Where I Belong

M. O’Keefe

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Copyright © 2017 by M. O’Keefe

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Hey! You are about to read Where I Belong which is the second book in THE DEBT DUET. If you haven’t read LOST WITHOUT YOU, start there.

I really hope you enjoy Beth and Tommy’s story!

To find out more about my books go to:

www.molly-okeefe.com

1

Tommy

I wish…

Swear to God, those were the most dangerous words I knew. It wasn’t important what words came after.

I wish I had a cheeseburger. I wish I had a million dollars. I wish I had a dog that didn’t look like a rabid squirrel.

Those weren’t the words that mattered, that wrapped around my legs, dragging me to the ground.

It was the “I wish” part that got me.

Admitting to the world—to myself—that I wanted something was a dangerous act. Because the minute I wanted something, it had value, and it could be taken away.

It would be taken away. That’s how my universe worked.

That was the first lesson I really learned, and the only one that totally stuck.

It’s not that I didn’t know how to wish. I had been a kid once. Kids wish.

And truthfully, even though it hurt, I lived wishes. I ate them and kicked them around my empty apartment like crushed beer cans. I had to bite my tongue to keep them from sighing out of my mouth when I wasn’t paying close enough attention.

I turned my face away from them, and shut down my brain and heart to them. I got so good at pretending I didn’t wish, that I started to believe it.

Not actually wishing took constant vigilance.

Not that I was content—fuck no. Far from it.

But I was accepting. I was…resigned.

Well, that was before.

Before last night. After touching Beth, the way I’d dreamed for seven long years, everything was different. Today, in the bright shimmery sunlight of my last day with Beth, I was so fucking far from resigned. I felt like I was being torn apart.

I’d been okay with our decision: one night together and then we each go back to our lives. But now, in the misty sunlight, I wasn’t okay.

Now I was swarmed with wishes.

They buzzed around my head and hung around my body an inch thick, so many I could barely see. I could barely move.

Wishing had paralyzed me.

I wish…

I watched Beth jump across the puddles scattered around the cracked and uneven asphalt between the gas bays and the family restaurant. She jumped over a little one, skirted a bigger one. The wind pulled at the tight bun she’d put at the top of her head, teasing out a few strands that flew out around her like flags.

I wish I could have her.

She used to do that as a kid, walking across the parking lot of the high school we shared for three months: she jumped over puddles and cracks like it was hopscotch. Smiling at me over her shoulder like she was having fun, like it was all a game and she wanted me to play with her.

I wish she was mine to keep.

And then—like now—I wanted to grab her and shake her and tell her everything was dangerous. We had to be careful. Our happiness would only be rewarded with trouble. Wishing only brought grief.

I wish I was hers to have. An hour, a week, three years. Forever. I don’t give a fuck. I’d be happy for anything. A second more of her skin against mine. Her smile burning its way into my brain.

It was ridiculous, I know. Our happiness would be rewarded with nothing because our time was over. But still…the urge was there. To wrap her up and put her in my pocket and keep her safe.

But safe, for me, meant doing nothing. It meant standing very still and letting life pass me right on by. It meant no pain, sure.

But it also meant no joy.

And Beth deserved joy. Beth was joy. She was music and art and laughter and orange Skittles. She was sex. Healthy, happy, nothing-held-back, nothing-is-dirty-or-secret-or-wrong, orgasmic, touch-me-all-over sex.

And I was the opposite of all that.

I had a shit apartment in the worst neighborhood in San Francisco. My only friend was out of the country more than he was in it. I had a dog for company and a backbreaking job that was ruining my body.

And I was a virgin. That’s how terrified I was of wishing. Of wanting.

Well, former virgin.

What part of me could she possibly want? What part of me was worth giving her?

I’d held myself so still waiting to pay my debt to Bates, the man that got me and my friends out of jail that night seven years ago, when we killed our foster father after he attacked Beth.

It still wasn’t paid. I was supposed to pick Beth up and drop her off at a rehab facility, but her mother had been there and Beth had begged me to keep driving.

And I never could say no to Beth.

So now I had to go to Bates and explain the situation to him. Hope that he would understand. Which was ridiculous. Bates was a killer, a drug lord, an ice-cold criminal, and I had no idea what was going to happen tomorrow.

The threat held over our heads if we didn’t pay back this debt was that we would go to jail for another crime he’d pin on us. Something heinous.

Or he could put a bullet in my head.

See, I had no fucking business wishing for anything. But I couldn’t fucking stop; they were pouring out of me like I was made of holes.

I wish I could touch her again.

I wish we were back in that cabin.

I wish we could stay there forever.

But one way or another, debts had to be paid.

Beth had to move on, too. Her career was hanging by a thread; there was a European tour she needed to salvage. No one said having all your dreams come true was easy, and she was the proof of that. She was a pop star now, having barely survived a seven-month trajectory into the stratosphere that left her reeling.

She’d stumbled, thanks in part to that shitty doctor and a bunch of people who didn’t actually care about her, while pretending that they did. She’d been taking some heavy-duty drugs for a few weeks, but they were out of her system and she had a long road ahead of her. But she would be okay.

She was strong. Stronger than me, for sure. She wished and then she went after those wishes and made them real. She had a life, a passion.

She’d moved on from the nightmare. The office and the Pastor were in her rearview mirror, and they were not slowing her down.

It was beautiful to see. Like…the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I didn’t just hope Beth was going to be okay. I knew she would be. It was a truth that settled around me like a blanket on a cold night. If nothing else, Beth was going to be okay. It had been the only thing that mattered then, and it was the only thing that mattered now.

So, I was going to drive her back to Los Angeles and say good-bye.

And then I was driving back to San Francisco to pay my debts.

I wish…

The meter clicked to a stop, and I put the nozzle back, the smell of gasoline and a recent rain in the cool air. Beth was no longer jumping puddles. She’d gone inside to get us some coffee and whatever food was easy to eat on the road.

She was pissed, I was pretty sure. Pissed that I wouldn’t answer her questions about why I’d still been a virgin. Mostly I was embarrassed to talk about it. Who confessed those kinds of things? And I was a little bit scared to talk about it, which didn’t make a lot of sense, but this feeling sat in the back of my brain, warning me not to get into this with her.

Not to get deeper into her.

I was scared that talking about it would make it real, make what we’d done some kind of tangible tie between us—and it was, of course it was, but I needed it to stay indescribable.

Beth wanted to talk and frame out the parameters of everything. She wanted every thought and feeling to be turned into something concrete. I needed to feel like it had all been a really great dream.

Because it was going to be hard enough to walk away from her.

And there were plenty of things she wasn’t telling me, the situation with her mother being first and foremost. I had a lot of questions about Beth and her mother, but she wasn’t answering them.

She talked a good game about telling each other everything, clearing the ghosts from our past, but she was as guilty of secrets as I was.

I kicked open the door to the men’s room that was on the outside of the gas station and had to breathe through my mouth.

I hoped the women’s room was better, for Beth’s sake.

Jada, I reminded myself, and then realized it didn’t matter. It was over.

We didn’t belong together. We didn’t seven years ago. And we didn’t now.

And it didn’t hurt. Not in the sharp way I’d grown used to. But it ached. Like the scars across my back had. And it would ache, I guessed, for the rest of my life.

However long that was.

The wall of urinals was on the far side of the bathroom and there were two stalls on the side near the door. The door closed behind me, and the bathroom became a dark cave. I picked the far urinal and unzipped.

The door opened behind me, letting in a bright slice of light, and I finished peeing, zipped back up and turned, only to find two men standing in front of the door, their arms crossed over their chests.

The door closed behind them, making the room dark, and one of them reached over and flipped on the light, a bare bulb that flickered from the middle of the ceiling, the light fixture long ago busted and gone.

The men were still looking at me. One wore a suit, black tie, crisp white shirt. The other man wore a leather jacket that didn’t make a lot of sense, weather-wise.

My skin tightened over my body. I walked to the sink, watching the men in the mirror as I turned on the faucet to wash my hands.

The guys weren’t here to use the bathroom. They were here for me.

“You Tommy MacNeill?” one of the guys asked. I cranked off the water and turned to face them, wiping my dripping hands on my jeans.

“Who wants to know?”

“Bates,” the guy in the leather jacket said. “Bates wants to know.”

* * *

Beth

I wanted to weep. But I didn’t. Because I had a job to do and that was to get some coffees to go, maybe a breakfast sandwich or three, and then I had to get the hell out of Tommy’s life.

This was good-bye. After everything that had happened between us—seven years ago and in the last three days—we were going to have an awkward, silent drive to Los Angeles, where he was going to drop me off and never look back.

And I knew it was for the best, like I completely got that I’d hurt Tommy enough, but it still stung, deep in my body where the pain lingered and reverberated and made me catch my breath and wish for different things.

A bell rang out as I stepped into the family restaurant. The smell of bacon and coffee and fried potatoes was thick and rich in the air, and as I walked through the crowded restaurant, I was again grateful that all my success had been in disguise, so I had the pleasure of a truck-stop breakfast without someone taking out their cell phone to get a picture.

But even as I walked over to the cash station to ask about to-go orders, I could feel people looking at me.

It’s the hair, I told myself. I had mermaid hair. And mermaid hair got looks.

But when I passed a man in a trucker cap who quickly tapped the shoulder of the woman next to him and tried—with zero skill—to not point at me while totally pointing at me, I started to wonder if it wasn’t just the hair.

TVs lined the dining room, and I passed one with the sound turned up. The picture changed, and I stopped in my tracks.

It was my mother on the screen. In a red suit, her blond hair pulled back in her classic chignon.

“My daughter,” she was saying in that voice… that fucking voice that meant people would be doing what she wanted because she expected it, “is in danger. From herself and from the man that kidnapped her from the drug rehab facility where she was to undergo rehabilitation for opiates and get psychiatric counseling.”

I opened my mouth to breathe but couldn’t pull in any air. There was no air. Not anywhere in the world. My mom had it all, and that look on her face told me if I wanted to breathe again, I was going to have to go to her and ask for it.

And then it wasn’t my mother on the screen with her perfect suit and her do-as-I-say voice. It was a picture of me taken when I was out at McDonald’s just the other day. Like… yesterday. I knew because I was wearing the howling wolf shirt. The same fucking shirt I was wearing right now. I gasped, walking backward.

And then it was a picture of Tommy with a pair of emoticon socks in his hand.

Bile rose up in my throat. My mother was having me followed. My mother…

Trying really hard not to make a scene, I walked back to the front door. The same cheerful bell rang out as I left, but it sounded false. Chilling even.

Like the go bell at a dog race and I was the rabbit they wanted to tear apart.

Tommy, I thought, we need to get out of here. Now.

But at the gas bays, Tommy wasn’t standing by the truck.

Tommy wasn’t anywhere.

* * *

Tommy

I scanned the bathroom for some kind of weapon. There was a mop bucket in the corner, with the mop in it. The paper towel dispenser looked like it would come off the wall without any effort. I edged sideways, closer to the mop. I’d break the handle over my leg, and I’d be able to do some damage.

The other man, a thin Filipino guy, took out some black gloves and started putting them on. He smiled like he was really looking forward to trying to beat the shit out of me.

“My name’s Sammy,” he said. “And I’m here to tell you Mr. Bates doesn’t like it when people don’t repay their debts.”

“You can tell Bates things weren’t what they seemed.”

Sammy glanced at Leather Jacket Guy, and they both laughed. In that moment I sprang for the mop, had it in my hands and broken over my knee before they’d stopped laughing at their own joke.

I went after the guy in the leather coat first, because I didn’t know what he had under all that leather. As he lunged for me, I brought one part of the wooden handle down over his arm. I wasn’t the best fighter, but I was strong as fuck and something snapped in the guy’s arm with a nauseating crunch.

He howled and I smashed him across the face with the other stick. He fell sideways, hitting his head against the sink before falling to the ground in a heap.

With that guy out of the picture, I turned on Sammy, but he was already there. Two lightning-fast punches across my face, knocking me back and back again. I tripped over the mop bucket and almost fell on my ass, but I wouldn’t survive if I gave him that kind of advantage.

Trying to get out of Sammy’s range, I shuffled sideways, but the guy was fast and he landed a punch to my ribs that knocked the breath out of me before I brought a piece of the mop handle down across his back.

He grunted but didn’t let up. The skin over my eye split, and my ears were ringing.

“We’re gonna leave you in this bathroom, asshole,” Sammy said. “And we’re gonna do what you couldn’t. Deliver that girl where Bates wants her to be.”

“You’re not getting close to her.”

“You won’t be able to stop us.” He kicked at my leg. I wasn’t suspecting it and went down hard on my knee. He brought both fists up over his head and smashed them down on the top of my back, and I fell forward, braced on my hands. One of the mop-stick weapons rolled out of my grip.

Fuck.

It was the goddamn office all over again.

“Say good night, asshole,” Sammy muttered, and I could feel him above me, winding up with his weight and strength.

I brought the stick up right between his legs as hard as I could. Sammy sucked in all the air in the room, a high whistle between his lips. He fell against the filthy wall, and I got to my feet. He was white and not breathing, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Just to make sure we’d get a head start, I hit him in the back of the leg with the stick, sending him hard to his knees, where he rolled to his side, cupping his extremely damaged junk. Future generations of Sammy were in doubt as of this moment.

I dropped the stick and limped out of there as fast as I could with my effed-up knee and the blood running down my face.

To my surprise, Beth was running across the parking lot toward me, her face white as a sheet. She got one look at my face and sprinted to my side.

“Tommy—” She gasped, her hands reaching for my face. I grabbed her elbow and spun her around so we were both walking/running to the car. “What happened?”

“I’ll explain in the car. We’ve got some trouble.”

“Let me drive,” she said, and I gave her the keys.

We were in the truck and peeling out of the gas station within seconds.

“Anyone following us?” she asked.

“Those guys who jumped me in the bathroom, they’re not moving for a while.”

“Other people in the restaurant though. They might follow us.”

“Why?” I asked, turning sideways to look out the back window, grunting with the pain as my ribs protested the twisting.

“My mom.”

2

Beth

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

“My mom held a press conference, telling people you kidnapped me.”

“Like the news?” he asked. “The national news?”

“I didn’t see…” I felt foolish, like I should have waited to find out that little fact. “I don’t know if it was national or local. Does that matter?”

He turned on the radio, scanning through static for a news report.

“She had pictures of us.”

“Pictures? From when?”

“The past few days. You were in Walmart getting me the socks, and I was at McDonald’s.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “They were following us but didn’t track either one of us back to the lodge?”

“I know.”

“That’s not Bates,” Tommy said. “He would have had the guys I just met in the bathroom beat me up and take you to rehab.”

“Is that what happened in the bathroom?”

“That was their plan.”

“Were they…were they going to kill you?” I asked. The words felt ridiculous coming out of my mouth.

“Well, if they weren’t then, they are now.” He didn’t look at me, switching from FM radio to AM.

My heart was beating behind my eyes, and I couldn’t catch my breath. They were going to try and kill Tommy because I wouldn’t let him drop me off with my mother. All of this…because of me.

“Watch your speed,” he murmured, and I realized I was going like a billion miles above the speed limit.

“Sorry,” I breathed and eased my foot off the gas.

“Calm down, Beth,” he said in that voice of his that immediately calmed me down. He left the radio alone, static a muted roar in the truck, and stretched his arm over the seat to squeeze my shoulder. “We’re safe. We’re going to be okay.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I’m sixty percent sure we’re going to be okay.”

I laughed, but it broke into a sob. I clapped my hand over my mouth like I could shove it back in. Back down, with the rest of the sobs I’d swallowed over the years.

“It’s okay,” he said, still comforting me, which was ridiculous because the split over his eye just kept bleeding. I pushed my freak-out aside and leaned over and opened the glove box, looking for napkins or anything else he could use to stop the blood.

We were so clumsy trying to take care of each other.

Pest, Tommy’s squirrel/rat/dog was beside herself, standing on Tommy’s knee with her paws to his chest, whining in her throat.

I get it, Pest. I want to do exactly the same thing.

He found a crushed-up napkin in the back of the glove box and pressed it to his cut without even a wince. A hiss. Nothing.

Stone. That was Tommy. Made of stone. He was completely together despite having been beaten up by two assassin dudes. I’d just seen my mother on a television screen, and I was losing my grip.

Get. It. Together.

“Do you think they’re working together?” I asked. “Bates and my mom?”

I kept glancing between him and the road, waiting for him to say something. To give me some kind of indication if I should be freaking out more or less than I was at the moment.

Because I really, really wanted to freak out more. I wanted to freak out a whole bunch. I wanted…

“Maybe,” he said, back to scanning through the radio stations. His hand no longer on my shoulder. “I don’t know how. Or why—”

“We don’t know why those two do any of the things they do.”

His searing blue eyes sliced through me, but he didn’t say anything and a chill went down my spine. A sixth sense of a shift in him; what it was, though, I couldn’t be sure. Whatever he was thinking, I couldn’t tell.

But it felt like doubt.

Tommy doubted me. Weird how that put a sting in my chest. A solid lump in my throat.

“Right now,” he said, looking behind us again, “we just need to figure out where to go. We can’t just drive around forever.”

“Okay.” I blew out a long breath. “My apartment is out of the question. My mother will have people there. Your apartment is out of the questions, because Bates will have people there. Simon—”

“No,” he said. “I’m not bringing these people to his door.”

“The Yucca Family Lodge?”

“They followed us there. It’s not safe.”

Safe.

I had one safe place in my life. One. And it was the place he’d never even been allowed into.

There was a breathless place inside of me. Scared and vacant. Should I do this?

Could I do this?

Hurting someone as bad as this would hurt him…I’d never done that.

But we didn’t have any choices.

I had to do it.

In another twenty miles I would get on Highway 40 toward California. Instead of taking the 15 into Los Angeles, we’d head up 58, and from there it was back roads through the mountains and some of the state parks, down to the coast just south of Santa Barbara.

It was the long way, but no one would expect us where we were going.

“I know where we’re going,” I said. “It’s safe. We can make our calls. Be sure no one is following us. Regroup.”

The radio stations he was scanning through suddenly crackled to life, and we heard the word Jada.

Tommy stopped scanning and turned up the volume.

“—Jada, the costumed pop sensation who made headlines last week for collapsing onstage during her final show in Los Angeles, has been kidnapped, according to her mother, Dr. Abigail Renshaw. The once-prominent child psychiatrist has expressed grave concerns over her daughter’s mental state, saying she was due to check in with her at a rehab facility before changing her mind and leaving with a strange man. Dr. Renshaw has released pictures of the pop princess without her usually elaborate makeup and disguises, as well as pictures of the man she thinks has kidnapped her daughter. State officials have released a statement saying they are not investigating this situation at this time. TMZ has reported—”

Tommy turned down the radio, and I blew out a shaky breath of relief.

“They’re not investigating,” I said. “That’s good news.”

Tommy was silent.

“Right?” I asked, and when I met his eyes—well, eye and blood-soaked McDonald’s napkin—I didn’t see relief.

He was staring at me so intently I looked away, flushed and hot like I was guilty of something. And when I looked back, he was still staring at me. But it wasn’t Tommy watching me. It was a stranger. The driver who’d kidnapped me a few days ago. The version of Tommy who wanted to put as much distance between us as possible.

The version of Tommy who wished he didn’t know me.

“What?” I asked, laughing because this shit was suddenly awkward.

“Child psychiatrist?”

“My mom?”

“Yeah, Beth. Your mom is a child psychiatrist? And a prominent one?”

“Once,” I said, like it mattered. “She was once prominent.”

The silence between us seethed like snakes, coiled and hissing around us. Or maybe those were just my secrets.

“I don’t know why Bates is doing this shit he’s doing,” he said. “But…I think you know why your mom is doing what she’s doing.”

“What are you getting at?”

“You never told me anything about her. Ever,” he said. “And I’ve always just accepted that it must have been awful. That you must have been the victim of some serious shit from her. Because I figured we all came from shitty families.”

The betrayal sliced right through me, so fast and so sharp I actually gasped.

“Now, you’re wondering if she’s right and I’m wrong? If I’m mentally unwell and she’s just trying to take care of me?”

“I don’t know who is right. All I know is those guys were going to hurt me, and now they’ll want to kill me, and my guess is they aren’t going to think twice about hurting you either, so maybe I just need more than trust. Maybe now I need some answers about you and your mother.”

I wanted to say a thousand childish things. I wanted to press my lips shut and turn my face away and ignore him until we got to that place that would drive a stake right through his heart.

But he was right. And what he was asking for was fair. I didn’t like it, but it was fair.

I took a deep breath and then another. Another. Stalling, yes. Totally. Because these words…they were not easy.

“Beth—”

“This isn’t easy, Tommy. So cut me some slack.”

I took the exit for Highway 40. It was unavoidable now. Not a possibility. But a real thing. The moment when Tommy would hate me for good was only a matter of time.

“My mother was… is, I guess… a prominent child psychiatrist. She rose to fame with some controversial treatments for kids who’d been diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, believing largely in pharmaceutical solutions for behavior problems in children. Or in extreme cases, institutionalized care.”

“Can you…? In English, maybe?”

“She drugged the fuck out of kids with ADHD or who were on the autism spectrum or had bipolar disorder or about a dozen other things. She drugged them until they didn’t speak. Didn’t complain. Didn’t cause problems. And if that didn’t work, she told parents to put their kids in psych wards and hospitals. And we’re not talking a few kids; we’re talking hundreds.”

His silence was comforting in a way, and so was the highway. The sunshine through the windshield. Pest nudged my leg with her nose. And I clung to those small comforts because talking about this shit…about my mom…it was hard. Much harder than it should be, maybe, because I never talked about it. Ever. So the load of my mother’s betrayal was as heavy as it had always been.

“At first it was success after success, and she was going around the country giving speeches and talking to parents about how drugs could help kids with behavior problems and learning disabilities, and she claimed, over and over again, with her help—their families could be ‘normal.’”

“Uh-oh,” he said and I glanced over, surprised. But of course he would understand; he’d been labeled by teachers and counselors and doctors his entire childhood. All the kids at St. Joke’s had—it was part of the reason we got there. We’d taken pills, each of us, mornings and evenings. Drugs to even us out, calm us down. Make us normal. Make us be less of a problem. And some kids needed drugs to function. Ritalin changed lives for kids with ADHD, there was no question.

But all of us, right down the line, were overmedicated.

Just so we were easier to manage.

“Right. Uh-oh. She couldn’t make things normal for anyone. And really, honestly, I don’t think she liked kids. At all. I mean, she didn’t like me, and I did everything I could to be likable to her. Anyway, I think the world was just figuring out that there was no such thing as a normal kid, and the backlash started. And her reputation in a lot of places got tarnished and she became…desperate, I think. She backed down and became an advocate for sensible treatment for kids. And she made a public apology and recanted her earlier methods, but I don’t think she meant it.”

“Why?”

“Because I was turning thirteen and hitting a kind of rebellious stage that my mother just…couldn’t deal with. I’d always had some problems, sleeping for one. Panic attacks. I had some attention issues. Teachers called me dreamy. I was shy.”

“None of those things are problems,” he said.

“Well, the sleep thing was, and the rest of it—” I shook my head, hearing my mother’s words come out of my mouth. Ways to qualify and hedge and still somehow damn myself. “Yes, you’re right. But I grew up being told all those things were wrong with me. Being nervous. Scared to try new things. Throwing tantrums over food. I was told all those things were bad my entire life. Sometimes it’s hard to shake that. And I’d spent years, years trying to be the daughter my mother wanted me to be, without really knowing what that was. But I became a teenager and I was so fucking tired of trying.”

At that moment, I would have given every cent of the money I had or would have for him to reach over and touch me. His hand over mine, or cupping my shoulder. Anything. Because I felt impossibly alone. Talking about my mom always made me feel so alone.

But Tommy stayed on his side of the truck. And I stayed on mine, and I couldn’t be sure he believed what I was telling him.

“Anyway, she treated me—she treated every kid—like we were problems that could be solved with just the right kind of chemical answers. And she was right sometimes. But she was wrong so much more.”

“What did she do to you?”

I took a deep breath, my eyes burning with a grief and betrayal I hadn’t really thought I felt anymore. This was why I didn’t talk about this. Because it was a long time ago and it was right now all at the same time.

“She drugged the shit of me. I became like… a guinea pig. And it didn’t matter how I begged her to stop, or how I told her the drugs made me suicidal or feel like I wasn’t myself, she didn’t stop. She’d just change the cocktail. I counted at one point, and I had been on thirty different meds in the span of two years. And those were just the ones I knew about. She kept changing my diagnosis. Bipolar, manic depressive, OCD, ADD. I think she threw epileptic in there too, at one point.”

“Isn’t it illegal for family to treat family?”

“Isn’t it?” I said with a slightly hysterical laugh I quickly swallowed down. “I kept thinking someone would find out. Someone would see what she was doing. A teacher or a friend’s mom. But it just never…happened.”

“And you never told anyone?”

I shook my head. Embarrassed maybe that I hadn’t fought harder to be heard. Or seen.

There must have been someone I could have trusted. Someone who would have helped, and it was my fault that I never tried.

“Beth,” he said. A small gust of air full of sympathy. But that was all. Just my name. And I shook off those old recriminations.

“I ran away,” I told him. “I wasn’t very good at it, because at first I tried to stay in school, but the principal turned me in to my mom. I ran away again, and that time I didn’t go to school, I stayed in a friend’s basement, but her mom caught me and she called my mom. I ran away again, and then I was just… on the streets for a few weeks. A month, really. I got caught stealing fucking tampons, if you can believe it, and the store manager called my mom and that time…my mom called the cops. She said if I wanted to see what it was like without her, she’d help me. She sent me to St. Joke’s.”

She sent me there. To be raped. And traumatized.

But to meet Tommy, too.

The scales were complicated.

“We were told your mom came to the hospital that night after everything happened with the Pastor,” Tommy said, his voice quiet and even.

“Yeah, she came back, swept in, tried to make it seem like I was a problem child acting out and she’d been this long-suffering martyr mom.” I rearranged my sunglasses, pushed down the visor and then pushed it back up. Fidgeting because I had to do something. “There was this nurse, though. And she kept looking at my mom like she wasn’t buying anything Mom said. And she came in that night when my mom wasn’t there and asked me if I was okay.”

“And you told her?”

I shook my head, my throat thick. “That would make a better story, wouldn’t it? A Hollywood ending kind of thing. I can’t…I can’t tell you the number of times I wished that I had told her. I played it over and over in my mind, changing what I did, imagining what would have happened. But I didn’t tell her. I told her what I told every other adult that asked if I was okay. If things were good at home. I told her I was fine. That I just wanted to go home.”

“You were just a kid, Beth. An abused kid.”

“I kept thinking about the thing you told me that day after we got caught in the art room. How I was a kid people listened to? And I didn’t understand how you could see that in me. Because I’d never tried it. I never told anyone what my mom did, because when I was a kid and told my mom to stop drugging me, she didn’t listen. I thought…I had no voice, until you told me I did.” I dared a glance at him, and he was watching me, his mouth slightly open like he couldn’t believe this story I was telling. And I didn’t know if he was having a hard time believing it because he was having a hard time believing me, or because the story was so awful.

And the difference between those two things was important. It was the distance I’d been grappling with my whole life. When you live something that’s hard to believe, it messes with your head.

“And I still couldn’t believe that I had a voice. I still don’t.”

“But your music? The concerts? The YouTube channel?”

“I live my life in disguise, Tommy. I have so many disguises, I’m not even sure who I am half the time. I’ve changed my name. My look. Everything.”

I had secrets and lies for every occasion. Every mood. I’d gotten so good at not being myself, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was underneath it all.

Nausea twisted in my stomach.

Because I liked to think that I’d handled what happened to me in that office. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe…maybe I was hiding from a lot of things.

“What happened with your mom? After the hospital?”

“I stayed with her for a few more months, pocketed some cash when I could. Figured out how to run away for real, and then I vanished. Middle of the night, got a bus ticket, and I was out of there.”

“How old were you?”

“I ran away on my seventeenth birthday. It was my present to myself.”

“Where did you go?”

“The place we’re going now,” I said, using all my strength to sound calm. To sound natural. To not look at him. “The man who lives there helped me. I stayed for a little over a year. Went to school. Made some money.”

He blew out a long breath. “I’m glad,” he said. “I’m glad you had someone.”

Guilt dried up my words, and all I did was nod.

The silence stretched on, and I needed more from him. Despite what I was about to do to him—I needed more.

I need him to believe what was so hard to believe.

“Do you trust me?” I asked, feeling small and vulnerable and also pissed and hurt that I had to ask for kindness.

“When I picked you up in that house… the doctor?”

“Dr. John.”

He didn’t say anything, and I felt the anger simmer in my system. “You’re wondering how I could choose that kind of help?” I asked. “You’re wondering how I could make that mistake after everything I went through. Drugs fucked me up once; did I honestly think they wouldn’t fuck me up again?”

“No,” he said, fast and hard like that was the furthest thing from what he was thinking. “I’m wondering how we get that asshole arrested. I’m wondering where he lives so I can beat the shit out of him. I’m wondering how we stop your mother from doing this shit to you a second time. Doing anything like that to any kid again, ever.”

His voice was low and rough and wrapping around me like a hug he wouldn’t give me for real. “And I’m sorry,” he said. “For doubting you.”

“Oh,” I sighed and felt, again, near tears. This whole thing was making a mess out of me. “It’s all right. I still doubt myself plenty.”

“You don’t have to say that,” he said. “It’s not all right. You are so strong, Beth. So strong to have lived through all that and still keep moving. Still have a voice and a smile and a life…”

“What else was I supposed to do?” I asked, because it really never seemed like I had a choice. “I had to keep moving or I would have died.”

I glanced over and saw the way he was looking at me. And I saw the way he hadn’t been moving, not for the last seven years, maybe for a bunch of years before that. He’d stayed stuck. And he was dying from it. Slowly, day by day.

“Tommy,” I breathed.

And he looked away, quickly, like he knew what I’d seen. He knew what he’d revealed.

He winced, pulling the paper napkin away from his cut. Some of the paper stuck there, and he looked ridiculous and so dear I had to curl my hands around the steering wheel so I wouldn’t touch him.

3

Tommy

We stopped for food and to let Pest stretch her legs in a small town up high in the Sierra Nevadas.

“I’d better go inside instead of you,” she said, putting the truck in park in the farthest parking spot away from the minimart and gas station.

“Why?” I asked, my hand already on the door handle.

“Well, you kind of draw attention, with the blood and the limp and split lip.”

“You draw your own kind of attention,” I said. Because she was wild and beautiful and I couldn’t stop staring at her. Knowing what her mother had done to her made her strength even more impressive. And that she’d stumbled into Dr. John’s care even more heartbreaking.

“Yeah, watch this.”

She put on her sunglasses and took down her bun, instead making two long braids that hid the colors as best she could. In the driver’s seat of the truck she took off her shirt, and I felt myself go white-hot.

“What are you doing?” I asked, looking away.

“Turning my shirt inside out. The glow in the dark wolf is kind of recognizable.” I could feel her looking at me and got even more embarrassed. Like it was weird to look away, but it felt rude to look at her. Privacy was a thing, right? Just because we’d had sex didn’t mean I had the right to look at her however I wanted.

I flinched when her cool fingers touched my ears.

“They were always your tell, Tommy.”

“My ears?”

“They glow red when you’re excited or nervous or worried.” I felt her come closer, and I closed my eyes with the agony/pleasure of it all. The miniscule nature of the truck cab. How it felt like every breath of air I pulled in had been a breath she’d exhaled.

The story she’d told me about her mom, the sex we’d had, the fact that our good-bye was not at all yet a good-bye; all of it was crammed into this truck with us, pushing us together.

And I didn’t know how to fight it.

She kissed my cheek, and the brush of her skin against mine went through me like a seismic wave through earth. “It’s cute,” she said and hopped out of the truck. “Let’s go, Pest.”

Pest hopped out after her, and I was left alone in the truck.

I watched through the windshield as Beth took Pest out into the field beside the car and Pest peed and then pooped and Beth looked around with a chagrined wince on her face to see if anyone was watching her not bag it up.

The smart thing, the best thing would be for me to leave. To, while her back was turned, get out of the truck and let her go her own way, and I go mine. Because Bates was after me. Not her.

Sammy, when he got sensation back in his legs, he’d be after me.

Not her.

This house we were going to, this safe place Beth was talking about.

That was hers. Not mine.

I’d bring all this trouble there.

I put my hand on the handle, pulled it but stopped just before the mechanism in the door caught.

I should leave.

But I didn’t.

I couldn’t.

Instead, I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and called Carissa, who answered before the first ring was over.

“Honestly, Tommy,” she said.

“I can explain.”

“I don’t think anyone cares anymore about your explanations. Sammy certainly doesn’t.”

“Beth can’t go back to her mother.”

“That’s not your call.”

“Why is it Bates’s call?” I pinched the bridge of my nose where a thousand pounds of pressure was building up behind my eyes. “Why is he doing this?”

“That’s irrelevant, Tommy. It was always irrelevant. The only thing that matters is you paying back the debt.”

“Her mom hurt her, Carissa. Really hurt her. And I don’t know if Bates knows that or cares about it. But I do. I said I wouldn’t hurt anyone to pay back this debt. And I meant that.”

“What do you think Dr. Renshaw will do to her daughter?” Carissa asked, and I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or if she was really wondering.

“Her mom thinks she’s sick. Like mentally unwell. She used Beth as a guinea pig for all kinds of drugs when she was a kid, trying to make her ‘normal.’ Who knows what she’ll do if she gets her daughter back? Drug her into a coma, probably,” I said, remembering Carissa coming back from that hospital she’d been put in when we were kids. We helped her hide the meds so she could get off all the drugs that made her feel like a zombie, but she was never really herself again after that. “Hospitalize her, for sure.”

If anyone should understand how scary that was, it was Carissa.

“Why?” Carissa asked, her voice sharp and hard.

“I don’t know, Carissa,” I sighed. “Why do shitty people do shitty things?”

A car pulled up next to us. An SUV with Mexico flags waving from the antenna. The back doors opened and kids spilled out. Two of them with a soccer ball raced into the field where Beth was standing with Pest. She stopped the kids, warned them about the poop and sent them to play a few feet away.

“I’ll be in touch,” Carissa said and hung up.

The mom from the SUV came out with their dog, a dainty little white thing, and she went into the field, too. I wanted to honk the horn, get Beth out of there before she was recognized, but instead Beth asked the mom for a poop bag and stood there and chatted with the lady. Pointing to me, pointing at Pest, who was sniffing the white dog’s butt.

Finally, Beth came back into the truck, bringing with her the smell of outside and a giant smile. It made me crazy how she acted like everything was okay.

“We’ve got to be careful,” I said. “Your picture is everywhere now.”

She waved me off and started the truck back up. “I’m a lady in a field with a dog,” she said. “They didn’t suspect a thing.”

“You take too many risks, Beth.”

“Oh, Tommy. They aren’t risks. I’m just living my life.”

And that, it seemed, was the difference between us. And I realized it was a fucking shame the number of times I’d tried to get her to be more like me, when what I needed was to be so much more like her.

I just didn’t know how.

“I talked to Carissa,” I said.

“And?” She glanced over at me, her eyes wide.

“Hard to say, but I think she’s going to try and convince Bates that you shouldn’t be anywhere near your mom.”

“Well, that’s good news,” she said with a wide smile. “Now we just need to convince my mom of that.”

* * *

Beth

The truck bounced over an unpaved road, lined with trees, taking us down off the ridge. The ocean had disappeared from view a while ago, and Tommy was looking more and more uncertain.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“Trust me,” I said, which, as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized were the most hurtful things I could say. Because he was going to trust me and I was going to stab him in the heart.

He’d peeled off the McDonald’s napkin that had been stuck to his head, and he was bleeding again. His white shirt had scarlet dots on the shoulder.

I turned left at the old blue mailbox, and we dipped down again. I went right, deep into the weeds, to avoid the giant pothole in the middle of the driveway.

My moat, Peter had always said, and in the rainy season, he wasn’t wrong.

I pulled the truck up to the back of what looked like a nondescript one-story house. Cedar shingles had long gone gray with age and sunlight. A pot of something green and overgrown sat beside a screen door under an awning. Butterflies and bugs drifted in and out of the sunlight.

The garage in front of us had a nice apartment built above it, where I stayed when I came to visit. Peter called it my apartment, which was a little ridiculous considering that, after I’d left three years ago, I’d only been up here a handful of times.

But Peter didn’t have anyone else in his life, so the apartment above the garage remained mine.

My heart pounded in my eyes. The palms of my hands.

Two dogs came roaring around the corner, a Doberman mix I didn’t recognize and Bessie, the German shepherd who’d been old when I’d been here last year and now looked ancient.

Pest got up in my lap, paws pressed to the window, her entire body wiggling with excitement.

“They’ll eat you in one bite,” I told her and set her down beside me. “Stay here,” I told Tommy, whose face was all bruised and bloody. Lord, he looked rough.

I’d imagined this moment over the years. Bringing Tommy here to introduce him to Peter. I imagined that it would be happy, no secrets. Everyone prepared and ready. Nervous, sure, but eager.

This was the opposite of everything I’d imagined.

Nothing but secrets and blood.

“Nope,” he said, and we both popped out of the truck, slamming the doors before Pest could get out and get eaten.

The screen door opened, and a tall, raw-boned man with a shock of thick white hair growing wild on his head stepped out into the yard. He had reading glasses on the end of his nose and a red button-down shirt, buttoned up all wrong.

He was holding a shotgun.

“What’s your business here, son?” he said to Tommy, who put his hands up and looked over at me. A whole lot of “what the hell is this mess” in his face.

“Peter.” I ran around the truck, averting shotgun disasters. Bessie, recognizing me, trotted over and nudged my hand for a pat. “It’s me.”

Peter tore his narrowed gaze away from Tommy and focused on me. A smile rippled across his face. He wasn’t a hugger, so we didn’t do that. But he looked at me fondly from a few feet away, and I smiled at him.

“Beth,” he said. “Been listening to the news, thought you might show up.”

“Here I am,” I said with a shrug. Though something like relief rained over me. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but we just needed a safe place to get ourselves organized.”

“You know you’re welcome here,” he said and glanced back over at Tommy. “Who is your friend?”

I’d thought about this. About lying. But before I could say anything, Tommy answered.

“Tommy MacNeill,” he said. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”

If I hadn’t been looking, if I hadn’t been watching with my heart in my throat, I might not have seen it. The way Peter leaned back a little, his mouth open like he’d been hit in the gut. The shotgun in his hand slipped to his side, and he took a deep breath before looking at me.

I shook my head once, fast; he doesn’t know, I said with that gesture, with the frantic widening of my eyes. He doesn’t know who you are.

Peter closed his mouth, pulled himself together, but it wasn’t easy. The effort was visible.

He coughed and wiped at his mouth, his fingers trembling.

“Looks like you’ve been in a scrape,” he finally said in a gruff voice to Tommy.

Tommy touched his eye, the dried blood there.

“It looks worse than it is.” Tommy aimed for a joke, and Peter glanced away, sniffing like it was just too hard to watch Tommy pretend not to be hurt. I knew the feeling. “It just won’t stop bleeding.”

It felt like the world was sitting on my shoulders, pushing me slowly into the earth, like if I looked down my feet would be buried in the hard-packed soil of Peter’s parking area. I’d be like one of his trees out front, the sky held in my branches.

“Those kinds of cuts are tricky,” Peter said, his throat bobbing above his shirt.

It was obvious I’d gone too far, bringing Tommy up here unannounced. Peter had every right to tell us we weren’t welcome. We brought a shit ton of baggage with us, and Peter had a real aversion to baggage.

“We can leave,” I said, drawing their attention. “If it’s not a good time or whatever.”

“It’s okay,” Peter said. “Go on up and get yourself looked after.” Peter pointed at the garage but was staring at the ground a few feet in front of Tommy’s toes. “All your stuff is up there from last time. I have Angie clean it up every month, just in case.” My heart squeezed at the thought of this old man waiting for me. Sending his cleaning lady up to the garage to change the sheets just so the place would be ready if I decided to visit. I used to come up here a few times a year, but since my YouTube video took off, I’ve barely called Peter, much less come to visit.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Get yourself settled,” Peter said. “I’m in the house when you’re ready to talk.”

He shot me a pointed look, and I nodded. He was going to want some explanations, and I owed him that.

“Don’t forget your…” Peter peered through the windshield of the truck. “Jesus, what is that thing?”

“We’re not sure,” Tommy said and opened the truck. Pest all but flew into his arms, and Peter’s dogs went nuts at the sight of her.

One sharp whistle between Peter’s teeth, though, and the dogs settled.

“Go on then,” he said, shooing the dogs with one hand and us with the other.

The apartment above the garage was just the way I remembered it. A big queen-size bed. The cat clock on the wall. The shelves of books. The TV Peter surprised me with years ago. He didn’t much like TV. But he did it because I told him about my insomnia, how the TV helped sometimes when I was up in the middle of the night. Old movies with the sound off had become a familiar bedtime story.

The denim crazy quilt his wife had made from worn-out pairs of jeans was still on the bed. The windows were clean, and tons of sunlight fell across the pine walls and floors, making the whole room glow like a honeycomb.

“Nice place,” Tommy said.

“It was for their daughter,” I said and immediately winced. Fuck, this was a tangled web. I put the bags down. There wasn’t much. My makeup and changes of underwear. His duffel bag. “I stay here every time I come up.”

“Peter has a wife?” Tommy asked.

“Had one. She died a bunch of years ago.” I stepped from the bedroom into the bathroom and opened the cabinet under the sink and predictably found the first-aid kit. “Come in here,” I said. “Let’s clean you up.”

He came to stand in the bathroom doorway, and the already small bathroom became tiny.

I could smell him, soap and his laundry detergent and the metallic bite of blood. I opened my mouth to inhale so I could taste the salt of his sweat across my tongue.

I would never not want Tommy. Never. And that was before last night. Last night had made everything a thousand times more clear. More real. I didn’t have to imagine how it would feel to have sex with him. I only had to remember.

And the memories were alive in me.

Even now, I felt him in my body, his lips and his breath, his sweat and his weight.

It had been real. Not a dream.

And I wanted him again so badly I ached with it.

He stepped inside the bathroom, and I shifted to sit on the edge of the tub. He lowered the lid of the toilet and sat there. Our knees touched and we both shifted away, but it was useless. The room was too small. There was nothing to do but touch.

And I felt the hard bone of his knee against the inside of my thigh and I had to bite my lip against the groan. The groan that sat in my throat waiting for me to be unguarded so it could come out.

Everything was going wrong for us. I was, in fact, in the middle of betraying him, and he was on the run for his life after trying to save my life, and it didn’t matter.

The world could be on fire and I would want him.

The white tiles and shower curtain and the bright sunlight made it feel like we were inside of an egg. A bubble.

Something fragile and small that contained, in its brilliant center, just us. Nothing else. Outside this bathroom there was nothing. Nothing that mattered.

“I can do this if you—” He reached for the first-aid kit in my lap as I just sat there, silent and wanting. And miserable with all of it.

“No.” I snapped into action. “I’ve got it.” I opened the first-aid kit too hard, and bandages popped out, rolling across the ground. Trails of pink stretchy fabric, leading into the bedroom, coming to a stop against the corner of the bed frame.

We were both staring at them.

“I’ll get those in a second.” I dug through things until I found the antiseptic wipes and some butterfly bandages that would work on the cut over his eye that kept opening. There were also some ice packs that, when cracked open, got cold. I put those on the edge of the sink, leaning past him, my hair up in its bun brushing his chin. My shoulder brushing his.

“Here,” I said, my voice breathless. My whole body breathless. I opened the antiseptic wipes with my teeth, reminded of how he’d opened the condom wrappers last night. Everything, ridiculously, was making me think of sex. Maybe because I could feel the end coming. The moment when he would look at me and it wouldn’t be kindness he felt. It wouldn’t be affection.

But right now, his ears were so red, his face flushed.

He was thinking the same thing. Not about good-bye. But about sex.

That settled me down inside my body. This I knew.

It was everything outside of the sex that had me rattled. It was the feelings and our past and the secrets I was keeping. It was hard just to breathe without any distance.

How were we going to do this and walk away from each other?

I pulled out the damp alcohol pad and pressed it to his forehead, wiping away the dried blood. Refolded the pad to get a clean edge and wiped away more. His breath brushed over my face, smelling like mint and him, and I felt like I could live on that. For a day or two.

We were so close. Closer even than we’d been while having sex last night. Or maybe I just wasn’t distracted, and I looked at his face like I was memorizing it. Fuck. I was memorizing it.

I could see the darker ring of blue around the lightest part of his eye. The whiskers of his beard were a different color blonde than the hair on his head. I put the butterfly bandage over his cut.

He hummed in his throat at the pressure, and I wanted to put my hand to his throat and tell him to do it again, so I could feel it against my body. “Do they hurt?” I asked, pressing lightly on the spot just under his eye that was swollen and smudged.

“A little,” he said. “Not bad.”

Because it was that moment, and because he’d taken care of me for two solid days, and because I felt so much for him I could barely contain it in my body, I leaned up and kissed that spot. Just under his eye.

“How about here?” I asked. My finger, the nail half covered in chipped green nail polish, touched the edge of his mouth, where the skin had been split.

“Beth,” he sighed.

I kissed the corner of his mouth, but as I shifted away, he grabbed my arms.

His hold wasn’t gentle, his fingers bit into my bare skin and I could feel the rough calluses on his fingertips.

“I want…” he breathed, his gaze making tracks over my face like he was memorizing me, too.

“Yes,” I said. And it was all he needed. He pulled me toward him as I threw the first-aid box into the tub behind me, and then I was in his lap, my legs straddling his, my chest against his.

His mouth on mine. I tried to be careful with the cut on his lip, but he didn’t seem interested in careful. He seemed interested in eating me whole. In drinking me in. He was hard between my legs, and I rocked against him, remembering how good he felt inside me.

I loved this moment, this anticipatory moment, this wild, empty thrill inside my body. I loved knowing how perfectly he would fill me. Just the right side of too much.

He stood up, his hands around my butt, my weight in his arms like it was nothing. And I loved that. I loved how my edges met his. And his met mine.

“Take down your hair,” he said against my mouth.

“What?” I breathed, distracted by the rub of my breasts against his chest as he took us into the bedroom.

“Your hair. Take it down.”

“Why?” I asked, kissing him. His lips and his chin and his cheek and the side of his neck. “It’s a mess.”

“Take it down.” He dropped me onto the bed, and I bounced against the mattress. His face as he watched me was hard, his eyes…everything…different.

Tommy the stranger was looking down at me. Unpredictable and strong and wild.

My body went up in flames, my clothes suffocating.

I took down my hair. The black and colored coils fell down around my face. I brushed them back, out of my way just as he pulled down my pants, taking my shoes at the same time. And then it was just me, my underwear and the inside-out howling wolf shirt.

“Your shirt.” He barely had the words out before it and the sports bra he bought me were tossed into the abyss on the other side of the bed.

“What else, Tommy?” I whispered and put my hands over my breasts. The nipples hard against my palms. I liked the way his eyes flared as I cupped my breasts.

“What else would you like to watch?” I asked, tilting my head, lifting my legs. “What else have you imagined over the years that I would do to you? That you would do to me?” I slipped my fingers down my stomach, my skin waking up in goose bumps at the touch of my own hands.

His eyes caught everything, the goose bumps and my fingers. My damp panties. His fingers trembled as they reached out for me, and I liked that. Loved it even. Loved how this stoic, big man shook. For me. And he always had.

This could be the very last time I saw that. The last time he shook for me. Watched me with his impossibly bright eyes. And I suddenly felt determined to make this something he would never forget. Even if he wanted to.

His fingertips, rough and callused, touched one freckle above my breast, another on my sternum, the small group of three just below my rib cage. The birthmark, the size of a thumbprint, at my hip.

And now I was shaking. Like he’d taken a hammer to a dam, I was leaking strength. I was leaking distance. I felt the press of his fingertip against my hip in all directions, in every part of my body. I had this sense, sure and steady and deep in my gut, that I would feel that touch forever in a way. A sensory memory like falling or the taste of Skittles, sunlight on my face on the first great day of spring. I would remember his touch like that—elemental and real.

I sat up, knocking his hands aside, and reached for him. The smooth skin of his stomach was warm under my fingers as I pulled at his belt. The button of his jeans. The cotton of his underwear and finally…

We both gasped as my hand went around him. Thick and long and velvet to the touch.

I shoved his pants down to his ankles, and he cupped my head in his hand in that way I liked.

“Jada,” he said.

“What?”

“That’s…that’s who I need you to be. How I need this to be.”

Oh. That’s how this was going to work. That’s how we were going to survive this. It was why my hair was down. He was fucking Jada, not Beth.

Well, I could sure as hell get behind that.

Jada wasn’t betraying him. Jada wasn’t sick with love and memory.

Jada was clean, pure sex.

I looked up at him through my lashes, leaned forward and licked him, the broad stroke of my tongue over the hard length of him. I licked the tip, watching him the whole time, my tongue wet, my lips wide.

Very Jada.

I took him all the way into my mouth, no warm-up, no teasing. I sucked him down, felt him against the back of my throat, a burn and a stretch.

“Jada,” he breathed, and I slid back and then forward again. Taking him deep every time. Suddenly, like he’d reached some limit, he stepped back, his dick red and damp and hard, jutting out in front of him. Obscene. It looked vulgar, more so when he stroked it, watching me watch him. He kicked off his pants. His shoes. Reached into his bag for the condoms and tore one off the strip.

He watched me with eyes that scorched my skin. And I felt all at once just how big he was. And how small I was.

“You want to know what I thought about?” he asked.

I nodded, beyond speech.

“Fucking you,” he said, his words crude. His voice cruder. “Everywhere. All the time.”

My breath shuddered, and my fingers slid down between my legs to the wet spot on my panties. I pushed against my clit, opening my mouth to breathe.

“I thought about that,” he said, watching me touch myself. “I thought about making you come. I thought about you sucking my dick. I watched porn and I jerked off and I thought of you all the fucking time.”

I moaned. He wasn’t even touching me and I could come.

“And I thought it would be better,” he said. “I thought if I fucked you, it would be over, this fever in my blood would be gone. I’d be done with it.”

“But it’s worse,” I said because it was worse for me, too. Wanting him before was an echo compared to what wanting him now was like. It was a knife right through the heart of me.

“It’s so much fucking worse.”

He stepped to the bed with all the power, and I didn’t know if he knew the control he had over me. But then as if to answer me, he grabbed me by the hips, lifting me and flipping me over at the same time. I hit the bed, and my breath whooshed out of me.

“Like this, Jada,” he said, the name a punctuation. A reminder. He popped my hips up, and I felt the bed dip under his weight. “I want to fuck you like this.”

He shoved my underwear aside, and his fingers, rough and blunt, found the wet heat of me. I cried out at his touch. The hard stab of his fingers into me, the wild grip of his hand on my hips.

He exhaled some word, some vulgar assessment of my beauty like this, and I gobbled it up with a spoon. I preened for him, sticking out my ass, stretching my arms out over my head.

“Jada,” he said again, like he was reminding himself. Both of us, maybe. Whatever.

“Fuck me,” I said. “Like this.”

His fingers left my body and I braced myself for the hard push of him into me, but nothing could have prepared me. Really. I put my face into the mattress and screamed as he rammed into me. I was wet and ready and he was still so big. So much.

“Do I need to stop?” he asked, easing out of me.

“Don’t stop,” I gasped. “Don’t fucking stop.”

His hands gripped my hips; his fingertips against the skin of my belly. And I opened myself up to all of it. To the pounding of his body against mine. The pull of my hair when he grabbed it from my neck, pushing it out of the way so he could see the side of my face. All at once I wanted to see his face. I wanted to watch him come, and I scrambled, trying to get away from him, to flip over on my back.

“No,” he said in his stranger’s voice, like he knew I wanted to get back some old connection. Dig up the ties between us and slip them over our heads again. He pushed his hand against my back, flattening me to the bed, and my knees slipped out from beneath me and his stomach was against my back, his cock so far inside of me I could barely move.

“Fuck,” he breathed, like this new position was better by multitudes. “Fuck, oh my God.”

He jerked against me. Random and hard, like he’d lost all rhythm and function.

I was ruining him and I loved it.

“Wait,” I breathed and I shifted my legs inside of his and I squeezed him with my pussy and my thighs and he put his head down on my back.

“I can’t fuck you…like this…oh my God, Jada.”

Jada. Right.

“I’ll fuck you,” I said, and I squeezed and pushed against him, undulating beneath him like waves under a cement dock. He was unmoving and I was nothing but fluid. His mouth was open against my back, my shoulder. I felt him kissing me, breathing. Heat and wet and slick and we were both a mess.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.” Lifting up on my arms so I could find a new friction. And he took his hands and buried them beneath our bodies, his fingers finding my clit and squeezing it. Pressing down. Pushing and retreating. I fucked him and he fucked me and things would never be the same.

“You are so beautiful,” he said against my shoulder blade, licking the sweat that trickled down my spine. “You’re perfect. You’re so perfect…” His words faded into gibberish, and we were both falling to pieces around each other.

“I’m going to come,” I whispered, and he shifted, kissing my face, the corner of my mouth, my eyes. Every place he could reach.

“Come,” he breathed. “I want to feel it.”

It was like I was a coil that had been pressed down with more and more pressure and it was either explode or break. I held on, I held on for as long as I could, as if it were a dare, as if breaking were the point, and then with utter and ecstatic relief, I exploded.

My cries and gasps and moans were muffled by the mattress where I buried my head. He got one hand out from under us and pushed himself up, and the pressure on my clit was too much and I came again, bringing him with me. Tugging him along in my wake, jerking and moaning and crying my name.

But it was Jada he was crying out.

Even while everything crumbled, he clung to that distance.

And twenty minutes ago I’d admired that, I was thankful even for it; now… the distance stung.

Stupid. You can’t have it both ways.

He fell down beside me, gasping, his chest red and sweaty, his neck splotchy. I caught a bead of sweat as it navigated the swells and dips of his shoulders and biceps, brought it to my lips to taste.

“Are you okay?” he asked, staring at the ceiling.

“Fine.” Between my legs I ached, but not in a bad way. In a way I’d feel for the rest of the day and blush, thinking of what we’d done together. A hot secret, a dark memory.

He turned to face me, and I smiled at him. “Was it as good as you imagined?”

I expected him to smile or his ears to turn pink and red with embarrassment and delight, but none of that happened. His eyes stayed steadfast on mine.

“My imagination when it comes to you?” He shook his head. “It’s never enough. You are always more than I could ever imagine. Always.”

The words bloomed in my chest like flowers. Like rare and precious flowers, and I looked at my skin, feeling like they should be visible, that’s how clearly I felt the sting and beauty of their growth. But my skin was just my skin, freckled and pale.

I sat up, dizzy as blood rearranged itself around my body. “I need to go talk to Peter,” I said.

“Do you want me to come with?”

I shook my head, swallowing back the hysterical laugh that bubbled up from my belly. “No, I need to talk to him on my own first.” Peter was going to be mad. He was going to have a thousand questions, most of which I had no answer for. I didn’t need Tommy to see any of that.

“I need to make a few calls.” I heard the scrape of his hands over his face. “I gotta try and clean up this fucking mess.”

Me too.

“The service out here is really spotty,” I told him. “We get reception when a certain satellite goes overhead, but that’s only a few times a day.”

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “A satellite?”

“Don’t even ask about the Internet,” I joked. “Peter is not a technology fan.”

From the dresser on the far side of the room I pulled out some of the clothes I’d left here the last time I’d stayed. Red underwear, weirdly lewd after everything we’d done. A pair of black skinny jeans, one of the knees torn out. A tank top and a long, slouchy gray sweater over it. A pair of Converse were in the closet, and I shoved my feet into those.

In the bathroom was the deodorant I liked and the toothpaste. I put my hair back up, and when I looked in the mirror, I was so completely Beth I almost couldn’t believe it.

No makeup. No elaborate hairstyle. Plain clothes. Beat-up shoes.

Beth.

I stepped into the bedroom, and Tommy must have seen how very Beth I was because he looked away, pretending a certain amount of busy-ness pulling his boxers from his pants and putting them on.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

“Take your time.”

Man, we could not get this right. This after-sex thing. It was like we were strangers who kept bumping into each other on our way into the same elevator.

It was the Jada stuff; I was sure of it. Clinging to distance while being so intimate with each other—it was bound to have an effect.

Before I said something that made it all worse, I got out of there. The sun was dazzling and I took the steps down from the apartment above the garage to the parking area and then, instead of going in the house, I walked around to the front deck where I knew Peter would be.

While the back of the house was plain, the front of the house, with its view of the orchard and the ocean beyond it, was spectacular. There was a large wraparound deck, gray and splintery but still just about the most beautiful spot on earth.

I found Peter where I expected him, in the rocking chair on the far corner, creaking in the shade of a big pine tree. His coffee cup was on the top of the railing, steaming a little against the intense green of all the trees around us. He used to have an ashtray there too, but he quit smoking a few years ago.

“Hi, Peter,” I said, my hands in my back pockets. We had a pretty strict no-apologizing, we-accept-each-other-as-we-are kind of policy. But when he put down the paper he was reading, his eyes behind the reading glasses were piiiiiiiisssssed.

“I’m sorry,” I said quickly.

“Really?”

“I shouldn’t have come unannounced,” I said, starting with my smaller crimes.

“You know I don’t give a shit about that.”

I glanced behind myself as if to make sure Tommy wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry for bringing him here,” I whispered. “We didn’t have a lot of choice.”

He stood up, closing the paper with a snap. “And now you’re passing that on to me?”

Other than that first time I’d shown up here with nothing but my backpack and the little information I’d had on him, Peter had asked me almost no questions. We talked about my job, we talked about school when I was in it. We talked about the rain and his new neighbors.

But he didn’t ask questions.

And I didn’t either.

Except for that first night when I told him I was friends with his grandson. I told him about St. Joke’s and what it was like there, and I told him what kind of person Tommy was. How brave he was and how he tried to make things safe for us.

I told him how Tommy had been abused and starved, and Peter had shown me to the apartment above the garage. But I sneaked out that night to sit in the shadows of the trees along the big deck, and I listened to Peter sob. He’d sobbed and sobbed.

But the next day he’d made me breakfast and he told me about his wife and his daughter and why he’d signed those papers giving up his rights. He’d said I could stay as long as I needed, and I nodded, shoveling eggs and bacon in my mouth like it might disappear.

And I’d spent the next year getting my GED and soaking in his rusty affection and friendship. And Peter had poured that shit over me like he’d had it in reserve. Like he’d been waiting for someone to fuss over and worry about and love in his own damaged and all-alone way.

He wasn’t my father, or grandfather, or kind but distant uncle. He was…a friend.

“We don’t have to tell him,” I said like a coward. Tommy had made no bones about the fact that we didn’t have a future, so what would be the point of telling him that I’d taken part of his past?

But even as I said the words, they tasted like shit in my mouth.

Peter laughed, and in a gesture so like Tommy, so painfully like Tommy, he wiped his hands over his face. My heart squeezed. My toes curled.

Peter’s hands were shaking. His face, when he finally looked at me, was shattered.

“He’s named after my father; did you know that?” he asked, and I shook my head. “And he looks like my wife. Just like her. That chin and those eyes.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.

“And you’re suggesting that we just… what? Hope he doesn’t figure it out? That he leaves soon enough not to put two and two together?”

That had been what I’d suggested, and it sounded so awful I could only shake my head.

Peter crossed the deck toward me, and I realized he wasn’t just pissed, he was sad. He was unbearably, painfully sad.

I couldn’t stop hurting people.

“You brought my grandson here. My grandson.” The word came out of him like it was new. Foreign. A word he’d just learned and he didn’t quite know how to say it, how it was supposed to sound. Or feel in his mouth. “And I owe him an explanation…if he wants it.”

4

Tommy

I got dressed in my jeans and put on my other T-shirt, cleaner but barely. I’d have to see about laundry. I grabbed my phone from the bedside table, but there was no service.

Figures. Satellite, really? This felt like a step back in time.

I shoved my feet into my boots and stepped out of the apartment. Pest made a break for the door, but I didn’t let her out, not without knowing where those other dogs were.

“Sorry, girl,” I said and heard her whining from the other side of the wooden door. The outside air smelled like pine needles and sunshine and something else on the breeze. Something with a bite.

Standing on the small deck at the top of the stairs, I held my phone up, but still there was no service. I took the stairs down to the parking area and got one bar, but it flickered in and out. It would be nice to just go hide out in that apartment, waiting for Beth to come back so we could have sex again. But Simon was undoubtedly freaking out, especially if he’d seen the news with Beth’s mom looking for me.

I also needed to call Paul and quit.

Shit to do, man. I couldn’t have sex and live on the run forever.

I smiled thinking it, and that I accredited to the sex. How did people get anything done? How was the whole human population not just holed up and fucking each other constantly?

Simon always said I didn’t know what I was missing, but I’d sort of thought about sex the same way I thought about cheesecake. Could it really be that good?

Now I was going to have to try cheesecake just to see.

Because the sex stuff was pretty fucking amazing.

Even with all the weird shit Beth and I layered into it. This Jada thing I was compelled to hold on to like it might keep us safe? I wasn’t sure who I was kidding with that.

My shoes kicked the gravel of the parking area, and the dogs came barrelling out from around the house like I’d tripped a wire.

“Hey,” I said, slipping the phone back in my pocket. “Hey, guys. Nothing to get excited about.”

The oldest of the two took me at my word and flopped down, panting from all the excitement. But the young one with all the teeth kept growling out of her throat. Holding her ground.

Beth and Peter came out from around the house; Peter looked less menacing without the shotgun. But not much. He looked—no lie—like a hermit. Like Clint Eastwood playing a hermit in a movie about a hermit.

He and Beth with her Technicolor self were an unlikely combo.

Peter whistled, and the young dog sat back on her haunches but watched me out of the corner of her eye.

“Sorry about that,” Peter said.

“They’re just doing their job,” I said and stepped a little closer to the young one, my hand out for her to sniff. She did, reluctantly, but once she got a good nose full of my smell with her master next to her, she settled down. “I was trying to get a signal,” I said, pulling my phone from my back pocket.

“Yeah, the only for sure place for a signal is the back deck; otherwise you have to wait—”

“For the satellite, Beth told me.”

Peter nodded, his eyes on the dogs and the ground in front of my feet and not at all on me. “Follow me.” He waved me forward and started back around the house.

“You all right?” I asked Beth as I walked by her. She seemed so different in these clothes. Familiar and not, all at once. And she was tense, her shoulders around her ears.

“Fine,” she said with a quick smile that wasn’t convincing.

“Is it Peter?” I asked. “He’s not happy you brought me?”

“What makes you say that?”

I laughed a little. “Peter doesn’t look like the kind of guy who’s real happy to have unexpected visitors.”

“No, he’s fine. Just a little crusty is all.”

She still had that wide-eyed, darty look she used to get when she was freaked out about school or the Pastor getting wind of something someone had done.

“Is it…” I dropped my voice. “Did I hurt you?”

Her eyes were big and wide and so pretty they kicked me in the gut. She shook her head. “You didn’t hurt me.”

I touched her cheek, the side of her neck where it met her shirt. The freckle just below her ear. “I want—” I stopped, shook my head. It seemed wrong somehow to say what I wanted, to put it into words in the sunshine. Everything I wanted usually lived in darkness.

Wishes I never said out loud.

“What? What do you want?”

Everything. All at once. All the time.

“I want to touch you again.”

“Good,” she said. “Because I want to be touched.”

My blood beat hard in my veins, and her eyes dilated in the sunlight. If I touched her, she’d be wet. I knew she would be. Just like I was, beneath my zipper, hard as a rock at the thought of her.

She wanted what I wanted.

Me. Deep inside her. Now.

“I have to…” I whispered, lifting my phone. There were people worried. I couldn’t leave them worried.

“I know.”

“Go upstairs,” I said. “Wait for me.” Take off all your clothes and spread yourself across that bed. Take your hair down and make yourself ready.

That’s what I wanted to say, because I was a lit fuse all of a sudden, the control I’d lived under all my life crumbling around me.

“I’m coming with you,” she said, stepping back from my touch. “Peter’s... kind of tricky.”

I smiled at her diplomatic language. Tricky seemed like an understatement.

“You sure he doesn’t care that I’m here?”

“I’m sure.”

I sucked down a huge breath. Adjusted my cock in my pants. She saw it and grinned, and the air around us sizzled.

“Come upstairs,” I said, reaching for her hand to pull her away with me. “We can be fast.”

I could. I could be so fast. I could be embarrassingly fast. But she shook her head.

“Peter,” she sighed. Right. Of course. The guy was waiting for us on his porch. It was enough that we were going to fuck like rabbits above his garage. But to keep the guy waiting wasn’t cool.

“And I don’t want fast,” she said. “I want it to last and last and last.”

We could do that. I would fuck her until neither one of us could walk out of here. “Okay,” I said.

“Promise?”

“Oh, it’s a promise.”

I grabbed her hand and pulled her along behind me, following where Peter had gone.

The wooden deck, gray and splintered, led around the side of the house and then opened up over the edge of the mountain, and it was nothing but clear views of the hills beneath us and the ocean beyond that.

“Holy…wow,” I breathed, actually coming to a stop. Beth, in my wake, bounced into me and then chuckled.

“It’s impressive,” she said.

The Channel Islands were out there and the oil rigs, and it was beautiful. The forested hills beneath us rolled down into a small town, a sandy beach just there at the edge of the water.

“It’s amazing,” I said with a smile ghosting across my face. It was like a scene out of a book.

“You should get a signal out here,” Peter said from a deck chair where he was sitting, his dogs around him. A coffee mug on the railing. There was a newspaper in his lap.

A king on his retirement throne.

“Is this all your land?” I asked.

“From there,” he pointed to the far edge of the deck and swept his hand to the other edge of the deck. “To there, down to about the first hill. Thirty acres.”

“What do you do with it?” I asked.

“Look at it, mostly. I used to farm it,” he said.

“Farm?” Something prickled up my spine. “What did you grow?”

“Hops,” Beth said. “Like for beer.”

Peter, after a long moment, nodded.

I didn’t know shit about hops. They could be growing weed out there for all I knew.

“I’ve never been on a farm before,” I said, laughing a little at how dumb that sounded.

“Not ever?” Beth asked.

“Not a whole lot of farms in the Tenderloin,” I said.

“Go ahead and use your phone,” Peter said.

“We’ll give you some privacy,” Beth said and opened the sliding glass door into the house. She waved in Peter, who stood up slowly and followed her in.

I turned to the water and dialed up Simon, who answered on the first ring.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he said.

“Hello to you, too.”

“You’re alive, I guess.”

“I am. So is Beth.”

“Well, interestingly enough, there are some pretty fucking suspicious dudes hanging around my apartment. I haven’t been home in two days. You have any idea who they are?”

“Bates’s guys, I guess.”

“You better start explaining.”

I told him everything. Beth and the guys in the bathroom. Beth’s mom.

“Where are you now?” he asked in his calmer voice.

“A friend of Beth’s. Way up in the hills south of Santa Barbara.” Again something pinged in my head, but I couldn’t pull it all together.

“What are you doing about Bates?”

“I told Carissa about Beth’s mom, and I’m hoping she’ll call off the dogs.”

“Well, it would be nice to get back to my apartment.”

“You and me both, man.”

“What’s Beth going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“How is she gonna deal with her mom?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, tell her she needs to get ahead of it. Tell her side of the story.”

That seemed…unlikely. Beth didn’t tell her side of the story. She dressed up in costumes to avoid it. She ran away and changed her name. Lived with a hermit out in the mountains so she’d never have to tell her story.

“How?” I asked.

“Well, I can put her in touch with some people who could make it easier for her. Or—she could just do a YouTube video on her channel. Cut out the middle man; she’d probably reach more people that way. In fact, I think that’s the best way, for sure.”

“A video of what?”

“Of her telling her story.”

No makeup. No disguises. Just her.

It would be seriously effective.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said. “Has Bates come sniffing around you?”

“Other than the goons at my door, you mean?”

“Yeah. I mean the debt.”

“No. Not yet.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m in a hotel. But I’m being sent out again on assignment tomorrow. So no worries.”

When Simon said no worries, I always got about a million more worries.

“What are you gonna do?” Simon asked.

“Well, right now I’m just waiting until Carissa gets back to me, I guess. Not much else I can do.”

“Makes sense.”

“Hey…Simon?” I pulled a splinter off the railing, but it was bigger than I expected and a long chunk of wood came with it, revealing new wood beneath, a divot of fresh yellow cedar.

“Yeah?”

“I never thanked you for taking me to the hospital that night.”

“You don’t have to do this, man.”

“No. I do. Thank you. Thank you for the hospital that night. And thank you for the last seven years.”

“No way, man, it’s me that should be thanking you.”

I liked that. I liked being thanked by a guy I respected so much. It made me feel like I had something to offer when I’d never felt that way.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Thanking me. This isn’t your death bed.”

“It might be if Carissa can’t call off the dogs.”

“Fuck that. We’ll think of something.”

“We won’t think of anything. You’ll be overseas, and I’ll be going back to the city to grovel to Bates.”

I could hear Simon breathing.

“Hey, man,” I said. “I’m just kidding.”

But I wasn’t and we both knew it.

“You should run. I can send you all the money I have in my savings account.”

“No, Simon. I’m not going to run.”

He sighed heavily. “That’s not really your style, is it?”

“Everything is going to be okay,” I said. “I’m sixty percent sure of it.”

Simon didn’t laugh at my lame joke. Just like Beth hadn’t laughed at it earlier.

“That’s not funny.”

“It’s a little bit funny.”

“You don’t make jokes ever,” Simon said. “But now you’re a comedian?”

“Just trying to lighten the mood.”

“Well stop, you’re bad at it. I’ll be on my work phone after tomorrow. Call me or text me on that.”

“I will. Take care of yourself.”

“You too.”

When I hung up, I felt better than I had in a long time. Having said what I should have said years ago.

I called Paul at work, but it went over to voice mail, which wasn’t surprising. No one could hear their phones or feel them on vibrate at work, not with all the heavy machinery.

“Hey,” I said, “I hate doing this over the phone, but I hate leaving you hanging even more. I’m not going to be back at work for a while. And I totally get it if you need to replace me or whatever. I’m real sorry, Paul,” I said. “You’ve been good to me. And I haven’t taken that for granted. Thank you.”

I hung up and took one more look out at the ocean and the trees, and I thought about starting over and wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel about it. If I did get out of this thing with Bates, I didn’t want to be a forty-year-old stone mason, but what else was I good for?

I was a high school dropout. No one would hire me to work in an office even if I could stomach the idea of that.

Working in a bar wouldn’t be so bad. I could go home and see if Lucy was hiring? Or maybe…maybe now I could wish for something. Something just a little bit better.

A guy with my skills was useful no matter where I went.

And maybe...if Bates wasn’t after me…maybe, I could go with Beth. Los Angeles or Europe.

The wish sat in my throat, unsaid, but burning like an ember from a fire that hadn’t gone out in seven years.

I opened the sliding glass door and poked my head inside. “Hello? I’m off the phone—”

It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness of the inside of the house. The door opened into a living room with a beat-up couch across from a fireplace. The open-concept kitchen was in the back. I saw Beth and Peter there, lit up by the light over the stove.

They were arguing. Or Peter was arguing and Beth stood there with her head bowed.

“Everything okay?” I asked, and they stopped arguing midsentence. Beth plastered just about the fakest smile on her face I’d ever seen. And Peter turned his back to me, getting stuff out of the fridge.

“Let’s go back outside,” Beth said in an overbright voice, rushing to the door to push me back out on the deck.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Totally fine.”

“You’re lying,” I said, and she went so still. “Is he making you feel bad for having me here? I can leave—”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It’s me making things awkward. It’s just…me. He’s making lunch.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “Isn’t it?”

Beth was quiet for a long minute, and I ducked down to see into her face. “Are you really okay?” I asked her. “I mean, it’s been a rough few days. This shit with your mom?”

Her smile was sweet, and her hand against my face was even sweeter. “It’s okay. I’m okay. Are you hungry for lunch?”

“I’d fucking love lunch.” I was starving. She must be too. We’d been living on oranges and adrenaline and sex for days now.

“Then we’ll have some lunch. Wait here.” She went back inside and came out a few seconds later with a platter in either hand and a tablecloth under her arm.

Was she nervous because they were arguing? The tension between them was thick and it totally had to be about me. But I didn’t know how to make that right for her. Or help her with it. I could try and make nice with the old guy, I guessed.

Make some small talk. Not be a concrete stump, which was my usual thing meeting new people.

I grabbed one of the big platters out of her hand and let her turn and lead the way to a table set up on the opposite end of the deck. Peter followed, his hands full of plates and cutlery.

Beth made another trip to the kitchen and grabbed some more plates full of food, and Peter spread the bright red and yellow tablecloth over the gray splintered wood of the old patio set.

“My wife used to do this,” Peter said like he needed to explain something to me. “The tablecloth and stuff. I never really got out of the habit.”

“It’s nice,” I said. And it was. I wouldn’t have done it for myself or even thought of it, but now that the tablecloth was here and platters of food were set across it, I couldn’t deny—it was nice. Like a beautiful picnic.

“You want a beer or something?” Peter asked, but I shook my head.

“No, thank you.”

“Beth, you mind getting the lemonade from the fridge.”

She paused, watching us like she wasn’t sure what we would do without her, like we might combust under the threat of conversation. But finally she nodded and went back in, and Peter set out the platters of cheese and ham and cut-up slices of fruit and hard-boiled eggs. Fresh bread.

Something about this seemed so familiar. I hadn’t had a hard-boiled egg since I was a kid.

“You all right?” Peter asked, his hand over a plate of sliced tomatoes and avocados.

“Fine,” I said. “It looks great.”

“It’s not much, but it’s lunch.”

“We’ve been eating oranges and pudding cups for the last few days, so this is pretty amazing.”

“Beth filled me in on some of what’s going on,” he said as we sat. “The drugs and how you helped her.”

“Helping her is a stretch,” I said with a laugh, guessing she left out the part where I kidnapped her.

“She says you did.” Peter shrugged like that was all that mattered, and I glanced away, the sun a bright yellow ball in a deep blue sky. She would. She would erase what I’d done and my part in everything that had happened to her.

“She hasn’t told me much about you, however.”

I blinked. “There’s not a bunch to tell.”

“You’re a mason,” he said.

I nodded.

“How long you been doing that work?”

“Five years. I apprenticed under a guy I met at a construction site. We were building this big fancy house, and Paul was out in the backyard building retaining walls and stone paths, and it just…well, it just looked like a more interesting job that sanding drywall.”

“You like it?” he asked.

“I’m not sure what liking has to do with it,” I said with a shrug. “I’m a high school dropout, and the only thing I have going for me is I’m a big guy. It’s about the best job I could get and stay out of trouble.”

“Is that hard for you? Staying out of trouble?’

This felt like a job interview. I shook my head. “Trouble never interested me.”

“Beth says you were in foster care together.”

“Care doesn’t feel like the right word.” Joking about it was a surprise.

Somehow in the last few days I’d let go of some of the bitterness around the memories. Maybe it was the sex? I was pretty sure it was Beth, allowing me to laugh about St. Joke’s like it was no big deal.

“It was bad,” he said, not quite a question but not quite a statement either.

“It wasn’t good.” Again I was laughing about it, but Peter looked pained and I realized how much he must care for Beth, to be so stricken at the thought of her in foster care. “Beth wasn’t there very long,” I told him. “Three months. And the night she would have been hurt was the night we all got out of there, so she… she was safe.”

“She said that was your doing. Keeping her safe. Keeping all the kids safe.”

“Well, I tried. It didn’t do much good. But everything worked out fine,” I told him. “Beth is safe. She’s got talent and money and people who care.”

“What about you?” he asked in a rough whisper. “You got people who care?”

5

Tommy

Stunned by the never-before-asked question, I sat back and after a moment shrugged. “I’m fine.”

He said nothing, his throat bobbing like he was swallowing down words.

“One of the guys at St. Joke’s, we stayed friends,” I said because it really seemed like the guy was worried about me. “And Beth, now. I’d like to think she cares.”

Oh, that wish in my throat, it was burning so fucking hot.

Beth came back out of the house, panting almost like she’d been running, a pitcher of lemonade in her hands and a few stacked cups in the other.

“What are you guys talking about?” she asked, eyes wide and too bright.

“Your foster home,” Peter said.

“Ugh, that’s a terrible conversation,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose.

I stood and took the pitcher from her and the cups, setting them down on the table and moving over so she could sit on the bench with me. Peter watched it all like I was performing surgery.

The guy’s attention was starting to get strange, the conversation more like an interrogation than anything else. So I looked right back at him until he coughed and picked up a platter.

“We gonna eat?” he asked, gruff and scowling again.

We passed the meat and cheese. I took a hard-boiled egg, holding it in my hand. The memory stuck in my head, but I couldn’t put it together. Why in the world did this egg and tablecloth and whole setup feel familiar?

“Everything okay?” Beth asked, holding her own hard-boiled egg. I smiled at her, because we were ridiculous. I reached forward and tapped my egg to hers, like we were cheersing each other.

She looked at me with wide eyes.

“You are acting…weird,” she said.

“I’m fine.” I put down my egg and took tomatoes and avocados, passing the platter around again. “In fact,” I said, “I think I’m happy.”

“This is you happy?” she asked, a smile curling around her lips, and I shrugged.

“Maybe?” I wrinkled my nose, and I knew as clearly as I knew my own hands that she wanted to kiss me.

“Not sure what there is to be happy about?” Peter said. “You two are in some trouble. You got a plan?”

“Good point,” Beth said, swallowing down her smile. “And no, I don’t have a plan. Do you?” she asked me.

“Nope.” I couldn’t stop smiling when there was seriously nothing to smile about. Happiness felt a little like losing my mind.

“You know you can stay here as long as you need,” Peter said.

“I do know,” Beth said. “And I appreciate it.”

“Carissa is hopefully talking to Bates,” I said. “Explaining the situation.”

“Do you think he’ll listen?” Beth asked. “Let you go?”

I shrugged.

“What are you going to do about your mom?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know,” Beth said, looking rather lost. A little forlorn. I reached over and squeezed her leg under the table, and she gave me a smile.

“Simon says you should go back on YouTube, tell your story,” I told her.

“My story?” she asked like it made no sense. Like she didn’t have a story.

“About your mom. The drugs. Abuse.”

Peter made a low sound in his throat. Disagreement.

“You don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to,” Peter said. “You don’t need to go parading your business on the Internet for everyone to see.”

“‘You don’t have to tell anyone anything you don’t want to’ is sort of how we got into this mess,” I said. I watched her remove the seeds from a tomato, remembering what she said that night at the Yucca Lounge—how what was between us were the things we weren’t saying. What was standing between her and total freedom from her mother was the story she’d told me. The story she should be telling everyone.

“I’m not saying you should do it,” I told her. “But I don’t think you should be scared of doing it.”

“I called my manager again,” she said.

“And?” I asked.

“I left a message.”

“Maybe we need to try someone other than your manager.”

She wiped her face, her eyes and sighed like the joke was on her. “I don’t actually have anyone else to call. You were right, Tommy. The only people who would help me are sitting at this table.”

“What about Beth?” I asked. “Your assistant.”

She tore a piece off her bread but didn’t eat it. “I think I burned that bridge.”

“I don’t think you did.”

She looked up at me, the sunlight catching at her amber lashes, turning her eyes to gold.

“It doesn’t hurt to try,” I said.

“You know that’s not true,” she whispered. It hurt a lot to try. To try and fail. To try and be rejected. To try and get nothing for all the effort.

We did know that. That might have been the second lesson I ever learned.

I wanted to kiss away the sadness on her face.

“Text her at least,” I said, handing her my phone. “Let her know you’re okay.”

Beth looked down at the phone for a long second but then picked it up and typed in her assistant’s number and started texting.

“Have you lived here long?” I asked Peter, happy to change the subject for no other reason but that Beth looked suddenly less tense now that we weren’t focused in on her.

Again, I had one of those sunbursts of insight into her—the costumes for the performances. It was easier for her to be the center of attention if she wasn’t really herself.

Good God, I could spend the rest of my life unpeeling this girl’s layers.

I wish…

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Peter said. “It was my father’s land before it was mine.”

“Wow,” I said, building up my sandwich, throwing in a little bit of everything. I didn’t really like avocado, but it looked so good. “Family business.”

“Well,” Peter said. “It ends with me.”

There was something so hard about those words. So final. The way he said it like each word was a tombstone. A weight he would not pick up again.

Fuck, if I was bad at small talk, he was worse.

“How…how did you two meet?” I asked, looking over at Beth, trying to guess how she ended up here.

“I worked here for a while after I ran away,” she said, jumping in quickly with a too-bright smile. Not really answering my question. How did she end up on this super remote farm? It’s not like she could have wandered off the street. “I come back from time to time to make sure Peter hasn’t gone full hermit.”

Peter scowled at her with such affection it might as well have been a hug.

“She made her first YouTube video right here,” Peter said, his neck a little red again, like the memory was so pleasant it embarrassed him.

“Oh my gosh, remember that?” She laughed, and the sound of it made me smile.

“She’d done this ridiculous makeup for Halloween—”

“Not ridiculous,” Beth said like she was offended. “Brilliant. I was a baby makeup artist, and I figured out how to make it look like I had a giant spider coming out of my eyeball.”

“What?” I cried.

“I know.” She was all joy and glittering pride. “It was amazing.”

“It was gruesome,” Peter said. “But it was…” He shook his head like he didn’t have any words for it, and I knew the feeling when it came to Beth. “Beautiful too. So she had me take this video of her with her phone.”

“What was she doing?” I asked.

They looked at each other, Peter grinning. Beth wincing. “You gonna tell him or do you want me to?” Peter said.

“I was rapping the Nicki Minaj rap from ‘Monster.’” My eyebrows lifted, and she shook her head. “I was eighteen and thought I was very cool.”

“With a giant spider coming out of your face, I bet you were cool. Is that how the whole YouTube thing started?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” she said while the smile slowly faded from her face. “God, it used to be so fun.”

She sounded completely joyless. Flat. I glanced at Peter, who was watching her with his unreadable face.

“When did it stop?” I asked. “Being fun?”

“Seven months ago. When I put up ‘Making Waves.’ That was the last fun thing I did. Excluding you, of course.”

I could feel the blush explode across my face, but Peter and Beth didn’t seem to care about the sexual innuendo. I was the only prude at the table.

“Is this what you wanted?” I asked. “This kind of career?”

She shrugged, tearing her bread into tiny pieces and rolling them into balls. “I didn’t even have time to decide if it was what I wanted. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it was like from the moment I hit upload, it was just this thing that was happening. That’s how the doctor got involved with his bullshit drugs…I just had to keep going because there was no time to stop.”

“You need to eat,” Peter said, like the personal conversation was just too uncomfortable. “Before the bees come.”

Beth nodded and stopped picking at her food, taking a bite of one of her bread balls. Peter put salt on his plate and rolled his egg in it.

“Ploughman’s lunch,” I blurted.

Peter looked up, surprised, the egg halfway to his mouth.

“What now?” Beth asked with a laugh.

“That’s what this is,” I said, looking down at the food. “Or at least that’s what my mom called it when she used to do this. She called it ploughman’s lunch.”

I looked up at the still and pale faces of Beth and Peter. “Sorry,” I said, realizing I was being a little weird. “The memory just came back to me. Looking at all this stuff. When I was little, before she died, she’d pack these picnics all the time. Hard-boiled eggs and bologna and the cheap white bread. She had this red blanket, and she’d spread it out at a park, or if there wasn’t a park, we’d sit on the hood of her car. It was nice.”

“How…” Peter cleared his throat. “How did she die?’

“Overdose,” I told him, and he looked away, nodding like that made sense to him somehow.

“How old were you?” he asked.

“Eight.”

“I didn’t know that,” Beth whispered.

“Yeah, she…ahhh—” This didn’t seem like happy lunch conversation, but they were both watching me so carefully, I didn’t know how to stop. “She’d left for the night—”

“She left you alone?” Beth asked.

“Yeah. She did that. I mean, she was young, you know? Wanted to have a life. She’d leave me with some food and the TV. She wasn’t usually gone overnight. Just a few hours. But she didn’t come back that night. Or the next, and I stayed as long as I could. Ate all the food that was in the apartment, and then I left to try and go find more. But I didn’t have keys…” I waved my hand. “I got picked up in the grocery store, eating a box of Twinkies right there in the aisle.”

I laughed, but they didn’t laugh with me.

“How long were you in that apartment?” Beth asked.

“Few days. I’m not really sure.”

“Do you remember a lot about her?” Peter asked.

“You don’t have to talk about this,” Beth said in a rush. “It’s sad—”

“It’s not,” I told her. “Not anymore. These memories haven’t been sad for a long time. She was pretty. She had a beautiful laugh, when she laughed. We moved a lot. I think money was hard. Mostly…I was alone, while she worked, while she partied. But when she was around, she was good to me. She tried. That’s what I can say about her. She tried.”

I glanced around at the stricken faces of Beth and Peter and lifted my hands. “Sorry, I don’t mean to bum anyone out.”

Beth handed my phone back to me and then sat with her hands in her lap, not eating anything when I knew she had to be so hungry.

“What happened to you after she died?” Peter asked, and Beth groaned low in her throat like the question hurt her.

“Peter,” she breathed. “Please—”

“It’s okay,” I told her, squeezing her knee. “I swear. It doesn’t bother me to talk about her. I spent some time in various shitty group homes while they tracked down my grandparents, who weren’t interested in an eight-year-old kid they didn’t know anything about, and then I got put in my first foster home.”

“You never told me about your first foster family,” Beth said.

I sucked in a deep breath. “Yeah, I guess not.” I didn’t much like talking about them. I liked, when I was a kid, to pretend they’d been a dream. Those memories hurt a little bit more than the ones of my mother. I’d let down a lot of guards with that first family.

“Were they decent?” Peter asked, and his voice sounded like it was bursting out of his chest.

“Really decent. Mark, the dad, taught me how to play catch, and Vanessa, the mom, she was probably the most loving person I’d ever known at the time, which might not have been saying much. But she was very kind. I think…had things gone all right, I would have been adopted, but the dad, Mark, he got really sick and after about two years, I was removed from the home.”

“He died?” Peter asked.

“He did. I got put in a few other homes and I started getting in trouble for fighting. Stealing. I kept trying to run away to go back to them. I didn’t understand that Vanessa was grieving and that there wasn’t room for me—”

Peter stood up, and I shut my mouth so fast my teeth clicked.

“You... you eat,” he said, looking anywhere but at me. “I’ve got some work to do. Leave the dishes when you’re done.” And then he was walking away from the table.

The silence after he left was stifling, and I didn’t know how to change it or fix it. This was why I was shitty with people; I didn’t know how to be easy. I could only be a stone, weighing everything down.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be.” She spoke in a rush. “Don’t be sorry about anything. Not a single thing.”

“I’d told myself I would make small talk with Peter so that you wouldn’t be stressed out, and now look what I’ve done.”

“You haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’m…I’m glad you told me those things. They help me see all of you, you know?”

I looked over to find her watching me with tears in her eyes.

“No,” I breathed. “No, baby, no tears. There’s nothing to cry over. It’s ancient history.”

“But it’s not,” she whispered. “You’re still that boy, waiting for your mom to come home, just like I’m the girl waiting for my mom to hear me.”

This morning I’d been ready to drop Beth off at her apartment and walk away from her. Right now, on this deck, my body blissed out from her touch, my fingers burning from the tears I wiped off her cheeks, I wasn’t ready at all.

I couldn’t even imagine a time when I would be ready. The date kept slipping further and further into the distance.

I wish…

“Come with me.” Beth stood, her hand outstretched toward me.

I was new at this, not totally used to the signals and signs, but I would have to be dumb and blind to miss what Beth wanted. It was written on her face. Her skin. I saw it in the way her nipples pressed against her shirt. She was everything subtle and not subtle about sex right now. About connection and about us.

I put my hand in hers and stood with her.

With her free hand she put my food on her plate and picked it up.

“We’re going to need provisions,” she said like we were soldiers off to have a sex battle. I grinned at her, feeling lighter than I had in years, and put the last of the eggs on the plate.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

I followed her up the stairs, my eyes glued to her hips in the black jeans she wore. The sway of her body, the curve of her spine. I was hard in a heartbeat.

I’d fucked up that conversation talking about my mom and the foster family. There was a chance I’d never be able to talk about them without making an emotional hash of it.

But this…losing myself in Beth, I could do. So far I hadn’t fucked this up at all. I had beginner’s luck. Maybe making love to Beth was my one true skill.

Inside the apartment Pest was sprawled out on the bath mat, asleep, and I shut the door to the bathroom while Beth put our food on the dresser.

“It’s been a long time since I talked about my mom and my first foster family,” I said.

“It’s not easy.”

“But fuck, I feel… better. You know?”

“I felt better when I told you about my mom. I mean, better and worse.”

“Better and worse, that’s it.”

Maybe there were a million women who would know me like Beth did, if I let them. If I let them into my life, even a little. But it was like I knew I only had room for one person like this in my life. And Beth got there first.

No matter who I dated. Or loved. Or had sex with. Beth got there first.

It was the singular truth of my life. I was Beth’s. Completely.

I loved her. I loved her now as much as I had then. More maybe. I loved the woman she was. The girl she’d been. Every piece of her, and I wanted to believe there might be hope for us.

And the hope was a slippery fish. With teeth. And I didn’t know how to hold it.

“I’m not hungry,” I said out loud instead of letting I love you fall from my lips.

Because I wasn’t ready to say it.

“Me neither,” she said.

I reached for her, my hand on her hip, the other at the nape of her neck.

“Make it good,” she whispered. Staring at my neck and shoulders, her hands still at her sides. “Make it something I can’t forget. Ever. Even if I try.”

Even if I try. Fuck.

She lifted her hands to her hair, to take it down. After that lunch, after telling her my story, I didn’t want the game. I wanted to do this with Beth. Not Jada.

“Don’t,” I breathed, pulling her hands from her hair. “Leave your hair up. Just let me love you the way you are.”

Immediately she shook her head, taking down her hair anyway.

“You won’t?” I asked.

“I can’t.”

It was a small pain she’d inflicted. A livable pain. I knew that. But still it hurt. Her hair fell down around her shoulders, across her face. Hiding her. Hiding me.

“I like it like this,” she said and I blinked. “I like the way you fuck Jada.”

Her hair was a wild mess around her small face. Like she’d been in a storm. Like she was a storm. And I was caught up in it. In the look in her eyes. The way she licked her lips.

She didn’t want love.

She wanted sex.

She wanted fucking.

It was me who wanted love.

But I put that boy away and let this be about what she wanted.

“What do you like about it?” I asked, stepping toward her as I pulled her into me at the same time. We met with a sigh and curse. If this was how she’d have me, this was how I’d take her.

“It’s rough,” she said. “Like you’re not sure if you like me.”

Right.

It was because I loved her.

6

Beth

I was lying to him. It was one thing not to tell him who Peter was, but now I was outright lying to him.

Hops? What the actual fuck?

They were lemon trees.

I couldn’t believe it, all those words downstairs, the lies too many to count now. I was clinging to seconds, to minutes; I was clinging to the idea of good-bye the way I wanted it.

Guilt ate at me, and when he’d wanted to fuck me with my hair up, it nearly broke my heart.

If I had any heart left after that lunch downstairs. I felt like a bloody stump. Heartless and ruined.

His face was hard and his eyes hot, and I knew I’d distracted him with telling him I wanted it rough. But I could see how hard he was pretending like he didn’t love me. I could see it, because I felt the same way.

But rough was what I deserved from him.

I needed him to punish me for the lies he didn’t know about yet.

All at once he grabbed me and spun me so I was facing the small dresser, the mirror above it.

And he was behind me, tall and wide and so fucking fierce.

Yes. Yes.

He pushed against my ass and his eyes met mine in the mirror, but it was too much. Even that small connection—eye contact—made regret threaten to swamp me, so I bent my head, making my hair fall in front of my face. Hiding me.

“Look at me,” he said, the words full of heat and grit.

“Tommy.”

“Look at me!”

I was powerless and met his eyes in the mirror.

“Watch.”

I was silent, but I did as he asked.

His hands cupped my breasts over my shirt and bra, and the friction against my skin made me bite my lip against a groan.

“Don’t.” His thumb came up to pull my lip out from under my teeth. “I want to hear it. Every sound.”

My breath was loud in the quiet room. And his hands went back to my breasts, his thumbs squeezing my nipples, pinching them until I cried out. And I saw him waver, just a moment. He could play rough, but he couldn’t stand the thought of hurting me. Even unintentionally.

That wouldn’t work for me tonight.

“More,” I said. “It’s okay. I want more.”

He pulled my shirt over my head, stood me up so my skin was against his chest. I felt him through his T-shirt, and I watched in the mirror as he pulled the cups of my bra down under my breasts and my tits were pushed out toward him. My nipples, brown and hard, begging for more of his touch.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Look at you.” His hands, rough and scarred, were all over my chest. Cupping my tits in his hand, rolling my nipples between his fingers, and I sagged against him, held up by his chest. By his hands on my body.

I moaned low in my throat. Between my legs I was so wet. So hot. I rubbed my ass against his cock like a cat in heat.

The tension and the goddamn drama and the sense that this would all be over sooner than I wanted it to tightened every crank in my body. Ratcheting up the heat to unbelievable levels.

His hand slipped down past my breast, over my tummy, and I couldn’t look away in the mirror. His hand was so big and I was so small and the tease of his fingers just under my pants had me writhing.

He stopped, and my eyes flew from his hand to his eyes in the mirror. “You want this,” he said.

“So bad.”

“What am I going to find between your legs?” he asked. “Are you hot?”

I nodded.

“Wet?”

Again, I nodded, and he smiled at me in the mirror. “How wet?”

“Feel me.”

“Show me.”

I licked my lips and put one foot on the dresser, my knee bent, my legs spread. There was a wet spot on my jeans.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Through your pants.”

“I want you so bad, Tommy.” His fingers reached around to unzip my pants and pull them off, yanking them when they were tight around my hips. My underwear—the lewd red bikini—was pulled half off my ass.

“Step out of your pants,” he said, and I shimmied them down my legs, the underwear half pulled off with it. I stepped out of my pants and shoes and I went to push the underwear down, but he stopped me.

“I like this,” he said, pulling the underwear back up. Setting the thin fabric back at my hips.

In the mirror I looked so shameless and wanton—I barely recognized myself. And it wasn’t just this Jada shit. It was the power of this desire.

I was fucking transformed by it. No other guy pulled this out of me. I didn’t even pull this out of myself. This…this woman in the mirror, she was all Tommy’s.

While he watched me, I stepped away from his body and bent over the dresser, my elbows against the wood, my ass and the thin red bikini cutting across it, grazing his cock through his jeans.

“Fuck,” he breathed, and I did it again. Little circles up against him, featherlight.

He wasn’t watching the mirror anymore; his eyes were on my ass against his cock. He grabbed me, his fingers biting in hard against my skin, and I liked that.

His calluses caught on the cheap silk of my underwear, ruining them, I imagined. They pulled taut between my legs, the lace around the leg rubbing against my clit.

I said something unintelligible, and he leaned forward against my bare back, kissed my shoulder with his open mouth and then bit me.

“Tommy!” I cried out, jerking against him, pulling the underwear even tighter. His hand slid down the back of them, palming my ass.

“Yes,” I breathed. His other hand joined the first and my ass was getting grabbed like he was gonna rob it and I shook between his body and the dresser, held taut by the rough desire we had going between us.

“Fuck me,” I said.

He hummed in his throat, considering his options, and I nearly laughed. His hand sliced down between my legs, his thumb touching my asshole on the way to my pussy and I jumped, electrified.

“What?” he asked, repeating my words back to him from the first time we were naked together. “No ass play?”

“You can…you can do whatever you want,” I said, my voice a shaking mess. Just like me. I’d never been fucked in the ass, but this could be my last time with Tommy. And I meant what I’d said; I wanted to able to remember this even when I wished I could forget it.

In the mirror his ears were glowing, and I couldn’t look away.

“Spread your legs,” he said, kicking at my foot a little when I wasn’t fast enough, and I didn’t know if he knew how much I liked that, but I did. I really liked it. When my legs were split, his fingers eased deeper into my underwear. I saw his knuckles against the fabric, and my knees buckled a little.

He worked me, slipping his fingers inside my body, making me cry out and stand up on my tiptoes, only so I could grind down on him harder. And then he pulled his fingers out, rubbing my clit. Palming my ass again, and then he was back between them. Over and over, until I was losing my mind. When he went to pull his fingers out again, I clapped my hand down on his, keeping him there.

“Please, Tommy,” I said.

“What?”

Everything. Please give me everything.

“Say it,” he said, his fingers still inside my body, the long hard spear of him.

“Make me come.”

“I don’t want you to,” he said, and I moaned, dropping my head down. “I want to be inside you when you come.” He shifted the underwear again, rubbing it against my clit, pulling it tight against my asshole, and I bit my lip to keep from screaming. “So deep you can’t feel anything but me. So deep I can’t feel anything but you and this.” His fingers inside me, spread wider, dug deeper, and I lifted up on my toes, the pleasure-pain of everything making me insane. “Your fucking pussy, Beth,” he said, “is so perfect.”

“Then do it already,” I moaned. “Please. Just do it already.”

“No.”

I groaned.

He didn’t take off his pants. He just unbuttoned them, pulled his underwear out of the way. But then he was against me, pressing me to the dresser, his chest against my spine. His dick settling into the crack of my ass.

“Letting you come would be kind, right? Nice. It would be giving you what you want… I don’t care.”

Slowly, so damn slowly, he pulled my underwear off, and I knew he was watching. And I knew he was loving it, and so I did, too. I felt the achy excitement of an orgasm, like it was waiting in my clit. I could reach down and with three sure strokes, I’d come.

But I wanted him to do it.

I wanted him to take care of me even as he was pretending I was Jada. I wanted to demand his attention in the places I needed it.

“Tommy,” I said, putting my forehead against my arm.

“You have to wait,” he said, kissing his way down my back to my ass, and I knew what he was going to do, how he was going to torture me. “I want to taste you.” He went to his knees behind me, his hands propping out my hips, lifting me slightly until his face was between my legs. And not just his mouth. His nose and chin.

It was messy and sloppy and greedy. He licked me everywhere. My clit and my pussy. The insides of my thighs. I pushed myself into him, rocking and rocking while he sucked my clit.

“I want to come,” I moaned, reaching behind me to push his face deeper and harder into me.

“No,” he said, muffled against my pussy.

“Please, Tommy.”

He sat back, and I saw him in the bottom of the mirror, his face all wet. Oh God, so fucking wet. All the muscles of my pussy were clenching down on something that wasn’t there. I was impossibly empty. Painfully empty.

“You wanted rough. Like I didn’t care,” he reminded me. His hand came up to my ass again, stroking it with his fingers. “You want me not to care if you come? That’s what you want?”

“Tommy—”

“You want me to use you against this dresser like I don’t give a shit?”

Oh…oh God, he was angry. My nerves went on high alert, the fog clearing from my brain.

“Maybe you want to pretend that I’m not me and you’re not you so it’s easier when I leave you here. Or when I drop you in Los Angeles and we both act like none of this ever happened.”

He was right. He was exactly right.

The ache in my pussy turned to an ache in my whole body. My heart. Everything was splintering apart.

“I’ve never had sex with a stranger,” he said, still stroking me with gentle touches, so at odds with his words. “That’s what you want? To be strangers?”

Our eyes met in the mirror, and I couldn’t stop the shake of my head. The no I gave him.

Not strangers. Not ever strangers. It was us. Beth and Tommy. Always.

“Please, Tommy.”

“You want to come?”

I nodded.

“You want me to make you come? Beth and Tommy. Not strangers.”

I nodded, a sob like a moan in my throat.

And his fingers, so gentle, slid between my legs, deep into my pussy. One and then a second one and his thumb found my clit and I was right. So right. It would take nothing to make me come.

“Beth,” he whispered, and I closed my eyes because I knew he would want me to look at him while he said my name and stroked me to pieces. “Please come for me,” he whispered.

His thumb pushed down hard against my clit, and I was done. Gone. Crying out into my folded arms, my legs collapsing, and he took me into his lap, sitting back on the floor while I shook and came so hard I could barely make sense of myself.

I opened my eyes and I was on his lap, his jeans and cock brushing against my ass and thighs, his fingers brushing back my hair. I was sweaty and slick all the way down to my knees.

He’d made a mess of me, and when I turned to look at him, I realized he was just getting started.

“Good?” he asked, brushing the sweaty hair off my face.

“So good,” I sighed.

“I can’t… I don’t want to be a stranger to you,” he said. “Not now.”

I nodded, my throat shredded from the screams I’d been swallowing. The words. I agreed because it was either agree or tell him why I was doing this. How I wanted to protect him from all the pain I was going to inflict on him.

I don’t want him to leave. But if he found out about Peter, he’d leave. And I need to tell him about Peter, which will make him leave.

I was living on a wire that ran in a vicious circle.

All at once he stood up with me in his arms and carried me to the bed like I was nothing.

And I loved that. The strength of his arms, the bulge of his bicep under my head. I put my arms around him and held on as hard as I could.

He positioned me on the bed the way he wanted, right in the middle with my legs spread while he stood at the edge of the bed and reached for a condom. And I realized we had only three left. Three left and then good-bye, and I wasn’t ready for there to be only two.

I curled my hand around him, and he stopped. Stilled. His breath coming in short sharp gasps. This was the Tommy I couldn’t not know, no matter how hard I tried.

“How close are you?” I asked.

“So close.” He said it through his teeth, barely holding on.

I tilted my head, my hair falling over my shoulder, and I sat up so I was facing him. My legs spread around his thighs. I kissed his belly. The small trail of fine blond hair that led down the smooth muscle of his lower abdomen. I licked him, sucking the skin into my mouth until he gasped.

His fingers tangled in the ends of my hair as he searched out my shoulder like he needed me to hold on to. I liked that more than I should. Pulling him to me as I kept secrets… What kind of woman was I?

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I nodded, and without saying anything I licked my palm and worked him. Slow and sure, watching his face to see what he really liked, and that’s when I saw it. When I saw how he gasped when I worked the tip faster and used my other hand to grip the base of his cock as hard as I could, I saw the way his chest went red and his hand came down harder on my shoulder.

“I want your mouth,” he breathed.

With his words I was hot and wet again in an instant, and I bent over his cock, taking it into my mouth. Slowly, keeping my lips tight like he was pushing into my pussy. I flicked my tongue against the end, stroked the sides, and I put my hand against his waist where I felt his body trembling. His muscles shaking.

I took him deep, blowing out of my nose, relaxing until he was a burning force down the back of my throat.

“You are so beautiful,” he said. “Like this. Taking me like this. I don’t…I can’t…” He shook his head and I met his eyes as he eased out and then back in, a slow, steady pressure. A fucking neither of us could forget.

“I have to be in you,” he said.

“You are,” I gasped when he eased out past my lips, a string of saliva connecting the head of his cock to my mouth. And then I took him in again, deep and hard.

His face was beautiful to watch, the fucked-out bliss of his eyes. The way his lips parted when I took him deep. The snarl of a pleasure, when I pulled him out, that was so intense it was nearly painful.

I knew exactly what it felt like.

I put my hands between my legs, finding my clit again, sore but needy.

His gaze flicked down, caught what I was doing, and he smiled at me.

Smiled at me, with his cock down my throat and my fingers on my clit, he smiled at me like the boy I knew.

Like I was the girl he knew and this was us having fun.

My heart couldn’t take it. My plans for no sex, for saving the condoms vanished, and I slipped away from him. His cock left my lips with a pop. I fell back on the bed, lifting my knees, my fingers between my legs.

“I want you in me,” I said.

He pulled the box of condoms from the table beside the bed and within seconds had one on. His knee on the bed beside me made me roll toward him.

We were connected by a desire so powerful it seemed to grow out of my body. He wasn’t touching me, but I could feel him. The inside of my leg. My elbow. The smooth skin of my waist. There were a thousand strings between us, wishes so powerful they practically glittered in the air around us.

He kissed me.

For the first time since walking into this room…he kissed me. His lips on mine. His tongue in my mouth, stroking the side of my tongue.

We were a mess, wet and sloppy and so raw it was like we were barely holding on. I wrapped my arms around his neck and whispered “please” into his mouth and then, because I was so wet, so ready, so…his, he slid inside of me between one breath and the next. My entire body arched up and he swallowed my scream just as I swallowed his groan and we were one continuous circuit.

Nothing but connection. Beautiful and painful and so real I didn’t know what would happen after this. What could happen after this?

He was thrusting into me and I was grinding into him, my clit pressed up against that smooth plane of muscle between his cock and his belly button. It was perfect, like it was made for me. Every movement brought me closer and closer until I was strung so tight all my muscles hurt.

And then he pulled his mouth from mine. He was breathing hard, his eyes glowing.

“I love you,” he said. “I love you, Beth.”

And I was done. Ruined. Shattered into a million pieces. Coming so hard I was barely aware of him jerking and groaning into my neck. His hand on my leg, holding me close to him in a grip that would leave bruises for days.

Good, I wanted the bruises.

The silence in the room was suddenly deep and thick, and I could hear the blood in my veins, his breath in his chest. The movement of our bodies against the quilt of the bed.

We were a symphony. So loud.

He was breathing hard against me, his head bowed, his forehead pressed to my breast. He let go of my thigh; his other hand, fisted in my hair, let go, the stinging pain of pulled hairs barely noticeable in the blown-out nerves of my body.

He loved me.

That was all I felt. Like an electric current all the way through me.

He loved me. Then, sure. We’d been kids. More hormones than anything. It was easy to be in love then, when we’d been so starved for it.

But he loved me now. When we were damaged and silent and guarding our secrets with all our might.

Now, when our desperation for love had made us dangerous to each other.

“You all right?” he whispered. I could feel him looking at me, and I couldn’t quite look at him.

“Good.” I stroked his arms. “I’m so, so good.”

He pulled out of me and I winced.

“Are you okay?”

“Sensitive,” I said. “That’s all. Really.”

He got up off the bed and walked to the bathroom, and now that his eyes weren’t on me, I watched shamelessly. Every inch of his body. Coiled and curved and sleek and smooth.

“Tommy,” I said, and he turned, looking at me over his shoulder as he tied a knot in the condom and tossed it in the garbage.

“Yeah.”

“I need to tell you something.”

“Wait…let me go first.”

I blinked, relieved when I should have been adamant. “Okay…what do you want to say?”

“I didn’t mean to freak you out. Earlier.” He pointed at the bed, like we’d be able to see his words tossed across it like my underwear. “I really didn’t and I can see that I did. But you need to know…” He took a deep breath, his massive chest rising and falling. He was completely naked in front of me. And not just his flaccid penis, resting in the blond curls between his legs. Not just his arms and legs, his long feet, his wide hands. He was so naked it was like I was looking at his soul. I sat up, realizing I needed to pay attention. Realizing something real was happening. “I’ve loved you since that first morning at church at St. Joke’s, the first time I heard you sing. I’ve loved you every minute we were together and every second we’ve been apart. And…”

I waited, sitting now at the edge of the bed, like it was a cliff I clung to.

Don’t, I wanted to say, even as I sat there, so eager for his words. Don’t do this. Don’t cross this bridge because we can’t go back and I’m lying to you. Hurting you and you don’t even know it.

“And I figure I’m going to love you the whole rest of my life.”

“You said we couldn’t be together.” I don’t know why I said that, why I needed to remind him of something I didn’t give a shit about. Maybe because he’d been so convincing when he said it. Maybe because half of what he was feeling could probably be attributed to me sucking his dick.

That wasn’t fair. And it was mean.

And it wasn’t at all the truth.

“I did,” he said. “I think because no one in my life has ever wanted to be with me. Just me.”

I had to look away, my hand on my chest like I could rub away the ache his words had put there. Like I could make it go away through my skin. By not looking at him.

But it didn’t.

“So it’s easy to assume that you won’t either. It’s easy to pretend that it’s too hard. Or too complicated. But I think…mostly…I’ve been too scared to try.”

“And now you’re not?”

“Now, Beth, now I’m too scared not to try. The last few days with you I realized I have nothing to lose. Nothing. And everything to gain.”

I pulled in a breath and held it so I didn’t sob.

“I don’t…I’m sorry,” he said the longer I didn’t look at him, and he stepped forward, touching my shoulder, my hair. I could see the bare skin of his calves, and I reached my foot out, touched him with my toe, even as I didn’t look at him.

Could I be worse? Could I be more awful?

“There’s no pressure on you to say anything. Or want anything more than what we do in this room. I want you to know I’m okay with that—”

Oh God, because he was so used to expecting nothing and getting even less.

“I’m okay with sex and…ploughman’s lunch and whatever else we have here until you decide you’ve had enough.”

“I’ll never have enough,” I whispered and looked up at him. “I’ll never have enough of you.”

He smiled at me, radiant and beautiful. “Then we can figure that out, too. Whatever happens next.”

“You may not want that, Tommy,” I said. “I’ve made so many mistakes. I’ve done so many shitty things.”

“You think I haven’t?” he asked. “We come from the same place, Beth. We’re survivors of the same fucking disease. The same fucking people. My mom, my grandparents didn’t give a shit about me, just like yours didn’t about you.”

“That’s…that’s not totally true,” I said, edging my way into the truth like a fucking coward.

“She drugged you, Beth. She made up conditions you don’t have. She made you believe you were a problem that needed to be fixed—that’s not love.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

He was silent, blinking. “What do you mean?”

The way we were sitting, it was like before when we were having sex. I could lean forward and lick his stomach like I had just minutes ago. I could take his dick in my mouth and put off this conversation until we’d had our fill of each other. I could keep him up here, fucking him and not talking for as long as possible.

“Beth?”

And I leaned forward. I didn’t kiss him or take him into my mouth. I just put my head against his stomach, the smell of him so familiar and new at the same time that I could not get enough. I would never get enough.

“Beth?” he asked. “Are you okay?”

“Just…hug me for a second, would you?”

He didn’t hesitate, and he didn’t make me ask twice. He wrapped his strong arms around me, pulling me right into his body, and then he shifted and went down on the bed, holding me against his side, kissing my forehead like he wasn’t going to let me go.

Now. You have to do it now. If you don’t, it’s really unforgivable. If you tell him everything, he might not be too angry. He might understand.

I pushed myself up on my elbow and opened my mouth to tell him the truth, but I got one look at his face, the easy, relaxed smile, the eyes still dazed from the sex, but mostly so damn hopeful it hurt. So instead of telling him one truth and hurting him, I told him another one and made him smile.

“I love you too,” I said. “I’ve loved you since the graham crackers.”

And it was true. And it was real. But it was not right. It was not right to say it now. Like this.

But if I didn’t say these things now, I’d never say them. The moment would be gone. And Tommy wouldn’t know. The little boy that thought no one wanted him had grown up into a man who thought the same thing.

He needed to know.

“I will love you,” I said, “for the rest of my life.”

His throat worked, and I knew he was swallowing back tears because I was blinking back mine. He leaned down to kiss me. So sweet. So gentle.

It was a kiss, a real kiss between Beth and Tommy. Like we’d been. And suddenly I was desperate. I would tell him tomorrow. I would tell him in ten minutes. But I needed this—him loving me without the pretense of Jada. Without the game or the lie or the distance that kept us safe.

Just when I had the power to hurt him the most, I stripped away all his defenses.

We were on our sides facing each other and I felt his dick growing hard against my stomach and I felt his hands, rough against my skin.

At that moment the alert on his cell phone went off. A string of beeps and buzzes that jerked him out of my arms.

“Shit,” he breathed, laughing a little in the way people did when their fight-or-flight impulse had proven unnecessary. “What was that?”

“Your phone,” I said, laughing too in the way of a person who’d dodged a bullet. “The satellite must be overhead.”

He sat up, rubbed his hand over his face. “Normally I’d say fuck it, but it might be your assistant, looking for you.”

“Or it might be Bates looking for you.”

“Let’s hope it’s your assistant,” he said over his shoulder, and he stood, grabbing his phone from the top of the dresser where he’d put it. He opened a screen and then, after reading the messages, which were still coming in, though slower now, the bings at random intervals and not quite so lightning fast, he smiled.

“Beth. For you,” he said and handed me the phone. “I only read the first one. But she seems…excited.”

I took the phone, and the pressure building behind my chest was alleviated by Beth’s enthusiastic response to my texts.

I didn’t realize how worried I’d been that she wouldn’t respond. Wouldn’t care.

Truth was, I deserved her cutting me loose. And that she did respond and did care was only a testament to how decent she was.

Fuck, I thought. I couldn’t help but screw over every decent person in my life.

OMG! You’re okay. Are you okay?

Jesus, Jada, tell me you’re okay.

I have been freaking out. Ever since the party. I came back into the room and you were GONE! I tried to get the cops to go after that driver… but I didn’t have anything to tell them.

I’ve been freaking out until I saw those pictures of you. Nice shirt.

Your mom is all over the place telling people you’re not well. And I’ve answered every reporter with the same statement: you have no relationship with your mother and that you question her motives.

I don’t think it’s working.

It might be making things worse.

Sherman isn’t answering my calls. His statement has been a total no comment.

Where are you? It’s probably the middle of the night where you are? Are you even getting these texts?

Are you still with the driver? What the hell is the story there? He was hot. Super hot.

Please text me back. I don’t want to freak out anymore.

The texts went on, but there was no point in texting her back. I needed to call her. I looked up at Tommy, and he already had his underwear back on, his navy blue boxer briefs that made everything he was covering up only look more appealing.

“You need to talk to her,” Tommy said. “And you need to stop looking at me like that.”

“I can’t, Tommy,” I told him, waggling my eyebrows at him like some lecherous old man—or woman in my case. “You’re just so beautiful.”

“Go,” he said, handing me my clothes. “Straighten out what you can. Me and all my beauty will be here when you get back.”

And so would everything I needed to tell him.

I threw on my clothes, and we both heard Pest scratching at the door.

“Poor girl,” I said. “I’ll take her with me.”

“What about the other dogs?” he asked, clearly worried about his pet he liked to pretend wasn’t actually a pet. Pest? Who was he kidding? He should have named her Beloved.

I glanced out the window, and it was getting dark. Peter took his dogs in at night, but he wouldn’t have done it yet.

“I’ll have Peter put his dogs inside,” I said. “It’s no big deal.”

He still seemed skeptical, and I stood up, pulling my shirt on over my head, forgoing a bra and underwear as I shimmied into my jeans. “It’s going to be fine,” I said. “Promise.”

“Well,” he said with a sigh. “If you promise.”

He opened the door, and Pest came running out, a little ball of excited energy.

“Sorry, girl,” I cooed, picking her wriggling body up in my arms. “We shouldn’t have left you in there that long.” I headed for the door with Tommy’s phone, his pet and, oh right, his heart. I felt, in the back of my mouth, a certain tang. An anxiety I hadn’t felt in a while, thanks to Dr. John and his horrible bag of tricks. And for a second I wished again for the bag of tricks, just to get a break from the guilt.

And that too was a shitty thing about me.

That I couldn’t quite rise above my desire not to feel anything. I was a pendulum constantly swinging between wanting too much and wanting nothing.

“I’ll be right back.”

He was lying down on the bed, picking up the clicker for the TV, with the plate of our leftover lunch on the bed beside him. “Take your time. I’ll be here.”

Every inch of my life with Tommy was covered in drama, a string of moments so far from normal it was almost funny. But this, leaving him in his underwear, about to turn on the TV and finish a sandwich after he’d fucked my brains out—it was what other people took for granted.

What some women complained about.

And I would take it if I could. I would grab it in my hands and never let go.

If he’d let me.

7

Beth

I stepped out onto the shadowed patio overlooking the moon-splashed ocean and the rigs lit up like golden Christmas trees among the darker shapes of the Channel Islands. Either the satellite had swung by overhead and was gone or my assistant had decided not to text anymore, because the phone was silent.

Inside the house I saw the TV on and the shapes of the dogs on the rug in front of the door.

And since I didn’t need to worry about Pest getting chomped on, I put her down on the patio, where she acted like the slats of wood under her feet might blow up if she left all four paws down on it at the same time.

“Go on, Pest,” I said. “You’ll be fine.”

She took me at my word and did a very funny mincing run to the far edge of the patio, where the hillside was dirt and grass and, from the way she was behaving, full of good-smelling things.

If she rolled in some dead animal, Tommy would not be pleased.

I kept one eye on her and called up my assistant, Beth’s number. She answered right away.

“Please be Jada,” she said in a kind of breathless murmur-laugh.

“It’s Jada.” The name I’d grown so used to felt completely weird to say.

“Oh my God, oh thank God,” Beth said. “You’re okay.”

“I’m okay.”

“Your mom doesn’t have you?”

“She doesn’t. She’s trying but she doesn’t have me.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m not…I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to tell you,” I said, leaning up against the railing. “I mean—”

“No. I get it. I totally get it.”

There was an awkward silence between us, and what I’d done to her in Los Angeles was looming so large in my head.

“I’m so sorry, Beth,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said in that typical way she had. Brushing off everything.

“No. No, what I did was so shitty.”

“It wasn’t you. Not really. It was the drugs.”

“Yeah, but the drugs were me too.” I took a deep breath. “I think… I was hating myself. And hating what I was doing, and I didn’t want someone I like and respect and admire as much as you to watch me sink so far down.”

“Jada,” she said, and I could hear the tears in her voice and for a moment we were quiet.

“It means a lot,” I said. “That you answered my texts.”

“We were friends, remember? Before all this shit happened.”

“Oh my God,” I said with a sigh, putting my head in my free hand. “I can’t remember anything before all this shit happened.”

“You want an update?” she asked.

“Do I?”

She laughed. “No. But you should get it anyway.”

My assistant filled me in on my mother’s continued efforts to stir up shit about me. With my ongoing silence it wasn’t just gossip magazines interested anymore. The Today Show had done a segment on my disappearance.

“Have you seen any news?” she asked. “Or been on Twitter? Your Facebook page?”

“No. I have no phone or laptop. It’s been kind of…nice, actually.” If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could survive without my laptop and my phone, I would have said it was impossible. Ed Sheeran always made such a big deal about not having a phone, and I’d rolled my eyes at him behind his back. But he was right. It was nice not having that leash.

“Well, don’t look. It’s a dumpster fire, for real. You’re better off just being oblivious.”

“Oblivious of what, exactly?”

“Everyone’s talking,” she said, her voice apologetic. “Liz, Ben… all those people you thought were your friends.”

“I never thought they were my friends,” I said, pinching my nose. “I knew they were using me.”

“They’re all over the tabloids, telling all kinds of lies.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. This was just part of the payment for what I’d done. That explosive rise to the stratosphere. It didn’t come for free.

“It kind of gets worse,” Beth said.

I laughed. “Of course it does.”

“The cops came by my apartment,” Beth said. “Asking questions.”

The cops. Shit. That was worse.

“What did you say?”

“That you’d been using, but as far as I knew you were somewhere getting clean and healthy.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“I also told them that your mother was a liar and a control freak and a terrible doctor.”

“Also true,” I said.

“But because I didn’t know where you were, they seemed to think there might be more to your mom’s story. And…there’s still more,” she said.

At this point it was almost funny. The utter destruction of my life.

“Goody!”

“Sherman dropped you.”

It wasn’t anger, exactly, since I’d thought it was sort of inevitable, but it was the creeping, twisting, agonizing pain of shame. I’d had everything, and I’d thrown it away.

“There are other managers who would snap you up in a heartbeat,” she said and that was true, but coming back from this was going to be one hell of a slog.

“Okay,” I said with a deep breath, putting one foot in front of the other. I’d get out of this hole. I would. Somehow.

“Can you tell me when you’ll be home?” she asked.

It was time to put a deadline on this. To set up an expiry date for when everything went sour.

“Two days,” I said and then immediately wished I’d said three. Four. A week.

Years.

Because now I only had two days to figure out what I was going to do with my mother. My life.

And Tommy.

“You want me to set up some meetings?” she asked.

“Beth… are you sure you want to work for me? I treated you so badly.”

“Of course I want to work with you. But with one condition…”

“Name it.”

“You start using again and I’m out. For real.”

“Agreed.” So agreed. So totally agreed.

“Okay! Let’s set up some meetings. A few maybe. Just to see. The most serious and reputable of the bunch?”

“That sounds good. I’ll see you in two days.”

We said our good-byes and hung up, and I stood at the railing, watching Pest sniff every board that made up the patio like she was trying to figure out a puzzle.

“Two days then?” a deep voice asked out of the shadows, and I turned toward the corner where Peter always had his chair set up. His newspaper and his coffee.

I hadn’t seen him in the shadows. And he’d heard my conversation.

“Two days,” I said, heat in my cheeks, thinking of what I’d said to Beth. “You could have told me you were there.”

I sensed, really, rather than saw his shrug. And then a gleam of a glass and the clinks of ice cubes.

“You’re drinking?”

“Whiskey. Want one?”

“No.”

I wouldn’t be drinking. Not for a long time. Not until this ache I had in the back of my throat was gone. This desire for the curtain that drugs could pull over the worst of my life, hiding all the flaws and all the mistakes I’d made from myself for at least a little while.

“I almost told Tommy,” I said. “About you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Because I wanted to be loved for a few minutes.

“You should have let me tell him at lunch,” Peter said.

I was glad I hadn’t. Because it would have cost me everything that happened after. And those memories had to feed me for a long time.

“You thinking of leaving this mountain and never telling him?” Peter asked.

“I’d like to,” I said with a laugh, but it wasn’t funny to Peter because he stood up fast and crossed out of the shadows to stand next to me at the railing.

“Why do you want to lie to him, Beth?” he asked.

“Because the truth is hard,” I said with a gasping, frantic laugh.

The truth was so hard and I felt like I was in danger of being crushed by a million rock hard truths.

“You lie to that boy and you’re as bad as me,” he said.

“You’re not that bad,” I whispered, forgiving him because I wanted to be forgiven too. “Your reasons weren’t malicious. Or evil. They were just desperate.”

“You think he’s going to see it that way?”

“He might,” I said, more hope than anything else. “If we explain it the right way.”

“What’s the right way?” he asked. “He’s already been here a day and we haven’t told him. Worse, now we’ve lied to him. And I think about that boy sitting in an apartment for days—” His voice cracked, and I did what I’d never done with Peter: I touched his shoulder. I put my arm around him.

For a moment he stood still in my half embrace. Like he was ready to reject it. But then he hung his head and slumped just slightly into me.

“You tell him, Beth,” Peter said. “Or I’m going to.”

I nodded, swallowing down my fears. “I will.”

“Tomorrow,” he said.

“Tomorrow,” I agreed.

8

Beth

He was asleep when I went back up to the room, and the coward in me was relieved. The television was on, casting blue shadows over the walls. The plate beside him was empty, and he lay sprawled half in, half out of the covers, like he’d just drifted off.

He’s tired, I thought, tender and sad.

I set Pest down on the floor, and before I could shut the door behind us, she’d taken a flying leap up onto the bed and climbed up on his chest.

He woke with a startled huff, his eyes taking in the room even as his hand came down, holding Pest to him. He looked like he was ready to do some battle.

“It’s just me,” I said softly, my voice matching the shadows. I walked to the bed and stroked his arm, the warm skin over the hard muscle of his shoulder. “Go back to sleep.”

“Hey,” he said, shifting as if to sit up. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “Don’t get up. Go back to sleep.”

He sighed and relaxed back against the bed. “So fucking tired. I can’t believe it.”

“You’ve been sleeping in a chair for like three days,” I said with a small laugh. He’d been sleeping in a chair, having sex, driving or fighting. He should be tired. It was in fact hard to believe he’d been awake this long.

His eyelids were drifting shut again. “Just… everything’s okay?”

“Fine, baby,” I said. “Let’s get you under the covers.” I moved the plate off the bed and pulled back the blankets, revealing the crisp white sheets. He was still wearing his blue boxers, and his skin looked smooth in the shadows from the TV. Like he was made out of blue pearl.

A treasure.

He sighed as I pulled the covers over him, and he was back asleep right in front of my eyes.

In the bathroom, our toothbrushes were in a cup. His red, mine yellow. It was cute. Like a scene out of a movie, something that would tell the viewer that this couple was happy and close.

They didn’t care if their toothbrushes touched, that’s how intimate they were.

The owners of these touching, cheerful toothbrushes were not a couple that would lie. That would keep secrets from each other.

I scrubbed my teeth, and when I was done, I put my lying toothbrush back in the cup.

I slid between the sheets with Tommy, facing him. Watching him sleep. He looked younger in his sleep. The hard lines between his eyes were gone. The crow’s feet from working out in the sun all the time, also gone.

With my thumb I touched his skin.

He was, at this moment, so dear to me. So impossibly special.

We were sleeping together. In the same bed. Just sleeping. Like an established couple.

Would he snore? I wondered.

Would I?

Oh God. What if I had a nightmare?

Well, neither the snoring nor the nightmares were likely tonight. My brain was turning too fast in my head to let sleep come.

I rolled onto my back and grabbed the remote control. I arranged the pillows behind my back, let Pest jump up on my tummy and flipped through the channels, over and over again.

* * *

Tommy

I blinked awake, something feeling…not wrong. Just not totally right, either. I opened my eyes to find Beth beside me, and I was, for the moment, filled with a kind of giddy happiness. A wild sense that I’d lucked out somehow. I’d been standing still for so long, moving not at all in fear of the world turning around on me. Coming up to bite me in the ass. But it seemed the world was turning in my direction for once.

“Hey,” she whispered, noticing I was awake. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

“You didn’t. What are you doing?”

She sighed. “Just watching TV. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Anything good?” I asked, stretching and rolling to my back to see the TV.

She was watching the news, and there was a clip of a YouTube video and a woman in a mermaid costume.

It was her.

I sat up, suddenly wide awake. “Turn up the volume,” I said, and she lifted the remote and hit the button with her thumb. “I haven’t seen this.”

“They’ve been playing it pretty steady the last few hours. It seems my disappearance has hit the national news.”

I had to admit, the makeup did an amazing job. Her freckles were gone. The shape of her nose was different. Her face looked longer. Her hair was a wild blonde wig. She even wore contacts, white ones that were eerie and magical all at once. She was painted a shimmery green and blue color.

If I’d just seen this video, I never would have thought it was her. It wouldn’t have occurred to me.

“I can’t…I can’t believe your makeup… I mean, you changed the shape of your face even.”

“Shading and highlights do most of the work. Losing the freckles. The contacts help.”

“All to hide from your mom?” I asked.

She was silent for so long I finally turned to look at her, the real her in my bed, not the creation of her on the screen.

“I think…I think I was hiding from everyone,” she said. “I told myself it was about my mom, but I think it was really about me.”

She looked at me, the liquid of her eyes reflecting the flashing lights of the television.

“About you, what?” I asked.

“Hiding from myself. Hiding from what I wanted. Hiding from what happened to me in that office.”

“Beth,” I sighed.

“I mean, I told myself I was okay because I didn’t know how to not be okay. If I wasn’t okay, my mom was right about me.”

That sounded so plausible it made me so proud of her that she could see that in herself. “But…there’s more, too. You know? If it wasn’t me up on the screen, if it wasn’t the real me but some version of myself I’d created up there, then I could still be safe. I couldn’t be hurt. Not really. Because I’d shown someone myself, my real self, and I got so fucking hurt.”

She was talking about me. About us.

And it was true. We both got hurt. Amazing how I’d thought she’d moved on, but in ways she’d been as stuck as I’d been.

The screen changed, the video over, and the two anchors from a popular entertainment show were talking. The screen behind them showed a picture of Beth in Walmart from a few days ago trying on sunglasses. Beth lifted the remote like she was going to change the channel.

“Wait,” I said, putting my hand on her arm. “What are they saying?”

“Same thing they’ve been saying for the last few hours. I’m on a drug-fueled mission of self-destruction. I’ve always been prone to theatrics and erratic behavior. As a teenager I’d gotten in trouble with police and been sent to a foster home for court-placed juveniles.”

“Oh my God,” I breathed. Her whole life was the news. Every single mistake she’d ever made thrown up on the screen to be dissected and torn apart. “Beth—”

“Oh wait,” she said with a sharp smile. “Here’s an interview with one of my ‘friends.’”

I recognized the new person on the screen as the man that had been in the bed with Beth when I grabbed her from the house in Santa Barbara.

“I knew Beth very well,” he said with a smug tone that made me see red. “A lot of us did.”

I gaped. In ten words he’d slut-shamed Beth on national television.

“I didn’t sleep with that little fucker,” she said. “I didn’t sleep with anyone on my team or my crew. Like it was a rule I had. But no one will believe me now. And even if I did sleep with them, even if I slept with every single person—why does he get to judge me? Why does anyone?”

“Beth,” I sighed. “I’m so sorry.”

“None of it matters,” she said in a tone that implied all of it mattered. All of it mattered a lot.

“How long have you been watching this?” I asked.

She sighed and then winced. “I don’t know. Too long probably. You’ve been asleep for a while.”

I took the remote from her hand and turned off the TV. The sudden silence buzzed. “You’ll never get to sleep listening to that crap.”

“I’m not sure I’ll get to sleep anyway.” She sighed heavily, her hands resting over the sheets pulled up to her chest. “I’m so fucking tired, but my brain won’t stop. At all.”

“What do you usually do when you can’t sleep?’ I asked.

“Watch too much TV.”

“That’s not working tonight.”

She looked at me, a small grin around her lips, her eyes twinkling in the shadows and moonlight. My cock perked up at that look, sensing it was going to like whatever she had to say.

“You really want to know?” she asked, pretending to be coy.

“I absolutely want to know.”

She rolled to her side so we were facing each other, and the intimacy of this bed was magic. Like it was just us floating above the world. All the shit waiting for us when we got out of this bed… it didn’t matter. Not right now.

Her hair was down, loose over her shoulders and her neck, and I thought of that shitty Jada/Beth thing I’d been doing with her hair. I wondered if it had hurt her. If it had hurt both of us and I just wasn’t aware of it yet. Like a cut so deep it didn’t bleed right away. I’d be off this mountain and she might be gone, and then I’d realize how badly I was hurt. How badly I’d hurt her.

“I masturbate.” She whispered like it was a secret. We smiled at each other, so pleased with ourselves.

“That seems like an excellent plan.”

“You want to help?” she asked, kicking the sheets off her body. She was wearing a T-shirt and a new pair of panties, yellow this time.

“I want to watch,” I said. “I want to see what you do when you’re alone.”

“You want me to pretend you’re not watching?”

I nodded.

“Impossible,” she said.

Her breath brushed my face, and I could smell the scent of her skin from the sheets she’d been wrapped in. It was a cocoon, this bed. And I had to wonder what we’d be when we walked out of it.

Blood pounded through my veins, heading straight for my dick, and I reached down and adjusted myself. My cock pressed against the warm fabric of my underwear.

“Show me,” I whispered.

She caught the edge of her bottom lip between her teeth, her eyes glowing, and she was the sexiest fucking thing I’d ever seen. Beth rolled to her back, shifting so she was lying a little beneath me and I was watching her over her chest, down between her bent knees. She tilted her head back as if to make sure I was still watching.

Oh, I was watching.

The hem of her shirt lifted up over her flat belly, the lacy edge of her bright yellow underwear. With one hand she cupped her breast, teasing her nipple until it stood up hard against the fabric of her T-shirt. My fingers twitched with the need to touch the other breast. Tease the other nipple.

But this was about watching.

Her other hand wandered slowly down her stomach, stopping to caress with the backs of her fingers the small dip of skin by her hip bone.

Over and over again she did it until she gasped and I put that little spot away for future reference. The things I would do to that pretty stretch of skin.

She slid her fingers down under the lacy edge of the underwear, and the bump of her finger under that fabric was the hottest thing I’d ever seen. It was innocent and dirty and private all at the same time.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

“Wet.”

“And?”

“Swollen,” she said. “My pussy is all swollen and wet.”

I groaned in my throat like I was trying to swallow it, but there was no point. I could imagine what she was describing. I could imagine pushing my thick cock between her swollen lips, deep and down and all the way into her.

I kept my hands away from my cock, even though I wanted to stroke myself so bad it hurt. My dick was twitching and leaking precum, and all I was doing was watching this beautiful woman touch herself in the way she liked best.

That finger between her legs, I could see it running from her pussy to her clit, over and over again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Not lingering but not going fast either. It was mesmerizing in a way.

She did it until her breathing was coming in ragged gasps and the silk between her legs was dark and damp. I could smell her arousal. I opened my mouth to breathe like I could taste it in the warm air around us.

She shifted, her one hand abandoning her breast to join her other between her legs.

The slow hypnotic movement of her hand stopped, and she focused on her clit, circling it slowly. Getting faster by tiny increments. She was not still on the bed anymore; she arched and shifted against the sheets, her hair wild across the pillows, and I couldn’t resist. I laid my hand flat against the curls, feeling as much of it as I could.

Her finger against her clit was moving faster, two fingers now, not in a circle but back and forth. The sounds she was making in her throat, gasps and groans and small cries that pushed their way under my skin.

“I don’t…” She’d turned her head to look at me. Her face was flushed, and sweat gathered at her hairline. “I don’t want to do this alone.”

I needed no other encouragement, and I reached down and cupped her breasts. Palmed them. Rougher maybe than I should have been, but I couldn’t rein myself in.

“I meant,” she gasped as her fingers worked harder against her clit. She was damp through her shirt. Sweaty and soft. I fucking loved her. Loved this. “Get off with me.”

“You,” I said, pinching her nipples harder, the way I knew she liked, and when that seemed to do nothing, I shifted on the bed, reaching for that sweet spot beside her hip bone, and I touched it so carefully. So softly. Like a tickle but with heat.

“Oh my God,” she cried, her eyes wide, her lips caught somewhere between a smile and grimace. “I love that. I love it so much.”

I did it over and over again. Same pressure. Same touch. Same place. But I lifted myself over her and took her hard, beautiful nipple into my mouth through her shirt, sucking as hard as I dared, and she came apart beneath me. Twitching and crying and swearing my name over and over again. I kept touching her, slowly easing off. Slowly touching other parts of her body. Her hands between her legs. I kissed her ear. The side of her face.

She sighed, breathing hard. Her eyes at half-mast. Her body relaxed.

“Can you sleep now?” I asked.

“After I watch you come,” she said, and I didn’t need to be asked twice. I was awkwardly crouched over her, so I sat back on my heels. My bruised knee protested, but I was too turned on to care. She was delicious spread out in front of me. Shirt skewed, panties damp and rumpled between her legs. Her eyes all blissed out and happy.

I pulled my shorts down under my cock, and I was so hard, so ready, I knew this wouldn’t be much of a show. She smiled at me, all vixen, and I wanted to kiss her so her lips would be swollen.

“I won’t touch you,” she said, lifting the hem of her shirt up and over her head, and I gasped at the sight of her. I’d seen her before. Her breasts and the freckles, but every time it was a surprise.

A beautiful thing I’d never get used to, no matter how many times she let me look at her.

“But…” She tilted her head, cupping her breasts. “I’ll give you somewhere to come.”

I groaned and put my hand under her panties, getting my fingers wet with her. My palm. I’d jack off with her on my skin—best fucking idea I’d ever had.

I wrapped my fingers around my dick, and I needed no preliminaries, no warm-up. I was going to come hard and fast and all over her beautiful tits.

“I like you like this,” she said, her voice adding fuel to the flame. “So hard and big over me. I want you to come—”

“Yeah.”

“Tommy. Come.”

And just like that I was coming in thick spurts, landing in stripes across her tummy. That sensitive skin by her hip. All over her breasts. My heart pounding so hard in my chest I was light-headed.

“Fuck, Beth,” I sighed, collapsing beside her.

“Can’t, baby,” she said quietly, her lips smiling even as her eyes were shutting. “I’m too tired.”

“Sleep,” I said and used the shirt she’d taken off to clean her up. I wiped the come off her body slow and gentle, and by the time I was done, she was asleep.

No idea what time it was, only that it was still dark outside, I lay down next to her to watch her sleep. To guard against her nightmares. To be here when she woke up.

I’d wanted this so badly when we were kids. To be able to be beside her at night so when she had a nightmare, I’d be there.

It was one of those wishes I’d had, that I’d been too scared to say out loud.

And now here it was.

I could get used to this, I thought, my own eyes drifting shut.

The sound of Pest whimpering and scratching at the door made me blink awake, disoriented for a minute by the bright sunlight pouring through the window.

God. We’d really slept.

Beth was beside me wrapped in my arms, her hair like a net across her face. I pulled my arms free as gently as I could, and she rolled forward onto her tummy, the freckled skin of her back revealed as the sheets slipped down to her hips.

The urge to touch her, to spread my hand wide over her spine and run it from the nape of her neck to the curve of her ass was hard to resist, but Pest was at the door, about to have an accident.

I took a second to appreciate the fact that this moment was one I could have again and again. We were at the beginning of us. Well… not the beginning maybe…the continuation of us.

She was where I belonged.

And I wasn’t letting her go.

Quietly I slipped out of bed and pulled on my underwear and jeans and T-shirt. I shoved my feet into my boots and, without thinking, opened the door and Pest tore out down the stairs. While I watched, the two other dogs came screaming around the edge of the patio.

Shit! Shitshitshit!

I flew down the stairs while the three dogs were all standing in place growling at each other.

Pest looked ridiculous with all her hackles raised.

But so, so small.

I was nearly close enough to grab her and maybe Pest realized I was there and in her wild little mind she thought she needed to protect me, I didn’t know, but she broke the stalemate and lunged at younger of the dogs and the older one darted forward and clamped her tremendous jaw around Pest’s neck.

“No!” I shouted, my voice deep and rough, hoping to scare the dog into dropping Pest, who was making a terrible high-pitched yelp. “Drop it!” I said again, my voice shaking.

Jesus, that dog was going to kill Pest.

I was about to drop to my knees and grab the monster around the throat and pry open its jaws when Peter came jogging around the corner.

One sharp whistle from that guy and the bigger dog dropped Pest, who lay in a crumpled, bleeding lump on the ground. I scooped her up in my arms to check her out.

“Oh no, Tommy,” Peter said, shooing off his dogs. “Is she okay?”

“She’s got a few cuts, one puncture wound, a little blood, nothing too bad,” I said, embarrassed by how relieved I was.

“I got a first-aid kit inside; we can clean up the worst of it.”

“Yeah,” I said, “that’d be good.” Like a sap I leaned down and nuzzled Pest’s little face and she licked my nose. I seriously thought I’d lost her there, and my heart hurt from the fear.

“Follow me,” he said, walking back around the side of the house to the large patio.

“I’m real sorry,” he said over his shoulder.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Your dogs are doing their jobs. I should have taken better care of her.”

There was haze down in the valley beneath the house, like a thick cloud we could see over. The ocean was gone. The islands and the oil rigs. Nothing but thick dense cloud.

Peter opened the sliding glass door into the dark interior of his house, and I followed him in. “Go ahead and use the sink in the kitchen if you need to,” he said, and I walked across a thick red and blue rug toward the open kitchen in the back. The place was immaculate. No dishes on the counter. No toast crumbs. Nothing.

I turned on the sink, cranking the water to warm, and looked around for a dishtowel. I found it hanging over the handle of the oven, spread out as if to dry. I snagged it, got the corner wet and went after Pest’s cuts and the puncture wound with a gentle hand.

She still didn’t like it. She rolled and did her best to get out of my hands, biting at me and whining in her throat.

“Shhhh,” I kept saying, not that it did much good. I let her have a go at my thumb, because her teeth didn’t stand much of a chance against the armor of all my calluses.

I set the towel on the counter, but it slipped off and I bent down and grabbed it, turning so I didn’t bonk my head on the counter. I was facing the fridge, an old white one with chrome handles. There were a few receipts stuck on it.

A picture of Beth in that makeup with the spider coming out of her eye. I smiled and leaned closer. It was her as I remembered her. A beautiful girl growing into a stunning woman but with… you know…a spider growing out of her eye.

There was another one beside it, stuck to the fridge with a black magnet covered in glue like whatever had been on it—a bottle opener or a welcome-to-Hawaii thing—was long gone.

The picture was an old one.

The edges curled. The color faded. Three people on a red blanket eating a lunch not unlike the one we ate yesterday. Right down to the hard-boiled eggs.

“Ploughman’s lunch,” I murmured and peered closer. Peter once had brown hair. A whole lot of it. His wife, judging by the way she had her hand on his knee, was a pretty blonde woman, curvy in a dress with ruffly sleeves. Beside them was a girl, also blonde, but not so happy to be there.

A teenager dragged there against her will, clearly. Her scowl told the whole story.

I peered closer and realized the girl was pregnant in the picture.

Yikes, I thought, but as I looked at her, she started to feel familiar. Her eyes. And her white-blonde hair.

Between one blink and the next, something went wrong.

Something sick and awful happened in my body. My stomach heaved and my head spun. I nearly dropped Pest because my hands were suddenly numb.

That wasn’t just a teenager dragged there against her will.

That was my fucking mother.

9

Tommy

“Tommy.” Peter’s voice was ragged and thick, and I turned toward him with my mouth hanging open. My eyes burning.

“The picture—” My voice cracked all over the place, like a window hit with a sledgehammer.

“That’s me and my wife. And our daughter.”

“Tell me that’s not my—” I looked down at the spots of blood Pest had left on the counter. I couldn’t even say the word. “Tell me that’s not who I think it is.”

“My daughter, Amelia.” I flinched. “She is… or was… your mother.”

It was, in a way, like opening that door to the office again. I tried not to see. Not to notice. Not to feel. But there were no defenses against something so big. Something so painful. It was a stone rolling over me, flattening everything.

“My mother.” I said the words, but they were only words. My brain was broken.

“That’s our last picture of her. She gave birth to you three days later and ran away six months after that, and we never saw her again. Or you.”

I couldn’t look at him. I could barely stand up.

“I’m sure…I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” Peter said, walking out of the darker hallway into the brighter kitchen, and I recoiled, stepped back so fast I hit the fridge.

“You’re my grandfather?” I asked. I mean, it was obvious. But I couldn’t grasp it.

Peter nodded, standing at the edge of the light from the kitchen, the white first-aid kit in his hand. Frozen, waiting for my permission in his own house.

I thought, I swear to God I thought I didn’t care anymore. If you’d asked me, I would have said I didn’t give a shit. My grandparents giving up their rights and turning me over to the state—it was an old wound that no longer hurt.

But I was flooded with anger. An anger so sharp it sliced.

Pest whimpered, and I realized I was squeezing her.

“Give me the first-aid kit,” I said, not looking at him. Not knowing how to look at him.

The white plastic box with the red lettering slid in front of me on the counter, and I knew he was standing on the other side of that counter. Close enough I could punch him.

I tried to open the plastic case with one hand, Pest cradled against me with the other, but it wasn’t working. I picked it up and jerked it and it didn’t open. I smashed it down on the kitchen counter.

I saw his old-man hands reach over and pop the latches, opening the case.

My grandfather.

“Alcohol swab?” he asked in a quiet voice. I nodded, wondering if he felt shame. Wondering if I gave a shit if he did.

He tore it open for me and handed it over, and I made fucking sure our hands didn’t touch. I still wasn’t looking at him.

“When the social worker found us, told us about you being in custody of the state—”

I ignored him, instead cleaning up the last of the blood around Pest’s puncture wound. At the sting of the alcohol she tried to jump out of my arms, but I held her and got the grit out of the wound.

“My wife, Betsey, she had stage-four stomach cancer.” I didn’t want to hear his voice cracking. I didn’t want to hear his reasons for signing a piece of paper that said he didn’t want me.

“I don’t care.”

“I’m sorry, son, but I think you’re lying.”

That made me look at him. Eyes burning, chest heaving. “Do not call me son. I’m nothing to you. You made sure of that.”

He nodded, swallowed. “I did,” he whispered.

I stepped away from the kitchen counter to get to the back door, but he shifted into my way.

“Are you suicidal?” I asked. I could break him with one punch. Drop him without any effort. Step over his unconscious body to get to my truck and get the fuck off this mountain.

“I look at you and I see how I hurt you. I see how Amelia hurt you. I see how everyone has hurt you. You’re bruised, son. And I can see it. Everyone can see it.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“I’d give anything to change that. To undo what I did to you.”

“You can’t,” I snapped. “And it doesn’t matter what you think you see in me. I don’t care.”

“Please, Tommy—” His blue eyes… my mother’s blue eyes, my fucking blue eyes… “Let me try to explain—”

“I don’t give a shit about your explanations. Or your reasons. They change nothing. They mean nothing. I grew up without you. Your daughter died without you.”

He looked away, chin shaking. He wiped a shaking hand over his mouth.

Good, I thought.

“She was ill. Your mom. Mentally—”

“Fuck you.”

He sighed, hung his head. “We were constantly battling her, and drugs, and men who wanted to hurt her, and friends who wanted to use her. We tried… we tried. Betsey—” His voice broke wide open on a hard sob, and I didn’t care.

I didn’t.

“My wife, she tried so hard to keep that girl with us. To keep her in our lives. To keep her safe. But Amelia didn’t care. She was so fun and so bright, but she could be so mean.”

I had no sympathy for this man who with one stroke of his pen signed my life over to one of dread and stress and fear. None.

But the woman he was describing. That was my mom.

I remembered that. Bright and fun but so, so mean.

She didn’t care about being safe. Didn’t care about me being safe.

She cared about the man treating her right. And the drugs that made her feel good.

That part I recognized, and it made me even more pissed. Because I wanted to believe, so hard, so deep in my gut that something this asshole did had caused that in her.

Nurture not nature.

“So?” I asked. “What did you do to her? What made her like that?”

If I’d punched him in his old-man face, I couldn’t have hurt him more. I saw it. For a split second the raw, open wound of his relationship with my mother was there—visible. But he shuttered it fast.

“I was too hard on her,” he said. “I wasn’t kind when I needed to be kind. I… I think I made her feel like she didn’t ever do anything right. That I wasn’t proud of her.”

“That doesn’t sound like she was mentally unwell. It sounds like shitty parenting.”

“She was bipolar. Diagnosed when she was sixteen and she tried to commit suicide—”

I jerked. Both of us held still in the aftermath of that word.

“You didn’t know?”

“I was eight when she died. We didn’t get to that conversation.”

“For a while she was better. Medicated. But she didn’t like the meds. They made her feel flat. That’s the word she used, flat. So she went off them. Started drinking. Drugs. We fought…we fought all the time. And then she came home pregnant. And she was clean again. On her meds again. She was—”

“Normal?” I snapped, hating the word and knowing he was thinking it.

“What’s normal? We certainly never tried to be that. We tried to be caring. We tried to give her boundaries.”

I just stepped away, turning as if to leave, and he put a hand up to stop me.

“She was happy. We thought. Pregnant with you, we thought she was happy. And then you were born and this house… I swear this house was brand-new. All of us were brand-new with you. You lived with us for six months,” he said in a rush, stepping forward again. “You were the sweetest baby. All eyes and smiles. Tiny.” He held out his hand, his great big palm stretched open. “I could hold you here.” He pointed at his palm with his other hand. “For hours. Right there… and then you were gone.”

“Yeah, fuck that, asshole.”

He flinched at the vulgarity and I remembered my mom had a mouth on her and I imagined her screaming that at him in this house.

Part of me felt small. Part of me, on the other side of being a teenager, felt… bad.

“When the social worker showed up on our door about you, Betsey was dying. And I couldn’t…”

“Yeah, I get it. You couldn’t take anything else on. I totally understand. Like a pet, right? Or watering a neighbor’s plants or some shit. I mean, I was just too much.”

He took my sarcasm on the chin. Like he deserved it, and he did, so I just stared at him.

“She was dying,” he said. “And it was ugly and it was painful and I wanted to die with her. I’d screwed up with Amelia, and I couldn’t imagine bringing you into our life so I could screw you up too. The social worker said you were in a good house. Your first foster home.”

I couldn’t remember the timeline. I was just a kid, after all. Maybe I was in a safe place and that was why they signed the paperwork. But it didn’t last.

Nothing ever does.

“Those were my reasons,” he said. “They’re… they’re not good. I know that. But that’s why I signed the paper. I thought you were in a safe place. A good place.”

“I was beaten; did you know that? My back, my ass, the palms of my hands—” I held one out like a sick parody of what he’d done just a few seconds before. He had the good sense to close his hands and tuck them into fists in his pockets.

“Do you know what happened to us at St. Joke’s? What happened to Beth?”

The second I said her name, it was like there was a whole new level of betrayal. Like I was standing on a porch thinking, wow, this is such shit, but I wasn’t aware of the giant house made of betrayal behind me.

“Beth,” I breathed, nearly doubling over with the pain of it all.

“Tommy,” Peter said, suddenly stern. Suddenly all guard dog.

“She knew. She… she came and found you when she ran away, didn’t she? Oh my God.” I put my body against the counter because my legs felt too weak to hold me up.

I’d told her that I had grandparents. Who owned a farm.

“She came looking for us after she ran away from her mother. But Betsey was long dead and it was only me and she just wanted… I think… to be close to you. Somehow.”

“She’s been lying to me for days,” I said.

Lying while I’d been thinking about a life. A love.

Lying. About this.

“Don’t be mad at her,” Peter said.

“Tommy?” It was Beth outside, calling for me.

And I felt my heart rip right in half.

10

Beth

I woke up to the sound of another series of texts binging through on a phone.

The satellite again.

I rolled to the side of the bed and picked up Tommy’s phone from the bedside table, sure it was my assistant with information on meetings. Or the information that no one wanted to have meetings anymore.

And truthfully, I wasn’t sure which one I wanted.

But the texts were from a number I didn’t recognize.

Bates needs proof.

Proof of Beth being all right.

Proof her mother means her harm.

Proof, Tommy, or he’s letting Sammy off his fucking leash.

How many times did I tell you not to screw this up, Tommy!

I scrambled fast out of bed, grabbing the phone and shoving my body into clothes, my feet into shoes. I blinked into the sunlight as I took the stairs two at a time.

Middle of the morning, it looked like. We’d slept half the day away.

“Tommy!” I yelled, crossing the dirt parking area. I ran around to the patio overlooking the ocean, but he wasn’t there.

“Beth.” It was Peter saying my name. From inside the house. And there was something in his tone that told a simple story about despair. And loss.

My stomach turned to ice, and the phone nearly slipped from my suddenly numb hands. I saw them through the sliding glass doors. In the kitchen. That fucking photograph on the fridge behind Tommy’s head.

I pushed open the door, using my body weight because my hands barely worked, and Tommy…Tommy wasn’t even looking at me. He stared at the corner of the counter as if there was something happening there.

As if he’d rather look at anything but me.

But the muscle in his jaw was bouncing so hard I knew he was clenching his teeth. Every muscle in his neck stood out against his skin. Pest, in his arms, whimpered.

He knows.

He knows who Peter is. Who his mother was.

He knows I lied to him.

“Tommy,” I whispered, my voice drenched in apology, and that made him look up at me. And for a moment, I saw it. All the pain I’d caused him. The pain his mother had caused him. His grandparents.

Every person in his life who never wanted him enough to be honest. To take a risk. To give more of themselves than they asked of him. Because Tommy, I knew with the kind of pain that came from knowing something too well and too late—Tommy would have given all of us… everything.

For one bright second, his blue eyes swam with tears.

And I’d never seen him cry. Not once. Not when he got starved and beaten. When his hands were so ruined he couldn’t hold a pencil. Not when he came charging into that room to save me. Not even when he saw me again.

This made him cry.

“Tommy,” I whispered again because it was the only word I knew right now. The only word that made sense. His name over and over again, pounding through my body with the beat of my heart.

“How—” He stopped himself, shook his head. As if arguing with himself. As if telling himself that it didn’t matter. The answers to all the questions he had burning through his brain—they didn’t matter.

Because all that mattered was the lie. And the rejection. And the pain.

“I’m sorry,” I managed, my throat sore with the force I was using to hold back my own crying.

“I’ll bet,” he said with a hard laugh.

I charged across the room toward him, with the sudden idea that if I could touch him, I could convince him, but he jerked back when I got to the kitchen counter. Jerked back like he didn’t want me to touch him.

Jerked back like he knew I would hurt him.

He flinched away from me.

I stopped in my tracks and looked over at Peter and realized he was in the same position. Frozen, trapped. Wanting to get closer to Tommy but knowing he’d run if we did.

“How did this even happen?” he finally asked, the tears gone. His eyes bone-dry.

“After I ran away, I came here. Looking for your family.”

“How? Like…what did you even have to go on?”

“It wasn’t easy, but you said that they were farmers south of Santa Barbara.”

“So you drove by every farm?”

“No, I searched online. Land taxes and sales...”

“Oh my God,” he breathed, staring up at the ceiling. “That’s insane.”

“Not really… the Internet made it pretty easy. Peter made it hard,” I said with a laugh, like any of this was funny. It sounded sharp and awful, a sob gone wrong.

Tommy looked at Peter and then at me. “Why?”

“He’s…well, he’s sort of off the grid here. Not so easy to find. Family land and all that.”

“And you went to all that work?” Tommy asked, and I nodded. “Why?”

“I had this dream that I’d come up the driveway and I’d knock on some stranger’s door, sure—at least mostly sure—that it was your family’s house, and the door would open and it would be you.”

“Why the fuck would you think I would be here?” he asked.

“Because he’s your family and everyone needs someplace to belong.”

‘Well, I don’t belong here,” Tommy said. “He made that clear.”

“I am so sorry,” Peter said, hanging his head. “I thought you’d be better off without me. The social worker said that you’d be cared for.”

Tommy nodded. “Yeah, that didn’t work out so well for me, Peter.”

“I know. And I’m…I’m sorrier than I can say.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you are. But it doesn’t matter. Were you just… waiting for me to leave?” he asked. “Like, hoping I wouldn’t come inside and see the pictures and I would leave and you’d never have to tell me who you were?”

Peter looked over at me, and I felt my guilt like a noose. “It was me,” I whispered. “Peter wanted to tell you.”

“And you didn’t?”

“No. I did. I just didn’t know how.”

“Like it’s that fucking hard? You’ve known we were coming here since we left that gas station. You’ve had days to tell me.”

“Yes. And yes, Tommy, it is that fucking hard because I knew it would hurt you. And you’re right, I put off telling you so I could put off hurting you. And it’s shit, but it’s the truth. This is the only safe place I have. And it’s the place that would hurt you the worst.”

He hung his head again, and Pest stretched her neck and licked his chin like she knew he needed some help. Some comfort. And my body, my heart, everything in me ached to give him that comfort.

Slowly I stepped forward, and he lifted his head. Watching me warily, but not moving. So I took another step toward him. Another. Until we were in the kitchen together. Not close enough to touch, no, but close enough to breathe the same air. Close enough that I had some hope. That he knew I’d fucked up but that we could get past this somehow. This was our fresh start.

He watched me for a long time, totally unreadable, and I had no sense of whether he forgave me or understood. Or if he was just barely managing to hold on to his fury. He was like an electric wire standing in that kitchen. So still. So powerful. Capable of burning this whole place down if he wanted.

“I’m glad you have a safe place,” he said, his voice quiet and low. Completely Tommy.

And then he turned to Peter. “Thank you for taking her in. Helping her. She needed that.”

“You’re welcome,” Peter said, blinking, nearly smiling like he was walking out of a cave into full sunlight. And I wanted to tell him to stop, to not get his hopes up, because Tommy was far from forgiving us. The easiest thing for Tommy was to put other people first. And he was just doing what was easy right now. “And now that you’re here, we can—”

Tommy didn’t even let him finish. He was past me without touching me. I only felt the current of air in the wake of his body as he left. He was out of the kitchen and out the door, the screen slamming against the wood. A terrible, lonesome, final sound.

“Goddamn it,” Peter said.

I gasped, feeling like I was going underwater. “I can fix this. I can.”

I didn’t know how. Had no idea how. But I was going to try. I followed him out the door, letting the screen bang shut behind me, too. He was walking into the apartment above the garage, and I took the stairs two at a time again, my breath stuck in my throat.

“Tommy,” I gasped, shutting the apartment door behind us. He had set Pest down on the bed, and she’d burrowed in under the covers, her nose tucked under her tail. “I can explain.”

“You already did,” he said in a voice so calm and quiet it was chilling. He stepped past me into the bathroom and started to brush his teeth. All without looking at me.

“You’re angry.”

He spat into the sink and kept brushing.

“I’m sorry.”

He ran water over his toothbrush and then almost put it back in the cup but instead threw it in the little garbage can between the sink and the toilet.

“Is that my phone?” he asked, pointing at my hand.

I’d forgotten. Carissa. Bates. The proof he needed.

I put the phone in my back pocket. “It is. And I’ll give it to you after we talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Beth,” he said. Finally he looked at me, and his eyes were dead. I was a stranger in front of him, and from the look on his face, one he didn’t much care for.

“Don’t, Tommy,” I breathed, tears clawing up my throat. “Don’t do this…”

He laughed but it wasn’t funny. He laughed, but it hurt. “I haven’t done anything, Beth.”

“That’s not entirely true,” I said.

He opened his eyes wide like he was surprised I was taking a swing at him. But I was so desperate, if fighting kept him here, I would fight.

“Are you talking about kidnapping you, because you know I didn’t really have a choice—”

“And I didn’t have a choice about bringing you here. It’s not like either one of us has a ton of friends. This was the one place I could think of. And I hated it because I knew it would hurt you.”

“I didn’t lie to you,” he said.

“Right. But there are a million ways you didn’t tell the truth.”

“What?” he cried, his face screwed up, and I knew the next words out of his mouth were going to be fuck you, so I jumped in before we started saying things we didn’t mean.

“And I didn’t either. We are splitting hairs between each other because that’s what we do. That’s how we stay safe. Even with each other. No one ever believes me when I tell the truth. My mother didn’t; the one person in my life who should have believed me, and instead she taught me how to lie. And I’ve never…I never meant to lie. But I’m trying to figure out how to tell the truth. I lied to you, I did. And I’m so sorry.”

His jaw went hard again, and his eyes found something interesting on the door frame instead of looking at me.

“Hardly matters now, does it?” he asked, stepping by me, our bodies touching, electric and sizzling with all this anger. I was losing him and I wanted him all at once.

“I think it does,” I said. Watching as he grabbed what little stuff he had. The duffel bag and the food for Pest. “I love you, Tommy.”

“Don’t.” He shook his head, throwing shit in his bag now.

“I love you.”

“Stop.”

“I’ve always loved you.”

“Goddamn it, Beth!” he cried, not moving but shaking almost. Every muscle rigid. I took a careful step toward him. Tommy would never hurt me, not on purpose, not with his body, but he could tear me apart right now. Pull me to pieces with just a word.

“I’ve loved you since the graham crackers and the art room, and I’ve loved you through every minute of the last seven years as I tried to be someone else so that the person who loved you and felt loved by you wouldn’t hurt so much not having you around.”

“Please don’t do this,” he said. His eyes were wet again.

“I love you so much and it’s killing me.”

The words sobbed out of me, my last effort, and when he was silent, I felt like I’d found his pressure point. I’d found the place where if I touched him right, he’d be mine again.

“You can be angry,” I whispered. “But don’t leave.”

And then I touched him.

And everything changed.

11

Tommy

I had this social worker once who tried to get me to draw a picture of what it was like inside my head. He tried to get me to draw pictures of what being angry felt like. What getting into fights felt like.

And every picture, every single one was monster. Green with black spots and teeth that dripped blood and claws that ripped people apart. They thought I felt like a monster. That’s what I was telling them with my picture.

My anger made me feel like a monster.

Those pictures caused me so many fucking problems. More doctor’s appointments. Prescriptions. Labels. Special classes for kids with behavior disorders… It was a shit show for a number of years.

But then one day, drugged to fuck and back, my brain feeling like mush, my body like air, when the doctor asked me to draw what my anger felt like, I drew a big black circle. Over and over again, until the crayon left shiny black wax on the paper a quarter-inch thick.

That’s what my anger felt like. A big black hole. No monster, an…empty space. And that was suddenly the right answer. The doctor perked right the fuck up. Black hole, yes! Black hole good!

Monster bad.

But the thing they didn’t know—and I didn’t know how to explain because I was a fucking kid who’d been left alone in an apartment for a week after my mother overdosed—

The monster wasn’t me.

The monster was my anger.

And the monster kept me safe.

And now, standing in this apartment, I couldn’t hold on to the black hole. And the monster was and always had been there.

“I swear to God, Beth,” I growled, my body coiled. I tried looking away. Pretending she wasn’t there. I tried to get the black hole back.

But then she touched me. Her fingers against my arm. They were cold and they were shaking and she touched the inside of my elbow and the skin there that no one touched. That rarely saw sun.

Hidden skin and she touched it like she knew.

Like it was hers.

And I couldn’t even argue with that. I was entirely hers. Completely hers. That skin on my arm and the memories in my head and the green monster of my anger.

Every part of me was hers, and I didn’t know how to live that truth and the truth of her lying at the same time.

And I turned, grabbing her arms, and her eyes were wide and I was sure I was scaring her—I was scaring myself—but I couldn’t open my mouth to say I wouldn’t hurt her.

Because I didn’t know if that was true.

I had her in the corner between the door and the dresser and she was panting and I was panting. And the air tasted like her and felt like fire.

“Tommy,” she breathed, her face full of freckles and a kind of hesitant joy. A careful happiness. Like this was going to be okay. Because I was touching her. Because if she said yes, I was going to fuck her and make her come so hard she’d never be the same.

But I would still hurt her.

“You want me?” I asked, growled really, keeping our bodies separate. Even though she was pushing against my arms, her body arching toward me like she knew if she could just touch me, the dam would break and we’d be awash again.

So fucking hot for each other it was the only thing that mattered. Not the lies. Or the secrets. Or the past.

Nothing would matter but her. Touching her.

“Yes, Tommy. Yes. I want you. I always want you. We can do this. We can—”

“Put your hair up,” I whispered, and she blinked at me, her eyes wide, her hair long and loose around her shoulders.

“What?” she breathed, not catching on, but she would. I’d make sure of it.

The monster protecting me would make sure of it.

“Put your hair up,” I said, glancing down at the black elastic she always had around her wrist. She usually had like ten of them. A sleeve of elastics. I made my voice hard. My face harder.

“Why?”

“You know why.”

Because I would fuck her as Beth. This last time. And then I was walking away.

“You’re still going to leave,” she breathed.

I nodded. “Now or later depends on you putting your hair up.”

She blinked, her eyes filling with tears. I was hurting her, and maybe it was inevitable this whole time. It probably was. Maybe I was the fucking monster and the black hole all in one fucked-up package.

“Why are you being so mean?” she asked.

Because I didn’t know what else to be, I thought. I had nothing left. And fuck, why was I being so mean? To Beth. She’d sliced me to ribbons, but she hadn’t meant to. I mean, I got it, in the end. She did it, but she didn’t mean to.

She couldn’t help it. But I could. I would.

I started to let her go. To let myself go. To get us both out of here. Away from each other, because we just couldn’t stop hurting each other.

But the second I let go of her, she grabbed at me.

“No. No, stay. Just…” She pulled that black band from her wrist and pulled her hair up into the messy bun I’d gotten used to. The grown-up version of her teenage hairdo that had made me so wild. With the nape of her neck and the freckles revealed by the part of her hair.

And it was almost too much. I almost turned her around to face the wall. I almost walked out.

But this was what I needed, this kind of pain.

I had to do to myself what the Pastor had always tried and couldn’t—stop myself from loving her.

The starvation and the beatings hadn’t worked—maybe this would.

“Just…” Her breath caught. “Don’t be mean.”

I put my hands on the wall beside her head and leaned in to kiss her neck, the tendons so tense against her skin. She was holding herself so still, like if she moved, I’d leave.

I kissed her neck, the warm, soft shell of her ear, visiting all my favorite places on her body in a farewell tour. Neck, ear, collarbone. Jawline. Nose.

The freckle at the corner of her mouth.

Her lips. Her fucking beautiful lips. I kissed them and sucked at them. I raked them with my teeth, licked them with my tongue. And when I was done, I turned her around so she faced the wall, my hands rough. My intent rougher.

“Tommy,” she moaned, her hands slapping against the wall. Her body still rigid like she was scared to feel this.

“Lift your arms,” I said, and she did. I pulled off the pale shirt she wore and threw it behind me. God, her back. Her delicate spine. The arch of it. The narrow span of her shoulders with all those freckles. All those gorgeous fucking freckles. I put my hands against hers on the wall and, keeping my body apart because this needed to last, I kissed each of those freckles. Connected them with my attention, the warmth of my breath. She had a cluster on her shoulders, and I put them together as a star. I made a heart out of a set near her armpit, the smell of her skin and her sweat making me crazy.

But still I touched her with nothing but my mouth.

She moaned and arched her ass into my hips, but I shifted away, and when she tried to follow, I pushed her away.

I kissed my way down her spine, the dimples at the top of her ass.

She was freckled there, too.

I reached around her body, and she moaned, shuddering a little. Her head tilting back until I felt the messy bun on the top of her head touch my shoulder.

It was like being brushed by electric filaments. I felt every inch of that hair like it was coiling around my dick. I unbuttoned her shorts, the denim cutoffs that were bleached nearly white from so many washes, that hugged her ass and showed off her legs. The button fly dipped low on her tummy, the skin above the button a warm curve that filled my palm.

She sighed again, putting her hand over mine. Pressing me harder against her like she needed more already.

“No,” I said. Not sure why, only that this had to be carefully done. Carefully orchestrated. We were a bomb I couldn’t have go off too soon.

“I can’t touch you?” she whispered.

“No. You can’t.”

She put her hand against the wall again, and I was staring at the chipped green polish on her nails.

Remember, I thought. I need to remember. All of this. Every inch of her. Every moment of good-bye.

I pushed her pants off her body; the silk scrap of navy underwear she wore, rolled down the curve of her ass. She reached back as if to pull it up, to cover herself with it, but I put her hand back on the wall.

I liked her like this. Undone. Not quite naked. Her ass was suddenly and without exception my favorite thing in the world. I ran my calloused hand over the tender skin, palming the cheek in one hand.

When I squeezed, she moaned. When my fingers traced the crease, she dropped her head against the wall.

“Spread your legs,” I whispered.

“Tommy—”

“Do it.”

Her feet shifted against the hard wood floors, and with my fingers I made my way down the seam to the wet, hot heart of her. I put my lips to her neck, biting her…just a little.

I remembered all those nature shows I watched when the memories and the nightmares seemed to blend and sleep was a dangerous endeavour. All those animals that mated like this, front to back with the male biting the female’s neck to keep her still.

Horrible. Not sexy at all.

Except…it was right now.

I felt the animal in me rising up. My cock pounding between my legs.

I found her clit through her slippery folds, and she moaned when I traced it with the calloused pad of my fingers. She was up on her tiptoes like it might be too much, but right now she wasn’t deciding that.

I was.

I sucked on her neck and she cried out, bouncing back against me, and then, like she remembered my command, she arched forward, pressing herself to the wall. My hand caught between her heat and the wood.

Yes. I thought.

Fucking perfect.

Her underwear skewed half off her body, the lace cutting into my hand, I worked her clit just the way she liked. Slow and steady, harder, faster until she was shaking against the wall. Her face pressed sideways, her eyes closed so hard, like she was chasing down the feeling.

I kissed her cheek, slipped a finger inside of her until I was drenched in her. Covered in her. And then I pressed that finger to her asshole.

Her eyes opened wide, startled and shocked.

“Shhhh,” I whispered against her ear, our sweat gathering and mixing at her hairline.

I was going to make a mess of her. And she would make a mess of me.

Our end was just beginning.

“Let me in,” I whispered. I felt her pull in air, the rise of her back against my chest, and she blew it out slowly and I slipped inside.

“Oh my God,” she groaned, her head falling forward. “Oh my God.”

I felt the tension in her. The way she bounced suddenly on her toes, and because I was never in this life such a good student except when it came to her, I knew she was close.

With my other hand I ran featherlight touches over her clit, hard and harder until she was crying out and swearing. Her legs bent, and suddenly, she was one large contraction. One large, wild beat of pressure and then, I could feel her airborne against me.

I eased up my touch on her clit but didn’t stop touching her. Never stopped touching her.

“Tommy,” she moaned when she was back to her self. Back in her body.

“Again,” I said, my finger still buried in her ass. I fucked her with it, a long, slow out and then in, and she pushed herself against me as if chasing me down.

“What?”

“Come again.”

“What…what about you?”

“Come again.”

I’d worry about me later. I’d worry about me when I’d wrung everything out of her I needed. Everything that would sustain me for what was left of my life without her.

I put my shoulder against the wall so I was facing her. Her blissed-out, wild eyes were gorgeous, but I wanted more.

“You’re going to come again,” I said, pushing one finger into her pussy and then another. I could feel my finger in her ass, and I knew she could too. She opened her mouth to pull in air.

“What…” she breathed. “What kind of virgin are you?”

I smiled at her, kissed her nose. Her lips. “One who has dreamed about doing this to you for the last seven years.”

It took some hand contortion, but I got my thumb back on her clit and she sobbed, sagging against the wall. Her hand clutched at my shoulder.

“Let me,” she whispered like she knew I would deny her that. “Let me touch you. I feel… I feel like I’m going to float away.”

I made some growling, menacing sound of consent, and I worked her over with my fingers until I felt her again, the strung-up tension of her body like she was gathering herself, pulling herself together for some unknown trip. Some internal explosion that would pull her to pieces if she wasn’t careful.

Her nails bit into my shoulder, and I grunted with the pain of it. My hands were so wet, up to the wrists with her. The muscles of her legs were shaking so hard.

“Beth,” I said. Her name, just like that, and her eyes sprung open like she’d been waiting for that. “Beth,” I said again; now that her name was in my mouth, I couldn’t get it out.

“Come on, Beth,” I said. “I want to feel you come again.”

Her ass squeezed me so tight I thought she might break my finger. She jerked forward, locking my other hand against her body and the wall, and she rode my fingers so hard I worried she might get hurt.

But she came and she came, sobbing and shaking. Every internal spasm locked in my memory. My fingers ached with the pleasure of having brought her to this shattering moment again.

Slowly I pulled my fingers away, and she flinched and moaned.

“You okay?” I asked.

“You always ask that,” she whispered, staggering like she had newfound legs.

“You always flinch.”

“It’s hard having you leave me,” she said. “It hurts when you leave.”

I put my arms around her waist, lifting her off her feet and carrying her to the bed.

“Beat it, Pest,” I muttered, shooing the sleeping dog off the blankets where she’d been curled up. She scrambled away from me like we were about to play a game, and I picked her up and put her in the bathroom, shutting the door behind me. She barked once in puny protest and then was silent.

Beth sat up when I turned, her hair still up in a bun. Her underwear still half off her body. She looked fucking delicious, and I decided I needed her to come one more time.

“Come here,” she whispered and I did, but as she reached for my belt, my rock-hard cock straining at the button and zipper of my jeans, desperate to feel her touch, I fell to my knees between her legs.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“One more.”

“I don’t… I can’t.”

I spread her legs wider, the scent of her saturated pussy making me crazy. Her thighs were shiny and the flesh between her legs so pink, so swollen.

She put her hand over herself. But it was only sexier. More beautiful. This half-hearted demure thing. This “oh no, I couldn’t” act.

She could. And she would.

I licked her fingertips, the green nail polish, half chipped off. I licked those fingers and tasted her beneath it. Felt the slick swollen tissue. Oh God, she was gorgeous like this. So juicy and perfect. Swollen and sensitive.

“Move your hand,” I said against her fingers.

“It’s not fair,” she said, and I smiled because I knew it was an act. “Come here, let me make you feel good.”

“This makes me feel good,” I said against her flesh, and she flinched and squirmed and I spread her legs out wider, my cheeks wet from rubbing against her thighs. Her come would be in my hair, and I loved it.

I sucked one of her fingers into my mouth, pulling on it hard, and she moaned, falling back on one hand braced against the bed, the other hand caught between my mouth and her pussy.

I sucked all her fingers one by one, tasting her pleasure and her sweat, and when I was done, I moved that hand out of the way and licked her. I licked her and sucked her until she was trembling. Shaking.

“I don’t know if I can,” she gasped.

“You can,” I said and slipped my fingers back inside of her, pushing through the swollen tissue. She moaned and practically vibrated off the bed. I found the spot she liked the best, the spot that made her go so still. I did everything she liked the best, and it took a while, come running down her legs, sweat pouring off both of us.

She was moaning and sobbing and crying my name, but finally she came, her hands clutching at my head, pushing me into her so tight I could barely breathe. I didn’t need to breathe. Not at all.

Who needed air when I had Beth Renshaw coming against me with such power? Like a force of nature.

She let go of me, her body relaxing boneless against the bed, her legs splayed, her hands falling to the blankets. Her skin was pink, and her freckles were nearly white against them; as I watched, they went back to brown, her skin back to its usual shade. Her face, though, stayed flushed and sweaty, her eyes on mine over the landscape of her body.

I stood up, my knee popping. I hadn’t come. It was a fucking miracle. I realized how I’d turned my body off in a way. Listening instead, completely, to her body, I’d tuned mine out.

But it was coming back with a roar.

My guts hurt with the need to come. My chest and legs. My teeth ached.

“Come to me,” she murmured, her voice barely over a gasp. She couldn’t sit up, much less blow me. Jack me off. I stepped back, because something felt not right about fucking a woman who could barely move. Whose body had been momentarily broken by pleasure.

“Please, Tommy,” she said, because of course she knew what I was thinking. She always knew what I was thinking. “I need you.”

Fuck it. Fuck. It. I was going to hell for any number of reasons, the least of which could be fucking Beth when I’d given her so much pleasure she was practically comatose.

It would be my very favorite sin.

I stepped back to the bed, found a condom in the little table by her side of the bed… her side of the bed.

That had happened fast; her side, my side.

But I pushed the thought away as I undid my pants and rolled the condom over me. Sucking in air through my teeth because it hurt so good. Just my own hand, rough and clumsy.

Her pleasure-swollen flesh would kill me.

“Hurry,” she said like I needed more convincing.

I bent and slipped my arm around her waist, lifting her and pushing her back on the bed, I split her legs open wider with my own and then, with my teeth gritted, I pushed the head of my cock into her.

“Oh fuck, baby,” I groaned, putting my head down on her breast. “Fuck, you’re so tight.”

She sighed, lifting her hips just barely off the mattress. Her hands were still at her sides, too tired even to hold on to me. I held my breath pushing into her, inch by inch.

I groaned and swore, sweat running off my body onto hers. Until finally I was inside her. Squeezed so hard I could barely move. I barely needed to. I pulled back, lifting my hips, and I felt the orgasm coming—all those demands of my body that I’d been ignoring as I’d been seeing to the demands of hers, they came roaring at me. I saw sparks behind my closed eyelids, my hands were numb, the bottoms of my feet super hot; it was as if I was being rewired, completely changed, from the inside out.

“Yes,” she was saying over and over again. Permission or something, I wasn’t sure. But I moved my body in hers, thrusting and retreating, inch by inch, clinging to what I knew and who I was until it was all gone and it was just my body and her body and a pleasure that unspooled in my chest.

I came in great spurts. Giant waves. I came in storms and earthquakes.

I was matter and particle and electrons and air. I was the very base of myself, blind and dumb to everything but her.

I was heaving over her, jerking and gasping for air. She didn’t come, but she was stroking my shoulders, whispering in my ears, words I couldn’t hear past the pounding of my heart.

“So good,” she was saying. “So good.”

I blew out a breath, only to suck one in, unable to catch it. Unable to regulate anything. For a second I thought I might cry. Might actually sob.

But I managed to stop myself, pushing up onto my hands. Away from her. It was important not to look at her. Not to see her underneath me, drenched in our sweat.

I was blood and bone and not looking at her was a mission of protection.

I got up off the bed with legs that shook and feet that didn’t work, and I staggered to the bathroom, opening the door so Pest could come out, smelling the air like she was a prude and not guilty of trying to lick her own butt.

I dealt with the condom and pulled up my pants and splashed water on my face, all while figuring out the next three things I needed to do. That’s how I would work this.

Three things. One step in front of the other.

Find my keys.

Get my stuff.

Go down to the truck.

I could do those three things. If I thought past that, things fell apart.

In the bedroom Beth was finally sitting up, her bun half falling down around one shoulder.

Her chest was covered in red marks from my beard. Smaller bruises around her neck from my openmouthed kisses.

Don’t look, I told myself. Three things.

Find my keys.

Get my stuff.

Go down to the truck.

My keys were in the drawer of the bedside table with the condoms and my wallet. I put them in my pocket with numb hands. Feeling her gaze on me all the while.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice rough and scratchy.

“Do you…” I cleared my throat. My own voice sounded like it had been dragged across a gravel road. “Do you need a ride?”

Her eyebrows hit her hairline. “A ride. Where?”

“Do you have a way home?”

“You’re still leaving.”

It wasn’t a question. So I didn’t answer.

It was obvious what she’d been hoping, that the sex would change my mind. That it would be enough to keep me here.

I gathered my duffel bag. Threw the last of my stuff into it. Shook the bag with the last of Pest’s kibble and then threw it in the bag. I turned to see Pest in Beth’s arms. She was licking the sweat off Beth’s face.

I’d fucked the rage out of myself. I’d fucked everything out of myself, and now I was empty. Hollow.

Find my keys.

Get my stuff.

Go down to the truck.

I added breathe to the list because I kept forgetting to do it.

“You can’t… get past it?” she asked.

I nearly laughed. “Get past you not telling me about my grandfather?” She looked so fucking hopeful. “No,” I told her. “I can’t.”

“But you’d drive me back to Los Angeles if I needed you to?”

I nodded, unable to watch Pest trying to comfort her. “Do you?” I asked, looking at the door, the dresser. Anything but her.

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t need a ride.”

“Okay.” Daring one last look, I watched her hunch over herself, the knobs of her spine pressed against the skin of her back. Her hair slipping over her shoulder to cover part of her face.

Remember, I thought. Remember all of it. The beauty and the pain and how it hurt to love her.

This is how wishes end up. This is why they’re dangerous.

I opened the door, the sunlight having slipped behind a cloud, turning the day dramatically dark.

Good, I thought. Better.

“Here,” she said, gathering Pest up in her hands and holding her out to me, tears and snot running down her face. “Pest.”

I realized at once how I could solve the problem of Pest. Of who would take care of her when I wasn’t around.

Because not being around seemed pretty fucking likely. If I went back to San Francisco, I’d probably be killed. If I didn’t, I’d be on the run for the rest of my life. Because if Bates and Sammy could find me in nowhere, Arizona, they could find me anywhere.

I’d take a stand in San Francisco.

“Keep her,” I said.

“She’s your pet,” Beth said, standing up, looking aghast.

“She’s yours now,” I said quietly and reached out to scrub at Pest’s head the way she liked for the last time. “Take care of her.”

“Tommy.”

“Take care of yourself. No drugs.”

Tears dripped off her chin onto Pest’s head. “I don’t believe you mean this,” she cried. “I don’t believe you can worry about me and care about me and still leave me.”

“You worried and cared and still lied. We’re endlessly capable of hurting each other.”

She sobbed so hard she shook, and I hit my limit.

Leave. Just leave.

And keep fucking breathing.

I closed the door to the apartment above the garage and took the stairs down to the parking area. Too late I realized Pete was standing in the shadows near my truck.

He gave me pause for a minute. One heart-stopping minute when my curiosity and my fucking endless need for someone to call my own almost swamped me, but then I opened the driver-side door and threw in my bag.

“Tommy.”

“What?” I snapped, not looking at him. Where were my fucking shades when I needed them?

“I’m sorry.”

I laughed humorlessly.

“And if you need anything,” he said. “I’m here. I’m always here. I’ll always be here.”

That wasn’t true, was it? He’d die. Like my mother. Like his wife. We all did. We all would.

“You want to do something for me?”

His throat bobbed and his eyes were all watery, his regret and his sorrow coming at me like fucking tentacles. I had to get the hell out of here.

“Very much,” he said.

“Take better care of Beth,” I said, got myself in my truck and drove out of there.

It wasn’t until I was on the highway heading north that I realized I was crying.

And had been for quite some time.

12

Beth

I was blank. Empty. My lungs worked. And my heart beat, but my brain would only buzz and my arms would only clutch Pest and my eyes would only leak.

Did I sit there for minutes? Hours? I couldn’t even tell.

I turned and put Pest on the bed and then slowly picked my clothes up off the floor. My underwear and shorts. My T-shirt. Each time I bent over, I felt more keenly the way he’d used my body. I would be sore for days. My clit and my ass. My inner thighs.

I might have pulled something in my back coming so hard, and I wished with all my heart that he was here so I could tell him that. And we could laugh. And make a list of our sex injuries. Like normal lovers.

Normal people.

Pest barked at me, sitting on the edge of the bed like she knew I was falling to pieces.

“Shit,” I breathed. “You’re mine now.”

I had a dog. A goddamned dog. I had Tommy’s dog.

“You’re mine now,” I said again, petting her wiggling little body. “You and me, Pest. Rejected by Tommy, party of two.” She had surgical tape on her ear, and I put it together that she must have gotten bitten by one of the other dogs and Tommy must have gone inside with her to treat her and that’s how he saw the picture.

“We’re a little banged up, aren’t we?” I whispered, wishing I had something I could bandage. Wishing my pain could scab over and heal in a few days’ time, leaving me a scar I could talk about on first dates or radio interviews. A funny story— “Oh, this? Oh, well, once I fell in love and all we did was hurt each other. No big deal.”

But there would be nothing short-lived about this pain.

I’d hurt him. Really hurt him. And that hurt me more than his leaving did.

And I had no idea how I would get over it.

So how could I possibly expect him to get over it?

I stood still in the middle of the room that smelled like our bodies.

I couldn’t expect him to get over it. And how…childish and selfish I’d been to expect that of him. To ask that of him. To just let this go, like I’d borrowed his car and put a dent in it.

And I realized that I thought he should do it, because I believed I had done it.

I put my hands over my face, feeling the world I’d constructed since St. Joke’s crumble around me.

I believed I’d put aside the assault. That I’d let it go. That I’d cried the effects of it away. That because I was okay with sex, that I was okay with what had happened to me.

But I wasn’t.

If I thought he could just let this kind of pain go…well, that seemed wrong.

And it seemed like something I should deal with.

And somehow, as I thought about it, as the shame of my childishness and cowardice settled over me and through me—I felt, in a weird way, myself change. My heartbeat found a slightly different rhythm. My skin felt different on my body.

I had a lot of regrets in my life, but this… God… this.

It was like fire. It burned through me, leaving me completely different. Brittle and burned. Frail.

My shoes were beneath the bed and I went down on my knees to grab them and as I pulled them out, along came a bunch of dust bunnies and a phone.

My phone? I thought. An old one? I didn’t remember leaving one here last time I visited. I flipped it over, touching the screen, and Carissa’s messages popped up.

Bates needs proof.

Proof of Beth being all right.

Proof her mother means her harm.

Proof, Tommy, or he’s letting Sammy off his fucking leash.

How many times did I tell you not to screw this up, Tommy!

Shit.

My brain sizzled and popped, and the world returned in a wild, crazy rush. Tommy’s phone.

I didn’t give Tommy his fucking phone.

I shoved my feet into my shoes and opened the door, shutting it before Pest could come back out, and ran down the stairs. Peter was sitting on the back of his truck, his eyes on the driveway.

“How long ago did he leave?” I asked, sliding to a halt next to him, the dirt and gravel kicking up dust under my feet.

“Twenty minutes.”

“Gimme… I need your keys… I need to go get him.”

He looked at me. “What?”

“I have to get him. He left his phone. He needs… there are things he needs to know.”

And the crazy irony of not being able to call him.

“You’re going to drive after him and what?” Peter asked. “Drive him off the road?”

“If I have to.”

“Beth…” He took me by the shoulder, and it was so startling. Peter never touched me. We both stood there as if we were surrounded by bees. “That’s crazy. He’s twenty minutes ahead of you, and we don’t know where he went.”

I knew where he went. The only place he would go. Right back to the city to face down Bates.

“He’s in trouble!” I said. “And it’s my fault.” My voice cracked, but I was out of tears.

“How?” he asked, and again it was strange. He didn’t do these things, comfort or ask questions. He let me come and go as I pleased. “Tell me,” he said. “We can figure it out.”

He knew about the foster home, about how Tommy had saved me and killed the foster father. But he didn’t know the rest of it. Bates and the debt, how Tommy had been living in suspended animation waiting for his past to come calling. And how when it finally did, it was to pick me up and take me to my mother.

I told him all of it, the words barely making sense as they tripped out of my mouth.

“But he didn’t take you to your mother, right?” he asked. “That’s what started all this with her?”

“I begged him not to, and now he has this Bates guy after him.” I fumbled for the phone and showed it to him.

Peter blinked. “And you think he’s going back to San Francisco?”

“Of course he is,” I said. Because that’s what Tommy does; he stands up when other people run. “I have to go. I have to go help him. I have to tell Bates what my mother did.”

Peter nodded. “Okay. I’ll drive. Do you know where he lives?”

I shook my head.

“Wait,” I said and quickly pulled up the texts from Simon and called the number attached to it.

Simon’s voice answered before it even rang. “This is Simon Malik. I’m out of country for the next six weeks. I’m available on my European phone number. If this is an emergency, contact Denise Pebis at the New York Times.”

I hung up with shaking fingers and then scrolled through Tommy’s contacts for something that looked like Simon’s European phone number. But there was nothing that looked right.

There were in fact only four other numbers saved in his phone. One was for a Chinese restaurant.

Three people. I went back to the list of people he’d recently called and found the one he’d called the most. Paul. And I dialed that number.

“Tommy,” he answered before the first ring was over. “Jesus, buddy, are you in some kind of trouble?”

“This isn’t Tommy,” I said, trying to make my voice sound calm and reasonable. Friendly even. But in my own ears I sounded like a freaking-out lunatic. “My name is Beth Renshaw—”

“What the fuck are you doing with Tommy’s phone?”

“He left it… and I need to get it back to him. But I don’t know where he lives. I am a friend of his—”

“Oh, I fucking know who you are,” he said. “I won’t be telling you shit, sweetheart. You got him in some kind of trouble that Tommy would never go looking for on his own.”

He hung up on me. And I’d been expecting it, a little. But it still stung. It still stung that out there in the world I was being painted as the one who was trouble.

Aren’t you? I thought. Aren’t you the one who always gets him in trouble? Like since day fucking one…

I took a deep breath, my brain scrambling.

Peter looked so pained that he had no answers for me.

“Okay, how about this Bates guy?” he asked. “You know how to get in touch with him?”

I shook my head.

“The Carissa you—”

“Yes!” I cried. Not that I knew where Carissa lived, but I could just go right to Carissa and, through her, Bates, explain my situation to them. Hope like fireworks exploded in my head. I went to Carissa’s texts and pulled up her number and called it.

But immediately a robotic voice said, “This number is no longer in service.”

“Shit!” I said and then yelled it, startling birds from trees, bringing the dogs running up out of the bush to investigate.

“Hey, hey,” Peter said, again grabbing my shoulders, giving me a little shake. “We can find out where Tommy lives, right? You can find him like you found me. Using your computer?”

“It took me months to find you,” I whispered, dread turning cold and hard in my stomach. “And his name is Tommy MacNeill. Do you have any idea how many Tommy MacNeill’s live in San Francisco?”

“Well, let’s get in the car. We’ll think of something on the way.”

Inspiration was not a lightning bolt; it rarely was for me. It was like the slow clearing of a storm at night. The careful, stalling retreat of dark clouds until one star appeared. And then another. I had an idea…a sense… but it wasn’t until most of the clouds were gone and the sky was revealed that I could connect the dots and see what I needed to do.

It was what I should have done all along.

“We’re not going to San Francisco,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

I looked down at Tommy’s phone and tried to make a list of what I needed. But for this I didn’t need anything. I had it all. Right here.

I needed me and this phone and the courage to do what I’d never been able to do before.

“Nowhere,” I said.

And somehow that I was coming back around full circle to this moment seemed only right. I just hoped it was in time.

* * *

Tommy

I filled up with gas and decided to get off the 5 and take the scenic route because…well, because it might be my last shot at the scenic route. The 152 went by the big reservoir, and it was a bright blue day, the kind that hurt my eyes. And I realized, with the highway stretched out ahead of me in a long ribbon, that I hadn’t talked to Simon lately. I dug in my back pocket where I usually had my phone, but it was empty.

Shit.

The duffel on the passenger seat beside me didn’t have it either.

Fuck. I’d left my phone with Beth.

Had she found it? I wondered. And I tried, really tried not to think about what she was doing right now. If she’d gotten off that bed. If she and Pest were curled up in a ball convinced that they were missing me.

That’s not fair, I told myself.

She was going to miss me. Just like I was going to miss her.

It just didn’t change anything.

I’d imagined leaving the mountain with no way of getting in touch with her. That would be easier in a way. No temptation. Because this, wondering if she had my phone, it was all kinds of temptation. I turned the radio up and rolled the windows down and tried to think about anything but her.

Which meant—weirdly—that I thought about my mom. That picture of her as a beautiful disgruntled teenager had rattled me.

Drudging up memories from the bottom of my brain that I hadn’t thought about in a long time. A really long time. The memories so long buried that I’d forgotten they actually existed, but they cropped up like unexploded WWII bombs in the French countryside. I had to handle each and every one of them with total care in fear of explosion.

Red blankets and ploughman’s lunches. The sound of her voice reading me the first Harry Potter book. We only got about halfway before the book got left behind in one of our ridiculous middle-of-the-night moves, but the memories were some of the sweetest I had of her.

She’d been a moth to flame for bad decisions. She’d brought men into our lives who’d had no business being there. Then, when they left, she’d stay in bed for days, not eating the sandwiches I brought her. Hugging me at night so hard, like she was trying to absorb me.

She was quick to anger and quick to laugh, and even as a kid I’d known…something wasn’t right.

I knew enough about bipolar disorder that it made sense of some of the things she’d do. The manic ferocity of her joy and the bottomless nature of her depression. And I wondered, if she’d been able to stay on meds, if she would have been able to love me better.

Love herself better.

And though I didn’t want to, I thought about what she must have been like as a kid. A teenager. In a house all the way up on a mountain.

I thought a lot about grief.

After Simon left for college and it was just me in that fucking apartment, just me until I took all my grief and all my loneliness and approached one of the women on the corner and bought my first twisted-up baggie.

You make shitty decisions when you’re blind and stupid with grief. And you really don’t care who you hurt.

And I didn’t care enough about Peter to forgive him. Or maybe that was a lie; how the fuck would I know? But I understood Peter.

Down to the ground I understood him.

I’d holed myself up in my shitty neighborhood, in my crappy apartment because I didn’t have a mountain to call my own. If I had, I’d be there.

It was almost—almost—funny.

The wind blew through the open window of the truck, and it was warm and smelled like highway and dust. It tasted like copper on my tongue, and the sun felt good on my arm.

The radio, which had been buzzing in and out with static, buzzed back in, and it took me a few seconds to realize, to hear it entirely, but the song playing was Beth’s.

And I turned it up as loud as it could go until her voice was beating against my eardrums.

Because that was the fucking key to grief, wasn’t it? You had to keep moving.

Too bad I figured that out too late.

The sun was setting when I got to the city. I wasn’t sure what I expected. But I pulled up in front of my apartment and there was no one there. No goons out front. No goons across the street. Just the regular men and women that worked the street on this edge of town.

Don’t get excited, I told myself. They were probably all waiting for me in my apartment.

Sammy for sure would be waiting to get his hands on me.

I parked the truck in front, grabbed my duffel bag, bit back the grief over missing Pest more than I thought possible, and pulled from the glove box the big long bowie knife in its serious leather case that I’d bought from one of the gas stations along the way.

Serious knife for a gas station, but whatever. If Sammy was waiting for me, I wasn’t going easy.

I took the stairs, my heart beating behind my eyes, sure at any minute I was about to get jumped, but it didn’t happen.

I got to my door without any drama. Unlocking my door, I took a deep breath, dropped my bag, unsheathed the knife. But inside my place was dark and still. Just like I left it. I closed the door behind me as silent as I could, but the click still felt like it boomed. My back to the wall, I edged through the kitchen, past Pest’s bowl, into the TV room, where the old take-out containers from the bar still sat.

Fuck, less than a week ago. How was that possible?

I checked every corner of my place. Every closet. Under the bed. Everywhere. No sign of Sammy or Carissa or anything.

My apartment was exactly the way I’d left it.

Empty.

So. Fucking. Empty. I had a couch. A TV. A bed and a drawerful of clothes. A closetful of work boots. Some books.

Mismatched plates. A couple of coffee mugs.

And this stuff… this stuff was nothing. Garbage. Things I could leave behind and never miss. No photographs. No memories. With Pest gone, this apartment could have belonged to anyone.

No one.

And it was weird. Alarming actually, that I’d lived like that for so long.

That I hadn’t cared.

That I was content being a shadow. Empty and quiet and…waiting.

Always waiting.

Fuck that, I thought. Fuck that right now.

I wasn’t waiting anymore. Not one more minute. I grabbed my bag from outside the door, clipped the knife to my belt, and put on a jacket to cover it.

And I left to go find Bates.

13

Tommy

Lucy’s Bar was quiet on a Thursday evening.

The lights and the muted televisions and the bottles of booze lit up behind the bar like they were something special were all so familiar to me and at the same time totally different.

Completely new.

It was the adrenaline, I knew. I’d lived on the edge of fear long enough to know when my fight-or-flight instincts were fully engaged. But it had been a while. And the world was safe and dangerous all at once.

“Whoa,” Lucy said, looking up at me as I came in the door. “What happened to you?”

I’d forgotten about the bruises from the fight. I touched my eye where the swelling lingered and tongued the edge of my lip where it was still split. Kissing Beth like my life depended on it hadn’t helped a whole lot.

For a second I was swamped with the idea of my blood on her mouth. That even now she’d be tasting the copper of me on her tongue.

I shook off the feeling, narrowing my attention back to the shit at hand.

“Scrape,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah, well you don’t look it. Beer?”

“No thanks.”

Her eyebrows furrowed. “Where’s Pest? What’s...?” Her gaze fastened on to me, and she really took me in. “What’s going on?” she asked in a careful voice. “You seem different.”

I was different in a thousand incalculable ways.

“I’m not. I just… I need your help.”

“Okay? Shoot.”

She leaned over the bar, the Puerto Rican flags on her hands, the beautiful flowers up her arms. She was a work of art, and I hated the idea of pulling her into this in any way.

But I didn’t have a lot of options.

“That woman that was here the last time I came in.”

Lucy went very still. Her face. Her hair even. “What about her?”

“Where can I find her?”

“Nope.” She shook her head. Got real busy putting glasses in the racks above the far edge of the bar. “No way, Tommy.”

“I need to see her.” I stepped to the bar, leaning halfway over it, and as she kept putting glasses up, I grabbed on to her hand, forcing her to stop. She looked at me wide-eyed, and I realized this was the first time I’d touched her, in all my years of coming here, even that night when she’d invited me back to her place. I’d never touched her.

And I didn’t feel anything, not now. Touching Beth had burned my nerves, and unless it was her under my hand, I was pretty sure I’d never feel anything ever again.

I lifted my hand from hers, and she stepped away from the bar.

“Why?” she asked and pointed at my face. “That scrape you got into, was it because of her?”

“No,” I said. “But I need to see her. Talk to her. Or the guys that did this are going to come back, and they’re not going to take it easy on me.”

“Tommy,” she sighed. “Why’d you go get mixed up with this shit?” “I’ve been mixed up with this shit my whole life. Since I was a kid. All of this”—I gestured to my face, the bar, the fucking knife on my hip—“was only a matter of time.”

Lucy hung her head for a second and then looked up at me, her eyes dry and fierce. “They run shit out of that club the Moonlight Lounge.” I didn’t know anything about clubs, and she took one look at my face and muttered, “Hermit,” under her breath. She grabbed a napkin from the bar and a pen from the knot at the top of her hair and drew me a map. “I don’t know the address exactly, but it’s around here.”

She pushed the napkin back over to me. “Be…be careful, okay? And come back.”

If you can. She didn’t even have to say it; the words were written in the air above our heads.

“I’ll see you soon,” I said, and I took the napkin, tucked it in my pocket and went back out into the cooling air of my city at twilight.

The Moonlight Lounge was a warehouse on the edge of the cool side of Market. The bricks were painted black and there was no sign, just a red velvet rope and a bouncer in a suit at the door.

I didn’t recognize the bouncer, so that was a bonus, but when I got through the line up to him, he took one look at my beat-to-shit face, the dark circles under my eyes, and the beard I hadn’t bothered to shave for a few days and shook his head.

“No way.”

“I’m here to see your boss.”

“You don’t know my fucking boss,” he said, staring out at the street.

“Why don’t you tell whoever is on the end of that earpiece in your ear that Tommy MacNeill is here to see Bates.”

That made the guy’s eyes widen for just a second, and then like he was a thug extra in some shitty movie about a bodyguard looking after a president, he lifted his wrist and talked into the sleeve of his jacket.

I barely stopped myself from rolling my eyes.

Suddenly the heavy door behind us opened and it was Carissa standing there, wearing a glittering green dress and a frown. She was so beautiful I couldn’t look at her too long.

“Jesus, Tommy, really?”

“Hi, Carissa.” I waved at her.

“You armed?”

“I don’t have a gun.”

She rolled her eyes and flicked her fingers, and Bouncer was frisking me. Yanking my knife off my belt.

“This is all he has,” Bouncer said, and Carissa held out her hand and he put my knife in it. She slid it out of the leather holster, rubbed her thumb against the edge as if testing its sharpness, and then sheathed it again.

“Come along,” she said with a sigh as if I were a toddler being particularly troublesome. I followed meekly, towering over her.

Though it was early, the club was half full of young beautiful people, the shine of sweat and glitter all over them. The club was going for that old speakeasy vibe, and to my totally not cool eye, it seemed to nail it.

“Why are you here?” Carissa asked, yelling over the thrum of the music.

“I’m not waiting for Bates to send Sammy to come finish the job. I had enough waiting for a beating at St. Joke’s.” She looked at me a long time, careful and still and unreadable.

“You fucked her,” she said, her face suddenly hard, the beauty cracking around a rage that burned white-hot.

I blinked, wondering how she knew.

“Don’t bother lying, Tommy. I can see it on you.”

“I’m not going to lie,” I said quietly. “I’m just here to make things right.”

After a moment she laughed. “You don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?” Lots of things I imagined, but there was something particular she was talking about and I was starting to get pissed. She started to laugh. She laughed so hard, she bent double at the waist, holding on to her knees. Looking for one ridiculous minute like the kid I’d grown up with.

“Fuck off, Carissa, this isn’t funny.”

“But it is! It is. Tommy the hero. Except you don’t need to be here. Your girl? She saved you.”

I blinked, an empty vacuum in my chest. “What…is she here?” I stepped back, looking around like I could find her in this place. And I could, I knew it, I could find her anywhere.

“Come on,” Carissa said, and she led me around the crowd to the stairs that led up to the second floor. There was a man at the bottom of the steps, black suit, no neck.

“Bates has a type,” I said.

“Remember when you volunteered to work for him?” she asked. “In the jail cell.”

“Vaguely.”

“It never would have worked.”

“Because I have a neck?”

“Because, you, Tommy MacNeill, have a little too much honor.”

She led us through a foyer, shadowed and small, and I felt my testicles try and climb up into my body. Everything about this scene said danger. Every single animal instinct I had left in this world wanted me out of there. Now.

But still I followed her, to an arched doorway that opened up into an office.

A fucking office, with a man sitting at a desk, working on a computer like he was an accountant or something. But when Carissa walked in, he looked up immediately, like he’d scented her on the wind. Or he’d grown accustomed to the flash of sequins in the corner of his eye and looked up whenever they were there.

It was Bates. A little bit older, but still the same ice-cold face. Pale gray eyes. Same black suit. Same bowel-tightening threat of danger and power.

“This is a surprise,” he said, leaning back in the chair.

“He doesn’t know,” Carissa said, crossing to a drink car set up in the corner. “Would you like something?” she asked, one eyebrow raised.

“Me? No.”

Without asking Bates, she poured two glasses of club soda, put a lime wedge in each and walked one over to Bates.

“You said you didn’t work for him,” I said. Hating that Carissa was serving this man anything.

“She doesn’t,” Bates answered, taking the glass and setting it down on his desk. Carissa kept the other for herself, taking a big sip while watching me. “I take it you’re here to explain why you didn’t fulfill your obligations to me.”

“I am.” I’d worked on this speech on the way over, but now that I was in this luxurious gangster office, I was stupid with nerves. “I picked up Beth and I drove her out to the rehab facility and she was going to go, but then her mother was there.”

“Dr. Abigail Renshaw. Not quite what she seems, is she?”

I blinked. “No. She isn’t. She abused Beth for years.”

“I am aware of that,” Bates said. “Now.”

“I couldn’t hand her over. Not to her mom. Not after everything she did.”

“But what about what she did to you?” Carissa asked, and I turned to look at her, standing beside a door leading to a different room.

“What do you mean?”

“The thing with your grandfather?”

“How do you know that?” I asked, and she shrugged like it didn’t matter. Like the most painful parts of my life were simply gossip for her. Maybe I’d been wrong about Carissa; maybe our past had damaged her. Just way down deep where you couldn’t see it at first.

“You don’t want to hurt her, but she must have hurt you,” Carissa said.

“Dos that matter?” I asked, looking back at Bates. “I mean, is that part of the debt?”

“No,” Carissa said. “It’s just a question. I just… I want to know, I guess, if you’re still so desperate for love that you’ll hurt yourself to get it.”

I gaped at her.

“Carissa,” Bates said like he was chastising her.

But she held up her hand, walking across the room like she was in charge, not the dangerous gangster at the desk. “Are you here sacrificing your life for some girl who doesn’t deserve it? Just like you did when we were kids.”

“No,” I said.

“You’re not sacrificing yourself?” she asked. “Because Sammy is in the building and—” “She’s worth everything,” I said. “She was then and she is now. I don’t regret a single fucking thing I’ve done. Not for her. Not for Simon or Rosa or you.”

“Do you love her?”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

“Do you love her?” Carissa asked again. “She nearly got you killed. She lied to you. Kept like… a million secrets from you. You look like you fucked her, so there’s that. But does it make up for—”

“I love her,” I said. “But that doesn’t change anything.”

Carissa pursed her lips and took a sip of her drink. I stood there waiting for her to say something baiting, to ask me some deeply personal and totally inexplicable question, but she only walked away.

“Do whatever you want to him,” she said to Bates, and then she was gone.

I sagged when she left the room.

“I don’t apologize for Carissa,” he said. “I respect her too much. But she can be…ferocious on some topics.”

I laughed, an exasperated, relieved huff. I had no clue what was going on.

“This is what she’s talking about,” Bates said and turned. He picked up a remote control and pointed it at a screen I hadn’t paid much attention to, hanging on the far side of the wall.

It blinked to life, and it was Beth there. Sitting at the picnic table on Peter’s deck. She wore her hair in a bun and no makeup. On her neck were the marks I’d left on her. Hickeys and scrapes. It felt like a million years since I’d seen her, but the proof that it was only hours ago nearly wrecked me.

“Hey, everyone,” she said with a smile and a wave. “It’s me! No makeup. No costumes. I’m not even going to sing for you. I just… I want to tell you a story. And I think it’s a story I should have told you a long time ago. But first I want to tell all of you, all my fans, how grateful I am for your kindness and patience for the last few days. The last few months, really. What started as this small little thing, between us”—she wagged her finger between her and the camera, and I felt like she was talking to me—“really exploded, and I think, well, I forgot about us a little bit. And you guys have been cool and patient and kind and I’m really grateful.”

“What is this?” I whispered, not taking my eyes off the screen. Not for a minute.

“Beth uploaded this video to her YouTube channel about an hour ago.”

“The story I need to tell you is a long one. And it’s not easy. So I’m going to need a little bit more of your patience. When I was a kid, my mom was a doctor…”

I stood there riveted, watching as she told the whole story. Her mother’s career, its relative crash and burn, and then the way she’d treated Beth, which was illegal and unethical and cruel. And she told the whole story without crying. Without hate in her voice. Without any of the anger that I knew she felt.

She was calm and she was careful and she was utterly persuasive.

And I was proud of her more than I thought I was capable of.

“My mother has been on the news a lot lately, saying she’s worried about me and that I need care and treatment. And she tells a good story about it, and it’s good because in part, it’s true. I do need care. And I could use some treatment, and I’m in the process of doing that right now. And I might need medication, lots of us do, for things we can’t control, chemistry in our brains and our bodies that make us different. Not bad, just different. But that will be between me and a doctor I trust. Because I don’t trust my mother. And I mean this emphatically and without qualifications, I do not need her. To everyone listening who believes that my mother would be the best thing for me right now, you are wrong. Empathetically and without qualifications, wrong.”

“I think that part is for me,” Bates said, and I nodded, still watching, because it was like Beth had turned into a queen in the hours since I’d been gone. Like telling her story had given her strength I’d never seen before.

“Also…” She pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “I was sexually assaulted when I was a teenager. And I’ve told myself that I was okay with what happened. That I wasn’t haunted. I wasn’t scared of sex. Or men. I had healthy consensual enjoyable sex, so how could I possibly still be hurt by what happened to me? But I think that story about being okay, was a lie. And I have grown used to lying. And I can’t do it anymore. I have made a lot of mistakes. More than I can count, and some of them…” She looked off camera, and I imagined Peter there watching her. Helping her. And I felt my heart pulling in my chest. “Some of them are unforgivable. And that’s… that’s a thing I have to live with. And to any of you who are in a position like I was in, where you’re being abused, mistreated, not listened to or ignored, I want to tell you this. The world is so large. It’s bigger than you can dream. And there are people in your life who want it to be small. Who want you to feel small and incapable and without value. You aren’t. You are gigantic and you contain multitudes and you can do anything. You might need help getting there, and I urge you to find it. You can tell the truth. And let go of the secrets. And you can be your amazing and real self. And I, for one, would love to see it.”

Her smile was amazing with those two front teeth that leaned against each other.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back. I don’t know if I’ll be making more music. My heart says yes, but right now I have some things I really need to take care of. Myself. The people I love. The people I hurt. I… I have some work to do. And before I go…” She took a deep breath. “I have one more thing I have to say. Tommy, I have no idea if you’ll ever see this, but… I love you. I love you more than I’ve loved anything in my life. I think because… before this moment, you were the only person I was ever honest with. And I know that sounds ridiculous considering how I’ve lied to you…” She looked away and carefully wiped her eyes. “You always said you didn’t deserve me, but the truth, the real truth, the truth I’ve known in my bones all along, is that I didn’t deserve you. I wish…” She stopped, wiped her eyes. She tried to keep the smile on her face but couldn’t. “I think you’re right. You were always right. Wishes are dangerous, and they’re not for people like me.” Her hand reached for the screen. “This is Jada—” She shook her head. “I mean Beth. This is Beth. See you later.”

And the screen went dark.

The screen went dark, but I didn’t look away.

She couldn’t wish anymore. All this time and I’d finally succeeded in making her like me.

Wishes are dangerous, and they’re not for people like me.

The pain was gutting.

“I asked for proof,” Bates said, “of her mother’s abuse. That’s good enough for me.”

Bates sat back down, his golden head bent over the desk, and still I just kept standing there.

“You can go,” he said, not looking up.

“That’s… that’s it?”

Bates was silent.

“All these fucking years and that’s it? A YouTube video and I can go on with my life?”

“You were free to go on with your life seven years ago. It’s not my fault you didn’t.”

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. “Why have you done any of this?”

Bates got to his feet and walked around the desk, but I didn’t step back, even as the danger he radiated made every hair on my body stand up.

“I told you that night,” Bates said. “You did something for me when you killed that man. So I took care of you.”

“Are you doing this for Carissa?” I asked, unsure of what the relationship was between them.

His face went icy and cold.

“No,” he said.

“Were you a foster kid at St. Jokes?”

“I’m not in the business of answering questions. You did what I asked. The debt is paid. Now get out of here.”

“But Beth?”

“Beth is not my concern. You are no longer my concern. You are, however, Sammy’s concern, so I’d get the fuck out of here before he finds out you’re in the building. Because I do not hold Sammy’s leash.”

“What about Carissa? Do you hold her leash?”

The blow was a surprise. The punch right across my face. It sent me back three steps, nearly crashing into the drink cart. I licked my lip and tasted blood.

Fuck. That cut was never going to heal.

“Leave. Now,” Bates said, straightening the sleeve of his jacket. “And get the fuck out of my city. If I see you or hear you, you won’t get a second chance. You’ll end up dead and buried where you would have been years ago.”

His threat, I didn’t doubt it. Not for a minute. The cold that rolled off him was the absolute truth. Leave or die.

So I left.

14

Tommy

Being a mason in the city of San Francisco paid me good money, and the fact that I never spent it meant that I had a pretty fat bank account. I didn’t even bother going back to my apartment. I got myself a new phone and drove away from my life. My old life.

I pretended as I drove down Highway 1 that I wasn’t going to her, even though deep in my gut, where my instinct and my internal compass lived, I knew I was going to her.

Because I knew what she wanted to wish for. I knew what she was too scared to say out loud.

She wished for me. For me.

And I couldn’t be the reason she no longer had the will to wish for something better for herself. I couldn’t be the reason she got stuck in her guilt and her fear.

And it wasn’t that I had nowhere else to go. I had a big wide world to disappear into. But none of it held any appeal.

Because she was where I belonged.

It took me two days, sleeping in a hotel halfway between San Francisco and Santa Barbara, my phone growing hot in my hand as I watched her video twenty times before falling asleep.

Every time I watched it, I saw something different, some new way she’d changed. The look in her eye. The tilt of her chin. The squared-off shape of her shoulders. She was older than she’d been when I drove away from that mountain. By centuries it seemed sometimes.

And she was only more beautiful for it.

I kept thinking about how she’d turned her tragedy into a flashlight for kids who lived with the same kind of abuse she’d lived with. Who’d built walls out of secrets and lies in an effort to control what was uncontrollable. Other people. Our own pain.

Our own hearts.

She’d turned her cowardice into bravery, and it would take someone stronger than me not to crumble in the face of that. I was good and crumbled. Maybe I always had been.

I found my way back up Peter’s mountain. Parked my truck in the spot where we’d parked the old one. I sat there, the engine running, watching the two dogs come trotting out around the side of the house.

The back door opened, and Peter came out with his shotgun. When he saw it was me, he put the shotgun against the house and stood there waiting for me to get out of the truck.

It took me a long time because I didn’t know what I was going to do. Or say.

Mostly I wanted to say nothing. Do nothing.

I looked up at the apartment above the garage, thinking that she’d come running out any minute, but she didn’t. And the longer I sat there, the weirder it got. Finally Peter walked over to my side of the truck, and I rolled down the window, still unwilling to commit to getting out.

“She’s in town,” he said. “She found a counselor to talk to. Someone she likes. You…you want to wait for her inside?”

The news about the counselor unlocked some of my muscles, and I turned off the car. But still I sat there. And Peter stood there. Crickets were going bonkers in the long grass outside.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I don’t…I can’t forgive you.”

“I don’t expect you to.”

I rubbed at my eyes, my face. My beard was itchy as hell.

“You hungry?” he asked.

My stomach answered for me, growling in the cricket noise.

“Come on in, so—” He stopped himself just in time, before the word son came fully out of his mouth. “I’ve got food; you’re hungry. I’ll give you space.”

Space and food sounded like something I could handle from this guy, so I popped open my door and he stepped out of the way and he led me around the house to the back porch. To my total surprise, Pest was there, lying in the sun, and as I turned the corner, she looked up and saw me.

She jumped to her feet and charged me, a wiggling bundle of dog. I scooped her up and accepted her kisses, even the ones on the mouth, with a happy heart.

“I missed you, too, Pest,” I said. And I really had.

“Go on and sit. I’ll bring something out for you.”

I sat with Pest at the patio set, scratching her the way she liked, and Peter brought out another version of ploughman’s lunch. He laid out the tablecloth and the bread and tomatoes. He had sliced turkey this time, and when he put down the hard-boiled eggs, I felt my whole body stiffen.

“Sorry,” he said. “Habit.” He grabbed the edge of the platter to take it away.

“It’s all right,” I said. “You can leave it.” It was, after all, only food. Peter was true to his word, and he sat on the other side of the patio, reading his paper, while I ate two eggs and fed Pest all the turkey.

“I saw the video she made,” I said. “Bates did too. The debt is paid.”

“That’s good. You’re safe now?”

I nodded, looking out at the sun behind a cloud. It looked like the yolk of the hard-boiled eggs I’d just eaten.

“How is she?” I asked.

“She’s…dimmer.” I looked over at him, alarmed, because I knew exactly what he meant. “Some of the light that makes Beth, Beth is gone. But I don’t think it’s gone forever. She’s… working hard at fixing some things for herself. She wants to deserve you.”

I turned away, my heart in my guts.

Peter was quiet for a long time until we heard the sound of a car coming up the hill and parking on the other side of the house.

“That’d be her,” Peter said. “I’ll go on inside.”

“Tommy!” I heard Beth yell, and I closed my eyes. She came running around the side of the house, her shoes hitting the wood of the patio. In my arms Pest started wiggling. “Peter, is Tommy—”

She stopped, and I turned in my seat to face her.

She’d cut her hair. I had no idea why that was the first thing I noticed, but I did. It was all cut off at her chin, the bright red roots an inch long at her scalp. I must have been staring because she touched it, her cheeks red.

“I did it…I did it myself. I know it looks bad. My mom always kept my hair long. Made me wear those buns and ponytails, and I just kept the habit because it was easier to change my look when I had long hair. But after the video I couldn’t stand it anymore—”

“You look beautiful,” I said. “You always look beautiful.”

Her shoulders slumped forward. “What are you doing here, Tommy?”

“Bates saw the video. The debt is paid, but…I had to leave the city.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice a little cooler. “You just need a place to go.”

I stood up from the deck and set Pest down. She went running over to the other two dogs and lay down between them. One of the pack. Odd, sure, but she’d found a place where she belonged.

“I could go anywhere,” I said, stepping close enough that I could smell her. I could see all her freckles, the light golden flecks in her dark amber eyes. I could see all of her. Every flaw and every beautiful, radiant strength. And there were so many more strengths. “I want to be with you. You are where I belong.”

Her lips trembled, and she was blinking back tears. “I’ve messed up. I’ve messed up over and over again, and all I’ve ever done is hurt you.”

“I wish…” I said and her eyes closed. “No, look at me, Beth. Look at me.” I forced her to open her eyes. I put my hands on her shoulders, and I waited until she looked at me. “I wish you didn’t believe that,” I said.

“You don’t wish. You told me that. You said it was dangerous, and I didn’t believe you. But you’re right. It hurts.” Tears ran over her eyes. “It hurts to wish.”

“No,” I said. “Listen to me. Listen. You need to wish. Your soul requires it, and it was me that took that away from you. And it’s wrong. It’s so wrong. You know what happens when you don’t wish? You turn out like me. Stuck. Waiting. Accepting all the shit because you never learned how to want more. I want more, Beth. I want so much more. I deserve so much more. You taught me that.”

“But I lied—”

“You did. And I kidnapped you. And I almost left you in that house, drugged up and surrounded by assholes because I was too much a coward.”

“No, you saved me.”

“And you saved me. Don’t you get it? You’ve saved me over and over again. Every touch, every kiss—”

“Shhhh, shhh.” She grabbed my face, her fingers squishing my lips together like she could seal my words inside.

“Beth,” I said, the word all jumbled by her hand. She laughed. I smiled, my lips curling against her fingers.

I gathered her fingers in mine, kissing the tips. Kissing the palms and then closing her hands into fists like I could get her to hold on to the kiss. Hold on to me.

“We both screwed up. We were both scared. We lied and we kept secrets and we’re just…we’re going to stop.”

“We’re going to stop,” she said, taking my words and making them a vow.

“And you’re going to wish again,” I told her. “And I’m going to learn how to do it.”

“What do you wish for?” she asked.

“You. What do you wish for?”

“You.”

I couldn’t stop myself. I held her hands to my chest, and I kissed her. Beth and Tommy. Us. It felt like a first kiss, a beginning kiss. It felt like sunshine and a warm breeze and a home.

It felt like everything I ever wanted and was too scared to ask for in this world.

And it was mine now. Mine to have.

“I love you,” I said against her lips, breathing the words into her mouth so she would believe them in her body. “And I belong with you. And you belong with me. Everything else is just something we need to figure out.”

She leaned back, tears running down her face, over her lips. I tried to wipe them away, but they came too fast. “Every shitty thing in our past, it’s led us to here,” she said. “To each other.”

I nodded. My soul at ease. The past in the past. The future a bright, shining road ahead of us.

Epilogue

Beth

Six months later

I wasn’t sure who was more nervous. Me or Tommy. Or Peter. Peter was probably losing his mind, he was so nervous.

Tommy drove up the mountain to the farm, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road because the road was treacherous. But I was watching him.

“You sure you want to do this?” I asked, my legs curled up under the white skirt I was wearing. I wasn’t sure why I was wearing a skirt, except that it seemed like maybe a skirt kind of occasion.

“It was my idea,” Tommy said, glancing for just a second off the road, and of course we hit a pothole so deep our teeth rattled.

“Yeah, but I feel like maybe I pressured you.”

“You didn’t, babe.”

It was funny in this place we were in, all either one of us had to do was suggest something and we’d run over ourselves to try and make it happen. Not out of guilt—that had burned out after our first real fight. Guilt was not a sustaining emotion. That’s what my counselor said.

No, we just were in the business of making each other happy. Big things. Small things. If Tommy wanted it, I did what I could to get it for him. And he was almost worse.

Or better? Yeah. He was better.

Two weeks ago I told him I wanted to drive up to see Peter. And now…here we were.

“I could have done this by myself,” I said. “You didn’t have to come.”

“You’ve made that clear, Beth,” he said, all dry and sarcastic.

Finally we got to the top of the mountain, the trees overhead breaking up to let in great streams of sunlight. Tommy parked and turned off the engine on our truck, and we sat there for a while, staring at the house.

The dogs came around, barking.

The back door opened, and Peter came out, looking frail.

“Oh,” I breathed. “He looks old.”

Tommy beside me was silent.

“Should I feel more?” he asked.

“I think you should feel whatever you feel.”

“I just… I don’t have the energy to be angry anymore.”

“I fucked that out of you,” I said with a joke and saucy smile when he smiled at me.

“You did. It took some time, but you fucked the anger right out of me.”

I touched his face, stroked his hair. Because I liked it and he needed it. He told me once, a few months ago, that everything was better when I touched him, so like the lovesick sap I was, I touched him all the time.

“I just don’t know how I feel,” he said.

“Well,” I said, because we’d been in this car a long time and I needed to pee, “maybe we can figure it out, outside the car.”

He smiled, and we both stepped out of the car.

“Hi!” Peter said, stepping out of the shadows toward us. He’d dressed up too a little in that he’d bothered to button his shirt the right way. We didn’t hug, because he didn’t do that, but we smiled at each other.

“Hi, Peter,” I said, my heart full of love for this complicated old man.

Pest came bounding out of the backseat when Tommy opened the door, and Peter’s dogs got to their feet and wagged their tales at the sight of her, all past transgressions forgotten.

Peter was still smiling over my shoulder, though he looked like he was trying to rein it in.

“Tommy, how was traffic?” he asked like it hadn’t been six months since they’d seen each other. I’d been up a few times without Tommy, but this was his first return trip.

“Fine once we got out of LA,” he said.

Peter nodded like that made sense. “Come on in, there’s food in the back.”

He turned and shuffled through the back door, heading through the house to get to the patio. I turned toward the side of the house, ready to walk to the back without going through the minefield of pictures and mementos Peter had in the house. It’s not like he had a lot, but they were powerful and I was pretty sure Tommy wasn’t interested in getting blown up.

But to my surprise, Tommy opened the back door, held open the screen so I could go in first. For a guy raised by wolves, he had the sweetest manners.

“You sure?” I asked.

“I’m not scared of anything in here,” he said. And if I’d fucked the anger out of him, I knew I’d loved the fear out of him. Just like he’d loved the fear out of me. The lies, too.

We walked through the dark house, Tommy behind me. I didn’t look to see if he stopped to gaze at the picture of his mother on the fridge. Or the framed one of him as a baby on the table by the couch. I let him have those seconds to himself.

I stepped onto the patio, sunlit and warm. The table in the corner was already set up for us. Ploughman’s lunch on the faded yellow and pink tablecloth because that was all Peter made.

“How’s the rain?” I asked him.

“Not enough of it. How is the album?”

“Not enough of it,” I said. “But it’s getting there.”

After I’d left here with Tommy, we’d gone back to Los Angeles. I filed a restraining order against my mom, and she’d faded, mostly into the back pages of the tabloids. My record company dropped me. And there’d been no more European tour. Thank God for makeup and Tommy’s construction skills; we didn’t starve. Because my assistant, Beth, had been right all along and every contract I’d signed had been a shitty mercenary contract and we actually had to hire a lawyer so I wasn’t sued.

But four months after everything calmed down, the music came back.

It was Tommy’s idea to make an album. And Tommy had all the best ideas.

I was doing the album on my own. Katy Perry was being super cool and letting me use her studio and sound guys.

It might turn out to be nothing, nothing at all. And I was fine with that. Because the music was back and that was enough for me.

Tommy came out onto the porch behind me.

“Come,” Peter said, never a very comfortable host. “Let’s eat.”

We made our way over to the table and I wanted—because I was more nervous than I let on—to shield Tommy’s eyes from the hard-boiled eggs. Like they might hurt him.

Dumb, I know. But he’d just already been hurt enough.

“How is your work going?” Peter asked Tommy. “Beth said you got a promotion.”

Tommy knew when I came up, I answered Peter’s questions about him. And that I wouldn’t say anything if Tommy didn’t want me to, so worried about betraying him, even a little. But Tommy was cool with it.

“I did. I’m a crew foreman now. We’re working on a bungalow in Santa Monica.”

“Renovations?”

“And restorations,” Tommy said, making awkward small talk. I loved him so much. It hurt how much I loved him. The kind of ache that made me wish my body was bigger so I could hold it better.

“You like it?”

Tommy nodded. “I like the guys. I’m good at the organizing. Never thought I’d be good with budgets.” He shrugged. “But it looks like I am. I don’t have my hands on the tools much anymore, and I’m okay with that too.”

“Your grandmother was an accountant,” Peter said and then stopped, his neck all red with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… I know you don’t want to hear—”

Tommy blew out a big breath, and I held mine. This was not my situation to figure out; I knew that. I couldn’t do this for him.

“I don’t know if we’re family,” Tommy said. “I don’t know what that is outside of Beth. But I don’t hate you. And I’m not mad. Not anymore. When I think of you I’m just…I’m really sad.”

Goddamn it. I told myself I wasn’t going to cry today.

“I’m sad, too,” Peter said.

“I know you are,” Tommy sighed, and I knew Tommy’s sighs like I knew my laptop. That sigh wasn’t forgiveness. But it was acceptance. They might never be family. But they could be…something.

“Let’s eat,” I said. “I’m starving.”

We sat around the table, passing platters of avocados and tomatoes. I handed Tommy the bowl of eggs, and he picked one up and held it in his hand for a second before putting it on his plate.

“Tell me about your wife,” he said all at once. “Betsey. Tell me about her.”

Peter looked, I swear to God, like the heavens had opened up. Like the chance to talk about the woman he loved and missed with someone who shared her blood was a gift he’d never dreamed of getting.

I reached over and grabbed Tommy’s hand under the table, holding on to him so hard there was no chance I’d ever let go.

Because when it came to gifts you never saw coming—like light out of the worst kind of darkness—I knew exactly what that was like.

And I got the very best one.

Suddenly Tommy’s phone chimed, and he winced. “Sorry,” he said. “It might be work. We have the roofers coming today.”

“It’s fine,” Peter said, and Tommy pulled his phone out of the back pocket of his dark blue pants. One glance at the screen, though, and his face went deathly white.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Simon,” he said, looking up at me with stricken eyes. “It’s time for him to pay the debt.”

* * *

Thank you so much for reading WHERE I BELONG! I hope you enjoyed it! If you have a chance, I hope you’ll leave a review. Reviews – good or bad – help readers find books.

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