Riptides (Lengths)

by Campbell, Steph

  We’ve been sitting here longer than we should have already. We could cloud the night with more complicated explanations and dissections of the same damn story, but the bottom line is, I have to accept that it’s over.

  Too bad my tequila-tinged mind just can’t seem to grasp that.

  “Don’t call me that,” she sobs, her shoulders shaking up and down. “Not anymore.” And just like that, any shred of intimacy we ever shared evaporates.

  I suck in a quick breath through my teeth. Her eyes are damp and her expression pitiful. It throws me, because that gorgeous face doesn’t seem like it can possibly belong to the soul-crushing monster I now know she is. “Okay. But I’m still calling you a cab. C’mon.”

  This time she lets me help her off her barstool. Jess slumps into my chest, and I position my head away from her. It’s self-preservation at this point. I need to help this woman get in a cab, because, even if I’m pissed as hell, I don’t want her behind the wheel. But I sure as shit don’t want to inhale the familiar apple smell of her hair or have her face too close to mine. Not kissing those tears away has been a Herculean feat as it is.

  The cool ocean breeze is a balm to my scattered brain. I slide my phone out of my back pocket and punch a couple of buttons on the car service app that has come in handy a few too many times after many long nights.

  “Alright, says someone will be here in about five minutes,” I say.

  “You don’t have to do all this, Enzo. I know you must hate me.”

  I want to hate her. I want to hate her with everything in me. But I don’t. Because she’s right. She tried to tell me. So many damn times. But I didn’t want to hear it.

  “Look doll——Jess, I don’t hate you.”

  Even if I want to. Even if it’d make my life so much simpler right now. I don’t hate this woman.

  I pull her in by the waist, too close to really trust myself, but I’d regret it forever if I let her walk away without getting the chance to hold her one last time. I press my lips to her forehead and try to brand the memory of her skin, the taste of it and the sweet smell.

  The tug of a hand on my shoulder rips me away from Jess, and, before I have the time to process it, a fist connects with my jaw.

  I stumble backward, blinking furiously. Shit, that was one hell of a punch. When I finally right myself, Jess is pleading with the huge asshole who just pummeled my face.

  “Brody! He was just helping me to a car. I’ve had too much to drink! That’s all!” She’s hanging off his arm and begging, like she knows I’m about to get kicked into a coma by this guy.

  By the one guy who has every right to kick my ass.

  I know by his possessive stance and the way he tucks her behind his body, lunging after me like I’ve stolen the heart out of his chest, that he’s her husband. A dangerous mix of jealousy and pity rises up in my chest, clouded over by a thick fog of adrenaline-fueled fury.

  “Didn’t look like he was doing anything to help you.” He looks back at her, and I catch a glimpse of an intimate argument, one that spans further back and deeper down than she dared to go with me. For all the hostility crackling between them, there’s a clear passion that makes me ashamed. If I’d known I was violating that, I never would have pushed things so far with Jess. “Go get in my truck. Your boyfriend and I have some business to settle.”

  “Don’t do this, Brody,” Jess cries, her voice so low and coaxing, it makes me cringe. They have a history that I know nothing about, and soon I’ll just be one bloody, stupid mistake that’s part of it.

  “Look soldier.” I straighten myself and cuff my sleeves up. There’s blood on my tux shirt, the one that’s rented with Cohen’s credit card. “I’m going to give you that one because I respect the hell out of what you do for our country. But I’m not about to give you more than that.”

  “Brody, I want you to come with me now,” Jess says, and we can both hear her forcing her voice to relax. “This is about me and you. This has nothing to do with Enzo.”

  “Enzo?” My name is a sneer in his mouth. He moves his huge granite jaw back and forth and cracks the knuckles on his hands——hands that look like they could strangle a grizzly bear. “I heard the girls talking about an ‘Enzo.’ Destiny said he was good-looking. Guess I was expecting something other than a wetback surf rat, but what do I know?”

  Now my fucking back is up.

  “Really? We’re going right to the slurs?” I know that what he’s saying has everything to do with hurting Jess anyway he can because she was with me.

  “I call it like it is. I have zero respect for a man who would fuck another man’s wife,” he growls, coming at me again.

  I manage to duck his swing and catch him hard on the side of his head. It’s more an ear shot that anything else, and my hand might be broken, but my adrenaline is running too fucking hot and hard for me to care.

  “Brody! Enzo! Stop!” Jess screams, but neither one of us is about to listen now.

  “So you’re going to come after me because I slept with your wife? Isn’t that a little hypocritical?” I ask, shoving at him hard.

  He staggers back and manages to clip me in the ribs before he turns to look at Jess. “What the hell, Jessica? You told him about that? About us?”

  Her entire chin and lower lip wobble. “Don’t play the saint with me, Brody. What did you tell her? What did you two talk about?”

  He backs away from me. “I told you, that was nothing but physical. It was after what happened with Garreth. I was fucked up. My head was fucked up. I never meant to hurt you.” His words go soft. His fists relax.

  “Well, you did,” she bites out, crossing her arms over her chest, those big brown eyes swimming with tears. “You did and you made me want to hurt you back, so I did.”

  She says the words like I’m not even there, then bites her lip and looks down at the ground when she catches my eye.

  “So it meant nothing?” I ask her, my voice gravelly and shredded. “Jess, look at me. All of that. What we did, what we had, it was nothing to you?”

  “Of course it was nothing,” Brody says, a satisfied grin on his jarhead fucking face. “She’s my wife. She’s with me. You were just a mistake, and one we’re going to forget ever happened as soon as this is over.”

  I get that. Brody is right. It hurts, it fucking throbs, but I get it. I can take it.

  It doesn’t stop me from running at him and hammering with my fists. He hammers right back. Blood spurts, there are stars in front of my eyes, I can hear Jess screaming, then sirens, then black, and I hit the ground hard.

  My last thought, through a dull, dark ache is simple:

  Fuck.

  FOURTEEN

  I don’t know what hurts most right now.

  My pride——having to call my baby sister, Gen to bail me out of jail, knowing she’s probably the one person in my family least likely to judge.

  My heart——ripped out and stomped on by the first girl I ever felt anything real for.

  Or my fucking hand——crushed on her husband’s face.

  Her husband. Her fucking husband. I was sleeping with a married woman. I fell in love with a married woman. I am not this guy.

  “Rodriguez?” The guard calls. I’m not cuffed or anything, they didn’t make me sit in a cell, but that doesn’t make the fact that I’m in police custody any less embarrassing.

  “Sign here and take your personal items,” he says, sliding a small envelope toward me. I sign my name on the clipboard and pull my wallet and keys out of the envelope.

  This. Is. Not. Me.

  When I round the corner into the waiting area, my lips are already forming the apology to Gen for getting her out this late after such a long day, but it isn’t my sister that’s bailed me out. It’s her husband, Adam.

  “Hey, man,” he says, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets. “I didn’t feel right about Gen coming to this end of town at this hour.”

  I nod, because I get it. And even if he’s one of the last
people I want to see right now, I can still appreciate that he’s always looking out for my sister. “Thanks for coming. How much do I owe you guys?”

  Adam waves me off and pushes through the glass door. I’ve only been inside the police station for a couple of hours, but when I catch that first breath of outside air, I feel like I’ve come out on the other side of serving hard time.

  Adam looks ready to never talk about this again, and I couldn’t agree more, but there’s no way I’m letting Adam and Gen get saddled with the cost of getting my stupid ass out of this situation. My head is spinning right now, but I need to let him know I’m not letting this lie for good. “We’ll settle up later.”

  “Do you want me to drop you at your car? Are you good to drive?” Adam asks.

  “Nah, just take me home. I’ll deal with my car tomorrow.”

  The first half of the ride is mostly silent, except for the music from Adam’s iPod playing too low for me to decipher what it is or let it curb some of the awkwardness in the air.

  “So, I imagine you’ve had better nights,” Adam says, as he turns the car toward the freeway. He lets a small laugh curl around the words to soften their blow.

  “Yeah,” I say. I rub my palm along my jaw and try to remember a shittier night, but I come up blank. “Tonight…tonight was about as bad as it gets.”

  “You don’t have to tell me anything, Enzo, but if there’s anything your sister and I can do to help you out of whatever mess you’re in…just name it.”

  My brother and I haven’t always given Adam the credit he deserves, but the guy is constantly surprising all of us, even when we treat him like a lesser member of the family.

  “What’d Gen decide about that trip to Belgium?” I change the subject.

  Adam blows out a long, frustrated breath. “Still says she won’t go. I don’t get it, to be honest. The girl is as independent as they come, she’d be fine on her own for a year. She’s acting like she can’t be without me, though, and that’s not the Gen I know.”

  I shrug. “Maybe she’ll just miss you too much. Don’t you want her to want you around all the time?”

  His jaw goes tight, and it’s one of those times I can actually picture him as a badass Israeli soldier instead of a nerdy professor. “Of course I want to be with her, and I want her to want that, too. But what I don’t want is her passing up opportunities because of me. I don’t think people——even married people——should ever want to change their partners. I want Gen to be whoever she is, and do the things that she wants to do and not be afraid of how I’ll feel——”

  “I think that’s where I fucked up,” I interrupt.

  “What?” Adam looks over at me, his eyes still lit up from the way he was talking about Gen and how much he loves her for exactly the crazy, funny person she is.

  I let my head fall back onto the seat rest and close my eyes against all my own stupid mistakes, which suddenly flare through my brain crystal clear and blade sharp.

  Too bad I didn’t have this conversation with Adam yesterday. If I’d have realized this all twenty-four hours ago, I could have saved myself a busted face and jail time.

  “With Jess. I think I had this idea of what I wanted our lives to be in my head. Of who I was going to be because I was with someone like her…How I was finally going to be a real, upstanding member of the family, just because I had a girl like her to call mine. Jesus, she tried to tell me so many times, but I had this whole thing worked out in my mind of how we could be together and——”

  “She tried to tell you what?” he interrupts.

  “The fight tonight? Was with Jess’s husband. She’s married,” the words come out in a rushed admission that only intensifies the guilt I’m still wrestling.

  “Holy shit,” Adam says, shock stuttering the words a little. “So, you fought her husband? What did you hope to accomplish by doing that?” He’s asking in his analytic, logical voice——not judging——but that fact doesn’t make it sting any less.

  “He punched me first,” I say, like a child——like it matters. I slept with his wife. I had it coming.

  “You had no idea she was married?” Adam asks, and again, he’s in scientist mode, just collecting data. Still makes me feel like a royal douchebag.

  I close my eyes and pinch the bridge of my nose, frustration and embarrassment coursing through me. “That’s the part where I fucked up. She says she tried to tell me, and at first, I called bullshit. But I think she’s right. There were so many times she was trying to tell me something but she looked too sad doing it, so I…convinced her to do other things with our time…”

  “Gotcha,” Adam says, cutting me off before the details get too graphic. “So what now?”

  “Fuck if I know.” I don’t know what was real in my relationship with Jess anymore, and now that I know she belongs to someone else, the only thing I’m certain of is that I’ll never have the opportunity to ask. “Go home and lick my wounds I guess.” I’m already plotting how I’ll swipe the leftover booze from Cohen and Maren’s wedding, how I’ll take the crates of alcohol back to my place and then won’t be seeing daylight any time soon.

  “Been there.” Adam gives me a tight smile and shakes his head, like he’s dealing with memories of things just as ugly and guilt-laden as mine are. “It’s what brought me to the US in the first place. Well, the first class education. But running away from… a situation I didn’t feel equipped to handle was the catalyst.”

  “Was the situation married?”

  Adam lets out an uncomfortable chuckle. “No. At least not that I know of. What she was was emotionally unavailable. She loved drama, I think. She pulled me in and pushed me away for sport. Got to a point where my entire life was one big chess board and she held all the power. I wasn’t able to make it to work on time, I wasn’t doing well in school. I had to get out.”

  I try to picture my rational, cool-headed brother-in-law in the middle of all that drama, but it’s hard. As kooky as my sister can be, she and Adam are very chill and get along really well——when they’re not arguing over Belgium. “So, what, you just left?”

  Adam nods, and I can see the tension in his shoulders ease when he talks about getting away from that relationship.

  “It wasn’t an easy choice. It hurt like hell to walk away from her——and from my entire life back in Israel. But sometimes breaks that big are the only way to go. For me, there was no other way. If I didn’t get out of there I know I’d still, to this day, be up at night thinking about ways to try to make things work with her, which way to crawl back and convince her we had a chance, even though I knew in my gut we never could.” He grimaces just thinking about the bullet he dodged.

  I know one day I’ll get to a place where I can see it all as clearly as Adam sees his past with that girl, but right now I’m too fucking raw and bruised, inside and out, to really process.

  “Wow, that’s rough, man.”

  “I left in the middle of the night one night. Didn’t even say goodbye to her because I knew she’d talk me out of it. Something about the night that makes it feel less real, you know? So I packed a small bag of clothes, got my passport and skipped around for a couple of months before I ended up in the States.” He shrugs like uprooting his entire life, badass Israeli militant style, is no big thing at all.

  “That’s pretty ballsy, Adam. I didn’t realize you had that in you,” I say, knowing it’s a dick comment the second I say it. With all the shit I’ve been through tonight, my filter is blown. “No wonder my sister digs you. You are a man of mystery you know that? And you’re clearly a saint, because Gen was always least likely to settle down and you’ve reigned her in. Now I’m the only one of the siblings that’s alone and clueless…”

  “I’d like to think a lot of things about me would surprise you if you and your brothers would ever lighten up and give me a chance,” he says with a rough smile. “I also think that sometimes, the best plan is to stray off the beaten path. I think you’ve got that in you, En
zo. Do your own thing. Stop worrying about what your siblings have or haven’t done. You’re your own man. Do what makes you happy.”

  Adam pulls up to my apartment building and puts his car in park. I sit there for a long minute replaying everything he just said. How he left everything behind because of a girl and somehow, stumbled into a life with my sister…a damn good life.

  I slowly climb out of the passenger seat and say, “Thanks for the ride. And the talk. I’m sorry to get you out this late, but I really do appreciate it.”

  “No sweat. Maybe next time we hit the beach, you’ll remember tonight and not drop in on every damn wave I try to catch. And don’t worry, when Gen asks, I’ll tell her your face looked fine,” Adam says, his eyebrows raised high.

  “What’s wrong with my face?” I ask, reaching up and pressing my fingertips to my cheek, jaw and forehead. I immediately regret it. I haven’t looked in a mirror yet, but all three places are swollen and sore. I must look pretty damn rough for Adam to comment.

  “I think you’re right,” I say, leaning on the open passenger door.

  “About what?” Adam drums his fingers softly on the steering wheel.

  “About taking off being the best option. Maybe I just need to bail on Silver Strand for a while. Start over somewhere new where no one knows me and my screw ups. Maybe the girl of my dreams is waiting for me somewhere new.” I let my head hang half out the window and look up at the couple of visible stars and the moon. The pale, sickly moon that led me astray and showed up in my cards. I’ve never felt the need to run beat through me stronger than does now.

  “Whoa, Enzo, I didn’t mean you should take off. I just meant that I understand the frustration of feeling like you’ve screwed up so badly you can’t fix it. But that’s a temporary feeling.” Adam turns in his seat to look at me, panic all over his face. I realize he’s processing all he just said and trying to determine how pissed my sister will be if she lays blame for me bailing on Adam.

  But my brain has latched onto the idea of going, and, even though it doesn’t always work all that well, my brain is stubborn as all hell. It’s decided going is the best thing for me to do, so now that’s all I can think about. Honestly, it feels good to think about a plan that doesn’t include maybe bumping into Jess and her husband all over Silver Strand.