by Parker, Ali
Valerie pursed her lips, staring at the bright-blue ocean and a spot on the horizon before her eyes swung back to mine. She shrugged her tattooed shoulders, her ink on full display in her skimpy tank. “Gotta say, I don’t really care. I’d fuck ‘em.”
Chapter 17
Will
Another day, another job done. As much as I loved my work, I was glad to be finishing up for the day. My truck was parked in front of my client’s house, the cherry red sticking out like a sore thumb against the drab washed-out houses and brownish lawns.
The house was in the suburb Rayce and I had grown up in. Being around there, that close to our foster home, always made my skin feel like it was on too tight.
I have to get the fuck out of here. The thought spurred me on, making my feet move faster toward the vehicle that would carry me away from this place.
After securing my kit on the back, I quickly climbed into the cab and took off. Only, I didn’t want to go home to my crappy apartment. As it was, I was feeling like even the sides of the truck were closing in on me.
The walls of my apartment would be jumping down my damn throat if I went home right now. It had taken me most of the day to sort out the client’s trouble, and every hour around here felt like an eternity. Like if I stayed too long, I would somehow become trapped there again.
No, I didn’t need my apartment right then. I needed wide-open spaces and fresh air, to clear my mind of the memories that were suddenly threatening to overwhelm me.
Over the years I’d managed to work out something of a quick fix to that feeling. It wasn’t the first time it had hit, and it wouldn’t be the last. The difference this time was that I didn’t want to do it alone; I really wanted to see Heidi.
Strange as it was for me to actually want company when I tasted the bitterness on the back of my tongue and felt like my lungs were constricting, Heidi had been on my mind every waking minute since our date. It didn’t surprise me that she still lingered there, no matter the day I’d had.
Without having made the conscious decision to do so, I found myself driving all the way across town. Before I had even really put thought into where I was going, I was passing out of my side of town and into hers.
The differences were striking, even if the transition was gradual. The houses slowly started looking better, bigger, maintained. Grass became greener, lawns more expansive. It was like even the damn sun was brighter the farther away I got from my foster home.
By the time I parked outside of Heidi’s house, it almost felt like I could breathe again. The bitterness had all but faded from my tongue, but I was still feeling on edge. All that would really make me feel normal again and dispel the darkness from my past was the beach, walking until the sound of the waves had lulled that beast inside back to sleep.
Heidi answered the door, her eyebrows rising at me standing there. “Hey, you. What are you doing here?”
Her tone was warm, relaxed, happy. At the sound of it, some of the knots of tension in my muscles released. “I’m done with work for the day. I was wondering if maybe you’d like to go for a walk on the beach with me.”
“Sure,” she agreed quickly, then called over her shoulder to her friends inside, “I’m going out for a walk with Will. See you later.”
Heidi slid onto the porch, closing the door behind her. Her long black hair was pulled into a high ponytail looped around itself several times to form a loose, messy bun kind of thing. Some of the strands around her face and the nape of her neck had escaped, framing her pale, porcelain skin and setting off the red of her lips and the natural flush high on her cheeks.
Her dark-green eyes glittered and danced as she smiled up at me, slipping her feet into a pair of flip-flops lying outside the door. She was wearing denim shorts and a tight black tank top with unicorns printed on it.
Casual and understated as the outfit was, she looked damn gorgeous in it. I was starting to think Heidi would look good in anything she wore—or didn’t wear for that matter. My cock liked the thought of her not wearing anything way too much, and since I hadn’t come here for a rough-and-dirty fuck in the bushes, I pushed all thoughts of that out of my mind and held my hand out to her instead.
“You ready to go?”
“Always.” One of the corners of her mouth tipped up in a smirk, which made me think she had been having the same thoughts of me that I’d just banished, then she took my hand and led me down the stairs. “So, this is a surprise.”
“A good one, I hope?” We hit the sidewalk, following it along to the side of the house where we turned toward the beach.
Heidi laughed, bobbing her head up and down. “I was wondering when I was going to see you again.”
“You were, huh?” An odd warmth filled my chest, replacing the cold ache that had lodged there earlier in the morning when I’d been given the address of the job today. “Glad I came by then.”
“Me too.” She was still smiling when we hit the beach, pausing to wait for me to take off my shoes. Looking up and down the mostly empty stretch of beach, I decided it would be okay to leave my work boots and socks stashed against the side of Heidi’s house. She kicked her flip-flops off again, rolling her eyes. “I don’t even know why I bothered with those.”
I reclaimed her hand when I stood up again, making sure our shoes were as hidden as they could be behind a shrub and tucked tightly against the house. “Habit, I guess?”
“Probably.” She shrugged, pressing her soft palm against mine and adjusting our fingers so the grip was both tighter and more comfortable. “You said you were done with work for the day, how did it go?”
“Are you seriously asking me how my day was?” I arched an eyebrow, allowing my lips to pull into a teasing smile.
She bumped my hip with hers, batting her eyelashes and flashing me a demure smile. “Why yes, honey. Did you have a good day at work?”
A low, genuine laugh rumbled in my chest. It surprised the shit out of me. Laughing wasn’t something that came easily under the best of circumstances and the day I’d had definitely hadn’t been that. “Work was work. The best part of my day is happening right now.”
“Oh, you’re a real damn charmer, aren’t you?” She shook her head but tightened her fingers around mine. “Anyway, for real now, how was your day?”
“That was my real answer,” I protested, grunting when her elbow met my ribs. “Hey!”
“You deserved it,” she said, winking playfully as she looked up to meet my eyes. “Besides, ‘work was work’ isn’t really an answer, and the rest just sounded like a line.”
“It wasn’t a line.” It had totally sounded like one. Releasing a deep breath, I swept my gaze over the horizon. “You really want to know about my day?”
“Yes.”
I kept my eyes on the swells of the waves behind the breakers, debating how much of the truth to tell her. I didn’t want to lie to her, and I did want to get to know her, but there was shit in my past that would send her running back to her house and never want to see me again.
“It was shitty. I had to overhaul an entire house, which would have been fine if said house wasn’t in the area that it was in.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw her nodding slowly. “There were some places back in New York where I hadn’t set foot in for years. Funny how seeing some otherwise silly landmark, or hear a familiar sound or even a smell, can trigger bad memories.”
There was something in her voice when she said it that told me she really did know the feeling. She wasn’t just offering a platitude.
“Yeah, exactly that.” We stood in silence for a few minutes, leaning against each other as we looked out at the ocean before we moved again. In silent agreement, we both started walking to the shoreline.
The sand became damp under my feet, cool as opposed to the sunbaked warmth of before. I sneaked a peek at Heidi, noticing that her usual smile had been replaced with a grim set of her lips. A pang hit me like a fist in a gut when I realized I was responsible for the
turn in her mood.
“We don’t have to talk about this stuff, if you don’t want to.”
She shrugged, angling her body to face me without releasing my hand. “No, that’s okay. It’s all part of the getting to know each other stuff. We covered the superficial basics the other night, and some, uh, more personal stuff. It’s only a matter of time before we had to get to the nitty-gritty stuff.”
“Okay, but it still doesn’t have to be today.” I sure as shit didn’t know if I was suddenly ready to start sharing the nitty-gritty stuff. There was way too much of the gritty variety in my past, but I was curious to know about hers.
Heidi lifted her chin the tiniest bit, a movement I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t staring right at her. “We’re already talking about it, so it might as well be today. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about your family,” I said, hesitant when I saw a flash of pain that was clear as day in her green eyes before she blinked it away.
Whether or not she wanted to talk to me about them, Heidi wasn’t one to back away from a challenge. She did, however, start walking us along the beach again. “My parents died when I turned eighteen. I’m an only child, so I don’t have any family anymore.”
I sucked in a sharp breath, the pain in her voice slicing through my heart. It had been stupid of me to assume I was the only one between us who’d had a tough past. “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m also sorry for bringing it up.”
She tore her gaze away from some spot ahead of us that she’d focused on while talking, offering me a small smile. “That’s okay. I think it will always hurt to talk about them, but we do have to. Sometimes, I think not talking about them is worse than actually talking about them. At least the hurt I feel when I do talk about them reminds me that they were real, that they really existed.”
My insides clenched, my blood feeling as if it had grown spikes and was stabbing at my veins. “Yeah, I get that. It’s still hard, though.”
“I had to grow up fast, but having the girls around has made it easier. How about you? You sound like you really do get it … the question is why. Not many people do.”
A dry laugh fell from my lips. “Don’t I know it. Most people hear about something like that and they don’t really know what to say. It’s always a very generic ‘I’m sorry’ without any meaning to it, an awkward smile, and a pitying look, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it kind of is.” Her chuckle filled the air between us, but it sounded as dry as mine had been. “You just told me you were sorry, though.”
“Yeah, but I meant it.” I released her hand to wrap my arm around her shoulders, pulling her closer to my side. It was more difficult to walk like this, but I wanted to hold her after hearing what she had gone through, and this was as close as I could get.
Plus, I kind of wanted to be held by her as I ripped off my own damn Band-Aid. Thankfully, her arm came around my waist almost naturally and rested lightly on my hip. I wouldn’t be able to really see the look in her eyes when I told her my story now, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“I’m an orphan, too, so I do understand the hurt that comes with talking about parents who aren’t around anymore. I’m not lucky enough to be able to say talking about them reminds me of how real they’d been, though. I can’t remember mine. I grew up in foster care, never got adopted, and only got out once I aged out.”
Heidi held me closer to her side, but she didn’t try to offer any words of comfort. She knew better than that. Sometimes, there really was nothing you could say to someone. I appreciated her silent support more than I would have appreciated any meaningless words.
We kept walking just like that, both of us wrapped up in our own thoughts for a few minutes. Angling her head to look up at me, she frowned. “Wait, you said you had family keeping you here?”
I had said that, yes. “Well, you know how your friends are like your family now?”
She nodded, quietly waiting for me to continue. “Well, I have a brother like that. His name is Rayce.”
“Why don’t you both up and leave then?” Her question was curious, not prying or invasive.
I ran my free hand through my hair, again debating exactly how much information I could give her about Rayce. He wouldn’t appreciate me talking about him behind his back, even in this context.
“We’ve thought about it, but we can’t right now. Rayce has been in and out of jail for years. Never prison or anything, but he has some stuff to sort out before we could go.”
Heidi’s eyes widened, but then she hugged me closer again and buried her head in my side. “I’m sorry about that, and I mean it too.”
“I know.” I dropped a kiss on the top of her head, wondering when the hell I had become comfortable enough with her to be walking like this—to kiss her hair or to tell her my story. “You shouldn’t be sorry, though. Sometimes life just happens. Nothing to be done about it, except to survive and make the best of what you’ve got.”
“I agree.” Waves licked our feet as we stood still again, taking the time to process what we’d learned about the other and breathing through the lingering pain of reopening old wounds.
Heidi let go of me eventually, taking a step back before shaking out her arms, hands, and legs. “Okay, enough of this. How about some ice cream? You can take me to that shop you mentioned the day we met. The one you said the girls should have gone to.”
“Sure.” That was the good thing about talking to people who had their own darkness and their own pain. They knew when to let it go. People who didn’t understand often pushed you to keep talking because they thought that was what you would want, what you needed.
It was only those with kindred souls who understood that while talking was sometimes good, too much of it threatened to open a black hole that would suck you right back into that darkness and refuse to let you go.
Taking Heidi’s hand again, we turned and walked back the way we’d come. We retraced our own footsteps, some of which had been washed away by the gently lapping waves. It felt like a sort of cleansing process, watching the footsteps we’d made while talking about all that shit being washed away.
Then I realized the bullshit philosophical direction my thoughts were taking and shut them down. I was on my way to take a gorgeous girl for ice cream, who the fuck cared about footprints in the sand?
Chapter 18
Heidi
The ice cream shop Will took me to was also on the beach, albeit a different one than the one by the house. This beach was busier, obviously much less exclusive than ours.
I felt immediately more at home here. This was much more what I was used to than giant houses, pristine semiprivate beaches, and a community who earned more a week than what I made in a year.
I loved Olive’s mom’s house. I really did. But it was nice to be among people who were more my speed again. Families and children were everywhere, running and screaming and playing. The cars in the parking lot were the type I was used to seeing back home instead of the luxury vehicles that lined the streets where we lived now.
The overall vibe was a lot more relaxed, and I relished it as we walked together outside the shop. Licking the ball of cherry ice cream in my cone, I moaned and sighed at the same time. “You were right, this is fucking amazing.”
Will was no longer at my side. I spun around and found him frozen in his tracks, his eyes narrowed and staring straight ahead. Blinking a couple of times, he shook his head and pointed at me with his own cone. “You can’t make noises like that in public. Especially not in the daytime.”
Butterflies exploded into flutters in my stomach, a delicious little thrill traveling through me as I laughed. The way Will was looking at me right now—the eager heat in his eyes and the sudden restraint that showed in his locked muscles—told me he wasn’t feeding me a line, even if he had denied what he said before had been one.
Whatever that unintended noise had sounded like, it made him want to fuck me right there and right now. Ideas that
were utterly inappropriate for a family-friendly area in broad daylight. It was a relief to know that he still wanted me, even if it did suddenly give me ideas too.
I smiled, then gave my ice cream another slow, deliberate lick. All the while keeping my eyes on his. “Sorry, it wasn’t on purpose.”
His full lips pursed, even as he rolled his eyes. “The noise might not have been, but that definitely was.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny that statement.” I doubled back to him, giving him what I hoped was an innocent smile. “Now, are we going for another walk while we eat this or are you going to stand here all day?”
Will grumbled something under his breath, then grabbed my hand and dragged me across the sidewalk that separated the busy beach from the shops and restaurants. “We’re walking.”
He held my hand again, slowing down once we’d managed to dodge a couple of groups of people who looked like college students playing volleyball and some kids running around. I relaxed against his side, hanging on to his hand and happily lapping up my ice cream.
The truth was that I was relieved Will still wanted me, was still willing to banter with me and act like nothing had changed between us after the emotionally charged talk earlier. In the past, I’d found that people often started treating you differently if there was any kind of tragedy in your past.
For at least a little while, they looked at you with pity in their eyes and discomfort in their hearts. They walked on eggshells around you and didn’t quite know how to act. It was almost like they were afraid that they were going to say or do something that was going to cause you to just spontaneously disintegrate. Just cause you to lose your shit all over them or to have a nuclear fucking meltdown.
I hadn’t necessarily been expecting Will to act like that, especially not knowing more about his own history now, but I had been a little bit apprehensive about whether that heat of attraction that had flared between us since the moment we’d met would have lessened somehow.