by Bella King
My heart drummed against my ribcage hard enough to hurt, but I wasn’t thinking about myself or my own safety now. My body was screaming at me to take action to make sure that Atlas was safe, but where had he gone?
I looked further left to see him charging around the pool at full speed, running as fast as he could toward Jared. He would get his head sliced clean off if he continued that way. Maybe he didn’t realize that Jared was armed, rushing him in a blind and selfless rage.
I yelled at him to stop, but he probably couldn’t even hear what I was saying due to how echoey the pool was and how many other girls were shrieking as they ran from Jared’s blade. He just kept charging, putting himself in mortal danger.
Then, I saw it. Jennifer was standing, dripping with water and frozen in peril as Jared walked toward her menacingly, raising his machete over his greasy head. He looked like a psycho killer from some fucked up horror movie, ready to chop up the first person who crossed his path. That person happened to be Jennifer.
I felt like I was watching this happen in slow motion, trapped a hundred feet away with a pool of water between me and the people about to get sliced up by Jared. My eyes darted between the people involved, as if through visualization I could save them, but that wasn’t the way the world worked. If it was, my mother would still be in my life.
I couldn’t lose more people. Not when everything was starting to come together for me. I had just been able to push past the suffering that my mother’s death had brought over me like a heavy blanket that wouldn’t tear no matter how hard I had clawed at it. I wasn’t ready for this to happen to me again, but life didn’t care about my suffering. Life took what it wanted from me, whenever it nostrils to take something. I never had a say in it.
Now, I was witnessing Jared, a man who I had only dated for a few months, lose his mind and topple over into the rivers of insanity, deeming it appropriate to murder people over the lose of a girlfriend. It was pure hatred that drove him, and in that moment I realized that Atlas had never really been bad. It wasn’t just that I had fallen in love with him, but that he was never the enemy. I had painted him to be that way, unable to accept the tension between us before.
All of that was done, but Atlas still had something to prove. He was going to be the hero this time whether or not I wanted him to be. He would sacrifice everything just to save Jennifer, a woman who didn’t like him very much at all. That was a real man, not the lunatic with a machete. Jared was nothing compared to Atlas.
Atlas’s heavy body slammed into Jared, bringing him toppling forward onto the rough concrete ground. His knees buckled and he snapped back like a twig hit by a car. The machete in his small fist flew into the air, somersaulting like a juggler’s pin.
The two men fell to the floor, tumbling across it in a gloriously loud fall. Jared’s limp body slid to Jennifer’s feet, and it was only then that she jumped out of the way, falling into the pool.
That was when I finally took action. As the machete clanked on the floor behind the pair of me, I dove into the water to retrieve Jennifer, swimming faster than I ever had before. I probably broke all of my old records, but nobody was timing me. It was a shame, because I probably wouldn’t be able to do that again without having extreme amounts of adrenaline pumping through my body.
I grabbed for Jennifer, feeling her body under the water. She was floating down, not moving, sinking to her potential death in the cold water. I caught hold of her arm, pulling her up with all the strength I had in me. Her head popped up through the water with mine, and she took a gasping breath.
“Swim,” I urged her, struggling to keep her body afloat.
Her instincts kicked in, even though she was in shock. It was amazing what the human body can remember even in times of tremendous stress. She hadn’t been able to run, but she was now able to swim away from the threat with me.
I got her to the other side of the pool and helped her out before rushing to Atlas, who was only now climbing to his feet. He kicked the machete that lay on the ground behind him, sliding the wicked metal into the pool. It sunk quickly, only to be retrieved by the police an hour later as evidence.
Jared was a crook mess on the concrete, pool oozing from his face, which had been badly busted up by the fall. His arm looked broken as well, and there was no way he was getting up without help. I wasn’t concerned about Jared though. I wanted to make sure that Atlas was okay.
I ran to him, looking over his body to check for any bump and bruises. He smirked at me, acting like it had been nothing.
“I do this shit every day,” he bragged, flexing his bicep.
“Fuck, Atlas, I love you,” I said, tearing welling up in my eyes.
“I love you too Virginia,” he said, pulling me close and hugging me against his shirt. It was stained with the blood of Jared, but I didn’t care. I squeezed him close like he would die if I ever let him go. I refused to stop until the police arrived.
Chapter 28
Everything is golden in the summer sun.
My father was just as confused as I was that Jared had been let out of jail, but we learned that his uncle had paid for his without giving much thought to Jared’s condition. Talk about incompetence. I was still shocked that the police let him go when he was clearly unhinged.
Talk of the town was that Atlas was the hero, saving all the girls on the swim team from Jared’s wrath. Apparently, he had intended to kill me, be decided to slice through some girls on the way there. I was lucky that Atlas had come with me, otherwise I would have been dead.
Jennifer recovered from her shock, finally allowing Atlas into her life as a friend. It was much better to have friends that would risk their lives for you than to keep them as enemies without reason. I saw things in much the same light, but Atlas provided much more than friendship to me. We were inseparable.
After Atlas’s father learned about his son’s heroics, he finally decided to start taking Atlas’s advice to get help. I guess it woke him up to how much of a man Atlas had become, and how he wouldn’t be there for much longer to see his son’s accomplishments if he continued to drink himself into a stupor.
Atlas’s father was really a brilliant man, and as soon as he was out of rehab, the company began to soar again. My father got a promotion, and I didn’t even need the scholarship I was aiming for to pay for college.
Do you want to know something great, though? I got it anyway.
Atlas, Jennifer, and I were all going to attend Granite Hills University in the fall, but first, we had a summer to enjoy.
After graduation, we all visited the lake, where half the school was already at, partying like there was no tomorrow. Beth and Rachel were with us, carrying a big back of sweet drinks for us to enjoy while we cooled off in the murky water.
“It’s hotter every summer,” Atlas said, waving a hand at a fly that whizzed around him. He was shirtless and covered in streaks of white sunblock. I hadn’t finished running it in, but he was already trying to walk away to the dock.
“Hey mister, I’m not done with you,” I called to him, squirting another large pump of sunblock into the palm of my hand.
Atlas stopped walking, waiting for me to come up and rub the rest of the sunblock on him. I walked up in my bikini, specifically small and sexy for him. It was bright yellow and practically begged him to tear it off me. He had already fucked me twice before we arrived at the lake. Even after all we had been through, he still couldn’t keep his hands off me. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
I slapped my hand against his back, rubbing the thick white liquid over him, massaging his shoulders and feeling every delicious curve and detail of his muscular physique. I traced the fine print of the tattooed words etched along his spine, lazily smearing the sunblock on.
“Hey, are you done or what?” Atlas said, turning around awkwardly to find me standing there dreamily, eyes half-closed as I looked at his body.
I laughed, shaking myself out of the haze he always seemed to put me in. “Yeah, you
can go now.”
“Great,” he said, flashing me a cocky smile and running toward the dock. He knocked over a student’s beer on the way but continued running until he was at the end of the dock. He took a leap, curling his body into a ball, and splashed into the water, sending a shower of lake water over everyone.
“Jesus Christ, Atlas,” Jennifer scolded, covering her drink from the water as it sprinkled down.
I chuckled, shaking my head. He was such a lovable goofball. Jennifer couldn’t help but like him too, but she did get annoyed that he was so large and unwieldy at times. He took up a lot of room in the car when all three of us were piled in the back of Beth and Rachel’s ride.
The sun shimmered off the water as it settled. I looked down the dock, waiting for Atlas to rise to the surface. It took him longer than it usually did, and I began to grow concerned as the second ticked by.
I walked quickly with my arms crossed over my chest to the end of the dock, looking over to see if I could spot Atlas underneath the black water. After another few seconds, he finally appeared, bursting through in another dazzling spray of water.
Jennifer scoffed and held a hand over the mouth of her beer can, shaking her head and rolling her eyes at him.
Atlas held something into the air, and after a second I recognized it as a crumble can of beer. It was just like the one that Jennifer had tossed into the lake the day that I had first stood up to Atlas in the nude. In fact, I was pretty sure it was that one exactly.
“I think I found the bottom,” Atlas said, smiling triumphantly.
The lake was lower now in the summer. The heat had dried up quite a lot of it, and it had been a while since the rain had replenished the water in it. Atlas had been able to swim all the way down, and I believed that he was the first person to have found the bottom of the lake. It was funny that none of the swimmers had been able to reach it, but Atlas, a clunky football player, had touched the forgotten depths.
“Wow,” I exclaimed. “Sounds like you deserve a reward.”
Atlas winked. “I can think of a few things.”
The familiar feeling in my lower belly returned. I wanted him so badly again, and yet, we had just gotten done having sex. I wondered if we would ever slow down. At this rate, we would be fucking away the entire summer, and I was alright with that. What better way to spend it than with the sexiest man in all of Granite Hills?
I curled my finger to Atlas, beckoning him to come out of the water and follow me. He climbed out, tossing the empty beer can over his back and dripping cool water over the sundried wood of the dock.
“Care for a swim somewhere else?” I asked him as he took my hand and we walked back to his car.
“I live for it,” he responded, planting a kiss on my lips and a slap on my ass.
The End.
More by Bella King
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