Chapter 3 #10
Something about that made my skin prickle.
Young and angry.
Determined to prove nobody owned me.
I understood that too well.
“There was peyote going around,” Regan said. “Or what someone claimed was peyote. It was laced with something. Something harder. Something dirty.”
Her eyes came back to mine.
“So, yeah. You’re real familiar now with what drugged and helpless feels like.”
My stomach tightened.
Regan’s gaze softened immediately.
“I hate that for you,” she said. “I hate that you know what I mean.”
I looked down.
“What happened?”
“I was laying under the stars, talking to them like they were going to answer me.” Her mouth trembled faintly. “I was hating your mother. Hating the fact that I loved?—”
She stopped.
Then shook her head.
“No. That’s not true. I didn’t love him yet. Not really. I saw him. That was all. I saw Edge across that fire, and something in me just… knew.”
I couldn’t picture Edge young.
Not really.
In my head, he was always what he was now. Hard. Scarred. Controlled until he wasn’t. A man with violence in his hands and regret behind his eyes.
But Regan’s face softened as if she could still see him through the smoke.
“He looked at me like I was the only thing burning out there,” she whispered. “And I was too high to be smart and too lonely to be careful. We kissed. We made out under that desert sky. He was the first man to touch me like I was beautiful instead of convenient.”
Something twisted inside me.
Not jealousy.
Not exactly.
Something more complicated.
“He never forgot me,” Regan said. “But that night, he went straight from me to Mandy.”
My breath caught.
Regan’s smile was brittle. “She caught us. Saw enough to know there was something there. And then somehow, by morning, he was with her. Like I had been nothing. Like I had imagined the whole thing.”
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“No one did for a long time.”
“She did that?”
“Mandy did a lot of things.” Regan closed her eyes for a second. “And later, when I found out she also had her claws in my brother, I hated her for it. Hated her in a way that made me ugly inside.”
“Tarak?”
She nodded.
I sat with that.
My mother had not been one story.
That was the part I kept tripping over. Everyone had a different Mandy.
A different wound. A different memory. To me, she was mother and ghost. To Regan, she was the girl who had taken Edge from her and twisted something bright into something humiliating.
To Tarak, she had been something else entirely.
To Edge, maybe love. Maybe regret. Maybe both.
“I never knew you felt that way about Edge,” I said. “That he went from you to my mother.”
“The same night,” Regan said.
The words landed hard.
I looked toward the ocean because her face hurt to look at.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Regan squeezed my hand.
“No, honey. Those sins are not yours.”
My eyes burned.
“I know that now.”
“Do you?”
I tried to answer.
Couldn’t.
Regan leaned closer, her voice low and fierce.
“I don’t hate you. I don’t see you and think her. I never did. I never mistreated you because of Mandy. I never looked at your face and saw the girl who hurt me.”
My lips parted, but nothing came out.
“I just loved you,” Regan said.
That broke something open.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just one clean crack right through the center of me.
“I don’t know how to believe that,” I whispered.
“I know.” Regan brushed her thumb over my knuckles. “But you can start by hearing it.”
The ocean moved below us, endless and blue.
Regan looked past me, through me, into some old desert night she had carried for years.
“That feeling you had when you kissed Dylan last night,” she said softly.
Heat rushed into my cheeks.
I looked down too fast.
Regan’s mouth curved faintly, but her eyes stayed serious.
“That,” she said. “That feeling. Like something in all that darkness belonged only to you. Like you caught a shooting star with your bare hands.”
I swallowed.
“Yeah,” I whispered.
“That’s how I felt about Edge.”
I closed my eyes.
“Like the desert had given me one wild, impossible thing that was mine,” she continued. “But the desert is wild and unforgiving. And a lot of people die thinking they can tame wild nights.”
“Like her,” I said.
Regan went quiet.
I opened my eyes.
“Mandy,” I whispered. “She got in a car and drove away too fast.”
“Running,” Regan said.
“From what?”
Her mouth tightened. “Things she started. Things she couldn’t control. Maybe things she never meant to turn deadly. It was messy. It was horrible. It was one tragedy piled on top of too many tragic love stories.”
My chest hurt.
“But you,” Regan said, turning fully toward me, “you were the light that came out of that story, Destiny.”
The tears came so fast I hated them.
Regan reached up and brushed one away with the back of her finger.
“You were never the punishment,” she said. “You were never the curse. You were the only innocent thing to come out of all that damage.”
I shook my head.
“I don’t feel innocent.”
“Most people who are don’t.”
I laughed once, wet and broken.
Regan smiled sadly.
Then her gaze sharpened again.
“Are you sure it was just a kiss with Dylan?”
My cheeks went from warm to burning.
“Oh my gosh.”
“Destiny.”
“No. No, no, no.” I sat up straighter, mortified so fast it almost made me dizzy. “We never— I never even took off my pants. Nothing below the waist. Nothing— no. It was a kiss. A soft kiss. Then another kiss. That’s all.”
Regan’s eyebrows lifted.
“Right,” she said slowly. “Below the waist.”
“Nope.” I pointed at her. “We are not doing this.”
“I’m just making sure.”
“You are like my mom.”
Her face softened so quickly my embarrassment tangled with something warmer.
“Yeah?”
I groaned and covered my face. “Which is exactly why I cannot discuss this with you.”
Regan laughed.
Actually laughed.
The sound loosened something in the room.
“I’m glad he stopped,” she said gently.
I lowered my hands.
“He did,” I said. “Not like he was ashamed. Not like I was wrong. He just… stopped. Like he cared enough to.”
Regan nodded.
“That matters.”
“I know.”
And I did.
That was the most confusing part.
I knew Dylan had wanted to kiss me. I knew I had wanted to kiss him. I also knew he had pulled back before the kiss could become something grief and fear tried to turn into a lifeline.
He had not taken.
He had waited.
There was a difference.
A knock sounded at the door.
I jumped.
Regan stood immediately, wiping under her eyes with one quick motion that erased every trace of the conversation except the softness still sitting in her face.
“That’ll be food,” she said.
But when she opened the door, Nate stood there carrying a tray and wearing an expression so serious it had to be fake.
“Ladies,” he announced, stepping inside. “Room service has arrived. Also, emergency update. We have suffered a tragedy.”
His sunglasses were pushed up on top of his head.
Which meant there was absolutely nothing hiding his face.
His beard was gone.
Completely gone.
I blinked.
He looked ten years younger and deeply offended by his own jaw.
Regan stared.
Nate pointed at her. “Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to.”
“You look?—”
“Don’t.”
“You look like you sell boat shoes to freshmen.”
He closed his eyes. “I knew this would happen.”
Despite everything, a laugh slipped out of me.
Nate looked at me like I had personally betrayed him. “Et tu, tiny fugitive?”
Regan smacked his arm. “Do not call her that.”
“What? It’s affectionate.”
“It’s terrible.”
“It’s accurate.”
I covered my mouth, but another laugh escaped.
Then someone else appeared in the doorway behind him.
And my laughter died.
Dylan.
Clean-shaven.
His sunglasses were shoved up into his dark hair too, useless as a disguise inside the room, which meant I saw all of him at once.
The beard had made him look older. Rougher.
Like trouble had grown naturally along his jaw and decided to stay.
Without it, his face was sharper, younger, unfairly beautiful in a way that made my chest ache.
His mouth looked softer. His eyes looked darker.
There was nowhere for him to hide now. He was only twenty four and I was a heartbeat away from eighteen. Thats plausible, right? Doable?
He wore a loose linen shirt, board shorts, and the expression of a man who had been dragged into hell by a tropical clothing rack.
Nate clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Behold. Two harmless vacation bros.”
Regan pressed her lips together like she was trying not to laugh.
Dylan’s eyes met mine.
The room changed.
Not loudly.
Not obviously.
Just enough that I felt the kiss on the hill again.
The grave.
The red paint.
His hands washing mine clean.
His mouth brushing mine like something sacred and sad.
Nate looked between us.
Then his grin widened.
“Oh,” he said. “This disguise is going to be a problem.”
Dylan didn’t look away from me. “Shut up.”
“You both look ridiculous,” I said, because it was safer than telling the truth.
Dylan’s mouth curved.
There he was.
“Careful, Beautiful,” he said softly. “This face is undercover work.”
Nate groaned. “Brother, that face is going to get us questioned by every sorority girl in Cabo.”
Regan crossed her arms. “You two are supposed to blend in.”
“We are blending,” Nate insisted. “I have already said bro four times and ordered something blue with fruit in it.”
Dylan looked pained. “He has.”
I looked from Nate to Dylan, then back again.
The world was still dangerous.
The grave was still defaced.
The search warrants still existed.
The cops still wanted answers. My bruises were still hidden beneath fabric and shadow. My mother was still dead. My father was still furious. Men I didn’t know were still trying to decide what my story meant before I could write it myself.
But Nate was standing in my room looking like a frat boy who had lost a bet, and Dylan was watching me with soft eyes and no beard, and Regan was smiling like maybe laughter was allowed here too.
For the first time since dawn, I took a full breath.
Maybe Cabo was not freedom.
Maybe it was not even safety.
But it was distance.
It was salt air.
It was a balcony over blue water.
It was Regan’s hand over mine telling me I was not my mother’s sins.
It was Dylan clean-shaven in a doorway, trying not to look at me like he remembered exactly how it felt to kiss me under a sky full of ghosts.