by Ace Gray
The faint light of the streetlights flooded in for another heartbeat and when the door snapped shut, Jordan stood just inside the darkness, searching for Bert. I sighed and slid off the stool, ready to slink back to my lonely little corner of the world, but Bert grabbed my wrist.
“If you ever need a friend…” Bert smiled. “An ear…”
“Thanks, Bert.” I reached in for a friendly hug, suddenly all too aware of Jordan and Diego’s eyes on me. I smiled the sad smile that was my norm and tipped the bottom of my bottle to his as a cheers. “But some secrets are better left with the dead.”
“I didn’t like the way you hugged Bert tonight.” Diego stood in the bathroom doorway, his arms crossed, his eyes a little wild. “And I definitely didn’t like any of that shit with Row.”
I eyed him, and the size of his chest. The flex and roll of shoulders. The fear that accompanied him more often than not started bubbling in my stomach. It would have frozen me if it weren’t for the mention of Row.
“I was just being polite,” I said, soft but stern as I reached for the sweatshirt I’d gone looking for then stepped toward him. Toward the smallest bit of freedom that lay behind him.
“I don’t give a fuck if you’re polite. I give a fuck if you’re mine.” His voice was gaining fangs, claws.
“Diego…” I tried to push passed him.
“You should be screaming my name.” He put his arm out and blocked my exit, leaning down to whisper in my ear. My heartbeat sped up and I held my breath, tensing every muscle in my weary body. “I would do you so good, you’d forget Bert, forget Row. You’d even forget Dantè.” I felt his lips against my skin as he whispered Dantè’s name.
“So you’ve said,” I spat, feeling more alive than I had in months. Years. Row had stirred some sort of fight in me. “But I’ll never forget him.”
“He forgot about you.” He let his lips graze the curve of my ear. I shivered from head to toe.
“That doesn’t make me yours.”
His hand snapped from the doorframe to my waist, pulling me flush to his body before I could wiggle away. He was strong but the hardest thing about him was digging into my hip.
“You’re right.” He rolled his body against mine, thrusting against my flesh. “My raging boner does.”
“Let me out, Diego.” I shoved against him, and he only moved enough to pin me to the door frame.
“No.”
His hips kept moving, and beneath his board shorts, his dick got harder, becoming a stony column between us. His free hand took the liberty of roaming up the length of my side.
“Stop, Diego.”
“No.” His body kept moving against mine. “Not until I get to fuck you like I hate you.”
“Let me out of here,” I said stronger. “Now!”
His hips froze against me but he kept me trapped. “There’s a price. There’s always a price.”
“Nah—”
Before I could protest, he pressed his lips to mine. I tried to scream at him but he captured my lip in his teeth and settled the weight of his body on mine. I shoved at his chest, but just like all the other times I’d tried to get away from him when he came back home, he overpowered me and kept me beneath him. He let my lips go only to gather them up again with his. His hot breath tasted of stale beer and salt that I realized too late was coming from my own tears.
When he finally pulled back, he had a lazy wicked smile on his face. My tears renewed as I rolled out from under his arm and started down the hallway.
“Don’t talk about Dantè again,” he called after me as I pulled on my sweatshirt and used the sleeves to shove the tears off my cheeks. “And don’t even start talking to Row.”
Their names swirled in my head. Dantè. Row. Row. Dantè. They were nothing alike, and yet, they shared one thing. Me. The way they brightened me up.
My insides had been dormant until today. Now that they were awake, it made Diego’s kiss that much more painful. That much more of a betrayal. Not just to me, but to Dantè. Once upon a time they’d been friends. Best friends. And I wasn’t sure in hindsight when that had changed. Probably sometime around him going to jail and cutting each of us from his heart, one by one.
I sat alone in the dark and fired up my laptop, pulling up a site I had stared at too many times for far too long early on. I hadn’t visited it in months because this screen was even more hopeless than Mackenzie’s unanswered texts. I spent my time waiting instead. Waiting and believing that he was something worth waiting for and that I had the tenacity to do it. Everyone kept saying to move on right? I can’t fight back the curiosity any longer.
I had Dantè’s inmate number, but I always chose to search by name, taking the time to wish on each key stroke as I typed in Dantè’s full name, race, age, and sex to the Federal Bureau of Prison’s website. To wish that he was free.
0 results for search Dantè Rogue
Race: White
Age: 28
Sex: Male
“What?” I cleared the form and typed each letter again. The same message scrawled in tiny font along the bottom of the page. For a moment, panic took control of my body. Though I’d always been sure I would feel it if he left this world, now I wasn’t so sure. Had he slipped through my fingers in more ways than one?
I flipped over to Google and typed in his name, my heartbeat thudding behind my ears so loud I couldn’t hear the key strokes. All too quickly there was a veritable Pandora’s Box of Dantè listed in front of me. Articles about his trial, his Facebook page, articles from school.
My fingers trembled as I opened his profile. It was a time capsule from the days when things were bright and beautiful. From when I felt like I’d risen up from a loveless home and was going to get a happy ending. In his profile picture, he was shirtless, only wearing a red and blue patterned zip up sweater, but decidedly unzipped, exposing his beautiful chest and abs. His eyes were downcast, his thick feather eyelashes fanned out across his cheeks just above his plump lips.
I remembered kissing those lips so vividly that the taste, the sear of those kisses, helped wash away Diego’s even now. My fingers felt the washboard of his stomach and treasured the gentle twitch and flex of his sexy laugh. That sexy laugh that was only mine on soft sun mornings when we were in bed together. When he made me feel like a million dollars because of the way he worshipped my body. My soul.
There were more pictures staring back at me, reminding me of what I’d loved. What I’d lost. And when it got too hard, I flipped back to the main search. An article that I hadn’t noticed before caught my attention.
Convicted murderer, Dantè Rogue, framed, falsely imprisoned, now free.
“What?” My voice trembled as I clicked on the article.
He’d been proven innocent just like I always knew he was. By Mackenzie Relle, the lawyer I’d paid and pled with. My wish had come true. And not just today, but months—months!—ago. She could have told me. And he…He could have come back here, he could have told us all what happened, and that he really was the good and noble man we all believed him to be, but he didn’t. He hadn’t.
He hadn’t kept faith. And he hadn’t come back for me.
A hollowness settled in my chest and wind seemed to whip through me the way it did the tips of the trees on a stormy night. I was alone. Utterly and completely. I was alone and left to the wolves like Diego and my father. Never had betrayal felt like such an acute wound.
But that was what my life was these days. Pain of the worst kind. Achy in my heart and in my bones. A tale of treachery and faithlessness.
“La, da, daaaaaah.” I couldn’t help but sing “Once Upon a Dream” from Sleeping Beauty as I swept in, waltzing with the corners of my dress, just like Aurora. Bert was just that—a dream. Our dates left me swooning like a Disney Princess and I really didn't mind. Matter of fact, I’d secretly always wanted a tiara.
I stayed in my love induced haze as I curtsied to the fridge then whipped it open to grab a bottle of wine, savoring
each moment from our evening together just like I would my sips of wine. I was still humming when I spun toward the living room and froze.
Dantè was hunched on the couch, his head buried in his hands. The only light in the room was what little came in from the street and maybe the moon. I didn’t need more than that to know he’d been crushed. The tilt of his shoulders said everything.
“What happened?” I asked as I rushed to his side, falling to my knees besides his.
“Oh, hey,” he said, his voice all shaky. “How was your date?”
“Oh no, no, no.” She shushed. “This is not about me. Talk to me.” I rubbed his thigh gently, and after a weighted silence, he shifted back and sighed.
“It was a lot tonight.” He shoved his hand into his hair and blew out a deep breath. “Mercy was there.”
“I know,” I said softly as I slid onto the couch next to him and curled into his chest.
“She hurts most of all,” he murmured as his fingers started aimlessly combing through my hair.
“I know that too.”
I thought about Jessie. About how even at the end, it wasn’t his betrayal that left me broken. It was theirs. That random group of equally infinite and finite them. The them that had hurt the man I loved most. Bert couldn’t hurt me like that, even if he tried. I saw that goodness in his eyes. If someone were to hurt him…Or if he turned against me…The thoughts left me silent, listening only to the questions inside me and the steady breathing filling Dantè’s lungs beneath me.
“She made me question whether I really wanted to do any of this.” His quiet confession shot me up straight.
“You can’t be serious?”
“It’s okay, Max,” he said with a mirthless chuckle. “It was just a moment.”
“Okay, because that shit you’re pulling with Danger is driving him insane. In the weeks I’ve been dating Bert, he’s changed. He’s either on drugs or swearing off them completely. He reads code all day long. He can’t figure out how to close the backdoor. He can’t even figure out how it got there.”
“Good,” he said softly as he pushed up from the couch and shuffled toward the kitchen.
He opened the fridge and searched but ended up shutting the door and turning empty handed for the table. I watched him as he moved through the room on autopilot, lost to thoughts that he wouldn’t share with me.
Nerves built in my stomach. If he bailed, what would I have? Nothing, that was what. I’d have my righteous anger and no means to act on it. And that’s what I loved most, to finally feel like I was able to do something about it. About Jessie. This was so much better than the law, which always felt like taking a machete to a jungle of red tape only to be left as confetti anyway. So I’d have confetti, a relationship built on lies, and a friendship crumbling to nothing.
I wasn’t ready for that.
“Rousse likes you.” I tiptoed into the kitchen and sat across from him.
“Always did.” He smirked.
“We could all go surfing, get even closer. Get him to invite you racing.”
“Max…”
“I mean that’s a good plan right? Get him racing? Take that from him?” My questions were speeding up.
“Max…” He tried to slow me down again.
“I mean it’s cars, not his future or livelihood, but I mean—”
“Stop.” He put his big bear paws over mine. “I know what you’re doing and there’s no need.” He managed a full, real smile for me.
“What?” I couldn’t hold his gaze, feeling my selfishness flame up along my cheekbones. “I don’t know…I’m not doing…”
“Max,” he sighed, “they broke me. Sure, some of those pieces still cling to the frame, but they’re the ones that shattered me and relished it.”
I finally got the guts to look him full in the face. The pain I always felt, the vengeance too, still mirrored on his.
“I will return the favor.”
“Yeah?”
He grabbed paper and a pen from the coffee table and focused in on me. “Okay, so tell me more about Rousse.”
“It’s beautiful Dantè,” I gasped as I studied the lines of the still rumbling muscle car. “He’s gonna love it.”
“It was a great idea.” Dantè smiled beneath his aviator sunglasses.
“I’m still sorry I freaked.”
“Don’t be.” He smiled and came in for a side hug, kissing the crown of my head as we stared at the muscled up Mustang in front of us. “I know how deep we’re both in.”
“I don’t…I’m not…”
“You are too, Max, and I’m grateful. Every day.”
I wound my arms around his torso and leaned in. “Me too, Dantè. Me too.”
“Get in.” He jerked his chin toward the car, our surf boards already sticking out of the backseat, then tapped me on the ass just to get me moving.
For a moment, as we drove down the 101, all of it was forgotten. The wind whipped in my hair as music danced with sunbeams, swirling into the car then back out again. There was a freedom when it was just Dantè and me. No pretense, no problems, no pricks. I would have frozen that moment and basked in the ease of it forever.
Each slight curve unfurled a little more of the California coastline beneath the golden sunshine. The dramatic cliffs and ocean monoliths punctuated the beauty of the world around me and the moment itself. I used to take these curves on the back of a bike but unlike so much of that life with Jessie, they hadn’t dimmed or lost their beauty. Just like my desire for revenge, to see him vindicated in some small way, they hadn’t dulled. Even after meeting Bert.
All three of us rode beside Dantè. There were three points of view to everything I did. Comments on choices and paths and judgement. Constant judgement. I couldn’t fathom the roil in Dantè’s head.
“Here we go.” Dantè sliced into the moment with a sigh as he slowed the car and pulled into a parking spot.
I grabbed my bag and he grabbed our boards. We fell into the easy, understanding laugh that embodied our friendship as sand squished between our toes, and we walked toward the four figures already waiting on the beach.
“Hey guys!” Rousse called as he jogged over, spraying sand up from his footprints in arcs behind him.
“Gorgeous!” Bert called out behind him, and I felt the physical jolt when our eyes locked.
I didn’t make the conscious choice to run for him, there was just a yearning deep in my belly for now that propelled me across the beach and into his arms. He caught me with a kiss and open arms as I launched myself at him. When we tumbled back into the warm sand behind him, I was eternally grateful that he wasn’t the brick wall that Dantè was.
When I finally broke away from his lips, laughter filled the space between us until I leaned in and rubbed my nose against his.
“Hi,” I breathed.
“I missed you.” His hands made a point of reacquainting themselves with the curves of my body.
“Missed you more.”
He turned me over and pressed me into the sand beneath his body. My attention slipped from Bert for just a moment and saw the wicked smile Dantè wore as he shoved my board in the sand by my feet and followed Rousse toward the ocean.
“Will you stick with me today?” Bert pulled my attention back. “Will you teach me how to surf? Better, anyway.”
“I’m not great. Dantè taught me everything I know.” I tensed beneath him as soon as his name slipped out.
“Who’s Dantè?” He asked as he arched up from me.
My eyes darted to the boys, Rousse was close enough to hear the name and turn. His eyes searched mine. I managed to force a flushed smile beneath Bert even though my heart slammed into my chest and my palms went clammy in the sand.
“Did you say Dantè?” he asked while the actual Dantè stayed so still I wasn’t sure if he was even breathing. Diego and Danger’s head whipped toward us in the sand. The heat of their stares a blistering sizzle.
Dantè turned ever so slowly to face us. His
glare was an ice so chilling I shivered despite the sun. But it was grounding, familiar in its wrath and anger.
“He was a friend in college. Taught me how to stand on a board.” I finally managed to suck in a full breath. “Row made me better, became my surfing buddy.”
My words hung in the air for a few heartbeats. Heartbeats that seemed to stretch on forever and to eternity. They thundered in my head and shook my body, leaving me with the sensation that the world was falling out from under me despite the sand’s caress.
Fuck.
But then Danger smiled. And it wasn’t malicious—at least not for Danger. “I wish my surf buddies looked half as good in a bikini.”
“Now I know what you’re staring at during staff meetings.” Dantè clapped him on the shoulder and they turned back toward the ocean.
I sagged back into the sand with a heavy sigh and a beaming smile I reserved for Bert.
“Don’t do that,” he said as he sat back onto his knees.
“What?” I shoved up onto my elbows after him.
“They all keep secrets from me.” He watched the boys head for the water, and his lips thinned into a small line. “Don’t you do it too.”
Each pulse of blood through my veins was a wave breaking. Pummel after pummel. I couldn’t even think about Max saying my name, just on what needed to come next. What words, what moves would detach me from that name. From their reaction.
“Is she a Paris or Hawaii girl?” Danger asked.
“Huh?”
His question snapped my inward spiral shut for a moment and I was able to shift my attention to him as he carried his board beside me.
“Is she a Paris or Hawaii girl?” he repeated.
“Jordan?” I crinkled my brow and let my smile pull up as my feet slipped into the surf. “I think she’d rather go to Paris.”
Danger started laughing as he shoved his board forward and slid onto it. I followed suit just before he looked over.
“I meant do you think she’d prefer getting Eiffel towered or spit roasted?”