Wilder Love

by Rose, Emery

  “I’m sorry about your old man. He’s a good guy.”

  I nodded to acknowledge I’d heard him. “I hear you’re his supplier.”

  “I do what I can to help the cause,” Dylan said with a laugh. “He was smoking some bad shit.”

  “When was this?”

  “Before you came back.” I eyed him. “Jimmy never told me he was sick. Remy did.”

  I rolled out my shoulders, trying to relax. These days I was so tense, so tightly wound, it was ridiculous. “You should stop by the house for dinner sometime. He’d like to see you.”

  “You’d be cool with that?”

  My brows raised in surprise. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He shrugged. “Not like you and I were ever friends.”

  “I’ve never been your enemy.”

  Dylan exhaled loudly, his gaze on the view. “I didn’t want Remy to get hurt. That’s what all that shit was about. She hates being left behind and I thought you’d… I didn’t think you’d stick around. Whenever you used to go away, she was scared you’d never come back.”

  “She told you that?”

  “She didn’t have to. I know Remy.”

  “What do you know about Remy?” Firefly sat next to me on the grass and drew her knees to her chest.

  Dylan got to his feet and stood in front of Remy. “I know that you should have minded your own fucking business.”

  “If you told me what was going on in your life, I wouldn’t have to eavesdrop on your conversations.”

  Dylan scowled and shook his head, looking over his shoulder toward the house. “Where’s the princess?”

  “She went home. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m fine.” He strode away, disappearing into the shadows, leaving me and Remy sitting under a towering palm overlooking the lights of Costa del Rey.

  Remy sighed and leaned back against the fence, chipping away at the polish on her nails. “I don’t know why they keep going back for more. All they ever do is hurt each other. Underneath his moody, broody exterior, Dylan is vulnerable. He never believed he was good enough. Never thought he deserved someone like Sienna. But it’s not true. He deserves so much better. He needs someone who fights for him the way he fights for the people he loves. Someone who keeps their promises just like he does. Dylan hides it well, but he has such a big heart. If only Sienna had handled it with care. He would have given her the world.”

  Remy turned her sad face toward me and I knew this was just as much about us as it was about Dylan and Sienna. I was doing this to her. I was making her miserable. All I’d ever wanted was to make her happy, to see her smile. To protect her from the bad shit in her life. But I had failed on all counts.

  “I don’t know how to fix us or make things right,” she said.

  “Some things can’t be fixed. Sometimes you have to start over.”

  “Is that what we’re doing? Is this the new us? Am I just a willing body to you?”

  “No. You’re so much more. You always were.”

  “It hurts.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I’m just trying to get my life back together and it’s hard,” I said, being more honest than I’d been with her since she came back. I wanted to talk to her the way we used to talk. Back when I could tell her everything. “It’s so fucking hard.”

  “I’m so sorry. For everything that happened,” she said. “I just want to be here for you. I need to be here for you. Please don’t shut me out. I’m still that same girl, you know? The girl who doesn’t like to say goodbye. The girl who’s scared of being left behind.”

  “I know. I know who you are.”

  “Am I being stupid, fooling myself into thinking that there’s still a chance for us?”

  I didn’t have any answers for her. I was just as lost as she was right now. “Let’s just take it one day at a time.”

  I reached into my pocket and handed her the set of keys she’d given me. She took them from me and wrapped her hand around them. “I guess that was a bad idea.”

  “A good idea but not for us.”

  She exhaled loudly and nodded. “Guess not. I wanted it to work. I wanted sex with no strings attached.”

  It would have never worked for us. Even our first kiss had strings attached. I stood up and held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her to her feet, checking that she’d put on shoes before I walked her back to the house, past the chairs and cushions still floating in the pool and around the ruins on the patio that Dylan hadn’t bothered cleaning up.

  I left her with a kiss and no goodbye. Remy hated goodbyes.

  36

  Remy

  “We know we’re not good for each other but it’s like an addiction. We can’t quit each other. But I think this time… I think we really have to call it quits. It just hurts too much.”

  Sienna’s eyes were puffy from crying and she was pale under her tan. Loving Dylan had taken its toll. On her and on him. How long could you try to hang onto something that just wasn’t working?

  “I’m not the girl he needs,” she said, her voice sad. “I wanted to be. I tried.”

  She leaned her shoulder against mine and we looked out at the ocean through the rough wood railings, our legs dangling over the side of the pier. This was the beach where I’d learned to surf. I could still envision Jimmy teaching me and Dylan how to paddle out and do pop-ups on the sand. Dylan had listened to everything Jimmy told us to do and had followed his instructions, without complaining or making any smart-ass comments. This was the beach where I’d surfed with Shane all those mornings when I was just learning, and he was so patient with me, making little comments that turned me into a better surfer without making me feel like an idiot. This was the beach that we’d ridden our bikes to on our seventeenth birthday, drunk and high and nauseous from cupcakes, with Sienna on Dylan’s handlebars.

  Memories were such a bittersweet thing.

  The beach was quiet at this early hour, and I watched the seagulls dip and dive over the water and listened to the sound of the surf as I drank my coffee next to the girl who used to be my best friend.

  “I wish it could have been different for you guys,” I told Sienna, and I meant that sincerely. “I wish it could have all worked out.”

  “I know, babes. I’m sorry you had to choose sides. That’s why we never wanted to get you involved. He’s your twin. I knew where your loyalty would lie.”

  “I love you too though,” I said. “And I know Dylan… he’s not always easy. Why does love have to hurt so much?”

  “It shouldn’t. It doesn’t always.”

  “You had good times, right?”

  “If we didn’t have good times, we wouldn’t have kept going back for more.”

  I sighed.

  “So… you and Shane? What’s the deal?”

  I sighed again. “We tried the whole sex with no strings attached gig.”

  Sienna snorted. “How did that work out?”

  “Not so great. I mean, the sex was great. But the rest of it sucked.” I had too many feelings for Shane and sex without love just made me feel too empty.

  “It doesn’t work with someone you already love. Someone you have a history with. It’s like trying to put a Jenga tower back in the box.”

  I puzzled over that one for a minute. “Is it really though?”

  She laughed. “Or like… when you get an inflatable for your pool and after you blow it up, you try to…”

  “Fit it back in the box?”

  “Exactly.”

  We were both laughing too hard to worry if that made sense. Sienna wiped the tears from her eyes and smiled at me. “I miss you, babes.”

  “Miss you too.”

  But we both knew that we’d never be as close as we used to be. Our friendship would never be the same. Too much had happened. Too much history, and too many times when I’d been forced to choose Dylan’s side over Sienna’s. I would always choose him, even when he acted like an ass or shut me
out, he was my soul twin and Sienna had known that from the start.

  We talked for another hour, about her job as an events coordinator and my modeling career which I hadn’t missed at all since I’d come back. It was funny how easy it had been to walk away from modeling. Now I just had to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

  After I left Sienna, I took a drive up the coast and listened to Bastian’s new album, playing the title song “Blue Ghost” on repeat. Was that really me? I’d like to think it was the eighteen-year-old Remy that Bastian had first met in LA and that I’d come a long way since then but some days… I wasn’t so sure.

  * * *

  “Got you covered, Jimmy. I brought the good shit.” Dylan produced a bag of weed and tossed it on the patio table in front of Jimmy. His contribution to our Sunday evening dinner.

  “I was hoping you’d bring a six-pack and some hotdogs,” Jimmy teased.

  “Well, you can’t always get what you want,” Dylan said, cracking open a beer from the six-pack I brought and putting up his feet on the patio table like he owned the joint.

  I shoved his feet off the table and they hit the ground with a thud. He scowled at me but kept his feet on the ground and leaned back in his seat to drink his beer in the summer sun. It was odd to see Dylan here, talking and joking with Jimmy, looking perfectly at ease in a place that I’d come to think of as a second home. With a man who was like family to me.

  Shane and I took over the food prep and stood side by side in the kitchen, skewering the vegetables we’d cut into chunks for our kebabs.

  “I’ve been reading your letters,” he said conversationally.

  The mushroom cap slipped out of my fingers and the point of the wooden skewer stabbed my index finger. “Ow. Shit.”

  “Slippery suckers,” Shane said, guiding my finger to his mouth and sucking away the drops of blood, his eyes on mine. Today his eyes were green.

  “You’re drinking my blood.”

  “Mm.” He released my hand and I stared at him for a beat then moved over to the sink and washed my hands. Drying them on a towel, I returned to my spot in front of the chopping board.

  “So… how many have you read?” I asked, stabbing a cherry tomato.

  “All of them.”

  My head snapped up. “All of them?”

  He smiled. “Every single beautiful word you wrote.”

  I gave up all pretenses of helping with the dinner prep and leaned my hip against the counter, studying his profile. “Are you okay?”

  Shane stacked the kebabs on a tray to take out to the grill and then he turned to face me, and he looked different to me somehow, a little bit more like the old Shane. Like some of the weight had lifted from his shoulders. Or maybe I was imagining it. He gave me a soft smile and cradled my face in his hands, his eyes locking onto mine.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t read them sooner. I did miss you. I did think about you. Every day. Every hour. You were always with me. And I never hated you, Remy. I never could. I hated myself. For leaving you. For ruining the future we could have had together.” His thumbs brushed away the tears falling down my cheeks. “Forgive me.”

  “Shane, there’s nothing to forgive.” I wrapped my hands around his wrists.

  “One day at a time?”

  “Okay,” I whispered.

  He held me against him, and he bent his head to kiss me. I melted into him as my fingers tangled in his hair. My mouth opened to his and our tongues met, exploring the taste of each other. Inhaling each other’s scent like a forgotten memory. It was a forever kind of kiss, and I thought that this was how it should have been the first time we saw each other again. It didn’t feel like a goodbye. Not at all. It felt like a promise.

  37

  Shane

  “What made you want to get into demolition work?” I asked Miguel when we stopped for our lunch break. Let’s face it, it was a valid question. What kid dreams of cleaning up the debris from a demolished building? Yet, the dude was always cheerful. Acted like there was nothing he’d rather be doing than hauling away broken cinderblocks and rusted pipes.

  He gave me a funny look. “Pays the bills. Keeps my wife and kids fed with a roof over their heads. What more could a man want?”

  What more indeed. What was a man if he couldn’t even provide for the people he loved? If he couldn’t protect them from all the shit in the world?

  “You know what you gotta do?” Miguel said, making himself more comfortable, settling in for a chat on the tailgate of my Jeep.

  “Enlighten me.”

  “You need to lay off that tofu shit,” he said, eying my lunch—tofu, brown rice, and leafy greens.

  I laughed and cast an eye at his lunch—leftover fried chicken and some other fried food I couldn’t identify.

  “You think I’d be happier if I ate fried chicken?”

  “Couldn’t hurt to try,” he said, wiping the grease off his fingers with a lemon-scented wet wipe, no doubt supplied by his wife.

  “Huh.” My eyes wandered to the graffitied wall next to my Jeep. Jesus Saves. Drugs Kill. Fuck You, Cocksucker. Getting mixed messages here.

  I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my arm and chugged a bottle of water while Miguel imparted more of his wisdom.

  “You need to pray,” Miguel said. “Whatever you need, God will hear you.”

  “Will God answer my prayers?”

  “Maybe He will and maybe He won’t.”

  “What’s the point in praying then?”

  “You gotta keep the faith.”

  On my way home from work, Remy’s song came on the radio. I call it her song because Bastian Cox was singing it. Not only was the song about her, she had obviously told him about the blue ghost fireflies and he’d used it in his lyrics. She hadn’t even mentioned the song to me and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it or the other songs from the album that I ended up downloading after I got home and showered. A Post-it note on the refrigerator informed me that my dad had gone to dinner with a few of his old surfing buddies. Don’t wait up, he’d joked. I might get lucky. The man was a comedian. I chuckled to myself as I crumpled up his note and tossed it in the trash. Then I retrieved it from the trash and flattened it out on the counter, smoothing my palm over it. I added it to my shoebox of memories and letters.

  I had lied to Remy. Not all of her letters had gone unread while I was in prison. In the beginning, for the first six months, I read every letter she sent. I’d read them so many times I knew them by heart. Her letters were funny and sweet and selfless, a heartfelt attempt to buoy my spirits rather than dwell on whatever she was going through. I’d even penned responses, but I’d never sent them. I wanted her to live and to move on and to do big things, not stay stuck in the past, thinking about someone who could no longer give her a future. With five and a half years left to serve on my sentence, I had stopped reading her letters. I’d told myself that I was doing it for her, that it was in her best interest to cut all ties with me. And at the time, I’d truly believed that.

  But now that I’d listened to “Blue Ghost”, it dawned on me that this Bastian guy had gotten to see another side of Remy that she’d kept hidden from me. If the lyrics were really about Remy, which I suspected they were, she hadn’t moved on with her life at all.

  I decided to go surfing to clear my head and sort out my feelings about the song, and about Remy. As I stood at the top of the staircase leading to the beach, there she was, floating on her board. She turned her head, her eyes seeking me out as if she’d been expecting me. By the time I paddled out to her, I was seeing everything more clearly. I didn’t know what had changed, but something inside me shifted. I’d been so selfish and so self-absorbed, only dwelling on my own problems and not thinking about how my actions and careless words have been affecting Remy. Sometimes it’s the people you love the most that you end up treating the worst. And I loved Remy. I had never stopped loving her. But I’d stopped believing that I was good enough for her.
/>   She gave me her Mona Lisa smile and I gave her my real one. “If it isn’t the Blue Ghost, haunting my dreams. How dare you star in all my dreams, Firefly?”

  She sat up on her board, the one that I made for her, those ocean eyes locking onto mine. “If it makes you feel any better, you always stole the show in mine too. You heard Bastian’s song,” she guessed. I nodded. “What did you think of it?” She gnawed on her bottom lip, waiting to hear what I thought.

  I looked out at the horizon. The sun was starting to sink into the sea, but we still had another hour or so of light to surf by. “It’s a beautiful song,” I said. “It reminds me of you. But I hope you weren’t sad for seven years. I never wanted that for you.” I turned my head to look at her. She was so sad and tragic and beautiful, like all her stories without happy endings. “I wanted you to be happy.”

  “I know,” she whispered. “But the world was so cold and lonely without you.”

  “Firefly. I’m here. Right beside you.”

  “If I hadn’t come back, would you have looked for me?” She shook her head. “Don’t tell me. I already know the answer.”

  “I thought I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you’d be happier without me.”

  “That’s such a load of bullshit. I never took you for a coward.”

  “I’m just being honest. My life has changed. Drastically. I have nothing to offer you anymore.”

  “How can you even say that? You are enough, Shane. It doesn’t matter if you’re working a demolition job or you’re a pro surfer.”

  “I have no money, no prospects, no future to offer you. I’ve got nothing.”

  “You’re such an idiot. Is that what this has been about?” She threw her hands up in the air. “Is that why you’ve been treating me like shit? Because of money? All I’ve ever wanted was you. God, you’re so infuriating. I want to punch you.”

  Her hands curled into fists and her eyes blazed with fury.