I shake my head and remind myself that I’m supposed to be the one searching for my brothers. Even with Jas in the back room, I can be asking around. At the very least, it will keep me too busy to be scared.
I walk straight to the bar and order myself a beer. I get the feeling this isn’t the kind of place where they’re going to ask me for ID.
Someone lights a cigarette beside me. I turn and come face-to-face with the scariest-looking man I’ve ever seen. He’s not as tall as Jas, but muscles bulge from beneath his wife-beater, like he spends his days lifting weights on the beach. He’s grinning at me; one of his bottom teeth is missing.
I consider mentioning that it’s illegal to smoke in a bar in California, but instead I ask if I can bum one of his cigarettes. When he leans in to light it for me, I wonder if he can tell that I’ve never actually smoked a cigarette before.
“Thanks,” I say, swallowing a cough.
“No problem,” he replies, and winks.
“So,” I say, taking a drag on the cigarette, “come here often?” I exhale, watching the smoke rise in plumes around his face.
“Aw, come on, beautiful, you’re not going to use that line, are you?”
He leans in so close that when he speaks I can taste his breath: cigarettes and liquor, yesterday’s lunch and last night’s vomit. I resist the urge to back away.
“You’re a little honey, ain’tcha? So pretty and clean.”
I shake my head. There are no clues to be found with him. I slide down from my seat, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other.
“Nice meeting you,” I say awkwardly as I turn to walk away, looking around for someone else to ask, hopefully someone slightly less terrifying.
But he gets up and follows me across the room. “We didn’t exactly meet, did we? And I’d sure like the chance to get to know you better.”
I grimace, tossing my cigarette onto the sawdust-covered floor.
“I came here with someone,” I say carefully.
“Just ’cause you came here with someone doesn’t mean you’re leaving with him,” he says, grinning again and displaying his missing tooth. I wonder how he lost it.
The woman who passed out a few minutes ago is moaning as she lifts her head off the table. I consider sitting down and offering her my beer as a pretext for asking her some questions. But the man beside me is licking his lips; his breath sounds like he’s practically panting. So I head for the door, gripping Jas’s keys so tightly it hurts. I may want to ask more questions, but I need to get away from this creep even more.
Soon I’m sprinting across the lot, dropping my beer on the ground, and climbing into the driver’s seat of Jas’s truck, checking to make sure that the doors are locked, the windows rolled up.
Finally safe, I exhale, the taste of cigarette smoke heavy in my mouth.
A knock on the passenger side window startles me and I jump. I don’t know why I didn’t think he’d follow me into the parking lot.
“Open up,” he says softly. “I won’t bite.” I shake my head. He knocks again, so hard this time that the entire truck rattles. I’m pretty sure he could tear the door off with his bare hands.
I reach into my purse. But then I remember that I can’t call anyone for help. Jas has my cell phone. My hands are shaking so hard that I can’t even fit the keys into the ignition.
Shit. Shit. I press the horn, just tapping it. The sound is enough to make the guy drop his hand. He grins and steps away, crouching down. When he stands up, he’s holding a rock, lifting his arm behind him like a pitcher winding up for the throw. A heartbeat after he releases the rock, the side view mirror on the passenger side shatters into a thousand pieces.
Now I lean on the horn like my life depends on it. Maybe it does.
Jas comes running out of the bar, charging right at the guy. They fall to the ground; I can’t see them from where I’m sitting. Instead, I just see dirt flying up from the ground below.
Suddenly, Jas springs up and runs around to the driver’s side. I unlock his door.
“Move, Wendy!” he shouts. “Move!”
I nod, scrambling into the passenger seat and handing Jas the keys. He shoves them into the ignition and we speed off so fast that I don’t even get a chance to look back, to see in what condition Jas left the other man lying on the ground.
“Are you okay?” Jas asks. I open my mouth to say yes, but I can’t get the words out. I lift my hands to my face, surprised to find that there are tears running down my cheeks. I brush them away and take a deep breath, but I can’t take a deep breath because I can’t stop shaking.
“Wendy,” Jas says, his voice so deep that it cuts through my shaking. “Wendy, look at me.” He takes his eyes off the road just long enough to look into my eyes. “You’re okay. He didn’t hurt you. I would never have let him get to you.”
He lifts his foot off the gas slightly; we’re back on the highway now, and he slows us down until we’re a little bit closer to the speed limit.
“I would never have let him get to you,” Jas repeats.
I nod. I believe him.
27
“Well, you were right,” I say after a few more miles of silence. My pulse has slowed to an almost normal beat, and the tissues I pulled from my purse have wiped away all traces of my tears. “The Jolly Roger is a bad scene.”
Jas laughs. “Told ya so,” he says, and I smile. “Hey,” he says gently, “I’ve got some news. There was a guy in the back who recognized Michael and John.”
“Really?” I ask, my heartbeat quickening again. “Oh my god, should we go back?”
“Back there?” Jas laughs. “Your friend’s probably still waiting for us in the parking lot. If he regained consciousness.”
“But if someone there knew John and Michael—”
Jas shakes his head. “This guy had shared a motel room with your brothers a few months ago—three or four months ago.”
“After Pete kicked them out,” I say, doing the math.
“Don’t be so hard on Pete,” Jas says. “I was the reason he had to kick them out.”
I look over at him, shocked that he’s taking the blame. That’s when I see that Jas’s right hand is bleeding all over the steering wheel.
“Your hand!”
Jas shrugs. “There was glass on the ground.” Whether it was from the shattered mirror or just from the dozens of broken beer bottles littered across the Jolly Roger’s parking lot, I don’t know.
“We’ve got to get it cleaned up.”
“Believe me,” Jas says, “I’ve had a lot worse.”
I don’t want to imagine just what that means. I see a sign for a service area coming up and I say, “Pull over there.”
Jas keeps the car headed straight ahead.
“Now!” I say firmly, and this time, to my surprise, he listens. The fog is thick as we curl along the exit ramp.
“Now it’s my turn to tell you to stay in the car,” I say, hopping down from my seat. I run into the shop next to the gas station. When I come back, carrying water, bandages, and a cup of ice, Jas is sitting in the flatbed of the truck, his long legs hanging down and swinging back and forth like a little kid’s.
“I thought I told you to stay in the car,” I scold. I hop onto the truck beside him and pull a towel out from between a couple of the surfboards, pouring the ice into it. In addition to his bleeding hand, an ugly bruise is blossoming above his left cheekbone. I press the ice to his face, and he leans into my touch before placing his left hand over my own.
“I’m sorry,” I say, dropping my hand and opening up a package of gauze. I pull his right hand into my lap, cleaning out his cut as gingerly as possible.
“What for? You didn’t punch me.”
“We went to that place because of me,” I say. “And for what? Another dead end. We don’t really know any more than we did before.”
“It was my idea,” Jas says, cringing as I clean the gravel from his wound. The cut is long and skinny, horizontal across h
is palm. I can tell now that it’s not deep, at least.
“Will you be able to surf tomorrow?”
“Takes more than a few bumps and bruises to keep me out of the water.”
I smile, nodding.
The fog turns into a light drizzle, soaking our clothes and the truck beneath us. I shiver, but I don’t want to move.
“We’re not far from Witch Tree now,” he says. “Surfers from all over the place will be there tomorrow. No one’s going to want to miss this swell.”
“So if my brothers are still out there, they won’t want to miss it, either.”
Jas shakes his head, dropping the ice into the truck behind him. “Wendy,” he says, “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” I say, but a lump is rising slowly in my throat. My tongue feels like it’s made of cement. Jas’s cut is clean now and the bleeding has almost stopped; I cover his hand with Band-Aids, spread across his palm. When I’m done, Jas lifts his undamaged left hand to my face. I close my eyes and imagine the way these hands propel him through the water when he paddles into the surf.
“They could be there,” he says. He sounds so sure, so certain. I open my eyes; his face is just inches from mine. His blue eyes are clearer than water. His breath is cool on my skin. He begins to drop his hand from my face, but I cover it with my own hand, pressing his touch even closer. His fingers are warm and solid, as strong as the rest of him.
Before he can back away, I lean forward and kiss him. Softly at first, like it’s my first kiss and I don’t quite understand the mechanics of it. For a split second, he doesn’t kiss me back, and I think maybe he’s not going to. Just the thought makes my stomach hurt, makes me want him more, makes me want to lean in closer, press my lips to his that much harder. And just when I think I can’t take it anymore, he kisses me back.
He lifts his wounded hand from my lap so that his palms are on either side of my face, cupping my cheeks. The Band-Aids are rough against my skin; I can smell his blood and his sweat, the stale beer that must have soaked into his clothes in the bar’s parking lot. I weave my fingers through his dark hair, gently brushing out tiny pieces of gravel from the ground.
The kiss seems to last forever and yet seems to end too soon. Jas is the one who finally pulls away.
“We should get going,” he says, jumping down to the ground. He has a look on his face, in the fog and the rain and the cloudy light shining down from the streetlamps above us, that I’ve seen before. A look I now understand is reserved just for me.
“Hey,” I say, emboldened, “that day, on the beach at Kensington. You didn’t really come to Pete’s side of the beach for the waves, did you? You were there because of me, weren’t you?”
Jas smiles. “What do you think?” he says. He lifts me down from the truck and takes my hand in his, leading me back to the passenger side, opening the door for me. When he gets in on the other side, I slide across the seat to lean against him and rest my head on his shoulder. As he pulls back onto the freeway, he puts his arm around me, and I fall asleep listening to the patter of the rain on the roof of the truck.
I wake up a couple hours later in another motel parking lot, almost identical to the one we left behind this morning. The only difference is that parking lot is filled and the sign flashing VACANCY has the word NO in front of it.
The rain has increased from a drizzle to a pour, and Jas runs from the motel lobby to the car.
“Come on out,” he says, opening my door. He takes off his sweatshirt and holds it over my head to keep me dry, the other arm around me, holding me close. He’s so warm that I wonder what it would be like to crawl up inside him.
“It says no vacancy,” I say, pointing to the sign above us.
Jas shakes his head. “Honey, I made these reservations days ago. The very second I heard about that swell.”
I stand on my tiptoes and kiss him again, quickly this time.
When I pull away, he says, “I got us separate beds again.”
“You didn’t have to do that,” I reply, winding my arms around his waist as we walk toward our room. I mean it. I want to stay this close to him for as long as I possibly can.
28
Jas’s long body curls around me when we finally fall asleep. I concentrate on the weight of his upper arm resting on my rib cage, the heat of his knees pressing into my calves. I press my back against his front, feeling the muscles of his chest flex as he tightens his hold on me.
Soon, Jas’s breathing grows slower and his muscles relax. He’s asleep, and I’m wide awake. Even though I hate to put any space between us, I roll away. He needs his rest for tomorrow; I don’t want to keep him awake just because I am.
And I’m not sure I want to talk to him about my reasons for being restless. How did I get here, lying in bed with a guy whose last name I don’t even know? I don’t even know the name of the town this motel is in. He’s a drug dealer, he can be violent, he can be cruel. He’s the reason Pete kicked my brothers out in January, the reason I’m still no closer to finding them than I was the day I graduated high school.
And yet, listening to the waves crashing through the open window, I know that I am closer. I sit up and slide off the bed. We chose the bed closest to the window; Jas threw my duffel bag on the second bed, but otherwise, it’s completely undisturbed.
I’ve never done anything like this. My god, until last night, I’d never even been in a motel like this. There’s only one lamp in the room, on a nightstand in between the two beds, and when Jas tried to turn it on earlier, the bulb flickered weakly. I don’t even want to think about the last time they cleaned the bathroom; there’s a ring of sand around the drain. And every surface in the room is covered in dust, as though no one has stayed here for months. Which, I guess, they haven’t. This place probably only fills up when the nearby waves break, and according to Jas, that hasn’t happened since January.
When my brothers were here. Maybe they stayed in this very motel. It would have been too cold to camp out on the beach. Maybe they convinced some friends to let them crash on the floor of their room, or maybe they used up the last of their allowance money to pay for a room of their own. No; they would have long since spent whatever money they’d taken when they left home.
I glance back at Jas; he’s rolled onto his back now and is snoring softly. The sound is comforting, a reminder that I’m not alone. With his drug money, he could afford to stay anywhere. He could have booked us into the nearest five-star hotel. The fact that he chose this place makes me like him even more. This is where the surfers stay. There’s nowhere we could have stayed that would have been closer to the water.
I grab his sweatshirt and slip it on, breathing in the smell of him: Tide and sweat, beer and salt, and something else, something uniquely Jas. I slip out the door, careful to close it as quietly as possible behind me. I don’t want him to follow me.
The rain has stopped, but the air is clouded with mist. I can barely see three feet in front of me. I walk barefoot across the motel parking lot and onto the beach, feeling the sand between my toes. It’s cold beneath my feet, no trace of the day’s heat left behind.
The roar of the ocean grows louder and louder, not just because I’m getting closer to the water but because the waves are picking up. Witch Tree might not be breaking until tomorrow morning, but the ocean is getting ready for it now, like a dancer warming up before her big show. The moon is full above me, pulling the tides every which way.
I walk until the sand goes from moist to wet beneath my feet, until I can feel the waves lapping my toes. I hear something to my left—a shout, a laugh, a cry, I’m not sure. In the distance, where there was only darkness before, I see a hint of light, someone sparking a fire. I watch as it grows from a single flame to a roaring bonfire, glowing and brilliant through the fog.
I smile, remembering the bonfire on the beach the night that I graduated, the first time I saw Pete. I’d never seen anyone move on the water the way he did; he looked like it was what he was made to
do. Was it luck that made Pete leave Kensington that night, head down to Newport, to the beach where my classmates and I were celebrating?
Even though I’m yards away from the bonfire on the beach now, I feel warmer just knowing that it’s there. I was falling hard for Pete, and now I’m falling fast for Jas. How is that possible? To feel such intense emotions for two different people, one right after the other? Maybe Fiona and my parents were right, after all. Maybe I am crazy. At least a little bit. I’d have to be a little bit crazy to do what I’ve done over the past few months, wouldn’t I?
And I’d have to be at least a little bit crazy to have enjoyed it as much as I have. Even despite the fear and the heartache, despite Pete’s lies and Jas’s dust, I’ve never felt so alive.
Another sound floats down the beach from the bonfire. A shout this time. Someone calling someone else’s name. Must be a group of surfers, getting ready for tomorrow. Maybe they’re celebrating the waves to come. I squint in the fog, trying to make out shapes of people sitting around the fire; from here, all I can see are shadows.
But then one of the shadows turns; I see a profile, one that I recognize. I break into a run, but the fire is farther away than I realized. I’m panting by the time another silhouette comes into view.
Between heaving breaths, I shout, “John! Michael!” I expect them to turn when they hear my voice.
“John! Michael!” I scream hoarsely. I cough; I’m getting a stitch in my right side. I wish I were stronger, faster, fitter. Jas or Pete would be there by now. They’d have sprinted down the beach in two seconds flat.
“Please!” I shout, and as I do, the figures scatter. The wind whips off the ocean, and the fire climbs to a terrifying height; for a second, it looks like it’s about to explode, and I freeze in midstep. Just as suddenly, the flames begin to dwindle until it looks like they’re going to fade away entirely.
“No!” I shout, willing myself to run faster, breathe harder, anything to get there before my brothers have the chance to disappear again. “Please!” I say once more, but by the time I’m close enough to smell the smoke from what’s now a dying fire, everyone has gone. The wind blows my hair into my face, blinding me. I tear it away, wishing I could rip it off. I turn in circles, calling my brothers’ names, but the wind carries my voice away before the words get very far.
Second Star Page 14
