by Alice Archer
My plan was to talk to Oliver as we walked, dig a little, then surround him with misfit kids.
I sent the kids ahead on their bikes, with instructions to wait at the green bench where two trails crossed.
“I know where that is,” Penelope yelled back to me, and they raced off.
Oliver hadn’t said anything beyond greeting the kids.
“Nice day, yeah?” I tried as a first foray.
All I got was a nod.
At the edge of the yard, Oliver insisted I go first down the narrow trail, thus foiling my plan to bring up the rear so I could perv on his hair and body without him seeing me do it.
“What are you working on in your bedroom?” I asked. “A painting?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” The flatness of Oliver’s voice sent off alarms. I wondered again where all his sass had gone.
“Okay,” I said, and we walked on in silence.
It was hella tough to keep quiet. The mystery of the guy tugged at me. I pretended I needed to retie my shoelace and Oliver finally passed me.
The long walk won’t be long enough. Shafts of light sprayed sparks off the fire in Oliver’s hair, and I sighed through a close study of his easy gait.
By the time we got to the green bench, the kids were manic with excitement. They seemed to have multiplied into a horde.
“Dismount,” I bellowed, and took the lead on the trail. I wanted the kids walking their bikes so we arrived at the brambles together. I didn’t want to miss the looks on their faces when they saw it.
Oliver remained at the back of the line.
The rough trail of switchbacks ended at Bast Road, across from the monster bramble Clementine had shown me. I crossed the road, turned to face everyone, and spread my arms. “Ta-da!”
“What?” Clover looked around, not yet seeing what was right in front of her.
“We’re here,” I said. “Stash your bikes back in the woods before you cross the road. Put up your hair or tuck it away.” I made eye contact with Penelope and Abelino, the only kids with long hair. “Because we’re going in.”
It took another moment for the kids to get it. Kai got it first. “In there?” he asked, awe in his voice.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
They whooped and ran to sling their bikes into the underbrush, then huddled around me by the brambles to scramble into kneepads and heavy shirts. Kai put on a ratty canvas jacket he said his dad had given him. It hung down past his knees.
While they got ready, I handed out the smaller cutting tools, making sure each kid understood how to work the safety latches and had a designated secure place to tuck the tool when they weren’t using it.
I pulled a giant pair of loppers from my pack for myself. The kids stepped back and stilled. I approached the bramble at the spot I’d sussed out on a previous visit as a decent point of entry.
Before I made the first cut, I turned to check on Oliver, to see if he’d lightened up yet.
He stood on the far side of the road, arms slack, face blank.
“Hey, Jill,” I said. “Would you mind seeing what’s up with Oliver? Maybe he forgot his kneepads or something. See if we can do anything to help, yeah?”
“Sure.” Jill tucked her clippers into a back pocket, checked the road in both directions, and jogged over to Oliver.
The other kids and I watched Jill talk with Oliver. I couldn’t hear what she said, but the whole time she talked, Oliver shook his head. He looked terrible—pale, angry, and sad.
Jill put her hands on her hips, like she was about to get stern. For a drawn-out moment, Oliver met my eyes. Then he took out his phone, put it to his ear, and walked back into the woods.
When Jill got back to us, she shrugged.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“He said he forgot he had an appointment. But… I don’t know.”
“Oh. Well, okay.” I was disappointed, really disappointed, and more curious than ever, but Oliver would have to wait. A gaggle of kids crowded me from behind. If I didn’t get busy with the loppers, I’d face death by thorn bush.
A few dozen calculated snips later and we were in.
Chapter 46
Oliver
When Grant directed the pack of tweens north, trepidation silenced me.
I knew where they were headed.
For decades, Mrs. Montgomery’s blackberry patch had threatened to take over her house. She refused to use pesticides and couldn’t beat it back fast enough by herself. Every summer, half the island’s high school students wrestled, chopped, and hacked at Mrs. Montgomery’s bramble for summer cash and cookies.
I tried.
I really tried to go with them.
Grant’s excitement, on a feedback loop with the kids’, pulled me harder than I’d been pulled in a long time, but I couldn’t even step onto the road.
I hated myself for that.
Jill listened with skepticism to my excuse about a forgotten engagement. I faked the need for a call to cover my panic, and withdrew.
As I walked away, I held onto the burble of tween chatter and Grant’s rumble of words for as long as I could. The voices faded with each step I took toward home.
I didn’t want to go home.
The prospect of removing my bramble adventure outfit, putting on painting clothes or throne-carving clothes instead, made my arms feel heavy and inert.
I turned right onto the forest loop around the house, followed it to the track the driveway spur became past Dad’s garage. Low tree limbs met overhead. I stooped to push through. After a while, the track veered to the right along a high bluff. Far away and below, beyond a carpet of treetops, lay the island’s southern shore, a stretch of sea, and the mainland.
The trail took me to a wall of holly ten feet high and impenetrable, impossible to see through. Granddad had planted the holly trees in his mid-twenties, to create a secret holly hideout for future generations.
I swept my left palm over the prickly leaves as I followed the curve of the wall, missing the old man whose smiling presence had suffused my childhood. After the social events Dad hosted around a fire pit in the middle of the holly hideout, Granddad and I had always been the last to leave. The embers trapped us, we liked to say.
A gate bit into the holly wall. I let myself inside and locked the door behind me, studied the grain of the wooden gate until sunshine warmed my back and comforted me. When my heart had slowed, I turned and walked to Dad’s Cadillac Sedan DeVille to begin my routine.
I opened the trunk and gathered supplies—spray bottle, squeegee, new blue cloth—then got to work. When the windows sparkled and I’d rubbed away pollen, dust, and months of grime, I dropped the cloth to the ground to take with me when I left. With a fresh chamois from a bulk pack in the trunk, I wiped the black finish with slow circles from the back to the front, around the hood, and down the other side, to refresh the gleam. Finally, I burnished all the chrome, including the thin stripes of molding along the sides.
I hadn’t visited the DeVille in almost a year. I teased dried leaves from the gap between the upper edge of the hood and the windshield, to procrastinate. I dreaded the next part of the ritual as much as I needed it.
The chamois joined the blue cloth on the ground. I closed the trunk, unlocked the driver’s door, and slid the key into the ignition to unlock the doors and crack the electric windows.
The holly wall stopped at the edge of the bluff, to preserve the view. From my slouch into the black leather of the back seat, I saw mostly sky out the front window. The DeVille interior embraced me like the best kind of cave, safe and secure as a hug.
The things I missed most about Dad were his bear hugs and the way he could persuade me to tell him the truth. He was never squeamish, and he always wanted to know everything.
I wasn’t great at getting to the truth
on my own.
When inside Dad’s DeVille, I had an unbreakable rule: I wasn’t allowed to avoid the truth. I hated my own rule. Dreaded it. Needed it.
To get myself started, I let my mind go blank. Inside the DeVille, that was the equivalent of a white lie. After an hour or so of blue sky and sighs, truths began to nudge through.
Watching Grant with the tweens makes me… ache.
I want to be one of those kids.
I didn’t want to think about Grant, but the truths I’d avoided pulled him forward anyway.
I don’t like being left out.
That was my own fault.
It’s easier to watch.
With that thought, the luxurious DeVille, memento of a bygone era, felt less like a hug and more like a moveable throne, a coach in which the liege rode in state, sealed off from the day-to-day activity of his realm. Protected to the point of isolation.
The weight of time and sadness decayed my slouch until I lay on the back seat. Between the truths I didn’t want to face and the blank space I courted to avoid them, I drifted to sleep in the warmth and dreamed of being a king.
The ping of a text woke me and I fumbled to unlock my phone, then wished I hadn’t.
Grant had sent me a group selfie from inside the bramble.
The tweens leaned toward Grant against a background of thorns. Dots of sunlight on skin smeared with dirt and berry juice. The faces of the children so open it hurt to see. Red scrape of dried blood across Grant’s neck. He looked euphoric.
I could have been in that photo.
I turned off my phone and set it on the floor, rolled to press my face into the seat back, closed my eyes, searched for some way to feel better.
A discarded king held hostage in a black cave, hidden away while a usurper rules his lands. No one from his kingdom knows where he is. No one looks for him. No one cares enough to release him from the spell that binds him. All he has are memories of his father and their once-great realm… and jousts with the emperor’s son.
Oh, stop it.
If I started a fantasy in the DeVille, the emperor’s son wouldn’t be Freddie.
I had no idea what I wanted.
The truth was that I was afraid to find out.
In the safe, sacred space of the DeVille, I admitted that Grant attracted and frightened me in equal measure. When I thought of building a life with Freddie, I felt… good, the same, normal. When I thought of Grant—on my property, in the toolshed, cooking in my kitchen, lighting up outcast tweens, challenging me, arguing, resisting, questioning, pushing—I broke into a sweat and rolled into a ball.
I covered my face with my hands and gave in to the fantasy, let it carry me away.
The plush furnishings of the suite don’t hide the fact that it’s a prison, or that I’m here against my will. I pace the row of tall windows in the main chamber and scan the treetops far below. Trees as far as I can see. In clear weather, when I’ve slept enough to make my vision sharp, I can locate the thread of track that cuts through the forest up the mountain slope on the distant horizon.
That’s where someone who’s come for me would appear.
Pacing, glances out the windows, and waiting have stacked into a crush of years. I’ve paced holes in my shoes again and again. A cobbler from the village on the other side of the fortress comes in to fit me for a new pair when my shoes fall apart. The eyes of the soldiers pin me as the cobbler works, hawks prepared to lunge if I do anything but sit quietly.
I’m forbidden to speak to the soldiers, or to anyone. I no longer try. Long ago, when hope remained, I tried to reason with them. They didn’t bring me food for a week. It’s been years since anyone besides me heard the sound of my voice.
It’s been months since I had anything to say to myself.
It’s possible I no longer exist.
In the deep of a night following a day exactly like any other, I startle from a blank sleep, woken by a faint sound. Blink into the blackness, strain to hear.
Just when I decide it must have been a sound I dreamed, I hear it again. A flick of something soft against stone. Up and out to the main room in no time, I lean over the windowsill to scan the stone wall below.
Nothing.
There’s no one there. The sound was a dream after all.
I turn and step into a hard body. A hand presses over my mouth. The rumble of a man’s deep voice against my ear. “Look up now and then.”
I breathe him in, try to back away from his touch, but he’s stronger. He’s always been stronger. My childhood enemy who bested me when we were boys ordered to fight. He was better. But I was going to be a king, so I’d fought hard, every time.
He always won.
I’ve never forgiven him for that.
The emperor’s son has come to kill me, win my kingdom, best me one last time. A part of me is relived, ready to be dispatched, freed from prison, even by death.
“Hold up now,” he says in my ear. One hand still over my mouth, he leads me to the nearest divan and pushes me down. Dim light from the night sky shows me how he’s aged.
“Missed you,” he says, and replaces his hand with his lips.
Sweet breath.
My lips brush his when I say, “I hate you,” my disused voice a croak. I close my eyes to feel him more. “Are you here to grant me a final wish before you kill me? Or until your soldiers kill me, so you won’t have my blood on your own hands?”
He pulls back. “I would be your last wish?”
I watch his lips. “Your smile…”
The first time I saw that smile I was eight. He was ten. We’d fought. He’d won. I hated and loved that smile. Hated it because he only brought it out when I lost. Loved it because I knew it was only for me.
He smiles that smile and kisses me like the smile was always supposed to be a kiss. I lift my chin. If it’s my last kiss, I want as much as he’ll give me.
“Oh, the drama.” He pulls away and laughs at me. “I can feel you mooning over your tragic demise.”
When I huff to contradict him, he whispers, “You always did give up too soon.”
“I only give up when I know I’ve lost. Like now. What’s your plan? Strap me to your back and climb up the wall? Toss me out the window and call it quits?” He must know I can’t do what he did, climb stone to escape. If I could, I’d already be gone.
“No, Sir Wails-a-Lot. In three hours, we’ll walk out.” He nods at the door to the hallway and the rest of the fortress. “Relax. Give the wheels time to turn.” One of his wide hands drops to my knee, sweeps up the inside of my thigh.
I yelp and squirm against him.
Hand over my mouth again, he stares down at me. “Gods help me. I knew you’d be this way. Hoped. I would imagine this after we fought. How I’d hold you down, run my hands all over you. How you’d writhe and whine.”
I still myself at his words. “I do not whine,” I mutter against his palm.
The fondness in his eyes confuses me.
“You do.” With a movement so precise it takes my breath away, he strips my loose trousers to my knees.
I whine.
We stare at each other. I count twenty of his slow breaths. My bare legs cool in the fresh air from the window.
He’s the one I wait for, the one I watch the horizon for. I didn’t see the speck of him on the thread of trail on the horizon, but he came for me anyway.
My breath speeds up. “I only get three hours with the emperor’s son?” I whisper.
“Emperor. And there you are.” He lifts his hand away and sticks his tongue into my mouth. With the same skill he’d used to best me over and over when we fought, he touches me where I’m hottest, tests the weight of my cock as it hardens, holds me in the palm of his hand. Holds all of me in the palm of his wide hand.
The gate in the holly bushes didn’t open,
but I heard it rattle.
And then footsteps through the tall grass.
Chapter 47
Grant
After Oliver ran off, I wrestled with my focus in the blackberry thicket. Clover took advantage of my distraction and muscled past me to take the lead. She turned back and held out her hands for the heavy loppers.
“Are you sure?” I asked. But all it took was one look at her radiant face and I became a convert.
Our advancement slowed, and Clover made different decisions than I would have, like to go around a clump of thick trunks instead of cutting through, but I didn’t mind. Behind Clover, the rest of us kept busy carving a bigger, smoother tunnel. The first time I looked back, I had to laugh. The kids had transformed the cramped passage Clover and I clipped away at into a causeway. The crawl back to the road would be a breeze.
No one else asked for time up front. After about thirty minutes, Clover could barely lift the loppers.
“Hey, Brutus the Buttercup,” I said. Kai and Jill giggled behind me. “Come on.” I tapped Clover on the back. “You’re pooped. Trade me.”
“No.” She stopped but didn’t turn around. “I’m not done yet.”
“I’m not asking to get in front. Just trade me those heavy cutters for this lighter pair.” We swapped, and Clover surged forward again.
The kids slayed me. They really did. Over the previous week, all the kids—with the notable exception of Kai—had talked to me at least a little about their troubles.
Baby Clover’s teenaged parents had been caught dealing drugs. She’d been passed around in their extended family until her parents pulled themselves together. Sort of. When Clover was five, her parents retreated to Vashon to get their families off their backs. They’d settled into a crappy cabin and minimum-wage career paths. Clover had told me her parents mostly worked and watched TV, and she didn’t expect her life to get better until she was old enough to leave home. Random home visits from social workers kept the worst of her parents’ behaviors to a minimum, but Clover’s self-confidence and sense of security had taken a lot of hits over her short life.
