He did, in fact, let go of her waist to grip the ladder with both hands. He moved more deliberately then, and they swung lightly, locked together, into the ladder and away.
Stella watched the stars across the horizon, the lights of the town creating a haze just above the rooftops. God, she loved this. The act wasn’t about anything climactic—she could see she wouldn’t be near that, but about doing it, about reveling in something she hadn’t done before.
“Should I wait?” His breath was hot on her ear.
She shook her head, and he pushed even harder, a strong thrust, and then the warm wetness flooded inside her and quickly trickled down. He huffed against her hair, then exhaled, slow and long, like the distant bellow of a train.
He sagged a bit, still holding on behind her, face on her shoulder. He seemed vulnerable like this, like a boy. Emotion surged through her.
Finally, he pulled away from her, tugging down her skirt before attending to himself. Stella’s arms still shook, but she continued her climb, heading up the second ladder, then the third, and grasping the edge of the platform to poke through the hole.
The sensation of rising through the square brought back the helplessness of a few days before, when she’d almost fallen. She could see the pale reflection of the bent rail, and suddenly her heart hammered and her breath came in short bursts. She backed against the solid wall of the water tower, her hand pressed against her chest.
Dane’s head popped through the gap. As soon as he saw her, he leapt onto the platform and drew her close. “I’m sorry, Stella. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.”
She tried to shake her head against his chest. He didn’t understand. But she couldn’t draw a proper breath, couldn’t speak.
He clutched at her hair, holding her fiercely, like an injured child. “I’ve wrecked things already. I should have held back. I shouldn’t have pushed.”
She did shake her head then, pulling back. “N-not that. N-not at all.” She closed back in. Even the small glance at the town from this height set it all off again. She couldn’t talk herself out of it, couldn’t rationalize the panic away. She wasn’t going to fall. She was fine. But no, her body reacted as though she stood on the edge, tumbling forward.
“What is it?” Dane’s voice rumbled from his chest.
“The height. Too high.” All she could manage.
“You’re afraid of heights?”
She wasn’t, or maybe she was. It was all so new. She nodded against his shirt.
He gripped her even more tightly. “Can you get back down?”
She shook her head.
He bent down, bringing her with him so they could sit. “Let’s just pretend we’re somewhere else,” he said. “We’re on a beach in Florida. The sand is hot. Kids are shrieking in every direction.” At that, a child somewhere shouted, causing them both to laugh lightly.
“See?” he said. “I know what I’m talking about.”
He held her in his lap, rocking. “I failed to set up the beach umbrella properly. It’s just fallen over.” He stroked her hair. “But I couldn’t stop looking at you in a little pink Ocean Pacific bikini.” He stopped. “You do have a bikini, right?”
She smiled against his shoulder and nodded.
“Good. I’m too poor for panties AND bathing suits on one paycheck.”
She grinned again.
“Sand is already everywhere. It’s stuck to a few beautiful places.” Dane slid his hand across her shoulder, then down between her breasts. “This hollow is like a valley of the dunes. I just want to lick it clean.”
Stella felt something uncurl inside, to relax. Her breathing slowed, became manageable again.
He rested his hand against her rib cage. “I feed you grapes and fried chicken.” His voice rumbled against her head, filled her with a deep, easy satisfaction. “And lick your fingers.” He took one in his mouth.
She smiled against his shoulder. She’d be all right with him. They’d make it down. They’d see each other again. The whole future was laid out before her like the lights of the town, spreading out in a geometry that had logic and beauty, a natural progression from one part to the next. Whatever she was doing next, she was doing it with Dane.
9
Carburetor Warning
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DANE wiped his hands on a shop towel. This carburetor was gunked like nothing he’d seen before. What had the guy put in his gas tank? Molasses?
Joe came up behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. “How’s it coming?”
“Haven’t gotten the floater pins off yet. Gonna have to soak ’em.”
“Did the carbs come off the air box clean?”
“Yeah, just pulled them off by hand. Didn’t need to ratchet it. Did he say what happened?”
“Wife caught him with a girl. Put Karo syrup in the gas tank.”
Holy smokes. So he was close. “Going to have to get the floats out before I can even get to the jets.”
“Yeah. Ugly work. But good for thinking things through.” Joe moved farther down the workbench, sorting through a stack of wiper blades.
Dane shook his head. Damn waste of a good bike engine.
“No? You don’t need to think?” Joe asked.
“What?” Dane finally worked the floater pin free and dunked it in cleaning fluid. What was Joe talking about?
“Darlene. Stella.” Joe stacked and restacked the boxes of wiper blades. He was irked.
Joe must have misunderstood something. Dane ran his thumb along the next floater, trying to coax it free. “Trying not to think, actually.” Damn small towns. Did Joe know about his night with Stella? He’d gotten her all calm and off the tower about 2 a.m.
“Both girls have had their troubles. Don’t need any more from you.”
Another floater came free. Two to go. He stole a glance at Joe, who was still messing with the blades and apparently would stay there until Dane agreed with him. “Understood.”
“Pick one or the other. Don’t play around.”
Dane dropped another floater in the fluid. “Got it.”
Joe nodded, satisfied, and headed into the office.
Dane watched him through a small, greasy window. The music kicked on suddenly, too loud, then down again. “All My Exes Live in Texas.” Dane stifled a snort. Subtle, that Joe.
He worked on the third segment of the carburetor, this one not quite as bad off as the first two.
Couldn’t have been too much syrup, maybe the bottle wasn’t full. Dane wondered how the bike’s owner had figured it out. Had the wife told him? Were they speaking still?
Maybe he had driven off on it, the wife watching smugly from the window. He might have gotten a few blocks before it started missing, goo flowing through its veins.
The last floater pin came out cleanly. He picked up a flat-head screwdriver for the jets, to see how badly they were gunked. This wasn’t going to be a cheap job, for sure. Labor was killer, even if he didn’t replace anything. He wiped his fingers again, black and sticky.
He imagined Darlene, shouting, face blooming red beneath wild hair, wielding a Karo bottle and chucking it after his retreating form. He had to handle this carefully. She no doubt had a mean streak a mile long. Stella wouldn’t talk about her, but their verbal catfight in the bay a few days ago was probably an indication of what he could expect from either one.
He pictured Stella, vulnerable and shaking at the top of the tower. She had gone up there despite nearly falling off a few days earlier, just because of him. He’d seen the bent rail, just like she’d described it once he was able to get her talking. He exhaled in a rush. That girl had balls, going up there just because he’d told her to.
Damn it, he couldn’t get that woman out of his head.
Dane began popping the jets with the screwdriver. He held one up to the light, peering through to see if it was clogged. Yup. That man had messed with the wrong woman if she was willing to fill his bike’s tank with syrup. He glanced behin
d him. The ’83 Yamaha Seca rested on its side on the floor like a dead horse. An image of Darlene loomed over it like an apparition. If some girl pulled a number like this on his Harley, well, there’d be payback.
10
Beads
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STELLA’S mother opened the door to Grandma Angie’s house, her face twisted into a warning. “She’s up. Made us turn down the morphine. This is probably going to be her last good day. Don’t upset her.”
Stella pushed past, pissed as hell. Like she would be the one to ever bring a moment’s grief to Grandma. That was Vivian’s job. Vivian, who had screwed half the population of Holly while Stella’s father watched television. Vivian, who decided Bible beating was better than dealing with her real issues.
Grandma Angie was sitting up, surrounded by TV trays full of beads.
“Grandma! You’re jeweling!” Stella set her bag on the floor, wishing she’d brought the pieces of the broken bracelet even though she didn’t have all the parts.
“I am.” Her hand quivered as she tugged a tray into her lap, the beads nestled in the flocked partitions. “I have all my favorites.”
Stella perched on the edge of the bed and ran her fingers along the edges of the tray, the flecks of felt wearing thin. The colored rows of square boxes were filled with crystals, seed pearls, bone beads, spirals, balls, and shells.
Grandma Angie grasped Stella’s wrist as if divining a secret from her bones. “A new boy.” She always knew.
“Yes.”
“Have you made a bracelet yet?”
Stella reached for a spool of fine wire. “I was waiting for you.”
“Ahh.” Grandma ran her hands across the rippling surface of the beads, as though she were reading Braille. “Usually you do them alone.”
“This one’s different.” Stella heard the words and wondered why she’d said them. Dane couldn’t be all that different. Cheated on his girlfriend already. Bad news. Totally bad news. She should stay away.
“He torments you. You are not in control of this one.”
Pegged it, as usual. “I thought I could use your help this time. For this bracelet.” Stella made a bracelet for each boy, just like some people compiled mix tapes. Each bead had its significance, an observation or a hope.
And when each relationship ended, she smashed them to pieces.
“Let’s start with the clasp,” Grandma Angie said. “Box clasp, subtle, gentle?” She held up a gold ball.
Stella shook her head.
Grandma’s fingers fluttered through the largest partition, full of metals. She showed Stella a silver loop on a hinge. “Lobster claw? The most secure, more functional than beautiful?”
“Nope.”
Grandma nodded knowingly. “I didn’t think so. You are not like your mother.”
She knew Grandma was thinking of Stella’s father. They had often talked about Vivian’s choice of husband, especially during the tough years, when strange men would show up at the house. Stella practically lived with Grandma Angie then.
“Toggle?” Grandma held a braided circle and a matching T-bar in antique gold.
“Too risky,” Stella said. “I don’t want to lose it.”
Grandma tucked the toggle away and laid three ornate clasps on the flat panel of the tray, where finished pieces could be admired. “S-clasps,” she said. “The most beautiful, simple, strong.”
Stella ran a finger along each of them, two silver, one gold. “Possibly.” One of the silvers had an edgy look, rows of tiny balls encircling the center of the “S.” She touched it again. “Especially this one.”
“I have one more,” Grandma said, reaching to the TV tray behind Stella to tug a tiny velvet bag from another box. “I have never used one like it. Unusual. Strange. Strong.”
She pulled the clasp from the bag. “I’ve had it a long time. I bought it on vacation, from an old woman selling bone jewelry near the Grand Canyon. An Indian woman. She had the most beautiful wampum belt.”
The clasp was a slide lock, one of the more elaborate types. Intended for bracelets with multiple strands, the slide lock had two pieces that fit together perfectly, creating one slender bar.
“Most slide locks are plain silver or gold,” Grandma said. “But this one was crafted by a silversmith.” She rolled it out onto the blue velvet tray. “See?”
The slender clasp was still open, each rod with three small hooks. Carved on each side were four stylized swirls, like the form a woman’s body might make if she curled up on a bed.
Stella picked up the pieces and fitted the slots together. They slid into place as smoothly as a caress, locking in with an almost imperceptible snap.
“I had planned to make a bracelet with it. A strand for Vivian, one for me, and one for your grandfather.” Grandma paused, then said his name. “Thomas.” The syllables spread out, expanding beyond the ball of lamplight and into the gloom beyond, into the spaces where he had once been. Grandma Angie ran her fingers through a bin of cool sky-blue beads. “I didn’t ever make it. I let life get in the way.”
“We’ll make it now,” Stella said quickly.
Grandma Angie shook her head. “Vivian’s would be too sharp, too blood-red. It wouldn’t match. It isn’t the strand it would have been then.” She touched the pale yellow, pine green, and peach, and Stella understood that those would have been her mother’s colors, back when Vivian was a child. But she agreed with Grandma. Now they’d all be angry and dark, scarlet and jet black.
“What would Grandpa Thomas’s have been?”
Grandma’s face relaxed, soft and serene. “A spiral, the symbol of becoming. In blue.” She lifted one from a container of cerulean glass. “And circles, for unity. Pale greens and clear.”
“Which metal?” Stella asked.
“Silver, certainly. He was a calm man. Gentle. Never raised a voice to me or Vivian.”
“Was he sad you didn’t have more children?” Stella couldn’t imagine her mother being anything but a disappointment, although if she thought hard, to when she was very small, she could remember her mother happy, smiles and kisses and cookies after lunch.
“He would never say it. Wouldn’t want the grief of it to cause me any pain.” Grandma lined up the beads absently, forming a pattern of blue and green, spirals and spheres.
Stella knew they had tried to have more children after Vivian, but Grandma repeatedly miscarried. One baby had been stillborn.
“I barely remember him,” Stella said. “But when I picture him, I see a puffy-cloud-filled sky. Or a newly mown lawn.”
“Blues and greens,” Grandma said. She seemed more tired suddenly and laid her head back against the pillows. “I remember when Vivian made a bracelet for your father.”
Stella pulled her fingers from where they had been buried in the beads. “Really? She has one? I never saw it.”
“Oh, yes. I remember the day we made it. Your father had asked Vivian out on a third date, but he hadn’t worked up the nerve to kiss her good night yet. Shy, that boy.”
“So you made a kissing bracelet?”
Grandma chuckled. “Sort of. We did alternating beads for him, mostly wood, with rich bone, in all the colors.”
“Love beads? Like the hippies wore?”
“Exactly. It made a beautiful piece, vibrant and yet grounded with all that texture, the lightweight and the heavy.”
“Did he kiss her?” Stella couldn’t believe she’d never heard this story before. It should have been basic family lore.
“He did. They were married six months later. She wore the bracelet at the wedding.”
Stella walked up to a photo of her parents by the altar of a church, peering closely at her mother’s wrist. Sure enough, she wore a strange bracelet, although the colors were lost in the black-and-white image. “Funny I never noticed it before.”
“Sometimes the most obvious things are right before our eyes.”
Stella studied her mother’s young face, radiantly ha
ppy. “Then it all went to hell.” Stella returned to the bed and plopped to her knees again. “When she starting boinking everything with three legs.”
Grandma sighed. “That was a difficult time of all our lives.”
“Not hers, apparently.” Stella poked at the red beads, blisteringly bright.
Grandma picked up the small carton of red and moved it to a table on the opposite side. “Stella, my girl, you must learn to forgive and forget.” She swirled her fingers in a compartment of crystal beads, clear and glittering. “So tell me about your man so that we might choose the beads.”
“Dane.” The word sounded beautiful to her, the forceful beginning, the soft end. “He’s tall. And lean. A bit dangerous.” She remembered him cradling her on the tower platform. “Kind. Very gentle. A lot of opposites.”
Grandma rolled the ornate clasp. “There’s your three, then.”
“Three? I can see the danger strand and the gentle strand. What’s in between?”
Grandma laid her fingers on the back of Stella’s hand. “You.”
And so they began sorting beads, bones in dark brown and crystals in fiery orange. Then earth tones in green and sand and antique gold.
And in between, for Stella, a colorful collection of bright tones, seed pearls, and, at Grandma’s insistence, an eye bead, hand painted with a blue iris, for warding off evil spirits.
Like Darlene.
11
Knife Revenge
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DANE perched on a rickety stool, leaning against the scratched surface of the bar, waiting for his beer. Since it was mid-afternoon, the joint was mostly empty, a few old men smoking cigars in a corner, broad and silent, like a trio of Hibachi grills.
The woman tending bar was stout, mid-forties, and not too friendly. She communicated primarily in grunts, and the breadth of her upper arms suggested that she could toss any unruly boozer out on his ass.
The beer foamed over the rim as she slid it to him. “Thanks,” he muttered, but she was already gone.
Tangled: A New Adult Romance Boxed Set (12 Book Bundle of Billionaires, Bad Boys, and Royalty) Page 119