“What the hell are you doing?” Trudy screams as I slug him in the jaw. And do you know what that mofo did? He slapped me like a bitch, right across the cheek. “Dom! They’re going to kill one another!”
Stepping forward, Dom extends his arms, letting us duke it out.
Trudy panics, “Aren’t you going to stop them?”
“No.”
“Fucking pussy ass!” Deacon groans as I try and get out from under him, but I only end up flopping on my belly. The son of a bitch grabs my waist and makes it look like we’re getting it on in the grass.
“This is not something I ever wanted see!” Trudy yells as I knock him in the sack with the back of my heel.
“You’re such a fucking prick! Sticking your dick anywhere you fucking can!”
Ouch.
Low blow, babe.
True—but still.
“You didn’t complain,” I hiss, confirming what everyone suspected. I walk away but add, “You begged for more like a good little slut!”
He comes at me again. Grabbing my sweaty arms, he tries to throw my ass back down, but I scissor one across with the southpaw into his wall of rock hard abs. It fuckin hurt my damn hand.
“Yours!” He leaps onto my back, and I fall to my knees.
With Deacon hunkered over me, he unsnaps my keys from the D-clip on my belt and takes off running towards my new Jeep.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I yell, stomping through the yard and talking with my arms, which are shouting quite loudly with their bird like motions. He cranks it up and I jump into the passenger seat. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Getting you the hell out of the fray,” he snaps, spitting out the window and grabbing a smoke. “Because this isn’t any of their goddamned business. This is between you and me. And Italy.”
He backs up and kills it.
“It’s a fucking standard, twerp.”
He blinks up and those sad blue eyes stab my heart with the force of a thousand men. “Fuck you.”
“Clutch all the way in,” I remind, grabbing a smoke.
He shakes his head and backs up with everyone watching on. “You’re such a goddamned asshole.”
“Takes one to know one, fucker.”
We drive down through town square, not saying a word. Main Street is quiet this time of night. I think about what he said—getting you the hell out of the fray—and I know, he still loves me. He didn’t say me or us but you.
He is protecting me.
“Thank you,” I mumble as we take the dark, winding road out to his house when a bolt of lightning sprawls across the darkened sky like an electrified, glowing varicose vein. The roar of thunder booms and I feel it in my bones.
“For what?”
“Reminding me, who I am.”
“It’s about damn time,” he says. “I haven’t talked to you all summer. Months, Raniero. Months.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.” I lift my foot to the seat and wrap my arm around my leg. “I think I broke up with Iris.”
“I’m very aware.”
“And yet, you’re here, making out with Allie… Why does this not make any sense to me? I gave Iris up for you…”
“I never wanted Iris!”
I scoff and give a hate-filled stare. “Could’ve fooled me!”
Pulling out my phone, I flip to the horrific reminder of why we’re the torn apart trio. I show him the pictures as he’s driving. He veers off to the shoulder and touches the screen of my phone.
“What the hell?”
“Are you going to say—this didn’t happen?” I accuse, holding the phone in my trembling hand. “Because I really can’t handle hearing anymore lies from your forked tongue.”
“Not like that!” he argues, “And you ought to know my slithering snake ain’t speared.” We sit on the side of the road for half an hour while he flips through the entire folder. I nervously watch the rain, the water, and my worst fears unfold. “This all happened.”
“You were naked with my girl.”
“And I told Iris, we couldn’t because it would break you,” he points out, steaming with fury. Setting his elbow on the door frame, he stares outside. “I did not stick my dick in your girl, and if I had, where the fuck are those pictures? Because they should exist! Were we close to it happening?—Yeah, and I won’t deny that. I’m passionate about her, but I couldn’t hurt you or go against your wishes, Sir. I stopped.” He shakes his head. “You know what? Just forget it.”
He gets out.
And walks.
In the torrential fucking downpour.
I am trained for this.
But fuck if it ain’t hard some days.
60
Penetrate My Purification Engine
I creep behind him in the Jeep for the two miles home.
The creek in his driveway rushes with a violent churn like I’ve never seen. With my headlights on his back, the son of a bitch steps into the water. “You fucking idiot…”
I keep my eyes on his sun-kissed blonde hair as he goes deeper and deeper to the center. It’s half-way up his chest when the current sweeps him away.
“Motherfucker!” I hop out of the Jeep, and without even considering my own safety, I lunge towards him. “No! Deacon!”
The water is so deep, dark, cold…and peaceful.
All I can hear is the water.
Whip-whirling and spinning in the current, I stop trying to control my body. I cease treading to end the fight because I cannot do any of this anymore.
And I imagine Rebecca…and now Deacon…finding peace in drowning as their lungs fill with water—succumbing to the innocence and returning to heaven.
The memory hits like a wave, capsizing all I have ever known.
“Sal, why are you always fishing?” Maria stomped out onto the dock with her sister Rebecca following. “Fishing is so boring.”
“I enjoy the quiet,” I said, guiding the pole. “At least until you arrived.”
Tugging on my long sleeves, she begged, “Can we go find seashells, please?”
“I will go with you for a few minutes,” I said, reeling in my line. I scooped up baby Rebecca as we headed down the coast.
Surrounded by a rocky landscape, the small sandy beach held a rare treat at the vacation home. We searched for seashells for a few minutes as Maria became distracted by a seagull. She ran over to the slippery black rocks, being lapped repeatedly with the waves. She climbed higher and further away until I could no longer see her.
In her pink gingham dress and bonnet, Rebecca played in the sand. Squatting, she giggled with a precious grin. I adored the moments with her because I never had a baby sibling—Rebecca was it. She would laugh, spin, and plop in the sand.
I was watching her. I saw her. She was fine.
Suddenly, I heard Maria cry out, screaming in pain. Running as fast I could, I found her laying on a rock. She fell, injuring her forehead. Blood spilled, staining her clothes red, and I carefully helped her up. It was the first time I ever saw that much blood from someone I loved.
From the rocks, I glanced back to where Rebecca was.
She vanished.
And I ran.
I’d been running ever since.
“Sal!!!” Deacon bellows over the deafening flood as I come out of the blackout. “Take my fucking hand or you’re going to die! Do it! God! Please! Don’t fucking leave me! Raniero!!!”
I reach for his hand and miss as I cyclone further downstream. My body bounces like a pinball, pirouetting off tree limbs and debris in the swollen creek.
“I need you to trust me, Raniero.” Iris lightly pulled my fingers, forcing me to make the decision of letting her go or following her into the water. I let her lead my broken boy into the water. “Where are we going?”
Her naked body climbed onto mine as I curled my fingers around her legs. “To the source.” I waded through the water until I slipped. I didn’t let go of her, but lost my hat when we went under. I could no longer touch th
e bottom, but I was confident I could save us despite my hatred of the tides. I brought us up and she plopped my hat on my head—backward. “I hate the water.”
“Because you want to control it.”
“Probably.” I kept moving, closer and closer to the rocks beneath the falls. “It’s unstable.”
Knowing she was the water to my fire, she asked, “Are you saying, I am unstable?”
“I’m drawn to it. It’s like the greatest temptation for me,” I confessed, stroking through the water with all of my might to get us there. “But I’m fucking scared as hell of it.”
“Sal!!!” Deacon clamors again as my forearm latches around a fallen tree. “Ease back along the length and take my fucking hand!”
I peer up to see Deacon balanced on the base of the trunk with the aura of lighting shining behind him. It is an ethereal, haunting moment where I just want to bask in his glory.
He looks like Jesus.
He looks like a Saint.
And he is screaming at me.
“How much fucking coke did you do?”
“None, asshole,” I shout, carefully inching my body along the gnarly bark. The wet, rough surface scratches over my bare chest. I hurt everywhere—my hands, my mind, and my heart.
The sound of tree branches breaking is a sound like no other, and when the root gives way with our added weight, the snap echoes like a gunshot through the tunnel of darkness. “We’re going to die out here!”
“Shit!” Deacon howls, sliding down the steep edge of the embankment with a thud. “Fucking hell!”
“Are you okay?” I ask, grappling onto the tree, which is hung up in even more limbs, for dear life. I’ve never been someplace so pitch black, so frightening, so…inherently evil.
This is my rock bottom.
And it is fucking beautiful—blissful.
“I’m alive. I’m not okay. This is not okay. I’m putting this fucking place up for sale tomorrow if I make it out of here.”
“Like fuck!” I shout, realizing how many memories we have yet to make. “No fucking way!”
“I said it before and I’ll say it again—I don’t want to do this without you!”
“You don’t have to,” I yell as a hefty branch jabs into my belly and scrapes along my gut. “Just tell me you didn’t fuck my girl!”
“You asked me to stay out of your nest, Sir!” Deacon fiercely defends. “And I’m a better sub than you ever give me credit for!”
“I’m an asshole!”
“No, you’re Sal!” I feel the vibration of movement along the trunk. “Take my fucking hand, you bastard!” I reach back, barely grazing his fingers. “Come some more.”
“… That’s what all the bitches say.”
“Fuck you, man,” he snickers and I want to cry. I want to cry for what we have lost. I want to cry for what we have become. I want to cry for what we have been blessed enough to find—each other. “What are we going to do about the Jeep?”
Knowing he is making future plans, I smile. We are going to get out of this. We have to. There is no failure. There is no loss. There is only victory.
Even thinking about fear or bad things brings negative energy.
The love of my life is kind of kooky and kinky in her thoughts. And God, I miss her. We’re so close to the end and I’m dropping the fucking ball—and I don’t just have two; I have four. Deacon’s and mine. So there.
“Let it run out of gas, cause I’m not going back across Deacon’s Swollen Stream to turn it off.”
“I got ya,” he assures, gripping ahold of my hand like we’re about to arm wrestle. “And I’ll be damned if I’m ever letting go again.”
“Do you think it will dry out?” I ask, shaking the phone from Jaid in the bag of rice the next morning.
“It will if you will leave it the fuck alone,” Deacon maintains, sitting in the dining chair and doctoring the multitude of lacerations across my belly. We got back to the house, showered, and crashed. Yes, in the same bed. No, we did not fuck like animals. We almost died. “Can you stop fucking wiggling?”
“I’m a little high strung. I saw my Guardian Angel last night.”
“… Did I have a halo?”
“Golden cock ring.”
He quickly blinks to me. “Shut up,” he scolds. “You don’t get to make light of your inherent need to find the dark. I swear it’s like a magnet with you. For about five minutes, I didn’t know where the fuck you were. I thought you were dead.”
I play with his bangs, parting them and running my fingers from the root to the tip, over and over again. “What would you have done?”
He thinks for a moment. “After I convinced myself not to come back to the house and blow my fucking brains out?”
“Ya,” I whisper, understanding how scared he was.
“I would’ve gone to Iris. Held her while she screamed. Hurt while she cried. And then, I would’ve married her. And put babies in her belly named Salvatore I to IV. And I would have nicknamed them like X…One, Two, Three, Four.”
“Sounds like we’re counting down for a raid,” I consider, stretching my fingers. “No girls?”
He bends back and gives me a glare. “… You’re fucking kidding, right? Can you imagine the hell boyfriends would have to go through with Dom and Nico as her uncles?”
I laugh. He’s right.
Poor, poor boyfriends.
Our daughters will be forced to become lesbians.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do if I got Iris pregnant,” I whisper, thinking about the future. “I guess we weren’t being very smart.”
“Do you love her?”
“Yes.”
He blots ointment on my belly. “Then you don’t worry about it. Odds are you didn’t.”
“I will want her with me,” I confide. “I don’t want to miss a single fucking minute.”
“I’ll make sure you don’t.”
“Can I stay with you until tomorrow?”
“You don’t have to ask,” he says as I grimace. “This one is deep, you want some sutures?”
“Nah,” I say. “I want you to cook me something.”
He carefully cleans the gash as I clench my jaw. It’s bad. I fucking took some damage from a tree, and I’m offended. “I can evade bullets and bad guys, but a tree… What if that limb had punctured me?”
“It didn’t.”
“But what if it had?”
“I would have figured out how to get you to the hospital, even if I would’ve had to carry your ass.” He steps back and examines my wounds and shakes his head. “What do you want?”
“Vegetarian pizza, gray sweatpants, and some baseball?”
“You got it, baby.”
Deacon is shirtless and dusted in flour as I scan over his tablet looking for someone to fix the motherfucking driveway problem. I sigh.
“We should just build a bridge over the damn thing.”
He furrows a brow. “We’re not doing that this week.”
“No,” I concur. The creek was low enough by noon, Deacon trudged through the water and rescued the Jeep and my current phone in the console. “Emily is scheduled for surgery on Friday. I have to get back home.”
“Is she really doing it?”
“The doctor says they can repair the damage Jack Kerris did, and we should be able to have children.”
He tosses the pizza in the oven. “Dear God… One minute, you’re dreamily wanting to have demon spawns with the lotus flower and the next you’re worrying about knocking up the devil.”
“Tell me, I know, but Emily isn’t the devil.”
“You aren’t going through with it,” he contends, washing his hands and grabbing a towel. “What the fuck are you going to do?”
I pull a smoke from the pack and light it as I type out a very assertive text to Jaid, warning her to stay out of my life. I glance over to Deacon. “I don’t fucking know. If I knew, I would’ve already done it.”
“Who are you texting?”
“Jaid.”
Stealing the smoke, he nods. “You shouldn’t be mad.”
I drop the fucking phone on the counter. “How the hell can you even say that?”
“Easy,” he says. “She is in love with you. She would do anything to have you, even making it look like Iris and I are having an affair behind your back. You cannot underestimate the pink posse. Some of them are great. Some of them are out to destroy us. Don’t make a dumb mistake here, Nero. A woman is just as capable as a man in gunning for The Unholy or Iris. Don’t be narrow.”
“I’m not being narrow.”
“It would be a fatal mistake is all I’m saying,” he continues, taking a drag. “Iris is about to have a shitton of power and she will wield it accordingly. That means calling shots. And calling shots gets you marked.”
“She’s killed before…”
“I know she has,” he says, smashing the butt into the ashtray. “But when we’re thinking about this gang shit with Cinco or anyone else, we don’t need to forget that behind every man is a pissed off wife or mother or sister or daughter or best friend.”
“God knows Trudy could pull a gun,” I marvel. “Serene could, too. And hell, Amber has multiple times.” Twisting my hair, I lean back in the chair and look up. There are still no answers available on the ceiling. “But why would Jaid do something so diabolical when she knew I was going to drop her like she was hot?”
We stare at each other as he elaborates on my exact thoughts. “Maybe because she knew you would. Jaid is smart. She’ll play reverse psychology on you. And beat your ass.”
“She thinks.”
I am trained for this.
But fuck if it ain’t hard some days.
61
Please Swimmers, Stay Away From Her Shores
“I’m going to stay at your house tonight,” Cat says as we wait for Emily to get out of surgery. I’m actually worried because I do love the girl. And I learned one very profound thing at Deacon’s while trying to drown in his river.
Hear me out.
Don’t think about this all sick and twisted, but Emily is Rebecca’s replacement. I’m serious. I loved spending time with Rebecca because she was the only one younger than me, and I could take care of her. I could provide for Baby Rebecca. And I lost her at such a young age, I think my computer uploaded Baby Emlee as a substitute.
Every Minute I Love You (a Tomb of Ashen Tears Book 3) Page 51