3. Sage #2
I follow him to where the surf laps at the shore, just past the edge of the jetty.
The moonlight turns the foam silver. Behind us, the other four are doing something I refuse to look at.
I can hear them—low voices, the scrape of something heavy on sand—but I keep my eyes forward.
If I look back, I’ll see it. If I see it, I’ll have to know it.
And right now, my brain is running on whatever fumes are left after the adrenaline burned everything else to ash.
He stops at the water’s edge, then yanks his shirt up and over his head in one practiced motion.
I don’t mean to look. I really, really don’t.
But the moon is bright enough to glow on every ridge and plane, and he’s built—not gym-bro built, but the kind that comes from hard labor, cords of muscle under sun-tanned skin, shoulders squared like they draw heroes in old comic books.
His dirty-blond hair falls in a crescent over his brow.
An ugly bruise shadows his collarbone, and a white scar sits just below his shoulder, a slash like an afterthought, or a tally mark.
Tattoos snake up his ribs. He crouches before he plunges the shirt into the tide, wrings it out, and stands.
If this were any other night, any other life, I’d want to know his name. But this isn’t that life. This is the one where I’m the girl who just killed a man.
Oh god. I killed Brock.
He stands, dripping shirt in one hand, then bunches the fabric and brings it to my face.
Some part of me expects him to scrub, to scrape, but he doesn’t.
He dabs at my jaw, my cheekbones, the soft skin under my nose, careful as a fucking saint.
I flinch anyway, shivery with memory, but his hands stay steady.
He rinses the shirt in the ocean, wipes my neck and hairline, then offers it to me.
“Here. Take it.”
I scrub between each finger, then harder, cotton raking at dried blood in the creases of my knuckles and palms. I crouch and plunge my hands into the surf, scrubbing until my skin warms from the friction.
But I can’t get it off. It’s in my cuticles, under my nails, ground into the whorls of my fingerprints like it’s been tattooed there. I scrub until my skin burns, until the salt stings, until I’m not cleaning anymore—I’m punishing.
“Hey.” His hand closes over mine, stilling my fingers in the cold water. Warm, firm, unbearably gentle. “That’s enough. You’re clean.”
But I’m not. I never will be. I stop anyway, hands raw and shaking, tears sliding down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw into the ocean.
Adding salt to salt.
He waits, letting me break in quiet, ugly pieces. Not saying anything, not trying to fix it. He sits there, knee to knee, his palm warm on the back of my hand.
I rock back, knees hugged to my chest, chin dropped to my kneecaps. The jacket sleeves hang over my fingers, and I ball my hands inside them because I can’t look at my own skin.
He doesn’t ask again if I’m okay. He just looks at the water with me, waiting for the next fucked-up thing.
When I finally risk a peek behind us, the others are hauling Brock’s body toward the dunes. Two at the shoulders, one directing them with a hand while he tucks a phone away with the other. Every movement is deliberate. They don’t look at Brock. They don’t look at me.
“Go home,” autumn eyes says finally. “Shower. Get rid of the dress—burn it if you can. Don’t talk to anyone about tonight. Not your friends or family. Not the police. No one.”
“And then what?”
“Go to sleep. Get up in the morning and go to work—or school. Whatever it is you do. Live your life like none of this happened.” He pauses. “Be normal.”
I almost choke on it. “Normal?”
“Yeah.” He wrings the bloodied shirt out and drops it back over his head, the wet fabric clinging to his muscles like paint. “Try not to think about it.”
I want to laugh in his face. Instead, I stand and the world lurches, my knees wobbling.
He reaches out to steady me but I sidestep, swallowing hard.
His jacket is heavy as lead, hanging off me like a costume.
I look down at my bare feet. Somewhere under that jetty, Amy’s shoes are sitting in a puddle of blood and vomit next to a dead man.
“My shoes,” I say. Because apparently that’s what my brain has decided is the emergency.
“Leave them.”
“They’re Amy’s. She’s my housemate.” I glance down at the ruined dress, plucking at the fabric. “This is hers too.”
“Then she’s down a pair of shoes.” He stands, brushing sand off his knees. “Go home, little savage. You did good tonight, but we’ve got it from here.”
Little savage?
He turns away, headed toward his friends, but I stand frozen.
My toes dig little useless furrows in the sand.
I want to say something sharp, mean, annihilating—but all my words fail.
Instead, I wrap my arms around myself and walk.
Barefoot across the cold sand, up the slope to the boardwalk, the jacket zipped to my chin and my hands buried in sleeves that aren’t mine.
Halfway up the slope, my hip knocks against something solid in the right-hand pocket. Heavy. The wrong shape for a phone.
I slow. Free my hand from the sleeve and slide it into the pocket until my fingers close around it. Cold metal. A folded blade, snug in its handle. The knife.
The one I—
My first instinct is to drop it, get rid of it, bury it, like carrying it is a felony that’ll get me executed right here on the boardwalk. But as I turn it over in my palm, the memory of the kill comes rushing back—the shock, the heat, the impossible rage. The feeling of vengeance and power.
Power. The secret little inch of me that’s never been anything but a trembling rabbit in a steel-jawed world gets a chemical hit, just remembering it.
The blade is heavy. I know I should throw it as far as I can into the tangled brush at the edge of the sand, but instead I tighten my grip around it inside the pocket, feeling myself steady. And I keep walking.