by Jewel, Bella
“If I ever see him on a boost with you again, Ace, he’s dead. Do you hear me?”
I shift on the bed, my belly forming knots. I never wanted Kelly involved. He’s fought too hard to be where he is today. His life means too much. He deserves happiness. He deserves so much more than I can give him, but what I give will have to be enough because I’m not letting go. He’s stuck with me now. Like a barnacle on a rock.
“You’re awake.” My eyes shift to the doorway of my room. It’s Echo. She’s wearing a short cotton dress in black and white stripes with white Converse on her feet, wiping her hands on a tea towel. “Chortle Chunks is awake!” she calls out to someone over her shoulder.
“Chortle Chunks?” My head pounds as I rise up on one shoulder. “Urgh.” I sink back down.
She laughs. The demonic sound grates against my throbbing ears. “That’s the name Kelly bestowed upon you after you blew chunks in your bed before laughing and passing out.”
Oh Jesus. I did that? I raise a hand to cover my eyes, wondering if my mattress would be so kind as to swallow me whole.
“He just calls you Chunks now, mostly.”
“How long was I out?” I rasp, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. There is nothing sexy about throwing up, especially not in front of the guy you have the serious hots for.
“Five days.” Five days? That long? “Yes that long,” she says, answering the silent surprise she can see on my face. “I’m making dinner. You hungry?”
“Does a bear shit in the woods?” I retort.
She leaves as Kelly appears in the doorway. He’s shirtless and barefoot, his legs encased in pale worn jeans. He looks warm and sleepy, like he’s been lazing the afternoon away on the couch. It’s unfair. I’m positive I look like crusted-over mould and he’s standing there like a giant cookie I want to shove in my mouth. My eyes rise higher. His hair. His hair. “You cut your hair.” My voice is an accusation. And his beard is trimmed short. I don’t know what to think. His black eye has cleared, and he appears a little less hard, maybe. He grins beneath my stare, and I suck in a breath because a dimple lies beneath the beard. A little diamond in the rough. No way. “You have a dimple,” I breathe in wonder, mesmerised by the new man that stands before me. “It’s … fucking adorable.”
Kelly swipes a hand down the lower half of his face, wiping away the smile and the dimple. “Don’t you remember?”
“Remember what?”
He steps inside my room, walking over to my bed as he talks. “Getting home. I carried you inside. You yelled at me about my hair and then you passed out.”
“She used to believe in magic and fairy tales.”
“He’ll always want more, and he’ll do whatever it takes to get it, even if that means never letting you go.”
I raise a hand to my face, covering my cheekbone with the flat of my palm as it all comes flooding back in waves. What was I thinking with the whole Kelly won’t even notice. I’m an idiot. I forgot how he placed that ice pack to my jaw with such care, his lips pressed in a fine white line.
“I remember.” You’re going to kill him. “Don’t kill him.”
Kelly seats himself on the edge of my bed. The mattress sags beneath his weight and my body dips toward him. “I can’t promise you I won’t,” he says, trailing gentle fingers down the side of my cheek.
His reply fills me with sick dread. “Kelly—”
He puts a finger to my lips. “No more. We’ll talk about it next week. Right now you need rest. I need you better because I told my brother I was going to this damn wedding on the weekend and you’re comin’ with me.”
The dresses. It all makes sense now.
“Do they know I’m coming too?”
“They didn’t but they do now.”
My vision blurs and I reach blindly for his hand, giving it a squeeze. I don’t want to make a big deal of it but him going is a big deal. It’s a massive deal. And now I understand the hair and the beard. He’s not trying to hide the lion within, he’s just learning how to harness it.
“That makes you sad?” He looks away. “Because if you don’t want to go, you don’t have to.”
“Why would I not want to go?”
“The family dinner, Ace.”
My face remains blank.
“I can’t even look at you?” he prompts.
A beat of silence passes before the penny drops. “At Mason!” I burst out. “I said that to Mason. Oh my god, you thought I said that to you?”
His jaw tightens.
He did. Anger rises swiftly. “Fuck you.” I punch him in the thigh but this virus has made me weak. My fist merely deflects off of his leg. “Don’t you know me at all?”
I go to thump him again, but he grabs at my hand. He grabs the other too, just in case, and he looks me in the eye. “I killed my father, Ace, while my mother lay bleeding out on the floor. I went downstairs and I got a gun from the locked drawer of my father’s desk. I took it out, making sure it was loaded. Then I went back upstairs and I put that gun to his head, and do you know what he said?”
“What?” I croak.
“Do it, Son. He wanted to die. He couldn’t live with what he did. I should have forced him to, but I couldn’t walk this earth knowing he still breathed the same air and saw the same stars as I did, all while my mother was buried in the ground, alone in the dark, where she would never breathe the same air and never see the same stars again.”
His voice chokes and tears start rolling down my face. My heart aches. It aches for him. It aches for his mother, who will never know the man her boy grew up to be. Someone who’s fighting so hard to let go of the hurt, and the guilt, and the bitterness. He’s fighting for happiness, and I want to be right there beside him, fighting for it with him.
“Do you know what I said to my father just before he died?”
“What did you say?”
He lets go of my hands and cups my face, brushing my tears away with his thumbs. “I told him I’d see him in Hell, but I was too young to understand. When I got older I realised it isn’t a place where you go after you die. Hell is somethin’ you carry inside you. It’s dark and heavy and fuck it, Ace, I’m tired of carryin’ it around.”
“Kelly—”
He shakes his head. “So when you said I can’t even look at you, I believed you meant it for me because when I look in the mirror I see that very same Hell in the eyes starin’ back at me.”
Jesus. I pull him toward me, wrapping my arms around him. I can’t hug him tight enough, or long enough, but I hold on as hard as I can, love bubbling up inside me so big and so bright it’s a wonder I can see. “Kelly,” I choke out, lost for words. What can I say to the boy who suffered so much pain and the man who carries it around with him every single day? I don’t want to fail him.
His arms slowly wind their way around me, until he’s holding me so tight I can barely breathe, and maybe that’s enough. “Let it go. Take the good memories and let the rest go.”
“How?” he asks, his head tucked in my shoulder and voice muffled.
“I don’t know.” Because fuck it, I don’t, but I wish I did. “But I’m not going anywhere. We can work it out together.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Kelly
We’re driving to my brother’s wedding when my feelings for Ace hit me. It isn’t like a brick to the head. It’s a slow realisation. Something that’s been building in intensity until I feel it through every inch of my body, and it’s just in that moment I recognise it for what it is.
I had picked her up from Echo’s apartment in the newly painted bright blue ’67 Mustang Fastback we’ve been re-furbishing for an old friend, leaving both windows open because the afternoon was warm and the sky was bright and cloudless. She was a beautiful car, with thick white stripes down the middle that I knew Ace would love. This is what her car could have been, and I wanted her to have this chance to ride in it before the car was returned to its owner.
Ace came out wearing a floor-lengt
h silver dress that shimmered in the late afternoon sunshine, which contrasted with the warmth of her skin—a colour that always looked tanned no matter what the season. The shoulder straps were delicate—thinner than my shoelaces and criss-crossing in a complicated pattern at the back where the dress dipped down to her ass. I know her hair was done by a professional because Echo arranged it for her, but it honestly looked as though she’d dipped her hair in the ocean and left it to dry in the sun. It was long and tousled, the ends golden as if she’d spent the day at the beach. Her eyelids had a light dust of what looked like bronze glitter, and her lips were the glossy colour of a ripe peach.
She’d somehow dressed for a black-tie event while still managing to appear earthy and natural at the same time. By some miracle, I managed to open my mouth and speak so I could tell her just how beautiful she looked.
The words didn’t seem enough because I didn’t see her at face value. I saw all she was on the inside reflecting outward, and it was more than beautiful. It was real. It was everything.
We were halfway there. I was accelerating after the light turned green, changing gears as I told her about how I first learned to ride a bike, because yeah, it’s funny now. Back then, when I was a young hothead with a bruised ego, not so much. Her body was twisted toward me, and she was laughing, her smile wide and hair whipping about in the breeze.
That’s when it hit me what that bright hot jittery feeling was.
I loved her.
My smile must have dropped clean away, my foot relaxing on the accelerator. The car started to slow.
“Kelly? Is everything okay?”
I don’t know. Is it? Suddenly I feel stupid. As if I should have known what these growing feelings were from the start. But had I known, what would I have done? Run the other way? Fucked her once and left? It takes only a moment for me to realise that running was impossible. She was under my skin from the start. You can’t run from that.
But now I don’t know what to say. Or how to act. Or what to do with how I feel. It’s actually true that love makes you stupid.
Arcadia
“Everything’s fine,” he replies.
It doesn’t feel fine. There’s an odd vibe in the car, as if I’ve somehow made Kelly uncomfortable. “I’m not going to throw up all over this beautiful upholstery,” I reassure him if that’s what he’s worried about. The virus has cleared. And while I’m fatigued from doing the smallest of things, my stomach is making up for what it lost over the last week.
“It’s all good, Chunks. I know you’re feeling better.”
“Then you can stop calling me Chunks.”
Kelly glances across at me, winking. “Where’s the fun in that?”
He’s brushing me off and rather than just letting it go like I should because we’re on our way to a beautiful wedding, and I want to enjoy just being with him and riding in a beautiful car. I push, and pushing never works out well for anybody. “Is it Casey? I know you didn’t want to go to the wedding.”
“It’s not the wedding.” He shifts gears, accelerating as he changes lanes.
“It’s Tony, isn’t it?” His lips twist. The subject is a touchy one, and I shouldn’t have broached it, but since getting better, I have a vague recollection of Kelly and Fox arguing in my room while I was out of it. He was furious. It’s why I remember because I’ve never heard him so angry. It sounded as though Fox were talking him down from a ledge. He mentioned something about sticking to the plan. And that comment has niggled at me ever since. “What plan were you and Fox talking about in my room?”
He doesn’t react. There’s no widening of his eyes. No jerky moves on the steering wheel. Nothing. And his non-reaction is almost a reaction in itself. “We weren’t talking about a plan.”
“Really?” Liar! “Because Tony seems to think you have an ulterior motive at play.”
And if I wanted a reaction, that got me one. His hands white-knuckle the wheel as he wrenches it sideways. We veer off the road, tyres screeching as he grinds the car to a skidding halt just five minutes out from the ceremony venue. He switches off the engine and turns to face me, nostrils flaring and perspiration beading on his brow. “What are we doing here, Ace? Huh?”
He’s mad. Sweat begins forming beneath my armpits. “What do you mean?” I ask, reaching for my little evening bag. I need tissues. The last thing I want to do is ruin Grace and Casey’s wedding with bad body odour. I open the silver clutch.
Kelly slaps it from my hand. Its contents spew across the matting of the car floor. “What is the point of us? You and me?”
I stutter, my eyes shifting from my discarded bag to his face. “Well … we …”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing with me if you’re going to give credit to anything Tony says. I mean, Jesus Christ,” he spits. “He thinks I have an ulterior motive at play and you believe him?”
I rub my peach-gloss coated lips together as everything he said sinks in. “I can see now that I worded that wrong.”
“Worded it wrong?” His brows fly up and almost off his face. “Worded it wrong?”
“Forget I said anything.”
“Forget …” He trails off, an expression of amazement on his face. Irritated amazement, as if he can’t believe the words that are coming out of my mouth. Then he huffs.
“I didn’t say I believed him.”
“Yet it made you doubt me.”
“You’re hiding something from me. So maybe you don’t have an ulterior motive, but something is going on and keeping me in the dark is just putting me in danger.”
Kelly rubs a hand over his face while my eyes glance to the clock on the dashboard. The last thing I want is for us to be late to his brother’s wedding because we’re sitting in a car arguing by the side of the road. I stare ahead, unhappy, the air between us soured like curdled milk. This is why you never push. “Can we just go?”
A beat of pained silence passes between us, and without another word, he starts the car and pulls out into traffic. We arrive at the venue in time, finding a park not too far away. I’m thankful because I’m wearing heels, which is rare for me. Kelly walks around the front of the car. I know his intention is to open my door for me, yet I beat him to it. Not because I’m deliberately trying to be a bitch. I’m angry at myself more than anything. It’s bleeding over into my attitude, and I can’t seem to stop it.
I crouch, reaching for my clutch and its scattered contents.
“Let me get that,” he says quietly and gently nudges me aside. I straighten while he collects my clutch. I don’t know what it is about watching him put my lip-gloss inside the little bag with care, followed by my little tube of eye drops because when I wear contact lenses this late in the day it makes my eyes dry out and the lenses stick to my eyeballs. It just makes me sag, my anger deflating like a punctured balloon. Sometimes Kelly angers me so much, and then he humbles me with the slightest gesture.
He rises, his body close to mine as he clips the delicate latch on the bag closed. Then he looks at me as he hands it over. “Here you go, Chunks.”
I take it, trying to pull it from his grip when he doesn’t let go. “I’m not Chunks.”
“You kinda are.”
“One time,” I reply, yanking at the bag. “I throw up one time and what, I’m Chunks for life?”
“Babe. You name it, you threw up on it.”
“Give me the bag, Kelly.”
“I don’t wanna fight with you, Ace. You can have the bag, but not until we kiss and make up.”
“You’re impossible.” I yank again and his lips twitch. “You’re holding my bag hostage for a kiss?”
“Yep.”
“Give him a kiss, love!” someone calls out.
I turn my head. We’re being eyeballed by guests walking toward the venue, all of them dressed in suits and glittery gowns, hair and makeup immaculate while I probably look like I rode in on a cyclone. And not only that, I’m here griping at Kelly and playing tug of war with a glittery clu
tch. “You’re so immature,” I mutter at him.
“Speak for yourself.”
“Fine! Kiss me, then.” I close my eyes and pucker my lips.
“Nobody wants to kiss a fish face, babe.”
I burst out laughing, so hard I lose my breath and begin to wheeze, and I’m glad I have the bag to hold on to otherwise I fear I’ll topple over in these heels.
“You’re not going to vomit are you?” I hear him ask, sounding genuinely worried.
* * *
The ceremony is beautiful. Held at the Grounds of Alexandria at dusk with pink and orange in the sky and a thousand fairy lights creating magic around us. Even though I don’t know them that well, my eyes burn as I watch Grace and Casey exchange vows, Grace saying, “I’ve seen the best of you, and I’ve seen the worst of you, and I choose both,” and Casey with, “I want to hold your hand at eighty and say we made it.” They’re both funny and serious, making promises to love each other through sickness and health, for life.
I sniffle quietly.
“You cryin’?” Kelly whispers from beside me.
“Don’t judge me.”
He grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze, and he doesn’t judge me while I swallow the lump in my throat. I tilt my head to look up at him while he watches his brother get married.
Kelly always knows just the right thing to do at just the right time. Comforting me through a tender moment. Making me laugh when I’m angry. Stealing cars with me when I’m in trouble. Taking care of me when I’m sick. Standing up to Mason when my brother condemns me. It all flashes through my mind as he squeezes my hand, and my vision blurs worse.
I look away from his handsome face, blinking madly. He leans in close to my ear, whispering, “You have a tender heart.”
For some reason I don’t like him thinking me so vulnerable. I don’t want him seeing inside my heart when I have no clue what’s inside his. “My heart is tougher than old leather, Kelly Daniels.”