Escaping Grace: A Turning Grace Novel

by Davis, J. Q.

  “Okay. You say no, then it’s no,” he said nonchalantly, almost as if it wasn’t the first time this has ever happened. He bent over to grab his t-shirt.

  I covered up my barely naked breasts with one arm while I picked up my t-shirt. I turned around to put it on, suddenly feeling self-conscience.

  “Grace, don’t be silly. You have nothing to be embarrassed about. You are hot!”

  “Well, thank you. But…”

  I was fidgeting from his comment and couldn’t find the hole to fit my head through. He walked in front of me and helped.

  “But what? Grace, you don’t give yourself enough credit. You are tougher and hotter than you think.”

  “Yeah, well…I don’t feel like it,” I admitted.

  We started to head back toward the beach. “Why not? What does any other girl have that you don’t? I’m not going to run down a list of things to help boost your ego or make you more confident. You already know what they are. You just have to believe it. Besides, you are a Zombrid! That makes you a badass in and of itself.”

  “Why do you think being a Zombrid is so awesome? I’ve killed someone. Someone who didn’t deserve to die,” I said, hearing the remorse in every word that came out of my own mouth. I truly hated that I killed someone, let alone my best friend.

  He stopped and turned toward me. “You said earlier that I didn’t know what it felt like to kill someone I loved. Well, you are sadly mistaken. I do know how it feels.”

  I instantly felt ashamed. How could I have been so inconsiderate? I didn’t even think twice about what he had been through. He wasn’t able to respond to the question earlier about whether or not he’d eaten someone.

  I stood still and quiet, waiting for him to finally share his story.

  “I ate my girlfriend, whom I loved very much mind you. And she tasted so good that I decided to hunt. Every other night, I snuck out of my flat to find fresh meat. I got nicked only because my roommate found out and told the police. Everyone thought there was a serial killer on the loose.”

  I swallowed hard, not sure of how I should feel about what I was hearing. “Um…you were the serial killer, Ian. How many people did you eat?”

  He stepped forward to begin walking again. “Seven or eight. I can’t remember. Those couple of weeks feel like a blur now.”

  I couldn’t believe it! I just almost lost my virginal card to a no joke, Grade A serial killer. I didn’t know whether to be afraid and run for my life or to just play it cool and listen to the rest of his story.

  But I didn’t have a choice, he continued. “I know what you’re thinking. I’m a horrible person. But those people that I ate were either criminals or deadbeat assholes.

  “But who were you to judge whether or not they deserved to die? Ian, does the rest of the group know this?”

  “Nah, just Charlie. But why do you think I ended up here? I was on a rampage. I was pissed about what I had done to the love of my life. I was going to marry Erica. And I had to take my anger out on something. Someone. But then Dr. Roberson came and…changed my life.”

  His accent made it so difficult for me to read him. I didn’t know if he was remorseful or not. His personality was so easygoing. Did he even care about what he did?

  “How did he change you?” I asked, truly curious to learn how Dr. Roberson managed to affect someone that was obviously so far gone.

  “He taught me how to control my cravings and my anger. He taught me how to get past that dark era in my life. He basically told me to pull my head in and quit being a twit.”

  The more and more I heard about Dr. Roberson, the more and more I realized that he could really be an all-around descent person. I always had my doubts about him. There was always a lingering question in the back of my mind, but it seemed everyone here thought differently. They appreciated all that he had done for them, and praised him in positive ways.

  “So, if you were to go back out into the world…you won’t kill again?”

  “Grace, you don’t need to worry about me. I’m good,” he said with a smile.

  We finally reached the beach. The dread was coming back as I thought of my reunion with Sonny. It was bound to happen. There was no escaping it.

  But before I faced that music, I had to ask Ian one last thing.

  “Ian, why did you stop?”

  “Stop what? Killing people?”

  “No. I mean, why did you just stop trying to…be with me?”

  “Oh, you mean the sex thing? Well, you said no. No means no, Grace. Any decent man would agree.”

  God. He wasn’t getting me.

  “No…why didn’t you even question it? You acted like you didn’t really care,” I reiterated, realizing then that it actually hurt my feelings a little.

  He chuckled and stopped in the sand to look me in the eyes. “Grace, trust me. There was nothing I wanted more than to have intercourse with you in that moment. But I’m not stupid. You aren’t over your ex. You aren’t over a lot of things. And you were looking for instant gratification. Now, I was willing to oblige but the second you stop it, it stops.” He was so sure about what he was saying. While I was pretty positive that this wasn’t the first time he had to give this speech, it was still genuinely convincing.

  I nodded. “Well, I appreciate that.”

  “No problem. I’m not looking for any kind of relationship anyway.”

  “Well…neither am I.”

  He laughed under his breath. “Okay.”

  Ian took a step forward to continue our way back to the huts, but I didn’t move. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, okay.”

  “No. No, you think that if I sleep with you, then I’m going to fall for you. You think that don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say any of that. Those are your words,” he answered.

  I started to walk again. “Please, what do you think you’re…God’s gift?”

  His little remark irritated me. Did I give off the clingy, obsessive vibe?

  “Again. Your words.”

  I shoved his shoulder. “Whatever. I heard you loved Charlie anyway.” I taunted. I didn’t necessarily hear that he loved her, but he deserved a good teasing.

  “Oh, no. No love there. Well, emotionally speaking. She and I just had sort of an arrangement. She needed some…special attention.”

  “You are such a pig.”

  “Am not! I just like to have fun. Something you should consider doing,” he said while pointing a finger in my face.

  I grabbed his finger and twisted.

  “Ouch!”

  “You need to shut up!”

  We approached the porch of the Laguna hut where V was standing. I gave him a look and a slight smile. He acknowledged and nodded. It was a kind of code we had between each other for indication that I was okay.

  “Speaking of shutting up, what’s with that new chick? You know her, right?”

  I groaned. “Yes, I know her. She was my first taste.”

  “Oh, yeah. The fight. And then the arm thing…got it. Well, good luck with that.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks.”

  “See you later, Grace. Thanks for…everything,” he said, giving me a conniving wink.

  “Goodbye, Ian.”

  I walked up the steps to the porch and caught V eyeing me. “What?”

  “What did he mean by that?” Hmm…he seemed concerned. Or maybe upset?

  “By what? The ‘thanks for everything’? Nothing. He’s an idiot,” I shrugged.

  “He didn’t…do anything to you, right?” he asked dubiously.

  Where was he getting at? Do anything?

  “No!” I looked away. But the feeling of his eyes burning a hole in my face made me give into the truth. “Okay, maybe we kissed. But that was it.”

  Well, it wasn’t the whole truth. There was touching involved, but he didn’t have to know that.

  V didn’t say anything. Instead, he gave me a disappointed look.

  “What? What�
��s the big deal?” I asked.

  “Nothing. He’s just not the type to date or stay faithful in a relationship.”

  “Why does everyone think I’m obsessed with relationships? Is it written on my forehead?” I snapped. I mean, did I look like that girl?

  He straightened his posture. “No, I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “Well, I can’t get any more hurt than I already am.” And with that, I stomped to my room.

  I instantly felt guilty for snapping at V. But he was dealing with a teenage Zombrid with a lot on her plate. I was sure he understood.

  I passed Estelle’s suite, then Maddi’s. I quietly celebrated that their doors were closed. Destiny and Charlie’s suite were past my room, so I couldn’t see if their doors were closed. I walked lightly down the hall, trying not to make too much noise on the hardwood floors.

  Yes, I was avoiding having any contact with anyone right now. I just really wanted to get back to my room, check my emails and messages, and maybe take a nap. I wasn’t sure when I was going to run into Sonny, so I needed to make sure I was mentally prepared for her snide remarks and mean comebacks.

  I was still shaken up by just seeing her, and although Ian and I had our tiny little tryst that went nowhere, it was still on my mind. I could have almost done something regret-worthy. I needed to regain control of my obviously befuddled brain.

  I opened my door.

  Sonny Westwood turned away from my computer. “Grace! Ha! You scared me!”

  Of course. I should have known better.

  Chapter 11

  The Breakdown

  I walked over to the computer and shut off the monitor. She was looking at my emails. “Sonny, why are you here?”

  “Well, you ran away like a bat outta hell earlier and we didn’t have time to catch up. I thought I’d come to your suite and wait for you.”

  “No. I mean, why are you here? At Everlasting Paradise?” My fuse was already burning low.

  She stood up from the chair and wandered over to my bed. She glanced around my room before taking a seat on the edge.

  I watched her closely, still not trusting her intentions. I never could. She just seemed like a girl who could snap on you at any moment, and I didn’t put killing someone past her. But she wouldn’t kill you in the obvious way like by using a gun or a knife. She was the type that would slip poison into your drink or maybe inject you with a drug. She was a silent killer.

  I analyzed her body language and expression as she crossed her perfectly tan legs. Her heels were six inches high. Her skirt was white and so short, that one wrong move would show off her hoo-ha. Her shirt was low cut to show off her cleavage. The only modest article of clothing she wore was the sweater that still draped over her shoulders.

  “Do you want me to start from the beginning, when you stole my boyfriend and bit my arm before you ate it?”

  Okay, I guess I deserved her sarcasm. “After that,” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Well, after you bit me, I went to the hospital. That was all I could remember before I woke up a couple of days later. Apparently I lost a ton of blood, thanks to you. So I was unconscious for most of the time. When I woke up, the doctor was standing over my bed. And that’s when he told me the news.”

  I was confused. She must have read that on my face because she chuckled. “Oh what, did Tristen not tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” I was anxious and could feel the worried butterflies in my stomach begin to fly in all directions.

  She then unbuttoned the top part of her sweater with one hand and let it slide down her shoulders onto the bed.

  All of the air expelled out of my lungs in a single breath. My jaw dropped, and I was sure my heart stopped in that moment.

  She looked down and cupped what was left of her arm. It was bandaged from just under her elbow up. Below that, there was nothing. There was no forearm. No hand.

  “Sonny,” I managed to breathe out. I wanted to cry.

  She smiled. “Hey, it could have been worse. I could have ended up like your bestie and her boyfriend, right?”

  “I…I’m so sorry.”

  Suddenly, she was serious. “Look, what’s done is done. I didn’t come here for apologies from you.”

  “But…why? What happened? I mean, I didn’t think that I’d hurt you so badly.” And that was the truth. I knew I’d bitten a portion off, but I had no idea it was all of her arm. On the other hand, I tend to lose track of time and what’s going into my mouth when I was in that…mode.

  “Apparently, you bit off so much that the doctors had no choice but to amputate. It was too mangled to save. I’ve had all kinds of surgeries since then.”

  I wanted to touch it. I wanted to nurture her and beg for her mercy.

  “Oh God. Don’t do that! Don’t give me that sorry look. Like I said, it’s done. But I have to say…touché, Grace. You were able to steal my boyfriend and render me imperfect. I’ll give you credit for that. Your revenge plot was one to be admired for all the things I’d done to you,” she said.

  “Sonny, you think I did this to you on purpose?” Yeah, she made my life hell, but I wasn’t good enough to devise a whole plan to get her back. Especially something this horrible and cruel.

  “Oh, you didn’t?” she asked, surprise in her tone. “I could have sworn you did. Well, that’s neither here nor there. I live with you now.”

  Great. So did this mean that she was going to seek revenge on me now?

  “How did you end up here on the island?” I asked, still puzzled by how it could have happened.

  She stood up and walked over to the glass sliding door. Her half-arm dangled and although there was a part of her literally missing now, she still somehow looked like the Perfect Sonny I left back in New Orleans.

  “After finding out that I no longer had my arm, I was mortified. I mean, how the hell was I supposed to be me without it? How was I supposed to get dressed and drive and do all those things? I know there are people out there who function without body parts but come on…I’m not one of those people,” she said with disdain.

  “Then, Dr. Roberson showed up to check up on me. He told me who he was and said that he could fix my arm for me if I really wanted it. He said that he was an experimental doctor and blah, blah, blah. But the only way to fix me was by injecting me with a serum.”

  What?

  “Wait! What?” I stood up. “Sonny, he gave you the serum? But how, you have to be—”

  “Dead. I know.” She laughed. “Do you think I’m stupid or something? He told me everything. Everything about this island and what you and your little Zombrid friends are.”

  “But you didn’t die. And he couldn’t give it to you if you were alive because it would kill you.” None of it made sense. Dr. Roberson specifically told me that the second patient died from the injection because he wasn’t dead. So how…unless…

  It was like a light bulb lit up above my head and Sonny could see it.

  “Ding, ding, ding. You got it!” She smiled wide and whispered, “I died.”

  I was more confused now than I had ever been in my life. I shook my head no, not understanding where she was getting at.

  “I wasn’t dead initially, but when Dr. Roberson said he could help me and explained that the serum can only work on a dead person, that’s when I decided to… die,” she said, shrugging her shoulders as if it were no big deal.

  “Do you realize what this means? This means that you are a zombie, Sonny. This means that you will have to eat raw things and be hungry all the time. You don’t want to be that way,” I warned her.

  She smacked her lips. “Please. You don’t know what I want, Grace. Besides, I wasn’t about to walk around with one arm, not able to do anything. Dr. Roberson is going to attach a new arm and because we have superhuman healing abilities or whatever, it’s going to be like nothing even happened.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he showed me. It’s happened before to one of his
subjects.”

  I briefly wondered who. Was it someone in our group?

  She sighed as if to be bored. “Anyway, yeah I’m a Zombrid now. I get to live forever and look this beautiful for a long time.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Sonny, this is not a gift. It’s actually horrible.”

  “God, you are such a drag! I knew there was a reason why I never liked you.”

  I was pissed now.

  I sat down in my computer chair. “You know, while we are on that subject, why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you? Besides what I did recently.”

  “Grace, you were just never in my league. You know that. I mean come on, you come from a broken family and you’re not as wealthy as me. You’re kind of a nerd. Your clothes are…frumpy at best. Is it really a surprise that we were never friends?”

  “How could you be so shallow? Even after everything that you’ve been through?”

  “Yeah, and it was all your fault! Everything was fine before. I had Tristen and my girls and my arm! And then you came traipsing along and stole him from me!”

  I stood up and moved closer to her. “I didn’t steal him from you! He chose me! He was tired of you controlling him and treating him like shit!”

  She moved closer to me too. “I did not treat him like shit! I treated him like a king! He got everything he wanted from me!”

  “Well, he didn’t want anything from you anymore!”

  We were now face-to-face. There were only inches of space between us. I was fuming with anger and could feel the fury radiating off her body.

  And then…the most surprising and unbelievable thing happened.

  Her eyes welled up, instantly turning red, and a single tear emerged from the corner of her eye. It rolled down the side of her nose, to her cheek, and then her mouth. Her bottom lip began to quiver.

  Sonny Westwood was crying.

  I stepped away from her, not knowing what to do.

  She covered what she could of her face with one hand and sat back down on the edge of the bed.

  “Sonny…”

  “I thought that he loved me,” she muttered between weeps. “I really thought that we would be together for a long time.”

  My chest caved in with sadness as I watched Miss Perfectly Perfect breakdown right before my eyes.