44. Bay
FORTY-FOUR
bay
The streets are flooded with neighbors for the annual block party in my subdivision.
There are well over a dozen grills going, a DJ blasting age-appropriate tunes, small pools filled with ice and canned beers, and a bunch of games for the kids and adults to play.
However, this year’s party is a ploy.
Sheriff Muncy has been all up South Shore’s ass with drug possession and that’s been the main hobby/sort of income for the residents here.
Once upon a time—when Penn Northcott headed the Titans with the fifth seat and The Landings and South Shore were the South Landings—many families grew weed. And, in turn, it was sold and distributed with each cut given to said family with a portion received for the Titans for taking the risk.
Now, the same rules apply, but The Nameless runs the distribution and the risks.
And, tonight, a major run is going to be made while Muncy attempts to make people like him by hangin’ out and making sure he converses.
Since he’s up for re-election in a year or two, Muncy has some major ass-kissing to do.
I can’t say that he has a big fan base here. Especially since he’s under Emilio’s payroll and always treating South Shore like the redheaded stepchild of the family.
And, while he’s occupied tonight, Levi and The Nameless are going to get the weed out of here to sell.
With the full day of festivities going on, Ellie and Mae got Dad to come outside and sit on the front porch to be involved and get some sun. Now everyone and their mom wants to play Connect Four with him because many haven’t seen his face since his stroke and they miss him.
“Do you think Dad’s getting tired?” Ellie asks me, picking at her hot dog bun as Mae faithfully sits on the armrest of his chair.
We stand off on the front lawn, keeping a distance but staying close enough in case he needs us so he doesn’t think we’re hovering over him.
“He glared at me the last time I asked,” I tell her. “When was the last time you asked?”
“Ten minutes ago.” We both laugh and I pick at her white top with nine different butterflies on it. It’s super cute and super my size.
“Let me wear this.”
Ellie scoffs and twists her body to get possession back of her shirt and my grubby hands off. “Noooo. You have your own clothes.”
“Says the brat who wants to borrow my leather jacket for her big date with Peter.”
“You said I could,” she complains with a whine. “There were no terms to it.”
She’s good.
Like too good, she’s been listening to me with Levi too long good.
I can’t help but run my hands through her thick hair. The straight strands are soft as my heart does this little skippy thing at how this isn’t real for me.
This isn’t where I was supposed to end up.
I didn’t realize how lucky I was before until Emilio took a wrecking ball and aimed it through the glass globe of what my life was. Now the water and glitter have fallen out and I feel as though I’m on borrowed time.
I can’t get the boys to fuck off me, and I’m afraid that the people I love the most are going to keep becoming collateral damage.
While I have one side of the coin—Emilio—wanting me around, the other—his annoying, hot fucking pretty boy son—is waiting for the perfect opportunity to do something else.
He’s already taken Levi, so what’s next?
“What’s wrong?” Ellie implores softly, leaning into me in silent comfort. “You’ve been kinda quiet the last couple of days.”
“Stressed,” I answer honestly. She’s not a little girl anymore, and I don’t want to sugar-coat everything because she’s not blind.
Ellie is smart, and she can’t not see that we’re struggling, that we’ve always labored to make everything work. I’m not sure how Dad did it. Mom was so scatter-brained with everything, so whatever about jobs he picked up most of the slack. I took that for granted, too.
“Can I help?” she asks me. “I can get a job?—”
“Just graduate for me. I’d really like that.” I give her a reassuring smile. “Dad would, too. We need to set a really good example for Mae. And then we’ll talk about it, okay? Levi and I have it handled.”
She frowns. “Are you sure?”
I nod. “Positive. I’m going to go grab a burger. Stay back and watch.”
Pivoting for the street, all I need to do is walk twenty yards to the nearest grill and take whatever I want.
Yet, it’s Mr. Jennings’s and he tends to burn the shit out of his food because he’s a man and men don’t need to wear glasses when they cook because it distorts something or another.
I wasn’t listening when he told me earlier.
I hit up the next grill, happy to find juicy burgers just waiting to be eaten. I’m quickly assisted by Mark Vavasor, the seventeen-year-old kid I caught looking in my window last year like a peeping Tom, and I’m instantly irritated.
“How’s it going, Bay?”
“I dunno, Mark, you tell me.” He smiles at me from over his shoulder as if him watching me dress and tearing out of my front to beat his ass with only shorts and a bra on was a fun time.
“Nothing much,” he claims. “Just school and stuff, ya know?”
“Practicing track?”
His blond brows clash in confusion. “Huh? I play baseball.”
“You should practice track,” I repeat. “You know, for when I slammed your head against the lamp pole when I caught you that night.”
Mark’s expression clearly shows he remembers when he averts his gaze and quickly grabs a bun. “Not sure what you?—”
“Give a cool story out for that one to your friends? I mean, I guess you couldn’t have because I was pretty much yelling like a banshee for you to get your ass over here so I could kill you.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t call the cops for child abuse,” he mutters under his breath as if I haven’t learned that trick from Ellie already or from doing it myself.
“There’ll be plenty of child abuse if I ever see you lookin’ through any of my windows, day or night, you little shit.”
“Fuck you,” he mutters underneath his hat. “You don’t scare me.”
“No, but I’ll make you piss your pants because, if I was dating her, I would’ve killed you.” The waistband of my jeans is given a small yank from behind, and I’m spun around to find a very casually, semi-hidden Reeve standing behind me.
However, his hazels aren’t on me, but Mark, who’s doing…fuck knows.
Nothing is said for what seems to be a very long minute before Reeve extends his arm for me to willingly step into.
However, my next thought barrels into me like a freight train and causes my paranoia to ramp up a notch.
What the fuck is he doing in South Shore?
To keep the peace and yelling down, I do as he silently asks. His arm wraps around my waist as I walk with him in a daze because… wait, is he stupid?
“What are you doing here?” My question goes unanswered as Reeve walks us down the rest of the street with my neighbors out and about and having a really good time.
Meanwhile and, thankfully, they aren’t paying much attention to my company.
Not that I should care because it’s his ass, not mine.
He’s wearing a hat over his face that’s tipped low and the only reason why I could see his eyes is because I’m much shorter than him.
“Reeve.” I feel the slight indentation of his grip on my hip but keeps moving. “ Reevie .”
That, ladies and gentlemen, gets him to glimpse down at me for the first time, yet he doesn’t stop moving.
“Did that kid watch you undress in your window?” he asks me, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. His jaw is tight, appearing as though it’s about to crack at any second. “Is that what I just fucking heard?”
“Answer my question first,” I dodge, because he’s not about to go do what I think he may be producing in his brain.
Again, South Shore.
“What was it again?” he grinds out, and I stop, making him come with me and turn to face my glare. “What?”
“Are you looking to get yourself killed? I have my sisters here. This is my home.”
“And?”
“Reeve,” I say slowly. “You’re in South Shore. Anyone could recognize you here.”
“That’s the good thing about being a nobody,” he tells me without emotion. His normal mellowed-out vibes void and depleted and my first thought is that I hate it. Reeve has always been that one who’s set me at ease. The easy one. “No one remembers who I am, so I don’t have to skate around with a target on the back of my head.”
“You’re one head of the Forsaken Crew.”
“So?”
Okay, something’s up.
“Reevie.” I say his nickname again because that seems to soothe him. “You’re one head of the Forsaken Crew who waltzed into a South Shore block party.” He continues to gape at me, causing my hand to reach up to his forehead to see if he’s sweating. “I think you’re ill.”
“Would you take care of me if I was?”
A smile breaks through my lips. “Why are you the way that you are?”
“How’s that?” His hazel eyes don’t budge from mine, sending a rippling effect down my body that only desires to…I don’t know.
While my feelings are pretty set in stone with Torin and Cairo, both of them pains in my ass, Reeve doesn’t fit in that category.
He’s just a dude.
And if you didn’t think long and hard about it, you’d forget he was part of the rival crew to my town. Reeve is the kind of guy that makes your toes curl. Those hazels so fucking clear and pretty that one look and he’s got you within his tight grip.
“Just”—I wave my hand between us, cutting into the unmalleable tension and unable to come up with the right forming of sentences at first—“you. You’re just you.”
“Is that a disease or—” I scoff-chuckle off his temperament that hasn’t matched what I’ve seen from him so far.
“Absolutely not. You’re…refreshing. However, I’m a little frazzled with your mental health. You seem upset or even suicidal, as you so put it to me before when I strode through enemy territory.”
“Maybe I am.” Those jumbled greens and browns plummet to my mouth. “Or maybe I just wanted to see you alone.”
If I wasn’t totally conscious of the yielding pull from him before, I’m definitely perceptive of it now. He’s everything a mother would warn her daughter to stay away from—handsome, a charmer, that smile that could make you wanna do anything, the heartbreaker. Reeve seems like the kind of guy who could easily slither inside your head and soul and combust it into a million pieces with the right words and that current way he’s looking at me right now.
I’m almost not able to stand it and keep my head together.
“So you decided to come to my street.” My comment doesn’t get countered with an answer, only the piercing way his eyes are pinning me to the cracked concrete beneath me. “I like it when you use words.”
“I like it when you look at me when no one’s around,” he puts forth. “That first time we met…you eye-fucked me like you didn’t give a shit if I saw you or not.”
“I didn’t.”
“And that’s why I like you, McQueen. When we’re alone, you settle. You’re yourself. When I’m close, you fight that attraction. And I get it, we’re sworn enemies, after all.” He takes one step, a singular leap that I’m not going to ward off. “However, I think you and I could make an explosion to where these stupid-ass old-timers who started all this are going to hear and shake after we break through this barrier.”
“Reeve—”
“You don’t have to bullshit me right now,” he quips, biting down on his lower lip. His nose ring moving along with his mouth. “But you’ll give me the respect to not lie to me, won’t you, McQueen?”
I’m immediately nodding before I can think not to or to do.
Nevertheless, I can’t get caught up in him or any of them.
It doesn’t matter that we’re a new generation. His buddies have done enough to me and mine.
“That’s all I ask.”
Right.
Honesty and respect, what’s worth more than that?
I tear my burger in half. “You might as well eat something while you’re here. Since you came all this way.”
“And why did I come?”
My face twists a little. “For…me?”
“Remember that.” He takes his half of my food offering as if that just ends what we’re talking about.
But it’s not.
“I still think we might need to go get you checked out.”
Reeve takes my peace offering and brings it up to his mouth. “You can do so at any time, McQueen.”
“C’mon,” I urge. “Let’s get you off?—”
“I’m fine here,” he retorts through chews. “You don’t have to sweat me.”
I don’t.
I shouldn’t.
Except, again, I don’t enjoy seeing him like Cairo or Torin, dejected of emotion and a tad gloomy.
No, Reeve is like the sun, all warm and fuzzy. A mood changer even.
“Wanna go make out against a house somewhere?” Reeve lifts a brow, aware that I’m teasing, but he still looks at me as if he’d say yes the moment he stops gnawing on his food. “Or you could tell me why you came.”
“I’ll take option one for four hundred dollars, please.”
I slowly rock my head back and forth. “How about you do something for me?”
“Does that include our mouths?”
“Actually, it does.”
“I’m listening,” he vouches as he takes another bite of his burger, not giving a single fuck that he’s talking and eating at the same time.
Fuck me and this guy.
I’m starting to enjoy every stupid little quirk about him.
“You don’t have to tell me all the details. Not even why. I just want to know…why do you seem upset?”
He continues to munch and swallow before saying, “I’m looking for my dad. And I think he’s dead.”
My heart immediately plummets right to my gut for him.
The thought of losing mine prior to what he just said always made my stomach knot and worked me into the verge of a panic attack.
I’d be lost without him. I’d be nothing.
I can’t form a sentiment that would fit what Reeve just said. I’m aware that no words would ever replace the empty placement of hopelessness that he probably feels right now.
And before I know it, my arms are wrapping around his middle, lightly squeezing him to my frame.
My cheek lies on his hard chest, the smell of salt and that herbaceous scent filling my nostrils into yet another calm that is always coming off him. The soft waves of the ocean, even though they scare me to death, are still beautiful and relaxing to be around.
Like Reeve.
I’m enclosed in his arms a second later, and feel his chin prop against the top of my head.
Just like Levi, but less aggressive and not yet placed in the friend's zone.
“You were the first person I thought about when…” He doesn’t finish his sentence, and I don’t need him to.
I’m his Levi, in a way. Or maybe his Travis.
No, definitely Levi, I’m an asshole.
I peer up at him and he tucks his chin in to look down at me, our lips only but a breath away when I say, “Come with me.”