by Ella Fields
He clicked his tongue. “An educated punk, just what I’m looking for. And yes.” He sighed. “Perks of the job.”
I frowned, the cigarette between my teeth as I studied his features and shouldered my bag. It was too dark to make out much, but the tight jeans and flannel black and white shirt, along with the stupid hat, told me he was either a creep or undercover.
Apparently, he was neither as he flicked a black and gold business card my way. “You’re good, but you already know that. Give me a call when you decide you’re through with vandalizing public property.”
Without taking my eyes from his dark ones, I snatched the card. “And why would I do that?”
He was already walking away but snuck a grin over his shoulder. “To make some money. Duh.”
Assholes clogged the hall, and I didn’t stop for any of them as I grabbed my shit from my locker and then headed to biology.
She was already there, seated in the very back corner, her throat bobbing when she saw me.
I stopped in the doorway, my breath fleeing in a whistle past my lips at the glimpse of a cut next to her brow and the bruise on her cheekbone.
I shook it off and kept walking. Dumping myself into a seat in the middle of the room, I felt her eyes boring into the back of my head throughout the entire class.
She was a witch, the way she could still have me worrying about her even while I loathed her.
Still, I wondered how she’d hurt herself. Again, I shook the thoughts off. She was okay, and she was smart enough to seek help if something had happened to her. It wasn’t my problem.
Never again would she be my toxic little problem.
For that was what she was. A toxin I needed to rid my body of. My heart and my mind and my ever-hungry dick. I’d fed too long on my addiction to her, and now it was time to go cold turkey. It was the only way I was going to survive this.
I had a kid on the way—a daughter arriving next month—and I’d vowed time and time again not to be like the scum she’d soiled herself with. I wouldn’t fall back on that promise just because Daphne Morris was hell-bent on ruining me.
As soon as the bell rang, I slipped out of class before anyone else could and rushed down the halls until I’d reached the office.
Maria, the receptionist, was on the phone, and she tried to halt me with her hand raised. I ignored her and walked past, pounding on Vince’s door.
The brass fixture with his name on it rattled, and then he called, “Come in.”
I stalked inside, my heart racing and my fists clenching. “I need your help.”
Denham frowned, then gestured for me to close the door.
I did and took a seat. “I need to graduate, and I need to do it now.”
Vince dropped his pen and folded his fingers over each other. “Lars, what’s going on?”
“Can you help me or not?” I snapped, then sighed, wiping a hand down my face as I bent forward. “Please. You know as well as I do that I can graduate earlier than the rest. I need to work, not hang around in a school I’ve got no fucking use for.”
After staring at me for a solid ten seconds, he lowered his voice. “You’ll need a few weeks, maybe more, to finish the coursework and sit the exams.”
Relieved, I nodded. “Whatever it takes.”
Daphne
A month.
One month was all it took for him to disappear from every facet of my life completely.
If I hadn’t seen him during biology and brief glances in the halls, I’d have thought he’d left long before that.
But he hadn’t. Peggy told me that Lars had been spending all his time in the library or in Denham’s office, if he wasn’t in class, because he planned to graduate early.
Peggy had hesitated to tell me. She and Willa knew we’d broken up and how, but I kept the details vague about Ellis. They didn’t need to know about that part. No one else did.
Movies, lunches, and scrapbook dates couldn’t keep the sorrow from seeping through every vein. Like a slow drip, as soon as I thought the pain would let up, it arrived again, paralyzing me where I stood or sat while I concentrated on breathing.
I wished I could say it was easier to do that without Lars’s presence at school, and selfishly, I thought that maybe it would be.
It wasn’t.
Heartbreak was a ghost. You didn’t need to see it to feel it, and you could never outrun it.
I’d tried to call Ellis a couple of weeks ago, but for what, I didn’t know. I suppose to apologize for making the reunion with his son one he’d never even dream of.
It was now one he’d have nightmares of.
Not that he didn’t deserve a little retribution, but it shouldn’t have happened that way. I was no judge or grim reaper. Black had never been my color.
I’d changed my mind when he didn’t answer, and he’d tried to call me back some hours later, thinking it was probably the least he deserved after ditching Glenda and Lars the way he had.
Mom and Dad hadn’t spoken in weeks, and I’d overheard her on the phone the other day talking to what sounded like a lawyer. Apparently, Dad had a prenup.
I’d hid my smile behind my glass of juice when I heard that, then quickly ducked out of the kitchen.
Did I hate my mother? A part of me always had, but no amount of hate was capable of drowning out love. So as I heard her crying in rare, fleeting moments in the weeks prior, it took everything I had to remember how she’d hurt me and to ignore her own.
In my room, I picked up the pamphlets for Edmond Ross, rubbing the glossy image of the wood and brick structures that sat on a couple of acres an hour out of town.
It wasn’t Ivy League, but it would still cost money.
I’d told Dad community college would do, but he’d insisted there was enough money to send me there, and I could take out a student loan should it cost any more and learn the real hard way.
“It’s … kind of quiet,” I’d said when Dad took me on a tour the weekend after Valentine’s Day.
He’d chuckled, steering me toward a bricked path that wound between two buildings. One was wooden with a wraparound porch and the other at least five stories tall and brick. “It’s daytime. Most people are in class.”
I laughed a little. “Right.”
“Did you expect it to be one big raging party all the time?”
I chose not to answer that.
“Here are the dorms.” Dad laughed. “If you don’t want to commute, here’s where you can stay.”
“They’re co-ed.”
That had earned me another chuckle. It was nice, I’d thought, gazing up at him behind my winged sunglasses, to see him smile in his jeans and black T-shirt instead of a suit or hospital scrubs. “Things aren’t what they used to be.”
We headed inside, and I looked up the wooden stairs. They flared at the bottom, the railings a chipped gold and the stairs a faded white, worn away by many sets of feet.
Posters and framed photos lined the walls in the lobby, and a rec room, kitted out with a pool table, desks, microwaves, and vending machines, sat to the left near the restrooms.
Smiling, I’d turned to Dad. “What’s the food like?”
Grinning, he took me by the arm, and we’d turned back for the doors. “Now we’re talking.”
As we’d driven away, something fluttered in my chest as I’d watched the small university fade in the rearview. Something that felt a little like hope.
Maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t made an irreversible mistake. No matter how painful, maybe I’d done exactly what I’d set out to do. I’d set everything right side up again.
Fate didn’t care about who held your heart or the person you gave it to. If it wasn’t meant to be, fate would come knocking, and that bitch expected you to answer.
She now owed me, and I wouldn’t wait much longer before I did some knocking of my own.
“We’re fucking free,” Peggy hollered, spinning in a circle for so long that even I, seated in the sand, felt dizzy from just
watching her.
“Ease up, Turbo.” Dash trapped her within his arms, and she laughed, swaying as he tried to steady her. He scowled at me. “Was the vodka your lousy idea?”
I raised my hands and, in doing so, my can of soda. “I’m not drinking.”
Dash frowned then. “You’re not drinking?” He shook his head, and Peggy started tugging at his shirt, trying to kiss his chin. “Yeah, sure. It’s only one of the biggest milestones in your life. Not worth celebrating at all.”
I flipped him off and then stole Raven’s blunt when he slumped to the sand beside me. “Happy now?”
“I think you’ve mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck.”
Raven and I both chuckled, and I sucked in another lungful of weed before handing it back.
“Where are you going for college?”
Raven belched, then stuck the blunt between his lips, mumbling around it, “New York.”
Peggy gasped. “No way. We’re going to be together?”
“Un-fucking-likely.” Dash scowled.
Peggy waved him off. “You know what I mean.”
He muttered what sounded like, “Learn to phrase shit better, Freckles. Jesus Christ.”
“Where are Willa and Jackson going?” Raven asked.
“Gray Springs, I think,” I said. I knew it was the only one they’d both been accepted into.
Despite saying she’d think about it, Willa hadn’t shown tonight. Jackson was here, though I couldn’t remember the last place I’d seen him, and now that I thought about it, I couldn’t remember the last time Willa had discussed him with us.
I took a sip of soda to rid the acrid taste from the blunt. “Am I the only one staying this close to home?”
Dash raised a brow. “Lars sure as shit isn’t going anywhere.”
I scowled. “Knew that already, asshole.”
We quieted, and someone changed the music playing on the tiny speaker over by the bonfire from a slow acoustic song to an old-school RnB track.
Students were everywhere. Scattered from one end of the bay to the other. In the sand, in the parking lot behind us, and some even in the dunes off to our left.
I glanced that way as Dash and Peggy filled Raven in on the apartment they were leasing near their campus and spied a few bodies moving about.
Melancholy settled in as the stars’ glimmer began to dull. When my butt grew numb, I said my goodbyes and stood, deciding to take the long way back to my car.
It was a wasted effort, trying to fill the deep crevice left in my chest. It remained the same, hollow and bleeding, and no amount of distraction or time changed that.
I often sought solitude, if only to better understand it. I wasn’t one to shy away from conflict even if it was my own inner turmoil.
Spying a trash bag, I opened it and slipped my empty can inside, then tucked my hands into my pockets, my flip-flops kicking up sand behind me as I straddled the damp line between the dry and soaked grains stretching out toward the pier.
A moan pulled me up short as I neared the dunes, and I snuck a glance at a couple who were attempting to hide among them for some semblance of privacy.
“Don’t leave a mess. Swallow it,” I heard and halted. “All of it.”
I knew that voice. I knew it better than my own, and I knew what it was like to have it whisper wicked things to you, to have it coax you to orgasm, and to hear it bellow out curses as you rode him into oblivion.
Ruthie rose from the dunes while I stood breathlessly still, the wind knocking my hair into my wet face. She wiped her chin and then began to pull down her cutoffs.
“I’m not fucking you.”
She paused. “What?”
Lars sat up, brushing sand from the back of his head. “What kind of immoral asshole do you take me for?” I could tell he was grinning up at her, batting those lashes to make her laugh.
And laugh she did. “Oh, come on.”
Standing, he whispered something into her ear that had her nodding and racing back down the beach. If she saw me, she didn’t so much as hint at it.
I watched her go, my heart beating in my throat and the contents of my stomach roiling.
I turned and moved to the water, trying to draw oxygen and not dry heave each time.
I knew he wouldn’t stay celibate. I’d wanted him to be happy, and that meant finding someone else, but if that someone else wasn’t Annika, I’d at least thought he’d try with her first. They’d just had a baby. So what was he even doing here?
“I’ve got some Tums in my car if you want some.” A taunt more than an offer.
Quickly, I swiped at my cheeks, my body trembling as I forced my feet to walk.
“What can I say?” He laughed, malicious and cruel. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
Right. I stopped and spun back around, tears blurring my vision.
It’d only been a couple of months since I’d last laid eyes on him, but since then, he’d changed and not just physically. More muscle had stacked on, likely from extra hours spent at the garage, but the planes of his face, the slopes and angles were more fierce—guarded. His eyes, too.
He held up a finger, then trudged back over the sand to grab an unopened bottle of beer at the bottom of the dune.
I wasn’t sure what I was doing. I was only sure that I couldn’t move as he threw the beer at my feet and sneered. “I’m guessing that might have stung.” His expression blanked as he gritted out, “So how about you throw some alcohol on it and warm up a little, you cold-hearted bitch.” Then he walked off, climbing the dunes and the small fence to the parking lot above.
Lars
Lily Glenda Bradby was born on the twenty-first of February, weighing seven pounds and three ounces, during one of the heaviest downpours Magnolia Cove had seen in years.
Her middle name was my decision, and though the creasing in Annika’s forehead suggested she didn’t care for it, the look I gave her brooked no room for argument.
For the second, and probably the last, time in my life, I fell in instant love.
From the dusting of brown hair on her head, to her chocolate eyes, to her outie belly button, and down to her tiny little toes, she was mine, and I was hers.
And besides the graduation party that I’d felt inclined to crash and work, I rarely chose to part with her since her screaming entrance into this world.
Annika had gone into labor the week after Valentine’s Day, her water breaking on the front lawn when she’d parked on the street and climbed out of her car after going to lunch with one of her friends. I’d sped home from work, grabbed her prepared bags, courtesy of Mom, and then helped her onto a towel into the front seat of the Escalade.
Two hours later, Lily arrived. I was allowed in the room but had been given strict instructions to stay up near Annika’s head, where I’d let her grind the bones in my hand to dust as she’d pushed our daughter out of her body.
I’d never been more petrified in my life. But I had to hand it to Annika; she’d soldiered through labor as though she’d done it ten times before. Although she did put her foot down when the nurse tried to encourage Lily to latch onto her breast.
Bottle feeding it was. It didn’t bother me too much as I’d quickly learned just how much more time I was getting with her by being able to feed her myself.
Annika slept through her wails, and on the nights that she couldn’t, she’d sit up in bed with tears streaming down her cheeks as she desperately tried to rock Lily back to sleep. I’d since moved her crib into my room and wedged it between my closet and the end of my bed. Annika didn’t protest at all.
She healed relatively quickly and finished school. Life rolled on, and as each week passed and I found myself staring at the innards of yet another car, I knew I was doing okay. Not great, but thanks to Lily, not terrible either.
That was until a harsh reminder from the likes of Annika happened when she’d crawled into my bed and wrapped her lips around my cock.
I’d pushed her off with a
start, and she’d sat there, her eyes wide, trying to explain. “That’s why she left you, you know? Daphne. She wanted us to be a family. A real family.”
Just the sound of her name was enough to spark and form a brand-new ball of fury inside me. A red haze overran my vision, and I tried not to growl as I whispered back, “We can be a real family without your mouth anywhere near my junk.”
Annika had frowned. “You mean, you want to take it slow?”
I’d laughed, then taken her by the hand and showed her to the door of my room. “No, I mean as friends, Annika. Co-parenting as friends. No romantic ties necessary.”
She’d called me an asshole, and I hadn’t spoken to her since.
That was three days ago.
“So Boyd’s taken you under his wing now?” Jackson asked from the couch with Lily sprawled on his lap.
I nodded, sinking back into the cushions as exhaustion smothered me. “I’m doing an apprenticeship. But he’s paying me more than he has to, so it’s not so bad.”
Dash pursed his lips. “You could take up escorting instead.”
Raven dribbled his soda down his chin, laughing.
Lily gripped Jackson’s thumbs, gurgling away at him as he gently wiggled her tiny hands about. “You’re a fuckwit.”
“Don’t swear in front of the baby, jackass.”
Jackson mouthed the word, “Fuckwit,” to Lily, and she gurgled again. “Shit,” he said, laughing. “I think she just chucked or something.”
“She does that a lot.” I tossed him the pack of wipes, and he reached over, yanking one from the pack on the floor to clean her chin.
Dash studied Lily as though she was some kind of science experiment, his brows furrowed and his fingers brushing his chin. “Poor fucking girl.”
My hackles raised. “What?”
Dash grinned at me. “She looks like you, is all.”
I flipped him off, too tired to spar with him.
As if sensing that, Raven drained his soda and set the can down on the coffee table. “Where’s Annika?”
“Avoiding responsibility, duh.” I shot a glare at Dash, and he shrugged. “What? It’s true. It’d be nice if she could be a mother for five minutes so your sorry ass could take the dirt bikes out with us before we leave.”
