I’m a Bert on my birth certificate.”
“Do you know an Ernie?”
He groaned and panic shot through me, making my hands double their hold, but then I caught his dramatic eye roll. And his husky chuckle bubbled up. Rattling his ribs beneath my hand first, then springing forth in this wild, raucous laughter. I was enrapt with the sound. It wasn’t deep and husky, nor was it high and girly. It was Bert, uniquely Bert, and it radiated good and light.
Until he started coughing wildly.
“Bert!” I steadied his sides as he doubled over to catch his breath.
He tried to wave me off but I wasn’t letting go. God, not ever, if I had my way.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” He managed to get upright even as his abs tensed with his rasp. I had to stop from drooling.
“You sure?” I asked still staring at his stomach.
“Yeah.” He laughed again, and my eyes snapped up to find him rubbing the back of his neck with a shy smirk on his face. “You guys wanna come in for a beer?” He jerked his head toward a wooded trail. “I mean, that’s the least I can do since you saved my life.”
“I’m gonna have to excuse myself, but Jordan, you should go.”
I caught Dantè’s look out of the corner of my eye. He’d decoded me after all, but his face was shuttered. I saw hurt and ha
te there, something else too. Maybe fear. Maybe love. I couldn’t tell, and I sure as hell couldn’t protest.
“Uhhh yeah. That’d be nice.” I shot a smile up to Bert, but then turned back to Dantè, silently begging him to give me answers, give me something.
“I’ll come pick you up later.” He gave nothing away as he handed Bert his own board, staying true to his word.
“I’ll drop her off,” Bert answered and brushed his fingers along the side of my body.
I sucked in a deep breath and swooned into him. He looked down and smiled, broad, and beaming, almost enough to block out the sun. When I remembered how to breathe and be an actual human, I turned back to Dantè for answers, only to find him already slipping into the driver’s seat.
“Is he your…” Bert asked, following my line of sight.
His voice had just the hint of a snarl, something I hadn’t expected. Something that spoke to the side of me that drooled for bad boys and Tom Hardy. Jealousy looked good on Bert’s broad shoulders.
“Friend,” I finished Bert’s sentence with a blush. “And roommate.”
“Good. Very good.”
Even at his elevation I saw his brow crinkle, and maybe it was just all those romance novels I’d read, but I guessed he didn’t like the idea of that rooming with me. Inwardly, I did a little dance though, maybe even added a little squeal. Outwardly, I bit my lip.
“Then I guess I can tell you waking up on the beach with you over top of me was maybe the highlight of my life.”
“Of your life?” My heart soared. “That seems a tad dramatic.”
“Fate has a flare for the dramatic.”
His phrasing was a big fat slap to my face. This wasn’t fate at all. This was all Dantè. I mean, he couldn’t have planned this particular set of circumstances, but now I understood why we were here. At this beach. He’d made all these grand plans for us without talking to me. He’d left me out of it.
Just. Like. Jessie.
My heart seized and my feet faltered. Bert held me tighter as if I’d just tripped over one of the roots in our path. I tried to clear my throat, to swallow the lump that had formed, but he interrupted.