1. Daphne Kandy With A K
one
Daphne: Kandy With A K
The salt from the Sound always makes my eyes burn in the fall, when the water cools, and Seattle leans hard into the smell of rotting fish and meandering waste.
Still, I hate sleeping with my window shut.
The idea of being locked in and Threx locked out makes my stomach knot, even though I am twenty-five, and he has a key to my shoddy little apartment on Capitol Hill.
Time is a tricky thing.
In more ways than I want to admit, I am still that ratty little girl plastered to dirty sheets, shivering on a mattress in a lightless room.
“Are you dressed, bitch? We are leaving in thirty,” Kandy with a K shouted from the other side of my door.
I have had my fair share of roommates, but she is my favorite. Though I am pretty sure her real name is Emma, and she is the lost heiress to some tiny country that made its fortune in crystals.
“Daphne?” she called again, and I sat up, rubbing my eyes in the dim light.
Right. The Black Wing Party.
Threx was part of some underground crew that made Sons of Anarchy look like a Jack Kerouac novel if Edgar Allan Poe had accidentally pissed all over it in an alley.
They didn’t ride motorcycles, but I am pretty sure they did everything else, from punching to killing to trading dark secrets in a world that reads like dark romance but ends up on true crime.
Threx, or Thayor Milo Gavros, if you have the pleasure of receiving his official mail as I do, joined when we were only sixteen, and managed to climb his way up…
but to what, I have no idea. It has always felt like he is chasing death the way I chase life, which is probably why I study midwifery and spend my nights with proof that life is real and that lights can turn on.
Still, Kandy had the hots for half the members in his crew, and being Threx’s…
gah. I don’t even know what the fuck I am.
Not girlfriend. The last time that title dropped, he ghosted me for a week.
And trust me, I am painfully aware he beds women daily.
Best friend? Maybe, but even that feels too clean, and nothing about Threx and me ever comes out in the wash.
Like a bruise. Or a scar. Or a fucking lifetime.
Whatever I am means I am allowed in. Forever.
Which is not the golden ticket most people imagine it to be.
It is like being invited into the possibility of a plea bargain. Still, there is no shortage of burly, tattooed, muscled men whose dicks are as unhinged as their fists. And all I can say to that is, yummy.
“I am coming,” I mumbled, feeling around for my lamp and phone on the nightstand. I had attended four home births this week, and the last was all back labor. Ten hours on your hands and knees, while a mother screams into your core, leaves you listless and wobbling.
I half-glanced at my phone to see if Threx had texted, not at all surprised to find him absent. He doesn't love it when I attend these parties or when any spotlight reveals what he is up to when I am not looking.
“Look hot,” Kandy ordered. “I mean it. If you put on a pair of leggings and a sweatshirt again, I will disown you.”
Dammit. When did getting dressed take so much work? Fucking eyeliner, curling irons, the whole half-day ritual? High pony. Low pony. Braid? Meanwhile, Netflix was looking a hell of a lot sexier than getting wasted with sweaty men. Well… sweaty Threx’s were nice.
“Stop doing the thing.” Kandy finally threw open the door and found me standing there like a deer waiting for the kill shot. “You know, the inner monologue thing where you talk yourself out of going.”
“I was not doing that.” I lied, smiling.
Kandy was a mocha princess who curved and bounced like a porn star with a degree. I shared her curves, with tits and hips in all the right places, but instead of a porn star, I was more of a kinky librarian who shoved Oreos in her mouth at five in the morning and called it breakfast.
“Plus, you need to get laid,” my roommate snarled, cocking her head to the side, then popped it upright. Asshole. “Twice.”
Her comment hit me between the thighs.
Too bad Sex and I were in a scowl match lately. It’s not that I couldn’t get men. That part was simple. I was just bored with the endless roll of hips and the mindless “You like my dick?” routine.
Actually, no. I do not like it. I am bored out of my mind, and if you have ever made a girl come in your entire life, you would know this is not all about your dick.
I wanted something different. Physical. Darker. In my head. In my body. Something that lived under my skin. I wanted starlight and pain, dripping like ribbons from Threx’s mouth.
And something else.
The word came to mind, and I could not say it out loud. But it was there. Simmering, the way it always has been.
Kandy tossed me a little black number that hugged my breasts and was completely open down the back, then nodded toward the black combat boots because she knew it would be a snowy day in hell before I ever wore heels.
I caught the dress midair and peeled off Threx’s Nine Inch Nails shirt I’d worn to rags, and tossed it to the floor.
“So, you’ve never really explained to me what you and Threx are,” she prodded from the end of my bed, rummaging through my things like a toddler who didn’t understand boundaries.
“That is because,” I sighed, shoving hot curlers into my hair. “I am not sure.” It was the closest thing to the truth I could manage.
“Well?” she hesitated, clearly deciding whether to open the can of worms she’d been shaking at me since the day we met. “Are you together?”
“Ish.” I peeked my head out mid–batwing, immediately fucking up the line. She rolled her eyes so hard I felt them from the bathroom.
“Okay, let’s put it this way. If I fucked him, would you be upset?”
Fire crawled under my skin, grinding into my jaw and knuckles, sending that embarrassing tint of metal over my tongue.
I picked up a bottle of face moisturizer and chucked it at her from the bathroom.
I guess I was the toddler now. Too bad my big-girl words were wrapped in rage and metal that tasted like fear.
“I guess that is a yes,” she laughed when the bottle bounced off my nightstand, demolishing half the clutter. “Explain to me again how you two met?”
That is the thing. I cannot remember an exact moment or date when Threx came into my life. We might have watched each other from our windows, tracking what was on the other side, but I could have made that up. Everything from those days is blurry, dripping in cotton and smelling like iron.
“Threx lived in the building across from me,” I explained, brushing out my curls and letting my dark brown hair fall to the center of my back.
“His parents were violent while mine were neglectful. I think I was six the first time he crawled through my window and spent the night in my bed. I don’t know.
From that moment on, we were inseparable. ”
I turned the corner to grab my boots, sitting in a straight line.
Threx liked things that way: linear, orderly, with an endpoint.
Not me. I thrived on chaos.
He must have adjusted them the last time he was here.
“We ran away together when I was fifteen, lived in a lot of Black Wing side houses until he took the pledge. Then he got a dorm at the clubhouse, and I stayed with him until I got into college and ended up here with you.” I smiled wide.
“And in all that time, you two were never together?” She threw me a side glance, tossing me a tube of lip gloss and admiring my ass.
“No.”
The answer hurt, but it was the one line he refused to cross with me. Well, that and kissing. We both had relationships along the way, but they never lasted.
Apparently, finding us snuggling in bed or me walking out of his shower violated the unspoken agreement of partner fidelity.
And they were right. It did. But it was not about sex.
That only happened once. It was because whenever we tried to set boundaries with one another, they stuck like dollar-store adhesive, peeling off the wall with an inevitable thud.
I couldn’t stay away from him, and judging by all the moments Threx came bursting through my walls, neither could he.
“We slept together once, right before I got into midwifery school,” I laughed, remembering the copper from his split lip and the yellow morning light bleeding through the curtains. It was slow. Emotional. And when it was over, we never talked about it. Not once. “But that is it.”
Kandy’s brow fell, her lips curving into her thoughts, and I could smell the storm brewing inside her chest.
“That is trauma bond shit, Daph,” she said, her big black eyes peering up at me in the half-light. “You know that, right?”
I looked at her and blinked. Of course, I knew that. I was not in denial about Threx. I just did not care about buzzwords like toxicity or trauma because they did not erase a goddamn thing. We were messy and broken and probably should stay the fuck away from each other, but that would never happen.
“Have you ever considered moving from Seattle and trying life without him? I mean, I get you two are forged in flames, but he is a bad guy.”
Kandy stood at the door, giving me a look.
“No, he is not.” I swept past her, grabbing my phone and pushing down the nausea of imagining a world without him in it.
“Not to you. Because to you, he is a whole person. The little boy who kept you safe when the world was burning to the ground. But come on, Daph. You are basically becoming a doctor, and he is a prince of the Seattle Underworld. There is no ending where you two live happily ever after.”
I rolled my neck and moved into the living room.
“Daphne?” she said my name like it meant something. “Daphne, stop.”
“No.” I met her eyes with a clear order. The green in mine crashing into the fear in hers. She would drop this, or I would drop her.
It was that easy.
That simple.
That broken.
Everything inside me twisted.
“Fine,” she conceded, shaking her head with a wink, but it did not make me feel better. “Well, at least tell him you love him. Because this in-between shit is killing you.”
An icy terror settled low in my stomach when I shut the door and locked it.
We lived in a two-bedroom, two-thousand-per-month, eight-hundred-square-foot piece of shit apartment that looked out over dumpsters, fast-food joints, and a boutique ribbon shop that somehow thrived in this economy.
Capitol Hill was Seattle’s version of Haight-Ashbury, if it had zero charm and a thousand hypodermic needles.
You could not walk down the street without stomping over one or running into pain.
There was no middle in Seattle. You were either the product of the tech boom, the corporate hippie hikers who ate gluten-free and drove a Land Rover, or you were choosing whether to pay rent or eat dinner. But this was home: Rain clouds. Sadness. Fish guts. Poetic grit.
My phone buzzed, and I glanced at it.
Thay: Don’t come tonight.
Kandy threw a look over my shoulder and giggled.
“Oh, tell him you are definitely coming tonight.” She hugged me from behind, pulling me down the hall. “All over his face.”