Chapter 4 #5
But tonight, their attention felt like fingers closing around my throat.
The blonde touched my arm.
I moved it away.
Pink bikini pouted. “No fun.”
“Been told.”
Glitter girl leaned in closer, her voice dropping. “Are you really going to sit here alone all night?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Sad plan.”
“Still the plan.”
The blonde made a soft, annoyed sound, then grabbed my chin before I saw it coming and kissed the side of my neck.
Fast.
Wet.
Deliberate.
Her tongue touched my skin, and her body pressed close enough that coconut and vanilla filled my lungs.
I went ice cold.
Not because she was ugly.
She wasn’t.
Not because she had done something I hadn’t allowed other women to do a hundred times before.
Because my body recoiled before my brain could dress it up.
I caught her wrist and moved her hand off me, careful enough not to hurt her, firm enough that she got the message.
“No,” I said.
Her smile dropped.
The sorority girls went quiet.
The blonde’s cheeks flushed, anger replacing seduction in half a breath. “Wow. You really are no fun.”
“I said that.”
“You could have just said you were gay.”
Pink bikini gasped. Glitter girl made a face like she wanted drama but not enough to get involved.
I looked at the blonde. “I could have said a lot of things. I chose no.”
Her mouth tightened. “Asshole.”
“Tonight? Yeah.”
She slid off the stool and walked away, hips swaying hard enough to prove she wanted me watching.
I didn’t.
The girls followed a few seconds later, whispering and offended, taking their coconut-vanilla cloud with them.
I lifted my hand for the bartender.
He came over, brows raised.
I looked at the bottle in his hand, then slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the bar. “Screw it. Give me the whole thing.”
He glanced from the money to my face, then shrugged.
Tourists asked for worse.
He set the bottle down in front of me.
I twisted it by the neck and stared at the lipstick mark the blonde had left low on my skin. I could feel it there. Sticky. Wrong. Like evidence from a crime nobody else would call a crime because men like me were supposed to want anything offered.
A woman kisses you in a bar, you enjoy it.
A woman presses her body against yours, you take the compliment.
A woman looks at you like you’re a good time in human form, you become one.
That was the script.
I had lived by it for years.
And now the feel of her mouth on me had made my stomach turn.
I was screwed.
Completely.
Thoroughly.
Professionally screwed.
I picked up the bottle and left the bar before another woman decided I looked like a challenge.
The sand was cool under my feet once I kicked off the sandals.
The beach stretched dark and quiet away from the music, the lights fading behind me with every step.
Somewhere down the shore, beyond the curve and the palms and the private walls, Destiny slept inside a villa full of guards and secrets.
I couldn’t see it.
Good.
Bad.
Both.
I walked until the noise from the bar became nothing but a pulse behind me.
Then I found a lonely palm tree leaning slightly toward the water, like even it wanted to get away from shore.
I dropped down beneath it with the bottle, my back against the trunk, knees bent, eyes on the boats bobbing in the distance.
The tequila went down hot.
The memories came up hotter.
I didn’t want to go there.
Of course I went there.
That was how ghosts worked. They waited until a man was drunk, tired, and stupid enough to sit still.
My old man came first.
He always did.
I saw him in the doorway of a cheap apartment that smelled like fried grease, mildew, and stale beer.
Work boots scuffed to hell. Shirt stained from whatever car he’d spent all day bent over.
Hands cracked from chemicals and cold weather.
Eyes already gone soft and mean from drinking before he even made it home.
He worked some nine-to-five job that never ended at five.
Mechanic. Grease under his nails. Back always hurting.
Paycheck always too small. The dealership took the real money.
Customers paid big for labor, parts, repairs, diagnostics, all those shiny words printed on clean invoices.
But the men doing the dirty work went home with sore hands, bad knees, and enough cash to almost cover rent if nothing broke and nobody got sick.
Something always broke.
Somebody was always sick.
We weren’t homeless poor.
That was what people said like it mattered.
We were food-stamp poor. Public-health-clinic poor. Secondhand-coat poor. Free-lunch-card poor. The kind of poor where teachers used a softer voice when they asked if everything was okay at home, and other kids used a sharper one when they asked why you wore the same jeans three days in a row.
I had one pair for a while.
One.
Dark denim, cheap, too stiff at first, then too thin at the knees.
My mother was supposed to wash them. She was supposed to wash a lot of things.
Dishes. Clothes. Herself when she stopped caring enough to get out of bed before noon.
Some days she was too busy crying. Some days too busy watching TV.
Some days too busy staring at herself in a cracked bathroom mirror like beauty was a debt the world had failed to pay her back.
So I started washing my jeans in the bathtub.
Hand soap. Cold water. Scrubbing the knees until my fingers hurt. Wringing them out as hard as I could and hanging them over the shower rod. Half the time they were still damp in the morning, but damp was better than smelling like sweat and school and shame.
I went to class wet more than once.
Nobody noticed the first time.
Then they did.
Kids always noticed eventually.
Poor made you angry in ways rich people never understood. Not sad. Not humble. Not grateful for small things like inspirational posters wanted it to be.
Angry.
Angry because every day was proof the world had already decided what you deserved.
Angry because your shoes talked before you did.
Angry because teachers said potential like it was a compliment, then looked disappointed when you didn’t magically turn hunger and humiliation into straight A’s.
Angry because other kids threw away things you would have bled for.
Sneakers were the worst.
A boy could survive a lot at school, but bad shoes were a death sentence.
So I learned Goodwill schedules.
I learned when people dropped off bags after closing.
Learned which donation boxes had loose hinges.
Learned how to climb in without getting stuck and how to move fast when headlights turned into the lot.
I dug through other people’s charity in the dark looking for sneakers that weren’t split at the sole.
Sometimes I found them.
Sometimes they fit.
Sometimes I wore two pairs of socks and pretended they did.
The tequila blurred the lights on the water.
I took another drink.
I pissed away school after that.
Smokes behind the gym. Fights in the parking lot.
Trying to be cool because cool was cheaper than hope.
Cool didn’t require clean clothes or application fees or guidance counselors who knew your name for reasons other than trouble.
Cool let you act like you didn’t want the things you couldn’t have anyway.
Scholarships?
College?
A future?
I burned those before they had a chance to disappoint me.
Not because I was stupid.
Because wanting things made you vulnerable, and I had been vulnerable enough.
But I knew one thing.
I was not going to be my old man.
I wasn’t going to work some dead-end job fixing cars while men in offices made the real money off my labor.
I wasn’t going to come home exhausted and drunk, swinging bitterness around like it was the only inheritance I had to give.
I wasn’t going to spend my life begging the world for scraps and calling it honest work because that made poverty sound noble.
Poverty wasn’t noble.
It was desperate.
It was ugly.
It made good people mean and mean people worse.
So I patched in as soon as I could.
The money was better.
So was the brotherhood.
People could say what they wanted about the club, and most of it was probably true depending on the day, but the first time a brother put food in my hand without making me beg for it, I understood loyalty in a way church people only preached about.
The first time Callum looked at me and saw something useful instead of something broken, I would have followed him into fire.
Eventually, I did.
More than once.
He patched me.
Took me in.
Made me family.
I didn’t even know where my real parents were now.
Didn’t care most days.
They had never thrown me birthday parties. Never put up Christmas lights unless someone gave us a half-dead string from a box they were throwing out. Never wrapped presents that weren’t donated by some church drive with my age written on a tag by a stranger.
I used to tell myself I didn’t care about birthdays.
That was easier than admitting I had spent too many of them pretending I forgot the date so it wouldn’t hurt when no one else remembered either.
I looked down at the bottle.
“What the hell do I know about giving a girl a birthday?” I muttered.
Especially a girl like Destiny.
The Royal Bastards’ badass princess.
Edge’s daughter.
Regan’s baby girl.
Santa Fe’s beautiful little storm with blood in her story and ghosts in her eyes.
Someone like me was not good enough for someone like her.
Regan was right about that, even when she tried to soften it.
No man alive was good enough, she had said.
But that was what mothers said when they loved hard enough.
The truth was uglier.
Some men were not just imperfect.
Some men were bad soil.
I had ink on my skin and blood on my hands. Blood that had washed off and stayed anyway. I had done things for my patch, for my brothers, for survival, for money, for revenge, and sometimes because the man standing across from me had it coming and I was the one sent to deliver the message.
Destiny needed empty pages.
I was written over in black.
I leaned my head back against the palm tree and closed my eyes.
Regan’s words came back.
Maybe that leads her back to you. Maybe it doesn’t.
Sometimes when you loved something, you set it free.
Not that I loved her.
Of course I didn’t.
It didn’t go that deep.
Couldn’t.
A week wasn’t love. A kiss at a grave wasn’t love. Finding a girl in the desert and keeping her alive wasn’t love. Watching her heal by inches and feeling something in your chest loosen every time she smiled wasn’t love.
That was trauma.
Proximity.
Adrenaline.
Bad timing.
A man could explain anything if he was scared enough.
Still, I understood the sentiment.
Let her go. Let her fly high and far away.
Let her get Malibu and nursing classes and ocean mornings where nobody whispered Mandy’s name behind her back.
Let her meet people who didn’t know what she looked like with smoke in her hair and blood on her mouth.
Let her become whoever she was supposed to be before everyone else’s sins tried to claim her.
Maybe she flew back.
Maybe she didn’t.
But that didn’t mean she hadn’t meant something to me.
It didn’t mean I wanted to vanish from her story like I had never been there.
I took another drink and looked out at the black water.
“What do you get the Royal Bastards’ badass princess for her eighteenth birthday?” I asked the empty beach.
The waves answered by breaking.
Helpful.
“What can a guy like me even give her?”
Money?
She was about to have more than she knew what to do with.
Jewelry?
Edge would cut my fingers off and make me swallow them.
Flowers?
Maybe. But flowers died, and Destiny had seen enough dead things.
A knife?
She probably already had three and knew how to use them.
A necklace?
Too much.
A card?
Too little.
My head spun pleasantly and painfully at the same time. The tequila was doing what I had asked it to do and nothing I needed it to do.
A gift.
Not something that claimed her.
Not something that asked for a promise.
Something that said I saw her. I was there. That night mattered. You mattered. You still do.
I didn’t know what that was.
Maybe that was proof I had no business giving it.
The bottle slipped a little in my hand. I tightened my grip, took one last swallow, then set it in the sand beside me before I could finish the whole thing and make tomorrow worse than it already was going to be.
The ocean breathed.
The palm leaves shifted overhead.
Somewhere behind me, laughter rose from the beach bar and faded again.
I told myself I was just resting my eyes.
Just for a minute.
But the ghosts were waiting.
This time, they didn’t come wearing my father’s work boots or my mother’s old perfume. They didn’t come as damp jeans, empty cabinets, Goodwill bins, or birthdays nobody remembered.
They came as her.
Beautiful Destiny.
Not the girl by the pool with sun-warmed skin and a bikini Regan had probably bought to torture me.
Not the girl who had looked pissed when I left with college girls and tried to pretend she didn’t care.
Not even the girl on the hill with tears on her cheeks and moonlight in her hair.
No.
The ghost that would haunt my soul forever was the girl from the desert.
Fire behind her.
Smoke in the air.
Dark hair tangled, long and wild, tumbling around a face too young to hold that much damage.
Crimson blood on her lips.
Scratches on her skin.
Prickers caught in her hair.
And those haunted eyes looking at me like she had already seen hell and was waiting to find out whether I had come to drag her back or carry her out.
That was the Destiny I saw when sleep finally pulled me under.
Not perfect.
Not safe.
Not mine.
Never mine.
Just alive.
And somehow, that had been enough to ruin me.