“What? You gonna shoot me in front of all these people? You gonna kill me in the middle of the fucking day with a bunch of witnesses standing around who could send you to jail?” Burk rolled his eyes.
“He really must be new in town,” Bear joked.
I raised the gun and aimed it at Burk’s chest.
“Why do you keep saying that!” Burk screamed backing up and raising his hands in the air. He looked over my shoulder to the crowd where not one person was making a move to protect him.
“Because,” I said, cocking the gun. “None of them are going to call the fucking cops.”
“Oh yeah?” Burk challenged “And why the fuck is that?”
I pulled the trigger twice, sending Burk’s bleeding body rolling into a heap of his own garbage.
“Because, unlike you, they know who we fucking are.”
I may not have found Bo, but I did find someone else. An old friend of mine I didn’t even know I missed.
And his name was Revenge.
“Reunited and it feels so goooooood,” I sang out the open truck window as we flew over The Causeway. I breathed in the salty air and it wasn’t enough. I opened my mouth so I could taste it on my tongue. Bear pulled me inside by my shirt. “Fuck, that was better than any therapy,” I said after planting my ass back on the seat. “What a fucking rush!”
“Yeah, Prep, if it put you in this good of a mood we should find someone else to kill,” Bear said sarcastically.
I pulled the note from my pocket and smiled. “Done.”
“‘Bout time you started feeling better,” King said, turning onto the dirt road under the bridge.
“No!” I exclaimed, turning toward them and gesturing with my hands as I spoke, one of which was still holding the gun. MY gun. “I don’t just feel better; I feel…” I looked up at my two best friends who were eagerly awaiting for me to tell them something the shit-eating grins on their faces told me they already knew.
“ALIVE. I feel fucking ALIVE.”
25
Five Months Later
DRE
I pulled the covers up to my chin but was still unable to shake the chill that had seeped into my bones. Every single degree the temperature dropped made me miss Logan’s Beach even more than I already did.
When I realized the chill was coming from my bedroom window that I didn’t remember leaving open I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and padded over to shut it, sleepily bumping into my desk in the process.
“You look like an adorable fucking Eskimo all bundled up like that,” a deep voice said from out of nowhere. I turned around and jumped back, bracing my hands on the window sill as the door slowly creaked closed. A face I never thought I’d see again stepped out from the shadows. He smiled and his eyes gleamed.
“What?” I asked. “Why are you here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be here?” he asked like it was an absurd question, and I wasn’t sure if he was telling me that was the reason he was there or just stating a fact.
“Because it’s been five months and I haven’t heard a damn thing from you,” I said, trying to catch my breath. Preppy walked around the room slowly picking up frames and trophies from my youth and running his hands over my ribbon for winning first place in the eighth grade science fair. “You scared the shit out of me you know.”
“How’s your dad?”
“He’s fine now. It was minor heart attack. He just has to watch what he eats and his stress levels. He was lucky he noticed the signs as early as he did and Edna called for help,” I said.
“That’s good. What did you make to win this?” Preppy asked. He held up the ribbon.
I mashed my lips together. “A portable printing press.”
“For books and shit?” He set the ribbon back down.
I shook my head and wrapped the blanket around me tighter. I shivered, but this time the cold had nothing to do with it. “A money press.”
Preppy smiled and I saw pride gleam in his eyes. “You made a counterfeit money printing press in the eighth grade…and you won?”
I shrugged. “Wasn’t that hard. Second place was one of those volcanoes that dripped tomato soup from the top.” Preppy was quiet as he approached the bed where he stood on one side and I stood on the other.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“The divorce papers,” Preppy said.
My heart sank. “So you came here to deliver them in person?”
Preppy reached into his back pocket and pulled out a manila envelope. “Something like that,” he said, opening it and spilling paper confetti onto my bed between us. “More like bring them back.”
Preppy was silent as he paced the room, tugging at his hair. A vein pulsed in his neck. I couldn’t help but notice that he’d gained a substantial amount of weight since I’d last seen him. Mostly muscle. His biceps flexed under the fabric of his white button-down. This was no longer skinny, lean Preppy because when he lifted his arms over his head and let out a deep sigh I couldn’t help myself from ogling the ab muscles his shirt outlined.
That’s also when I realized that for the exception of a missing bow-tie he was wearing typical Preppy attire. Suspenders, khakis, boots. His hair had grown into the style I remembered from years ago, long on the top, shaved on the sides.
My insides clenched but my mind raced along with my heart. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“What do you want?” I screamed, literally pulling at the roots of my hair and charging him across the mattress until I was on my knees on the bed eye to eye with the man who’d broken my heart on more than one occasion. It was a good thing my dad was out. “You have to tell me what you want!”
He stood his ground and shouted back. “I want YOU!”
“Then let me the fuck in!” I yelled through gritted teeth, shoving against his chest. “Tell me what happened to you and let me the fuck in!”
Preppy growled. “He fucking tortured me!” he screamed, his face turning red with his anger, a vein pulsed in his throat. I gasped and sat back on my feet, watching as his walls finally crumbled. “Is that what you want to fucking hear? Do you want to know about all the times he beat me with a bat, waited for my injuries to start to heal, before doing it all over again on top of the bruises? Do you want to hear how sliced me with a sharp knife until my skin was shredded?” His voice grew lower, darker. “Or maybe you want to hear about how he sent one of his biker bitches down to fuck me in the ass in an attempt to fucking break me? You want to know how he sounded when he laughed as he came on my back? Or how he kicked me in my spine when he was done and I blacked out when my head hit the fucking wall because I couldn’t even hold myself up.” Preppy looked to the sky and then back to me. “I couldn’t hold myself up never mind fight him off even though I tried. I fucking tried!”
“Preppy…”
“No, I don’t need or want your fucking pity.” He quieted sinking to his knees on the carpet and I slid down from the bed onto mine, craning my neck so I could look into his eyes. “I have nightmares all the time. You know what’s the only thing that makes them go away?” He placed his hand over mine. “You. You silence the world when it’s too fucking loud. You make me feel less broken.”
“You’re not broken!” I said, grabbing his hands in mine and away from his face. He opened his eyes. “You’re not broken.”
“I’ll always be a bit broken,” he said, staring at me with glassy eyes.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. I released his hands and stood up abruptly. I pulled open my desk drawer and retrieved the proof I needed. I unfolded the wrinkled piece of paper and stalked back over to him shoving it into his hands. “A broken man didn’t write these words.”
“You got my letter,” Preppy said, turning the page in his hands, the ink smudged with the millions of tears I’d cried reading his words a thousand times over and over again. A small smile appeared on his face. “You lied to me, Doc,” he said, sounding both amused and pissed off.
“I did. I didn’t
tell you because I didn’t know if you still felt the same and I didn’t want to make assumptions when you were in a shitty place.”
His voice softened to a whisper. “Do you want to hear about how the only fucking reason I survived that place was by thinking of you every single fucking day and night. I even meditated like Mirna showed me and tried to go somewhere in my mind, anywhere that wasn’t there. I spent hours in my head having fake conversations with my friends. With you. I don’t remember much, just wanting to get away. I’m alive because of you.”
“No, you’re alive because you’re YOU. Because you battled with the Reaper and you won! Because you’re Samuel fucking Clearwater and you make your own rules.” I laughed and choked on a sob. Preppy smiled. “That place you went to in your mind? It was home. It was to your family. To me. I heard you. We all did. Me. King. Bear. Ray. Even Thia.”
“You really believe that?” Preppy asked, raising a brow and brushing a hair from my face.
“Yeah. As crazy as it sounds, yeah, I think I do.”
Preppy leaned in close, pulling my lips within an inch of his. “You always were a little fucking crazy,” he breathed. He leaned down to kiss me and I pulled away. I stood up and walked to the other side of the room.
“You made me think you were dead again. I can’t live in a constant state of fear that you’re going to be hurt or worse. I just can’t. You broke me and I can’t.”
“You’re the one who taught me that. If you’re hurting, you don’t have to stay hurting. I’ll take your hurt for you. I’ll take it all for you. I’d go back down in that fucking hole all over again if it meant getting to see you just one last fucking time. I’m a selfish fucking man and when it comes to you I’m the most selfish man of them all, because I want you regardless of the fact that I’m no good for you.”
“I don’t…” I started, but stopped when I realized I had no clue what I was going to say.
His eyes spoke volumes of how he was feeling. Sad, but determined, rimmed in red, but wide open and clear. “And if this is all coming to an end before it even has a chance of beginning again then there’s no fucking risk in telling you what I have to tell you now. What I have to say to you before it swallows me fucking whole.”
I shook my head, both fearing and anticipating what was coming next. But nothing could’ve prepared me for those three little words that trampled over me like a herd of fucking cattle.
“I love you.”
I shook my head again, not to disagree, but to shake the words from my brain. Words he couldn’t have really said. It was either my imagination or lies. They had to be. Either way, my heart couldn’t take much more. The barely held together seams of the last mending had started unraveling the second I saw him in that bed. ALIVE. And with those three little words that held so much power I felt them reach down my throat into my chest and start snipping away at the fraying threads stitch by stitch. “No. No, you can’t just love me.” I heard myself choke out. “You just think you do,” I rationalized. “And you want what you can’t have.”
“Fuck that," he said, anger lacing his words. His eyebrows pointed inward causing lines on his forehead to appear. "You think I just decided NOW that I loved you?”
“Well, maybe I don’t love you.”
“Doc, this wasn’t a revelation 'cause you showed up with Justin Bieber's stunt double and I thought you were engaged. I love you because I fucking love you. I’ve loved you since way back before I fucked it all up, you know, the first time. I thought if I pretended to be happy that I’d be happy but it took months of sitting in the dirt being tortured every single fucking day to realize that the real torture was not telling you how I fucking felt from that very first day.”
“You…”
“I loved you when I carried your broken body to Mirna’s that first time. I think I even loved you from the second I saw you up on that water tower. You were so broken…and so fucking beautiful.”
“When you saved me,” I said, unable to yet find my voice it came out as a whisper.
Preppy shook his head. “No, when you saved ME.” I gasped and placed my hand over my chest where I was sure I was about to pass out from the pain. Tears welled up in my eyes and rolled in warm drips down my cheeks to my chin. Preppy reached out and wiped the tear from my chin with his thumb. He then placed his own hand over his chest like he was feeling the same kind of unraveling I was. “And before you say anything else. Before you tell me that I can’t really love you, or to fuck off, or that you don’t feel the same way, I have to tell you first, that I don’t like being lied to.”
“Who lied to you?” I asked, trying to look anywhere but into his eyes, but it was impossible. I was locked into his determined gaze.
“You did, Doc. You fucking lied to me,” he growled.
“When?”
“Twice actually. First, when you told me you didn’t love me.” Preppy took a step forward, and I instinctively took a step back. He chuckled low and deep. “Because you and I both know it’s bullshit.”
“And the second time?” I tried to swallow down the lump forming in my throat that was threatening my airway, causing me to breathe erratically. My chest heaved up and down with the need to catch my breath.
He smiled wickedly. “Then when you said I couldn’t have you.”
“Why…why all this? Why now?” I asked.
“Because, Doc. When I was still in that fucking hole I made a promise to myself that I was going to find you. Find us again. What I didn’t realize was that before I could do that, I had to find me first and there wasn’t anything you or anyone else could do to push that along.”
“Did you find you?”
“Fuck yeah, I did.”
“Therapy?”
“Something like that. Now come home. We’ve got something else we got to take care of. Together.”
“What’s that?” I asked, my heart still fluttering like a schoolgirl.
He reached in his back pocket and handed me a stack of papers. “We found him. We found Bo. He’s been living with me at the house for a while. Doc, I don’t want him to have the same life as me. I see me in him and I think we can still save him. Just got to get his useless mama to sign these.”
Application for Adoption of Minor Child was the heading.
I leapt into his arms and nodded. Tears spilled down my face. “So what do you say, Doc?” he asked. “You wanna be my baby mama?”
I scrunched up my face like I had to think about it. “Are you going to keep me this time?”
Preppy smiled from ear to ear. “Yeah, Doc. And I’m never fucking letting you go,” Preppy said. He reached behind him and took off his shirt in that way that only men can do. I gasped when he leaned over to the nightstand and flicked on the lamp.
“Wow,” I said. When I noticed Preppy’s muscles while he was wearing a shirt, it was nothing compared to seeing those muscles live and clothing free. And although his ridiculous body had me foaming at the mouth that wasn’t what I was staring at. The wound on his side. The one from the gunshot. The one that healed wonky and left a criss-crossing of scars across his torso had been tattooed over by a large intricate colorful piece that had me in tears all over again. Red lips. Glasses. Pencil skirt. Even the bow tie heels Mirna had given me. “It’s me,” I gasped.
“So you gonna answer me or just lay there drooling?” he asked with a wink. “You coming home?”
“Yes. I’m coming home,” I said and the warmth on Preppy’s face was enough to melt away any lingering fears or doubts.
“Good, now we can get to the part where we fuck,” he said, and his mouth came down over mine.
“Wait, where are we going to live? Mirna’s house already sold. I sent the keys down months ago,” I said.
“More fucking, less talking,” Preppy said, tossing me onto the bed.
Who was I to argue?
He didn’t waste any time, hooking my booty shorts and panties and dragging them off my legs, tossing them to the side. Without hesitation
he pushed my thighs apart and dove in. The second his tongue made contact with my clit I moaned long low and LOUD.
“I missed this beautiful pussy,” he said against me, the vibrations of his words mixed with the circular tongue motion was bringing me closer and closer to the edge.
I was about to come, I could feel it right there, just a few more long strokes of Preppy’s talented tongue and I… heard my dad come in from his bowling league game. “Andrea?” he called out, but Preppy didn’t stop. Not only did he not stop he pushed a long thick finger into my ass and I squealed. He reached up and covered my breast with his hand, pinching hard on my nipple. “Are you home? Bowling sucked. We lost to that group of women in their eighties again. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be last again this year.”
“Answer the man,” Preppy said against my folds. He pulled out his finger only to push it back in.
“I’m here dad. I’m just…really tired so I’m just going to go to bed early,” I shouted back. Preppy thrust his tongue inside me and I arched my back.
“Yeah, I’m beat too, see you in the morning,” he said. I heard his door close and the second it clicked Preppy increased his efforts, relentlessly fucking my pussy with his tongue and my ass with his finger until I grabbed a pillow, smashed it over my own face, and screamed out my orgasm into goose down.
It was Preppy who eventually took the pillow off my face. “Thought you were suffocating under there,” he laughed.
“You’re such a shit,” I said.
He settled between my legs and pushed his entire massive length inside of me in one quick thrust. I was about to scream out again but he put two fingers in my mouth. “Bite down on me if you need to, but don’t make a sound, Doc,” Preppy said wickedly.
At first he built a slow rhythm again reaching behind me and pushing a finger into my ass which heightened everything his cock was doing in my pussy. He was making it impossible not to scream so I did what he said and I bit down on his hand. “That’s it, bite me. Show me how much you want to scream.”
Preppy, The Life & Death of Samuel Clearwater: A King Series Trilogy Page 39