Beach Reads

by Adriana Locke

  Fiona turns her attention away from the scenery outside the passenger window, meeting my eyes for a whole second before lowering her lashes, studying the restless hands in her lap.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles. “What?”

  “The bracelet I gave you. I didn’t expect you to still wear it.”

  “Of course, I still have it.”

  “Have it, yeah. But wear it?”

  “It’s a nice bracelet.” Voice hushed and defensive, she finally looks at me again, her green eyes a lush, guarded forest I can’t see through.

  Not that nice.

  “Sorry I never called or anything,” I offer stiltedly.

  There. I’m the first one to say something real.

  I delivered the comment to the windshield in front of me.

  “I didn’t expect you to.”

  She delivers hers to her lap.

  “And you never tried to get in touch with me,” I point out.

  I risk a glance, the space of a heartbeat, in her direction.

  “You told me not to.”

  And you listened to that shit? The one time you listen to me, and it’s on that?

  “I didn’t see where we had much to talk about it.” I let my words settle around us, like fine dust particles clogging the air. “Then.”

  “And now?” she asks softly.

  They say time heals all wounds. Fuck “they.” What the hell do “they” know? Have “they” ever had their heart busted open with a crowbar? By the girl they would have trusted with their lives? That night is a broken bone that’s never healed right. It aches with the weather. Gives me problems when I’m tired. And at her question, I feel a fresh flare of pain. As sharp and bright as it was the night she broke me. It steals my breath and my words and my good intentions to make things right.

  “And now, Justice?” she repeats, turning in her seat to face me.

  “I don’t know, Fi.” I fix my eyes on the sign for Lillith’s exit, wishing it could guide me to more than her apartment.

  “Why did you come to my graduation?” she asks.

  “Your mom invited me.”

  “But why did you come? After all this time, and shutting me out the way you did, why did you come?”

  “I don’t know.” I answer. “Guess I thought it was time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “Time to put the past behind us?” I execute a shrug, the best answer my body has.

  She’d fired her questions at me like a flurry of bullets, and the sudden silence hurts my ears.

  “I’m glad you came,” she finally says.

  “Are you?” I keep my eyes trained on the road

  “Yes.”

  I hazard a glance, noting the battle going on in her head play out on her face. She’s balling up to broach something I don’t want to discuss. I can tell. Even after five years, she’s still a book I’ve read so many times I barely have to look at the pages to know the next line.

  “There’s something I need to explain about that night, Justice. About Barkley.”

  “Don’t.” Rage blows its hot breath down my neck. “Don’t explain, and don’t say his fucking name.”

  “But, Just—”

  “We’re here.” I pull into a parking spot, slamming roughly on the brakes. “You see your mom’s car?”

  I focus all my attention on the windshield sticker reminding me it’s almost time for an oil change. I silently will her not to revisit that night. If she starts talking about it, I might physically remove her from my car, dump her in the parking lot and drive off.

  She doesn’t look away from my profile, and if she is waiting for me to look at her, she’ll be waiting a long time. Her sigh is my reprieve and her surrender.

  “The green Kia Sorento.”

  “Well, at least we know she’s here. Let’s go make sure she’s OK.”

  Four

  Fiona

  I fumble with the key to my mom’s apartment. I felt crowded in the confines of Justice’s Range Rover, but in the open hall, with him at my back, I feel positively claustrophobic. It isn’t that he’s close. It’s that he’s here. After so long, he’s here. And everything about him presses on me. The burn of his eyes on my neck. The familiar clean scent of him invading every breath I draw. The rugged beauty of him eclipsing everything around him into a vague blur. He hasn’t even touched me yet, and I feel assaulted on every side. Drowning in him.

  And loving it.

  I finally steady my hands enough to get the door open, gesturing for him to follow me inside.

  A hair dryer drones from the back of the apartment, but otherwise the place is as quiet as a mausoleum.

  I turn to Justice and give him the smile I’ve used so often apologizing for Mama’s flightiness.

  “She may have gotten the time wrong altogether if she’s just now blow drying her hair.”

  Justice sketches a deep line between his dark blonde brows, concern accumulating in his eyes.

  “She gave me the right time, and said she’d see me there.”

  My smile disintegrates.

  “Mama.” I glance around the neat apartment, keeping my tone even, at odds with the picking-up-speed pace of my heart. “You back there?”

  I head toward the bedroom, hearing Justice’s slower steps dragging across the carpet behind me. No one in the bedroom. The pretty green dress Mama and I chose for graduation stretches across the bed, wrinkle-free and waiting.

  The blow dryer moans into the preternatural quiet. I open and close my fingers across damp palms before clamping them into tight fists at my side. Something bad is in that bathroom. The sick certainty slithers along my skin.

  “Come on, Fi.” Justice slips his big hand around my fist, not even bothering to thread our fingers together. He steps ahead of me, putting himself first in line for whatever waits in the bathroom. I lag behind a step or two, delaying something that feels inevitable.

  Justice’s sharp inhalation is the last sound I hear for the next few minutes. For an eternity. I lose all perspective of time when I see Mama splayed on the bathroom floor, bright red hair blazing against the stark white tiles. Eyes closed. Face serene. Wearing only the silky lilac slip we bought at the boutique a week ago.

  I thought it was only in the movies that all the sound sucks out in the big scenes. That it was a special effect, the way the players move in a vacuum of slow motion and silence, but tragedy sometimes bends time and space. It’s real. So real when Justice falls beside my mother. So real when he places his lips over hers, forcing air into her lungs. So real when he pounds on her chest. Unrelenting. Banging. Begging. His face twists with the urgency of these moments.

  So real and yet surreal because I find myself in two scenes at once. I’m here in this bathroom watching Justice fight a futile fight for Mama’s life. But I’m also in a grocery store, more than a decade back in time, my two braids in the wind as I race back over to the aisle where I left my grandmother. I’m rounding the corner, the cans of corn I found suspended in triumphant satisfaction, but I drop the cans, not even noticing where they roll. Grams is jerking on the dirty grocery store floor and clutching at her heart, face almost unrecognizable in reddened agony.

  And I didn’t have this blessed silence. I heard Grams’ last pained wheezes. The choke of her heart surrendering to the defect it had been secreting away all her life. I’d watched and cried as the store manager intervened. He followed the same script Justice does now. Blown air in. Pounded on Grams’ chest over and over until that dreaded look of resignation took over his face. I had been too young to truly grasp what that look meant then. But now I recognize it for what it was.

  Justice is dialing and talking into the phone, but I still don’t hear. I stand by numb, frozen by the thought that this could happen again. That this could happen now when I’ve had so little time with my mother.

  “Mama!”

  That sound. That tortured sound - like a speared animal – is the first I’ve heard in so long. And it’s coming fro
m me. And I can’t make it stop. Unintelligible vowels and consonants scrape along my vocal chords like barbed wire, cutting and burning my throat. I fall to the floor, resting my back against the garden tub, pulling Mama into a desperate clench. My arms contract around her small frame. I weep into her hair. Whisper a lullaby Grams always used to soothe me.

  I do everything but let go.

  Five

  Fiona

  “Eat.”

  I glance at the plate of food Justice sets on the table, but stay slumped in the lounge chair on the balcony overlooking the ocean. The balcony we shared for the years this was my home, too.

  “Not hungry.” I close my eyes without looking at Justice, begging the balmy night air to lull me to sleep, the only state where I don’t have to feel.

  “It’s Grams’ chicken salad,” he says.

  “No, it’s not.” I puff my lips in a bitchy pout. “It’s yours.”

  “Well it’s Grams’ recipe.”

  Even with my eyes closed, I know exactly what Justice’s face must look like. The forced patience I’ve heard in his voice for the last month is probably wearing pretty thin. I need it to wear out soon. Wear out so he’ll give up and leave me to waste away.

  “I used pecans and cranberries,” he adds.

  “Not. Hungry. Would you leave me alone?”

  In the silence, I hear his patience snap.

  “No, I won’t leave you alone, Fi. You’ve barely eaten for the last month.”

  I manage a shrug, but can’t muster much else. It takes effort just to breathe, and even that feels like a waste of my time.

  “You’ll make yourself sick,” he continues.

  “And you care because?”

  “What the hell does that mean?” he asks, irritation sharpening his response.

  I give something that’s half grunt, half laugh, and all sarcasm.

  “You will open your eyes and you will answer me, dammit,” Justice bites out.

  If I could make my eyes more closed than they already are, I would.

  “Make me.”

  “You’re being childish.”

  “And you’re being a pain in my ass,” I reply, eyes still sealed shut.

  “Oh, you want a pain in the ass?”

  And before I can respond, Justice lifts me from my don’t-bother-me splay across the lounge chair. He sits on the edge and lays me across his lap. I twist against the muscled strength pressing me down, holding me hostage.

  “Let me up!” I squirm without success and screech at the first slap on my butt. His hand feels like a two-by-four back there. “What the…are you crazy?”

  “You said I was a pain in your ass. I’m showing you what a real pain in the ass feels like.” He wallops me again, one hand across my back and the other punishing my tender rear end.

  I glare at him over my shoulder and flap around like a land-locked fish.

  “You’re gonna pay for this, Kenner,” I growl.

  “Anger,” he says with a grim nod. “That’s a healthy emotion. How about more of that?”

  He slaps my left buttock with enough force to bring tears to my eyes.

  “Justice, stop! It hurts.” I want to swipe the tear rolling down my cheek, but he has my arms pinned between my body and his lap.

  “It’s supposed to hurt.” He leans down to whisper to me, his warm breath brushing my ear. “Fi, it’s supposed to hurt.”

  He isn’t talking about the spanking. I go completely still, letting my head drop forward until my hair falls, hiding my face and drifting down to the redwood planks of the balcony.

  It’s supposed to hurt, but I haven’t let it. I haven’t cried once since the funeral. I haven’t cleaned out Mama’s apartment because I’m afraid to crack open that Pandora’s Box of pain and grief. I’ve barely even spoken to anyone, except to turn away whatever food Justice tries to force on me every day.

  I raise my head and look over my shoulder. Justice is waiting for me, eyes steady and patient. This has been his plan all along. To push me until I crack, and emotion – any emotion, even anger – breaks through the wall of ice I’ve shrouded myself in. Keeping me numb. Keeping me sane.

  “Justice?” My voice breaks in half under the weight of the desolation I’ve ignored the last four weeks.

  Justice flips me over like something light and sweet that might fall apart if handled too roughly. He pulls me up beside him on the lounge chair, tucking me into his side. I lay my head in the crook of his shoulder, burrowing into that scent that has always meant safety. Has always meant home.

  And I cry.

  The tears gush out, strangling my words into choked whimpers and gurgling gasps that leave no room for words. The tears drown my dignity, leaving me a snotty-nosed, moaning heap of pain. A pitiful spill that Justice, even with his sweet assurances and soft words, can’t clean up. My heart is a sponge in the grip and twist of a pain that keeps squeezing out more tears, more tears, more tears. Until there’s nothing but the “shhhhs” Justice murmurs in my ear and the kisses he leaves in my hair.

  “I’m okay.” I strangle the words out.

  “You’re not,” he insists, his voice firm and concerned.

  I squeeze my eyes shut, hating the tears determined to streak down my face.

  “I’m trying really hard to be.”

  “You don’t have to be okay,” he says. “I’m not afraid to be with you when you’re not okay.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be this way.” I leave my words at just above a whisper, knowing he’ll lean in to hear. I want, I need him that close.

  “My mom was supposed to see me graduate. See me play volleyball overseas. See me walk down the aisle.” I gulp back the emotion scalding the inside of my throat and flooding my eyes with too many tears to blink away. They said Mama died of the same heart condition that killed Grams. They figure her life choices accelerated the process. One more reason to hate the addiction that stole so much from us.

  “She was supposed to see her grandchildren,” I say. “She had already missed so much. We were supposed to have more time.”

  “I know.” He pushes the hair away from my face to watch me closely.

  “And I’m just…I’m so mad about it.” I grip Justice’s hand and pray he won’t let go. I’ve given him every reason to let go, but I pray he won’t.

  “Fi, it’s okay to be mad. It’s normal.”

  “Yeah?” I glance up at his profile, the lines softer than I’ve seen since he came back to Merryn Bay. I bundle deeper into Justice’s neck, happy to have even this small patch of him back. I know he was supposed to leave weeks ago. I know he’s only still here because he thinks I need him.

  He’s right. I do.

  “You know there’s more where that came from, right?” Justice asks, rubbing several strands of my hair between his fingers, turning his mouth down at the corners. “All that emotion. That was just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Hmmm.” That’s all I can manage.

  “I want you to see a grief counselor.”

  “Justice—”

  “No excuses. I’ve already called someone and made an appointment for tomorrow.”

  I search for anger or resentment or outrage at his highhandedness. It’s nowhere to be found. This is exactly what I need. He is exactly what I need.

  He always has been.

  Six

  Fiona

  “You’re going.”

  I feel about thirteen years old rolling my eyes, but I can’t help it. I’ve told Justice I don’t want to go to this party, but he isn’t taking no for answer.

  Shocking.

  “I’m not.” I pull a bag of kettle corn from the microwave and empty it into a bowl on the marble countertop. “I want to stay home.”

  “Didn’t the grief counselor encourage you to spend more time with your friends?” Justice reaches in to grab a handful, talking and chewing. “And to stop moping around the house?”

  “I’m not moping.” I grab my bowl and brush past Just
ice, out of the kitchen and into the living room. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m unemployed.”

  “Yeah, Mom did mention she was sick of your freeloading ass.”

  I give him an over-the-shoulder smirk, knowing Carolyn would never say that. I settle into the supple leather of the couch, curl my legs under me and grab the remote.

  “Gimme that.” Justice snatches the remote and takes off for the stairs.

  I jump to my feet and hightail it after him, chasing him into his bedroom like I did countless times over the years.

  “Real mature, Justice.”

  I cross the space separating us. He leans against his desk and holds the remote over his head, just out of my reach. I might be five ten, but Justice still has six inches on me. He’ll never let me forget that.

  “I have a season binge waiting,” I tell him. “Give me that remote now, or else.”

  “Don’t or else me.” Justice grins. “Which show?”

  “Vampire Diaries.”

  “You’d rather stay home alone watching sparkling vampires than hang out with friends you probably haven’t seen in years?”

  “First of all, the Salvatores don’t sparkle. That’s Twilight.” I ignore his look that says I’m ridiculous. “And second of all, correct. I don’t want to be with anyone tonight. Much less people I have nothing in common with anymore. Now gimme.”

  Justice stretches up another inch, keeping the remote just beyond my grasp.

  “So nothing in common with Margo?”

  I frown, setting my feet back on the floor at his mention of his best friend who lives in New York. I haven’t seen her since the funeral.

  “Margo’s gonna be there?”

  “I told you that this morning, but you were in another world.”

  He lowers his arms, but keeps the remote behind his back. I reach for the remote, circling my bare arms around him. I look up, but the words disintegrate on my tongue like sugar. Something sizzles in his eyes, heating them up and scorching every bit of my skin they touch. Second by second, I become aware of every place where our bodies meet. My breasts pressing into his unyielding chest. My arms brushing against the soft, golden hair covering his sinewy forearms as I reach behind him. My thighs laid against something getting harder by the second.