“I love you, Juma Landry,” he whispered in my ear minutes later as he eased out of me and where I was so full with him and lust and love, I was suddenly empty and he knew this so he filled me with his words instead. “The way you touch me and kiss me and love me. The way all of you is welcome and open and full of passion.
“I love your legs and your thighs and your goddamned beautiful ass.” He kissed me and cleaned me up with a warm cloth while showering me in his truths. “I love that you love fucking me and touching me and letting me do all kinds of wicked shit to your body. I love that you do even wickeder shit to mine.
“The fact I can be myself and make daring demands of you, that I can indulge my need to possess you and own you and make you mine.” He picked me up and ignored the surprise in my eyes as he confessed his secrets and laid me on that bed, studying me as if he were seeing me for the first time. He then crawled in beside me, tangled his legs with mine, and pulled me into his arms. “The fact you know all my ugliness and horror and are still here, loving me the way only you can do, overwhelming and freeing me all at once. Fuck. I don’t deserve you, but I want you and I love you, goddamn I love you.”
Dutch traced my lower lip, then leaned close and kissed me slow and tender, the kind of kiss that started eyes open and full of awareness before slipping into a fusion of bodies and souls and breath and time, tongues lapping and tasting and tangling around each other while everything settled but also felt so intense, and I swore I could feel him in my fingers and toes. Sighs and smiles became full of hope and promise as all of me slipped under his skin and found a home inside his darkness.
“That is the version of me that came back to you tonight, Juma.”
CHAPTER TWELVE: DUTCH
Island mornings crept into my awareness, slow like the first fingers of sunrise on the beach, chasing the chill from the air with a soft kiss made of quiet warmth. I’d hear a dog bark in the distance or catch the stirrings of the town center as I enjoyed an early morning jog and waved to Mike, who ran the coffee shop, or chatted up Juju, the owner of my favorite diner and world’s best biscuit maker. Everything was slow and lazy and I couldn’t hurry the morning if I tried.
Unless the island was Martha’s Vineyard.
On the Vineyard I lived in a house set far back from the main road, hidden by some of the island’s oldest trees, and overseen by a crackhead rooster named Winston. He was a motherfucker, and when I stayed in that safe house, Winston was the goddamned bane of my existence. No one knew where he came from, but years ago he’d decided he was going to live at this house and roam this property and greet every morning at 4:13 a.m. I goddamned hated Winston. There was nothing about his skinny ass I found charming: his feathers were dull and sparse, his comb was pink and scarred, and his cock-a-doodle-doo was ill-timed, off-key, and loud as fuck.
And if I was on the property, he knew it, like that motherfucker could smell me, and he would set off all kinds of cacophony under my window.
Perhaps if I wasn’t such a miserable fuck, I would have learned after all these years of interacting with Winston to simply tune him out—Avery and Kash did. Honestly, everyone who ever stayed at this safe house did. They found Winston unique and an oddball, and they loved the idea of the house having its own avian alarm clock. There was a lot of “Ease up, Dutch” and even more “Oh, he’s not so bad” tossed my way over the years but that was because Winston left all those motherfuckers alone, he didn’t seek them out and do his best to annoy them with his special brand of bullshit.
Winston saved that magic for me.
When Rani and I exited the portal near the old red barn with the broken windows and off-kilter door in the far corner of the property, the section that was wild and overgrown and felt as though time stood still but also moved too fast, I spied that bastard. He was perched on the corner of the roof watching me, at a point where a beam jutted out at a crazy angle as if the builder had come to work that morning after a night of drinking too much cheap whiskey and laid that roof. I could feel Winston’s beady little eye following my every move as Rani and I picked through the brush to meet the path running along the right side of the barn, leading toward the house and the main road. Winston didn’t move, he just stared and I swore he was calculating the seconds until 4:13 a.m.
“See that piece-of-shit bird?” I asked Rani, and she looked in the direction I pointed and then back at me like I was maybe a little crazier than she’d guessed. “Someone should have killed that motherfucker years ago.”
She stared at Winston again and before continuing on her way toward the path to the house, muttered under her breath, “Then the two of you have quite a lot in common.”
This morning was different, though.
This morning my eyes opened at 4:02, and for long luxurious seconds of perfect stillness and peace, I listened to Juma inhale exhale on my shoulder, her lips slightly parted and her breath warm on my skin. The peppermint that always lingered on her tongue mixed with her lemons and honey and all of it was intoxicating and I knew if I didn’t unwind myself from her curves and slip from the bed soon, I would wind up slipping inside her and fucking her awake.
I slid my arm out from under her and watched as she stirred and sighed and then settled back into the pillows and continued sleeping the sleep of the well fucked because after last night, Juma and I were both very well fucked. In the most literal, most amazing sense of that phrase.
I sneaked a peek at the clock—4:07 a.m.—pulled on some jeans and my wrinkled and faded Cal Berkeley T-shirt, and made for the kitchen. I needed a shit, shower, and a shave, but before any of that I needed some coffee, water, and a smoke. Five minutes later, I was outside on the deck, coffee in hand, lighting my smoke, ready to watch the sun rise.
Alone.
Pause.
Almost alone.
That motherfucker Winston lurked just out of the corner of my left eye, watching me warily, probably wondering what the hell I was doing up before him. I turned his way, caught his stare, and stuck my tongue out at him. He walked off and headed for his perch in a tree without one cock-a-doodle-doo escaping his goddamned beak.
Fucked-up feathered piece of shit.
I turned back to my coffee and there stood Rani, arms crossed, watching it all.
“He started it,” I said, and pointed at the rooster, sipping my coffee and tamping down the dread Rani inspired every time she and I shared space. It wasn’t so much born of fear as it was my unfiltered disdain for her. Nothing about her appealed.
“You and he have a thing for each other.” She sat and smoked and watched Winston watch me. “I think he might like you.”
“Said the avian expert.”
“Fuck you, Dutch,” she snapped, her stock response to almost anything I said.
The sky behind Rani, just above the trees, began seeping into the pink of early morning and I knew it would be a warm day, the kind meant for lying on the beach next to a gorgeous girl with nothing but time on your hands.
“Why are you still here?” I asked out of the blue, cutting to the chase instead of wasting precious time bullshitting with one of my least favorite people when I could be alone.
“Well, that’s not happiness to see me,” she said with a smirk, and shifted and I could tell my words made her less than comfortable.
“Why are you still here, Rani?”
She squirmed and I waited.
“Jesus, Dutch.”
“I will ask again. Why are you still here?”
I leaned back in my chair and propped my feet up on the bench in front of me, smoked and sipped coffee, and anyone who came upon us, that nosy motherfucker Winston included, would probably think us friends based upon the intimacy of the hour, the peace and quiet of the locale, our solitude. But upon closer inspection, a different story would reveal itself. One of strained necks and tense hands, fingers rapping a table, lips pursed in stubborn silence. And eyes, always the eyes. Dark and dangerous and full of dislike for each other.
&
nbsp; There was nothing friendly about our gathering, and even Winston headed for higher ground, having witnessed my foul temper enough times to know ill will brewed in our midst.
“Fuck you, Dutch.”
“Not good enough, Rani,” I said, and shook my head, “not this time. Why are you still here?”
She smoked and glared at me and I refused to relent, because I wanted an answer to my very simple question—and then I wanted her to get the fuck out of my face.
The quiet that settled between us was tense and thick and I didn’t care because just as Rani had never spent three seconds of her existence concerned for my well-being, neither had I ever given two fucks about hers. This morning was no different, so while she focused her attention on the treetops where Winston sat watching us, I drank my coffee and smoked in silence.
“What do you want me to say?” she finally asked, her voice low and full of frustration.
“Say?” I laughed and leaned forward, my elbows on my knees as I watched her watch anything but me. I wondered how I ever fucked her and then I laughed to myself because of course I fucked her. Once upon a time, I fucked anything with tits and a cunt that crossed my path, Rani Rao included. “I don’t want you to say shit. What I want is for you to take your skinny ass and get the fuck out of here.”
“I cannot do that, you know I cannot.”
“And why not, Rani?” I asked. “Because from where I’m standing, all you have to do is walk back from where we came—” I pointed to the far side of the property and the decrepit barn. “—hit the portal, and be gone. Vámonos!”
She locked her elbows and leaned into her arms, her smoke dangling from her heavily mehndied fingers as she admired her similarly decorated feet. And if she weren’t a putrid pool of sick funk, I would call the work stunning and wonder at the fact she made time for such self-care, but Rani was putrid and sick and nothing but funk, so I didn’t give two shits about her gorgeous hands and feet.
“Because then I am as sure as dead,” she said without looking at me.
“And?”
As if I gave two fucks about her life.
I cared about mine. And Juma’s. And Avery’s and Kash’s and Frist’s and the Landrys’. What I did not care about was Rani’s, now or ever.
“Dutch.” She met my gaze and left whatever remained to be said, unspoken.
I sucked on my smoke in that way I did when I was riding the edge of some epic blowup shit and I needed to chill. And the whole purpose of coming out here before the sun rose, of slipping out from between all of Juma’s warm, brown, sexy-as-fuck, naked perfection was to do just that. Chill. Rani and her bullshit messed with that plan in a major way.
“You need me alive and you know it.” Those words in no way improved my mood but I told myself she was speaking and explaining herself and that was a start. But fuck her if she thought it was the right start, because it wasn’t. I needed contrition and remorse sprinkled with regret and a side order of guilt. I needed a goddamned mea culpa. This bitch needed to beg.
“It probably kills you to admit it because it most definitely kills me to sit here and have to ask you for a goddamned thing—” she began.
“Interesting choice of words, Rani,” I interrupted her, “because I’m not really getting that feeling from you right now. Not one fucking thing about you, as you sit here and interrupt my morning—really, my goddamned fucking life—feels painful for you. True to our history, the pain is all mine.”
She sat up straight, cocked her head to the side, and considered me. I knew from the squint of her eyes and the slack of her mouth that she was putting something together and perhaps the pregnant pause was her walking that fine line of say it–don’t say it.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Dutch, because it is painful. All of this is painful for me in ways you cannot begin to comprehend because you’ve never once stepped outside the orbit of your own grief and torment to consider another because only Dutch Mathew knows real pain. You wallow and wail and all of it reeks of childish self-pity and—”
I didn’t consider it, I simply moved.
One second Rani was rolling out her litany of judgment and the next, I stood over her, my fingers clamped around her long neck, her voice cut off midsentence. The trees above rustled and Winston flapped his wings, then settled. And somewhere in my shitty soul I knew it was quite fitting for that motherfucker to witness me at my weakest, giving in to my darker self, letting that monster loose to do as he wished.
I kept that part of me locked and chained in the deepest darkest corner of my personal hell because he reminded me I was part Khan and part Shema and capable of the most horrific, spontaneous acts of violence. And, yes, my life depended upon acts of violence, but they were justified and expected. This right here, this unleashing of my soulless self, nothing about it was justified. It just was. And I wished I could stop doing this, the wrapping of fingers around Rani’s throat, the need to feel her life expire at my fingertips, but I could not.
Two of the bones cracked in her throat—I heard them, I felt them—and her eyes bulged with pain, and instead of giving me pause and making me reconsider myself and her and the quiet perfection of an island morning, I marveled at the veins around her eyes and how they seeped into her kohl and all of it made for a most amazing design. And if I were a poet, my words would dance along the lines on her face, the tear streaks and the mucked-up makeup and the near-to-bursting capillaries.
But I was not a poet.
I was a killer. A cold-blooded assassin with death in his heart and dread on his tongue and a lifetime of godforsaken rage with Rani’s name written all over it. So really, I was simply reveling in my true self as I watched the life slowly seep from Rani’s body and pool at my feet. This was all expected of me.
“Good lord, I swear. This is what you sneak out of bed to do.” Juma’s morning voice, that low raspy drawl of southern sex, came up behind me and curled around my everything. I felt her in my skin and my toes, my fingers sang her name as she reached around me and unwound my hand from Rani’s neck. “Honestly, Dutch, how many times am I going to have to come between you two?” she asked real slow and calm, and there was a joke in her voice as she rubbed Rani’s neck where my fingers had left bruises.
“I don’t even like her,” Juma said as she took a seat on the table between Rani and me, “but now I’ve gotta rub my hands all over her. Fuck, Dutch.”
I wouldn’t say I felt chagrined—I was too out of it and in my own world of fuckery and madness to think too hard on the words falling from Juma’s lips—but I did hate making her feel as if she needed to continually watch Rani and me.
“Sweetheart, you broke some bones in her neck,” Juma said while she pulled out her wand, but I stopped her. I knew that little lipstick-looking tool of magic she walked around with could work tiny miracles—I’d been on its receiving end—but that didn’t mean I wanted Juma wasting an ounce of its power on motherfucking Rani Rao.
“She’ll heal. Leave her the fuck alone.”
“I’m not going to ‘leave her the fuck alone,’ Mr. Let Me Rise Before the Sun and Do Some Killing.” Juma laughed and even though I wanted to be mad about her working on Rani, I couldn’t because there were few things in this life I could be mad at Juma about. Instead, I leaned back in my chair, lit a smoke, and watched her do her thing.
“Answer me something,” Juma said, focused on her wand and the breaks in Rani’s birdlike neck that I should have fucking snapped in half when I had the chance instead of getting lost in the artistry of my attack, “you leave me naked and sexed up and just waiting for another round with you and your gorgeous dick to come out here and try to kill Rani?” She turned my way and stared at me hard and I knew not to say a thing, just shut the fuck up and listen to whatever words Juma had sitting on her tongue. “You are a goddamned idiot, you know that, Dutch?”
“Yeah, I—”
“I love you something fierce,” Juma cut off whatever admission I was about to lay in her lap,
“but holy fuck, mister, stop this already. You are smarter than this and better than this, and if there is one thing I will not watch happen in any of my lives, it is you, reducing yourself to the likes of them.” Juma spoke those last words with a sneer in Rani’s direction, and I fell for her again.
And fuck her for making me do that over and over.
And fuck her for believing I’m better than I am.
And fuck her—god, I wanted to fuck her right then.
I shook my head and she reached across and cupped my cheek and smiled because she was Juma and she knew.
“Relax, gorgeous,” she whispered. “Breathe deep and just be.”
“I’m sorry.” I closed my eyes and kissed her hand.
“Don’t be sorry,” she replied, and returned to tending Rani. “Just don’t do this shit again. No more trying to kill the one woman who knows more about The Gate and the Black Copse than all of us put together. And she knows how to find Sevyn.”
Juma closed the cap on her wand and touched Rani’s throat as the bruises began to fade and the deep brown of Rani’s skin returned. “Rani matters, Dutch. I need you to understand that and promise me I won’t have to do this again. Then I need you to get my parents out of here. I don’t like them being here. It feels unsafe.”
And almost on cue, as her words fell between us, all of her stilled, the color drained from Juma’s face, and she looked quiet and scared.
“They’re here,” she said. “Go now. Rani, up.” Juma pulled the tiny Keeper onto her feet and pushed her into me, the morning quiet suddenly a rush of frenzied motion. “Please! My parents.”
“Juma!” I grabbed her arm and made her see me.
“The Black Copse,” she said, her eyes a little wild and frantic, her voice low and serious. “Dutch, they’re coming. Get my parents out of here. Please.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: JUMA
The world is split into listeners and directors.
A good listener knows when you intimate grave danger and an escape plan, no matter how half-assed that plan might be, to heed the warning and put the plan into high gear. A good director assesses the situation, evaluates the pros and cons, and then issues orders. There are no grays, it’s a world of black and white, yes and no.
Death Page 9
