by Meg Jackson
“It’s good to see you, Tricia,” Cristov said, his eyes warm. She felt closer to Cristov than she did to Kennick; Cristov had been the one to save her from Paul, had brought her to his trailer to keep her safe afterwards. “You look good.”
“Thanks, it’s good to see you too” she said back, the smile no longer quite as forced. She turned to Kennick. “Both of you.”
She took a moment to look around the diner, breathe in the familiar smells. A lot of familiar faces, too. She caught a few of them looking back, their eyes widening slightly in recognition. She felt like shrinking back into her seat, and fought it. As much as it no longer felt like her hometown, this was her hometown. The stares were something she would need to get used to.
“How are you doing?” Kennick asked. The question was so casual, so normal, yet there was nothing cavalier about the asking.
“I’m good,” Tricia said after a brief pause. “I’m…getting used to being back.”
Kennick nodded. Tricia was struck by the green of his eyes. All the Volanis siblings had those green eyes, but there were subtle differences in each shade. Kennick’s were like a level sea. Cristov’s were lighter, like clover. And Damon’s, she could still remember, were the darkest. Forest green, almost shadowy.
“We just went to the storage unit,” Ricky said, steering the conversation towards something lighter. “I forgot how much stuff was in there.”
“I haven’t,” Cristov said with a grin. “Neither have my muscles.”
“Oh, yeah,” Tricia said. “I meant to thank you guys for helping clear it out. I was…well, you know.”
She swallowed. Maybe this dinner was a bad idea, after all. What could they talk about that wouldn’t wind back to the event that linked them all together? Tricia had left so suddenly, afraid of the bikers coming after her, that she’d left everything behind. It had been the Volanis family that cleared out the house and brought everything into storage. She owed them her life and the return of her security deposit.
“Of course,” Kennick said. “It was nothing. We were happy to do it.”
“They were suitably rewarded for their good deed,” Ricky said with a wink. “No thanks necessary, trust me.”
Tricia had to laugh at that, joined in by Cristov, while Kim blushed and Kennick shook his head, a smile on his face. Cristov slid his arm across Ricky’s shoulders. Tricia felt a bittersweet happiness, seeing the adoration in Cristov’s eyes as he looked down at her friend. She’d always liked Cristov. She was glad Ricky had finally come around to seeing how good he really was.
A waitress came by and took their orders; there was no need to look at a menu, as everyone had their own personal favorites. Conversation turned to town gossip, much to Tricia’s relief. By the time the food arrived, Tricia had almost managed to forget what had kept her away from Kingdom from so long.
But every time she looked at the empty space across from her in the booth, she remembered something else.
The person she wished was sitting there. The one person she wanted to see.
That strange and unavoidable longing seemed to get stronger by the minute, and even overcame her hunger as she picked at her sandwich. She’d been looking forward to it, an old slice of heaven that had never ceased to make her happy. It smelled just like she remembered it. But the few bites she took didn’t taste right. Or, at least, it didn’t taste the same. It didn’t really taste like anything. The conversation around her slowly receded into background noise. Her shoulders slumped. She played with a fry, twirling it in her ketchup. She told herself, again and again, to cheer up. Enjoy herself. Stop thinking about him.
“Trish?” Ricky asked, softly, reaching across the table to take Tricia’s hand. Tricia looked up, blinking, coming back to the present moment. “You okay?”
“Not really,” Tricia said, surprising herself with the truth. “I…I kind of want to go.”
“Okay,” Ricky said. “Let’s get the bill and…”
“No,” Tricia said, hurriedly. She looked around; no one was even half finished with their meal. “You all go ahead and eat. I’m just tired. And I kind of want to be alone.”
“Don’t be silly,” Ricky said, waving her hand dismissively. “We’ll all go, I’ll….”
“No, really,” Tricia said, her voice firm. “Please, stay. I really just want to take a walk and get some air and have some time to myself. I’ve been with you guys since I got here.”
Ricky opened her mouth to protest, but Cristov squeezed her shoulder. Ricky looked at him sharply, clearly ready to argue her point. But she surrendered when he nodded, and Tricia felt a surge of gratitude towards him. Kim reached over, rubbed Tricia on the back with her palm, smiling gently.
“Just be careful walking back, okay?” Kim said.
“It’s like five minutes,” Tricia smiled. “I’ll be fine. I’m sorry to leave, I really wanted this to be a nice night for everyone but…I think it was just a little soon.”
“Sure,” Kennick said. “We’ll do it again some other time. Whenever you feel like it.”
“Thanks,” Tricia said, rising from her seat, immediately feeling a rush of relief. She reached for her wallet.
“Okay, now that is not okay,” Ricky said. “We got you on this one, Trish. You barely touched that sandwich. Do you want me to bring it home for you?”
“A cold oyster po’boy? No thanks,” Tricia shook her head.
“Awesome,” Cristov muttered, reaching over the table and pulling the plate towards him. He still had half a burger on his plate, but his eyes were lighting up like an arcade game at the prospect of more food.
“You’re disgusting,” Ricky said, clearly fighting a smile. “We’re breaking up.”
Cristov took a huge bite of the sandwich and turned to Ricky, chewing loudly, swallowing even louder.
“That’s fine,” he said. “I was planning on having an affair with this po’boy, anyway, and I really didn’t want to be a cheater.”
“I guess a full stomach can keep you warm at night,” Kim said, her eyes laughing.
“Smart woman,” Cristov said through a mouthful of fries, pointing at Kim. “Good thing you kept her around, Nick.”
Tricia left them behind with their laughter, feeling happy and sad at the same time. She loved her friends too much to want anything but the best for them. But things would never be the same. She knew that now more than ever.
The sun hadn’t yet gone down, but it would soon. The air was thick with summer, everything faintly buzzing. She walked down a street she knew, then another. Intimately known streets, all strange and new. She got to Ricky’s apartment, fingered the key in her pocket. Then she got in her car and drove off.
6
It had been a long time, and she’d only been there once, but Tricia didn’t have too much trouble finding the Volanis trailer. Mostly because Damon was standing outside it, putting a bag into the trunk of his car. Tricia’s arrival caught his attention and he looked up, faint surprise in the position of his eyebrows. Immediately, Tricia felt her body responding to him, the way it had the first time they’d met. Even under those strange circumstances – she’d just been rescued from her ex-boyfriend by Cristov, and brought back to the trailer to spend the night – he had made quite an impression on her.
He had the trademark Volanis eyes, deep green and expressive, framed by black eyebrows that made them seem darker than his brother’s. His hair was black, too, and cut short on his head. He had the same beard, scruffy and dark as midnight, around his lips.
Dark, she thought, his whole being matching his appearance, the word seeming so appropriate. She parked, wondering if he could see her through the windshield, if he would recognize her. She was irrationally afraid that he might not.
He straightened up as she got out of the car, his eyebrows lowering as the surprise seemed to fade.
“Tricia,” he said, voice cutting through the air between them, low and gruff and smoky. “Hey.”
“Hey,” she answered.
“I heard you were back,” he said, moving around to the side of the car. They took each other in, not speaking for a long moment as their awkward greeting settled into a more comfortable space – it settled into that space almost too quickly.
“Is anyone around?” Tricia asked, gesturing to the trailer. “Kennick or Kim or anyone?”
“No,” Damon said after a moment. “No, everyone’s out.”
Tricia suddenly felt very stupid. She blushed and laughed, looking down at the ground and putting her palm to her forehead, shaking her head at her own dumb question.
“I knew that,” she said. “I just saw them all. I don’t know why I asked. I didn’t…”
She forcibly relaxed her shoulders.
“I didn’t come here to see anyone but you,” she admitted, looking up.
“Okay,” Damon said, putting her at ease with a slight smile. “Any particular reason?”
“Well…I mean…you shot a man for me, do I need any more reason to want to see you?” Tricia asked, knowing that she was jumping right into the heavy stuff – and not really caring. He could handle it. She knew that, somehow. She had a feeling he’d handled much worse.
“That’s a good point,” he said, nodding, that smile lingering on his lips. “Well, I’m glad to see you.”
She felt warm from his words, even though they were impersonal, polite. They felt intimate.
“Are you going somewhere?” She gestured again to the trunk, which contained a suitcase. Damon followed her glance, stiffened slightly.
“Yeah,” he said, looking back at her. “I have some business in Miami.”
“Oh.”
When he offered no more explanation, Tricia looked for something else to say. She’d come here for a reason, but that reason suddenly seemed very vague. All she knew was that he looked good. And he felt nice to be around. He seemed like a lighthouse, when the whole rest of the world was an ocean. Her experiences had tarnished her ability to trust; both others and herself. But something about Damon…
“How long have you been back in town?” he asked, filling the silence between them, much to Tricia’s gratitude.
“Just two days,” she said, nodding for no reason. “I’ve been crashing on Ricky’s sofa.”
“Ah,” Damon said. “I knew there was a reason Cristov came home last night.”
“Yeah,” Tricia said with a smile. “I guess Ricky doesn’t want to keep me up all night. Can’t say I’m not grateful. But I don’t think Cristov’s too happy about it.”
“He understands,” Damon said. “And if he didn’t, I expect Ricky would remind him pretty quick who’s more expendable in her life.”
Tricia felt like Damon was joking, but it fell flat on her ears. She wasn’t the girl that Ricky grew up with and loved. She wasn’t sure she could still claim that place in her best friend’s life. Things had changed while she was gone…
“So how is it being back home?” Damon asked, leaning against the car with his arms crossed. Tricia glanced away for a moment, thinking about the best way to respond. The question wasn’t loaded, but her answer might be – if she told the truth. When she looked back at him, she had that uncanny feeling that out of everyone, he was the one person who might understand the truth.
“It doesn’t really feel like anything,” she said. “I mean – it doesn’t feel much like home. Or maybe it feels too much like home. It’s just…I’m…”
She bit her lip and looked away again. His question was the same one she’d been asking herself for the past 48 hours. She felt like there was a different person inside her, someone she didn’t know, and that person was still getting acquainted to her old flesh. She was getting acquainted to seeing familiar things and having to recognize them as familiar. The whole world looked different. But nothing had changed.
“I’m restless, maybe,” she finally said. “Or – I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t ready to come back. It’s like, everything I see tells me that what happened…didn’t happen. Because you don’t get kidnapped and beaten in the town you grew up in. It’s all very surreal. Things felt a lot more real when I wasn’t here. And it was kind of comforting, to be honest. The realness.”
She looked at him, saw that his face remained impassive, unchanged.
“I’m not making any sense,” she said, her words coming out rapidly now as a blush filled her cheeks. I must sound like a crazy person, she thought. Or a total moron. “It’s just hard to…”
“No, you’re making sense,” Damon said. “I mean, not to me. I can’t possibly understand. Because I’ve never really had a town or a place I called home. And I’ve never had it ripped away from me. I imagine very few people could understand that. But it doesn’t mean you’re not making sense. You’re uncomfortable, right?”
“Yeah,” Tricia said, cocking her head slightly to take him in. “Uncomfortable. Poignantly uncomfortable. That’s a good word for it. Kind of simplistic, but good.”
“Sometimes the simplest words are the best,” Damon said.
“I guess so,” Tricia said, fighting back a smile. She was torn between thinking the dark-haired man was full of shit, and thinking that he was smarter than most of the people she knew. Everything he said sounded like it could come out of a fortune cookie. But it also felt very right whenever he said them, like the timbre of his voice washed away any hint of cliché.
“No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange,” he said, speaking in a strange rhythm. Tricia cocked her head, trying to figure out what that meant; his deferential smile was the closest she’d ever seen him get to blushing.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was dumb. Just a line from a poem that seemed…to fit.”
“Oh,” Tricia said, repeating the line in her head and thinking that it did fit. “Who wrote it?”
“C.D. Wright. What are you going to do?” he asked, and though it didn’t interrupt the flow of their conversation, it sounded sudden. It was so bold and all-encompassing. What was she going to do? Do about what? About the life that had so recently fallen apart, the life she was adrift in? About finding a new job, a new apartment? About the stuff in storage?
“Wait,” she said, the answer coming to her in yet another simple word. “I guess all I can do is wait, right? Just do the things normal people do. See friends and find work and be an adult and just wait until normal feels normal again.”
“Are you a patient person?” Damon asked, and Tricia felt like he was on the brink of asking her something quite different. The air between them almost seemed to have changed. The way he was looking at her – as though he was trying to decide what to do with her. As though she was a candy bar in the supermarket, and he was trying to convince himself not to buy her.
“Sometimes, I guess,” she said, growing frustrated with the strangeness. If he was going to ask her something, he ought to just ask it. She had enough unknowns in her life – she didn’t need to be pinned down by his enigmatic stare and wonder what was going on in his head. “We’re all patient about some things and impatient about others, aren’t we?”
“Do you have a sleeping bag?” he asked, and this time the question was definitely abrupt – he asked it almost before she finished her own question. Tricia blinked, and found herself answering without really thinking about it.
“In storage, yeah, I do,” she said. “Why?”
“You should come with me,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the car. “If you’re not ready to be back here, take some more time away. I’ll be gone about two weeks – maybe a little more, maybe a little less. I want to take my time on the drive. See the Outer Banks along the way. I wouldn’t mind the company. But I plan on camping out most nights, so…”
“Damon,” Tricia said, her voice flat and astonished. “That’s crazy. That’s a crazy idea. You realize that, right?”
He broke into a smile, and Tricia felt herself warming to that crazy idea; no, no, don’t go getting yourself all twisted up in that smile
, she told herself. That’s the smile of a crazy man. A very handsome, sexy, magnetic, crazy man, but a crazy man all the same…
“It’s a crazy world,” he said, one eyebrow slightly raised. “Psycho boyfriends, insane bikers, ridiculous gypsy ideas about how the road can heal a soul. And then, of course, there’s turducken, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, people who dye their poodles pink…”
Tricia couldn’t help but laugh, but she put her hand up to stop him all the same. When the giggles faded out, she was still shaking her head and looking at him in awe.
“I mean, you’re not serious though, are you? I can’t just get into a car and drive to Florida with someone who is, no offense, basically a stranger. I don’t have to explain why, do I?”
“Why don’t you try?” Damon asked, a glint in his eye. “I’d like to hear your reasons.”
Tricia scoffed, irritation flaring up in her. She calmed it as best she could before putting up a fist. She jabbed one finger up into the air as she began speaking.
“One: it’s crazy.”
Another finger.
“Two: what would I tell Ricky and Kim?”
Another finger.
“Three: I barely know you.”
One more.
“Four…um…I don’t know where my sleeping bag is right now and I don’t feel like digging for it.”
Her brow furrowed as her thumb joined the rest of her fingers.
“And five…uh…five: it’s crazy.”
“No fair using the same reason twice,” Damon said, feigning criticism. “That’s poor rhetoric. They wouldn’t let you get away with that in debate team.”
“Well, lucky me that this isn’t debate team, or even a debate,” Tricia said. Damon studied her for a long moment: her hands on her hips, her eyes gleaming like gold in the light, her hair gently blowing against her cheeks in the breeze. She would cave. He could make her cave.