by Ace Gray
I sat down and skimmed the words, just enough to see her name and remember the way the shape of those letters used to be the same as the shape of my heart. The second I let myself touch the memory in the deepest part of me, I crumpled up the paper and leaned back to shoot it into the trash just a few tables away. It bounced off the back and rustled as it fell into the other sheets.
“You didn’t do it.” Priest startled me, and my feet snapped from the table to the floor, my chair chattering behind.
“What?”
“The way you fight…” He took up his signature stance.
“I’m working on it,” I said as sharp as I could muster.
“And the visitation request?”
I swallowed and my gaze shifted away from him. I couldn’t speak about her. Not to him. Not in here. And judging by the way my heart flipped on itself every single time I thought about her, not even to myself. I sat in solid silence instead.
“You didn’t kill that man.” He enunciated each word softly. “But if you want, I’ll teach you to get revenge on the ones who did.”
Three Months Later…
Watching. Waiting. Every day. All day.
I was used to watching Mercy’s every move out of the corner of my eye but with Dantè gone, I watched her a little more freely. There was no one to catch me red-handed anymore. If Danger or Rousse gave me shit, I’d remind them they were murderers and that snitches of any type get stitches.
She didn’t notice; she had retreated into herself and was too busy breathing in and breathing out. I liked the way it made the swell of her breasts tremble.
Not gonna lie, I kinda liked the sadness that hung on her too. I could imagine both kissing away her tears and feeding them as I sucked at her soul. I wanted to rule her emotions, her world. I wanted her to crave my control.
I’d wait for it. Patiently. Even if the waiting was what killed me a little each day. Now that I had my chance, I wasn’t going to waste it. I wasn’t going to push her. No. I was going to be there to pick up the pieces whenever she chose and fashion them into the woman that I’d always wanted. The woman that I always loved.
“What are you doing?” Rousse interrupted my thoughts, and I couldn’t help but lick my lips as I snapped out of it.
I hadn’t realized that I’d gone a little hard at the breakfast bar and started to stroke it at the thought of Mercy at my, well, mercy.
“You’re fucking disgusting. Go to your room.” He gestured down the hall. “What are you jerking it to anyways? Love it or List it? Good Christ, you’re a freak.”
I tried to swallow my smile but just couldn’t. Specially not when Mercy chose that moment to walk back into the house. In a dress no less. Her long legs extended from the circle of her skirt as it fluttered around her thighs like it was caught in a breeze, a breeze that was only a slave to her. Her toned calves flexed as she balanced on one foot to nudge the door shut with the other behind her. She didn’t quite get it and rather than offer, I watched as she set down her grocery bags, and her hem rose high enough to expose the curve of her ass.
She was smokin’. Always had been, always would be. And the day she was finally beneath me… My dick twitched. Her body waved like it used to when she snapped up off a surfboard, sensual and powerful all at once. I had to angle myself away from her. Rousse just arched an eyebrow.
“I got everything for shrimp tacos,” she said when she finally noticed us watching. Waiting.
I couldn’t help but smile. Again the reason was forked. One, she was cooking again, and I loved her shrimp tacos. She knew it. Cooking them was almost like a tribute. To know that in some small way she thought of me made me grunt. Two, she looked a little cornered as we both sat behind the island watching her struggle. That made something inside me snarl.
“Sounds delicious, Merce,” Rousse said as he elbowed me.
“Delicious,” I repeated, noticing how the grocery bag smushed her breasts in and up.
I felt it coming before Rousse swatted me, below the counter this time. But I couldn’t stop staring. Not with that delicate half-moon−no, plum shape−of her tits creased more than they should be. Her nipple right there with the way the fabric shifted. God, I’d maul them if I had the chance. And fuck the shit out of them. Then her.
A sharp piercing pain in the membrane of my ear shook me from my mental titty fuck and pulled me down the hallway. Literally. Rousse had me by the ear and was dragging me out of the kitchen. I looked back just in time to see a confused Mercy, complete with arched eyebrow, watching me and my swaying hard-on disappear toward my room.
The slam of my door only shook me a little from my haze.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rousse asked as he gathered my shirt in both fists and shoved me up against my door.
“What do you mean? You know why I did what we did.” I shoved at his hands. “You know she was always my motive,” I added a bit softer.
“Yeah, but that little display isn’t the way to go.” He dropped me with a sigh. “Just because he’s gone doesn’t mean you can be like that with her, man.”
He circled away and shoved his hands through his hair. The weight of what we’d done had weighed on Rousse’s shoulders since Danger had stabbed the kid, but today it seemed heavier. I didn’t get it.
“I can be however I want.” I shrugged until my t-shirt was mostly back in place.
“I know. But not if you want her to want you. Please tell me that you know she has to want you. She doesn’t want to be raped.” He shot me a look of true and utter concern.
“A lot of chicks fantasize about that.” I smirked.
“Dude. No.” I thought steam might come out of his stupid ears.
“I’m just kidding Rousse. You should see your fucking face. Almost as red as your name would suggest.”
“We’re all she has.” He didn’t lighten. Not even a little. “We took everything else from her,” he gritted through his teeth. “She can’t lose us too.”
“Look, bruh, she’ll never lose me. My soul and hers…” I held up my hand and twisted my fingers on themselves. “Ooooooo, look at that. I promise.” I saluted him with the swirl.
“You know when you cross your fingers it supposedly gives you license to lie.”
I rolled my eyes, uncrossed my fingers, and saluted him all over again. “Good enough for the Boy Scout?”
“I’m not a Boy Scout,” he sneered as he pushed past me and reached for the door.
“Sure ya are. There’s gotta be a merit badge for murder.” I winked just before he slammed the door in my face.
I chuckled a little before I fell back onto my mattress. My dick bobbed, a little painful for how bad the column swayed. For how much I ached for her. I grabbed myself as I reached for my stash of photos.
Years of Mercy were between my fingertips. She’d shown me how to take real photos a few months after she’d moved in and I’d been snapping ever since. Her surfing. Her cooking. Her dancing. Her smiling. At me. Or with me. There was something there—there always had been. Dantè was just in the way.
He still sort of was, the fucking bastard.
I let go of my dick and scowled as I flipped to a different photo. And another. And another. I could see an arm in this photo, his back in that. He was a ghost fucking haunting Mercy and I. What we could be together.
Together.
That was what I focused on to cool the anger simmering in my veins. She and I would be. It was only a matter of time. She would want me. She would love me.
I let the photos fall to the bed beside me as I reached for my dick again and started stroking. It wasn’t one thing about Mercy—though her tits would have been that one thing—it was a million tiny things that made her perfect.
“Goddamn.” I drug out the end of the word as I thought about her. As I touched myself to the very essence of her.
Stroke. Stroke. Thrust. Tug. Repeat. Blonde hair. Freckles. Depthless eyes. Tropical flowers.
Lust took me over. She
took me over. Just like she had for years. And as I jerked it to the thought of her—not only fucking her but in the kitchen with her, reading with her, surfing with her—I was sure that my soulmate was making me shrimp tacos for dinner.
And in the not too distant future, I’d be eating her pink taco. A man could only be starving for so long.
Nine Months Later…
“A visitor?” I creased my brow.
“Legal counsel.” The guard was brisk, jerking his chin toward the door.
I pinched my face in confusion but stood from my chair and followed him. The buzzer of the holding door startled me, a new sound after two years in prison. I was surprised that anything seemed new after the monotony of my day in, day out. Even more than the fact that someone was here.
“Mr. Rogue?” A woman looked at me from over her thick black framed glasses and under black shaggy bangs. “I’m Mackenzie Relle, I’ll be working on your appeal. I’m sorry it took me so long, I was booked at first.”
“My appeal?” I didn’t know whether her beauty or her words were more disorienting.
I’d stayed true to the promise I’d made to myself that morning after solitary. I didn’t think of a life outside of these walls. I didn’t think about her any more. I didn’t let that part of me out. Now all I saw was concrete, steel, tattoos, and barred teeth.
“Yes, I’ve been reviewing all the details of your trial as requested, and I think you may have something.”
“My trial? As requested? What?” I sat back and the chair creaked beneath me as someone finally unsettled me after all this time.
“I mean, you’re big and brawny, but I expected you to be smarter than this based on my research.” She shot me a look that made her bangs wiggle courtesy of an arched eyebrow.
I laughed in spite of myself then stopped short. The sound was even more foreign than the buzzer on the door. The shock of it was enough for me sit up starkly, jarred as if I’d been slapped.
“There’s nothing in here about any kind of mental instability.” She shuffled the papers in front of her as the corner of her mouth quirked up into a smirk.
I’d forgotten what it was like to joke. To tease and be teased. I had Priest who talked philosophy with me, prodded me to remember that night, and protected me while I pumped iron but that wasn’t anything light or jovial. He reminded me daily that I was hard, ruthless, and vengeful. That I needed to be.
“Sorry,” I said softly. “I’m a little outta practice with this whole people thing.”
“You don’t get a lot of visitors?” She eyed me up and down then blushed beneath her glasses. “I would have thought Mercy—”
“Don’t say her name,” I snarled, a knee jerk reaction.
She eyed me. “I just meant that you had a lot of people testify on your behalf. Friends. A girlfriend.”
And there she was, without my consent. As if this lawyer had summoned her, Mercy stood full figured in my imagination despite how I’d shoved her down. I couldn’t breathe. I was choking on the memory of everything that had been pure and good in my life. I was choking on it and I was going to drown.
“Mr. Rogue, are you okay?”
I shook my head, desperate to clear Mercy out and find myself, and focus on the girl in front of me. I was frantic, needing to suck in a deep breath.
“Mr. Rogue?”
“They deserved better than me,” I managed through stilted breaths.
Pity flashed in her eyes, and my whole chest imploded. I hadn’t seen pity in years. I hadn’t felt compassion. They burned against my skin. And I sure as fuck didn’t deserve them. I was a monster. I shot up out of the chair on instinct alone. I had to get away from her—from her look. No one could look at me with that softness anymore. They needed to see me for the monster I was and I…well, I needed to believe it.
“Everything okay over here?” The guard nearest asked Mackenzie as he stepped forward with a taser in hand.
“No, I’m fine. We’re fine.” She stood up across from me and waved her hands at him. “Dantè, can I call you Dantè?”
“Okay. Sure. Sure, okay.” I still stood back from her, frozen except for my hammering heart.
“Great. You can call me Max. My friends call me Max. Will you sit down with me, Dantè?”
I eyed her again.
And took a deep breath.
Then slid back onto the fiberglass chair.
“What did I say that bothered you so much?” she asked quietly, and this time she didn’t mess with her papers or joke with me, she just waited. Her eyes flitting from her hands to mine and back.
I repeated her nervous eye movement, searching for some answer that didn’t strip me bare. There wasn’t one. I couldn’t be the man I’d worked to become and tell Max that the mere mention of Merce—no, I wouldn’t say her name—of my past picked at wounds I pretended were healed on my heart.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said gruffly.
She sighed. “Look, none of this works if you don’t come to trust me. If you don’t tell me the truth.”
“I didn’t ask for anything.” I shrugged, I didn’t know who did. I didn’t know if I wanted to.
“I get it. You got wrongfully accused and thrown in here. The system failed you.” She pulled out a single sheet of paper and slid it across the table toward me. “I, however, will not.”
Her resume was in front of me and, as I scanned the small typewriter text, I realized she was good. Damn good.
“Why waste your talent on me?” I asked as I handed her resume back.
“Because you don’t belong here.” She shrugged.
“And what if I’m exactly where I belong?”
She reached over and squeezed my forearm. Every hair on my body stood on end, a ghost wind blowing goose bumps along the back of my neck. If laughter was foreign, then touch, tender touch, was something I’d lost all knowledge of. I swallowed the lump in my throat and stared down at her hand wrapped around my wrist. And when my eyes moved from her hand to her deep brown eyes; my mouth went dry.
“I really don’t think this is where you belong.” She held my gaze. “And I’m going to prove it.” Her plump, pink lips turned up into a hint of a smile as she reached for a yellow legal pad in front of her and picked up her pen. “Now, Dantè, tell me what you remember.”
Hope was dangerous kindling in my chest; the fire that threatened to catch would drown out everything else. As it was, the crackle burning deep inside was enough to drown out the question fading in the back of my brain.
Who asked her to come?
I’d told the story so many times my mouth felt raw. Max was a demanding little thing, and she wanted the story over and over and over. She clarified points until my world was the words, and I didn’t know up from down. I only knew that when Max thought really hard about something, her brow crinkled enough that her thick, shaggy bangs danced. And her button nose wrinkled.
“Who was your visitor?” Priest asked from the cell next door now that we were shut in for the night.
“An advocacy lawyer.”
“Really?” The telltale squeak of his mattress said he had shifted and was listening intently.
“She wants to prove my innocence.”
“I knew you didn’t do it.” He chuckled.
“Yeah, well you and her have something in common.”
“Was she pretty?” he asked and just by the tone of his voice, I knew he was salivating.
The answer was yes. Max Relle was petite with curves that were anything but, try as she might to hide them under her sweater and slacks. Her long hair was piled on top of her head but if it were down it would reach well past her chest. Though they were milk chocolate, her eyes were deep and rich. And all around they were dusted with freckles.
It was the freckles that twisted me up and kept me from answering Priest.
They reminded me of Mercy’s and the way hers sprinkled across the plump of her cheeks and bridge of her nose. Of the ones that made the constellation on her b
ack. Of that morning—that beautiful, serene morning—when I’d been convinced my life existed in the framework of those freckles. Of that night—that fateful, fucking night—when her skin became liquid in my hands, something I couldn’t keep even if I held on with all my might.
There was a flash. A moment I hadn’t remembered until now. Mercy had tripped and rolled her ankle on a puddle of water. No. Beer. I’d caught her. I’d even kicked two kids fucking out of our bed to prop her up and get her ice…
“You still alive over there?” Priest asked, but I stayed focused on the wisp floating by. I had to.
When had Mercy hurt herself? Where did that actually fit in? My thoughts that had gotten so jumbled that day. They jumped around like kids playing hopscotch.
“I asked if she was hot. Don’t leave me hanging.”
“Yeah. Yes,” I stammered. “Just thinking.”
“About her?”
Yes. About her. About Mercy. And that day. About how I’d gotten here, and she’d gotten hurt, and there was this whole world that had gotten locked up inside me. Or outside me. I remembered talking to Rousse, Rousse who desperately wanted me to drink water…
When had that happened?
“Did she make you tell her about that night? I know how you get after you talk about it.”
That night. That damn night that was a giant question mark on my existence. On my very soul, leaving the question of good or evil punctuated with the same damn mark! I snarled. I’d recounted it too many times. If there was really something more to it, something that mattered, wouldn’t I have found it by now?
“Dantè?”
“Let me think!” I snapped at my faulty memory, at the story, at that night, as much as I did at him.
“Fucking prick.” The tone of his voice told me that he was rolling his eyes and abandoning me for the time being. As much as the next cell would allow anyways.
And he wasn’t wrong. I was an ass for yelling at my only real “friend” these days. But I needed to unpack those memories and live in them by myself. I started at the beginning, going through the motions. I didn’t look too long at my loved ones—I still couldn’t—but I combed through the events, the flow, and the lost bits.
