Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
SCARLETT
T he thundering waterfall behind me was nothing compared to the thumping of my heart, blasting through my ears.
Hands grabbed me from the side, and lost in the noise swallowing my brain, I couldn’t pinpoint if they were Camp’s or Nash’s. I wasn’t sure which one I was hoping they were. Better yet, I wasn’t sure which ones I was hoping they weren’t .
A murderer. Maybe I’d misheard James when he snapped at us before turning on his heel. But I knew better than to let myself be delusional like that. I knew what I’d heard. Besides, murderer was one of those words like orange—not a whole lot rhymed with it. Kind of hard to mistake it.
“Scarlett, listen to me.” Nash’s voice was steady in my ear, breath hot against my skin, but not enough to pull me back to Earth yet, not when I was trying to make sense of this new information. “Scarlett, I swear I can explain everything, if you just listen.”
“Man, just leave her alone. Should you even be near her? Jesus, you guys had me under a microscope and apparently you were the one we needed to worry about.” Camp didn’t sound happy at all, and when I felt myself pulled in the other direction, I knew he was trying to get me away from Nash.
But I considered what I knew about Nash. About his soul’s gentle nature, and his personality. I didn’t feel at risk around him. For all his talk of dangerous things and how to avoid them, I never felt he was the thing to be frightened of.
He had lied, though. I did tell him I would trust him to tell me whatever secret he held when he was ready, but I was operating under the assumption the secret wasn’t one that would put me in actual danger.
My brain pulled in two separate directions, slowly stretching itself thinner as I worked myself in circles. At the end of the day, I could only work with the information I had at hand, and right now, I didn’t have enough.
I spun, wrestling myself out of Camp’s grip, clocking the brief look of concern in his eyes as I did so. When I took a step back from both of them, his shoulders visibly relaxed. Nash on the other hand, held only pain in his eyes. His jaw ticked, a thousand words on the tip of his tongue he wanted to say to me, but he held himself back.
A checkmark in the right box then.
I held up my hands to both men. “Look. I’m not making any assumptions or decisions right now. I don’t have anywhere near enough information to do so. This is what we’re going to do. I’m going to get dressed.” I threw a hand down my still barely-clothed body. “Because I’m not about to have this conversation in the nude. Then Nash is going to tell us everything, and Camp and I are going to listen .”
Camp raised a brow in my direction, pushing his damp hair back away from his face.
I silenced his unspoken words with a wave. “We are going to listen. We listened to you, and now we’re going to listen to Nash. We can deal with James later.”
An odd twinge of pain shot through my heart when I thought about James, and the broken look deep in his eyes as he confessed Nash’s secret. I hadn’t really been thinking about how he’d feel watching everything from the sidelines until he stormed over. I hadn’t really been thinking at all.
And after all, hurt people hurt people.
I tugged my clothes on over my damp underclothes, cringing at the way the fabric felt on my skin. I’d change into dry clothes as soon as we were back on board the boat. Getting to the bottom of Nash’s story was more important.
Sitting on the same rock James had occupied only minutes before, I waited for the guys to get dressed, both making the same expressions I had. Wet clothes in the dense humidity of the rainforest were no one’s friend.
Eventually Camp came to sit on the ground at my feet. Nash stood in front of us, twisting his hands, a move so at odds with his usual comfortable confidence.
He sighed. “It all began when I was in university. James and I were in the same class, a beginner level business class. By some odd twist of fate, we ended up in a group project together.”
Camp and I remained silent, letting Nash collect his thoughts before proceeding.
“I guess you could call us friends. I mean, I thought we were friends back then. But knowing what I know now, I’m not sure if we ever were. I don’t know if James knows how to have friends. I don’t know…I don’t know how much my life would be different if I’d realized that sooner. We would go out together, get beers, watch the other people from our classes make complete fools of themselves over girls, and on the dance floor. Friends by lack of association, if you know what I mean. I never really fit in with any group, and James, well, James had always been different.”
Nash tapped his fingers on his hip, looking past us, into the dense rainforest, as if he could see through all the trees and bushes to where James trekked back to the Carpe Diem . “One of these times, I let it slip that I didn’t know how I was going to make next semester’s tuition. The sub place I worked at had gone out of business, rendering me immediately jobless and stressing about the future. James said his father was looking for some help with the family business, and with no other possibilities, I said I’d meet with his father the next morning.”
Something wasn’t sitting right in my chest. “When you say family business…”
Nash met my eyes with a bleak expression. “James’ family owns a lot of property. They have for many years. But maintaining that property, well, sometimes things get complicated. Property and business inside a city like the one we grew up in is a power game. You have to be the most powerful, the strongest, the toughest. If you’re not, you’ll get eaten alive. At first, James’ dad had me doing simple stuff. Running errands. Picking people up. That sort of thing.”
“Then one night, he called me. It was late. Too late for a boss to be calling their errand boy.”
I wanted to give Nash a hug when his shoulders slumped, but I also needed to hear how his story.
“One of his bouncers for a club they owned was sick. There’d been an incident, and they needed someone to come and deal with a situation. I was the only one he trusted, or so he said. In reality, they needed someone large to scare off a college kid who’d been trying to sell drugs for another family in the club. I was big enough to be scary.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, even Camp sucked in a quiet breath. I could already see how this story would end, how it spread out on a timeline. But that was the problem with hindsight. When you’re in the situation, by the time you realize what’s going on, you’re in too deep.
“I didn’t learn the truth until later. He wanted to make sure I was trustworthy and reliable before he let me into the business. He needed an enforcer. Someone big, scary looking from the outside. Someone who could intimidate people. He swore up and down I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. Just scare them. We both knew he was lying. But the money was good, and I was broke. And for the first bit, he wasn’t lying. I didn’t have to lay a hand on anyone. Maybe get in their face a bit, but most of them backed off pretty quickly. James and I still hung out, but it was different by then. We both knew what happened behind closed doors, what really kept him in nice clothes and in university, and it wasn’t something either of us wanted to acknowledge out loud. But we had a part to play. Pretenses to keep up.”
It was hard for me to correlate the sweet man in front of me, the one who named crocodiles and always had a smile on his face, with someone who used to intimidate people for money. But we all had a past, and I knew that better than most.
“Nash, I…” I trailed off. “If you don’t want to tell us anymore, I get it. I’ve heard enough to know you.”
He shook his head, waves bouncing. “No, it feels good to get it off my chest. I haven’t told this story to anyone. I’m not even sure if James really knows the whole thing. Besides, I’m almost done. Because we all know how this goes—it didn’t stop at intimidation. Eventually, he had me rough people up. Teach them a lesson. People who weren’t paying their rent, the monthly dues, people who tried to get around him. And one night…one night it went too far. We were sent to collect rent money from an older dude, one who was constantly fucking around with the money he owed. He wasn’t a poor man, not by any means, but he didn’t have a wife or kids, and kind of just did whatever he wanted. Another guy, Tommy, and I went. We took turns slapping him around, making sure he knew who he was really fucking with.” The walls in Nash’s eyes broke, his face falling apart completely. “I don’t know what happened. I really don’t. I don’t know if I hit him too hard, or if he was trying to fight back, or if he tripped, and I never will. All I know is I was the one who hit him last. He stumbled and fell into the table beside him. The sound is something I will never forget. He landed on the floor, and when I saw his eyes, I knew. I fucking knew what I had done, and I knew there was no coming back from it.”
“Oh, Nash,” I whispered. I could feel his hurt, radiating off his body in waves, nowhere to go but out . That kind of pain never settled, never found a place to rest. It just expanded, larger and larger until it consumed everything in its path. “Nash, you weren’t more than a kid yourself. How could you have known?”
He looked up, a bitter smile on his face. “Because I should’ve known better . I should’ve known the minute James offered me a job that it would change my life. And I guess I did know—that was why I accepted it. I just hadn’t expected it to be like that . I don’t know what happened afterward. Tommy made some calls, and we left. I couldn’t go home. I just…I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror. I spent the night wandering the streets, ignoring any calls that came in, and when the sun finally rose, I took as much cash out of my bank account as I could, and just never looked back. Eventually I ended up here, and I never left. Never stopped thinking about that man either, what I’d done. Never stopped atoning for it.”
Camp ran a hand over my knee, squeezing it lightly, a reminder to himself that I was still here. Funny how touch worked. “Nash, man, you’ve done everything you could. At some point, you have to accept it and move on. Try and live a better life. You know?”
“No.” Nash shook his head. “No, I don’t. I killed a man. Killed him with my bare hands. There’s no accepting that, no moving on. But what I can accept is that you might not want to accept it. I’ll have to be okay either way. I will promise you both that you are completely safe with me. I will never hurt another person, ever again.”
I stood, closing the space between Nash and myself until I was able to press my palm on his chest, just above where his tender heart lay beating. “I don’t need more time to think. The strange thing about being in sociology for so long is being able to see through people. There are reasons we do things, even the terrible things, and the reasons are usually more telling than actions if someone is a good person or not. You’re a good person, Nash. I swear to you.”
Nash grabbed my hand, pressing it harder into his chest, as if he was trying to sear the imprint of my hand on his skin. “Do you…do you mean that?”
I smiled, a smile filled with sadness and hope, joy and pain, every human emotion mixed into one. “Of course I do. And I will happily get back on your boat with you. With all of you. You made a horrible, awful mistake, and you took things too far. No one is denying that. But the circumstances of it, and the way you’ve reacted since then…they tell a different story than a serial killer on a rampage.”
Nash grimaced. “Well, I mean, I did consider that as an option afterward. Decided it to be a little on the messy side, though.”
I dropped my hand, bending to get my backpack. “I think we have a lot more to talk about. All of us.” I gave Camp a pointed look, making sure he knew exactly what I was talking about. Nash’s bombshell might have shaken us up, but we really needed to talk about what had just happened between the three of us in the waterfall.
The walk back to Carpe Diem was much quieter than it had been to get to the waterfall, each of us lost in thought. I couldn’t stop thinking about a young Nash, feeling trapped, and then feeling like he had to flee. Anger simmered below the hurt, thinking that James probably knew all of what had gone down, and instead of choosing to help his friend, had abandoned him to a life where he felt like a pariah, and eventually used it to blackmail him into getting what he wanted.
Even closer to the forefront of my mind were the memories of us in the pool, Camp’s hands on my body, Nash’s lips on mine. I had originally thought Camp would be too possessive to share, and maybe he still was. Some part of him might have thought he owned a special piece of me, and was reluctant to share it.
But maybe desire had outweighed possession. Maybe hunger won out over control.
Our relationship was far more tangled and twisted than the massive spiders that wove their webs trees apart, stretching out with nothing more than a dream. On the other hand, maybe it was just as beautiful, a perfect slice of nature only a few were lucky enough to witness.