project

by Torrance, Asa

  “Do you need protecting?” she asks, raising an eyebrow skeptically.

  “No, and neither do you, and you wanna know why?” I don’t wait for her answer, can’t stop myself from blurting it out. “Because I’m about to squash every threat. Soon, the Snake Eyes are going to rule this city.”

  “You sound insane.”

  “I’m ambitious,” I correct her. “And when I’m at the top, that means you will be, too.”

  She laughs. “Okay, stop the car.”

  “Why?” I ask, my foot pressing heavier on the gas.

  “Because I said so,” she utters before turning towards me with a fire in her eyes. “Now stop this fucking car before I scream!”

  But she screams anyway, a jarring whistle-high shriek of rage that makes me instinctively jerk the wheel over to one side. My car comes to a twisting, dusty halt in a turnout on the side of the road, and I look at her. “Happy?”

  “No,” she tells me between clenched teeth again, only it’s not as cute anymore, because I can tell she’s in pain, and I know that pain was brought on by me. “I can’t take any more of your manic bullshit. You say you want me at the top with you, when just last night you were throwing my own suicide note in my fucking face. I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry I ever let Jessa think that was an option, I’m sorry I signed off on it, if that’s what you think I did.”

  “Windy, stop—”

  “No,” she argues. “Do you know how badly I wish I could take back everything? Do you know how many times I’ve lied awake at night and wished I would have gone with her just so I can stop feeling so much guilt?”

  I stay quiet, letting her speak, letting her unload everything on her conscience onto me. There’s something in it I need, too.

  “I wished I had stopped her,” she murmurs. “And I wish I had done it, too—”

  “Don’t say that,” I tell her, keeping my voice low because I don’t trust it. “Because I don’t. I don’t wish you had done it.”

  She looks at me, wide brown eyes glossy with tears she won’t let fall.

  “Losing both of you would have killed me,” I say, and it feels like the first time I’ve acknowledged that fact. “It would have killed anyone that ever cared about you. And your mom, she’s a fucking saint. I know shit didn’t go the way you wanted it to with your dad, but you’re at least lucky to have her. And I know she’s lucky to have you, too.” I look at her. “You’re good. Better than me. I think sometimes I’ve refused to leave you alone because I think you might be able to make me good, too.”

  Her bottom lip trembles, and she bites down with her teeth to stop it. “You don’t want to be good.”

  I shrug. “I do if it means…”

  If it means being with her. The one thing I’ve wanted since the very first time I saw her, a force that only grew stronger the more she became a permanent fixture in my sister’s life, and in mine.

  But I haven’t put the time in. I let myself get worse. Even before Jessa died I had been convinced the cards were stacked against me. Getting sent away had cemented that feeling in my mind. Even down one of their kids, my parents still didn’t want me around. Things would be less complicated if I were stored away, and once I returned, everything returned to chaos.

  Chaos that I brought. Chaos that I’m still bringing, even to people I care about.

  Windy is still looking at me with doe eyes, ones I can’t resist, and I feel like kissing her. Instead I lock my hands around the steering wheel in front of me to keep myself from touching her. “Are you getting out or not?”

  She isn’t fazed, maybe because she knows if she gets out, I’ll go after her. I’m always chasing her one way or another, and it’s all a matter of time before she realizes our entire power dynamic has always put her firmly on top.

  Instead she scoots forward, her knee sliding across the bench seat until it butts against my hip. I closet the pleasure I get out of having her come towards me rather than run away. She turns her head, glancing behind her at the backseat. The entirety of my possessions are still sitting in a duffel bag on the floor.

  “Do you still have it?” she asks.

  I shake my head, too distracted by the thought of crawling into the backseat with her to figure out what she could be talking about by myself. “What are you talking about?”

  She ignores my question with an unamused grimace, but I can still see the interest curling through those chocolate brown eyes of hers. Without another word, she gets to her knees, clutching the back of her seat with her hands as she lifts herself up and over. Her skirt moves up and over the back of her thighs and the curve of her ass, the light pink of her underwear underneath visible for a flash as she tumbles into the backseat with a thud.

  I suppress a grin. “Good thing your mom didn’t name you Grace.”

  But I’m glad she didn’t, because she’s always been perfectly Windy, wild and free, something no one can box, a force to reckoned with, something missed when it’s gone.

  I know I can only push her away so much until she’s gone forever. Demanding I stop this car was her at her breaking point, but the fact that she hasn’t gotten out yet, and given up on me forever, is her gift to me. She would be in the right to do any one of those things.

  So when she reaches for my bag on the floor, I don’t say anything, willing to express patience when maybe I wouldn’t have before. She unzips it and begins to rifle through the contents, her eyes flittering up to my face like she’s waiting for me to say something. Letting her go through the last of what I have feels patently vulnerable, but if I don’t start trying to open up and let her in, I could lose her.

  “Windy,” I say anyway.

  I know there’s nothing in there that could hurt her. The gun from the other night has since been stashed back in the glovebox, and I’m almost glad to have her away from it, an analogy for the rest of the shit I’ve been doing in Diablo Beach. The gangs, the battles, the other entities that have been trying to exert power over us, I want her away from it all.

  Her arms come to a stop inside the bag at the same time her gaze lifts to mine. She raises her hand, fingers gripped around the object she was trying to find.

  The tattoo gun, homemade, but mine.

  “That’s what you were looking for?” I ask her.

  She gives a nod. “I think it’s time.”

  28

  I wait, expecting Damien to call my bluff. A part of me wants him to.

  But instead he lifts himself over the front seat, strong hands gripping into the leather before he tumbles into the backseat next to me.

  “Hard to do that gracefully, isn’t it?” I ask. Being able to rib him even through all the tension sitting inside the car feels right. When the corner of his mouth tilts up in a grin, I nearly melt.

  For all the times I’ve told myself to have my guard up with Damien since he’s been back, he has a way of disarming me almost instantly.

  But his smile fades just as quickly, and his eyes lift to mine as his face goes serious. “Why now?” he asks me.

  “Seems like as good a time as any,” I murmur. “You know, with the world going to shit and all.”

  Only right now, things feel good, or at least better than they have been between us for a long time. I don’t want it to end, but that’s not why I’m asking for the tattoo.

  Damien takes the tattoo gun from my hands, his own grasp stilling over it for so long I begin to think he’s about to tell me no. Instead, he shifts the duffel bag away from me, reaching inside and coming out with a bottle of vodka. I watch as he unscrews the top, tinkering away with the gun to disinfect the parts of it that will eventually jut into my skin. His brow furrows as he works, fingers looking meticulous and graceful as my eyes stray to the way thick veins run from the top of his hands into strong forearms.

  He catches me staring at him before I can look away, so I play it off, holding out my hand to ask for the bottle of vodka. “May I?” I ask. “This is goin
g to hurt, isn’t it?”

  “You may,” he murmurs, eyes shifting back to the tattoo gun as he sets the parts into place. He doesn’t answer my second question, and I can’t shake the feeling that it’s probably on purpose.

  Even when he’s not purposely trying to fuck with me, he does.

  I take the bottle from him and tilt it between my lips, the cold-feeling liquor somehow going down warm. It spreads into my chest, making my skin feel like it’s on the verge of perspiration, before entering my bloodstream with a spiderweb of effects. I reach up to the single button holding my school blazer in place and twist it open, shifting the jacket off my shoulders and down to bare my arms.

  These aren’t necessarily the circumstances under which I imagined my first time in the backseat with Damien Black. Then again, I hadn’t really imagined them at all. While Jessa was alive, I never figured I’d have my chance, and after she was gone, I knew the circumstances she left behind would never make it right. Or rather, the ones I had brought on myself.

  Yet here we are.

  Damien flips a switch at the end of the gun and it buzzes to life with a light whirl that’s intimidating despite its softness. He flips it off again and looks at me, gaze patient and waiting, like he’s expecting me to chicken out at any moment.

  Instead, I lift the bottle to my lips again, taking another long swig before I feel him reach up and take it away from me. “Easy,” he tells me. “This has gotta be a mostly sober decision.”

  “I’m just glad to be able to make the choice,” I say with a tilt of my head. “Remember how you were always threatening—”

  “I remember,” he cuts me off with an unamused stare.

  A grin slides onto my lips, one that’s quickly cut short as the gravity of the situation washes over me again.

  I turn my forearm over, staring at the untouched skin on the other side. It’s where he would have tattooed me, giving me the classic Snake Eyes placement.

  “Don’t tell me you want the bite,” Damien says.

  My eyes flutter up to his. “I sort of got used to the idea of something being there,” I tell him, my gaze moving over to the tattoo on his forearm. He took the plunge before me, marked for life as one of them. “It’s as good a place as any.”

  His fingers wrap around my wrist to pull me forward and toward him. He examines the blank canvas of my arm, running the fingertips of his other hand down my skin in a way that makes me shiver.

  “You sure about this?” he asks me.

  I give a nod, but I know he wants a verbal confirmation, so I find my voice and speak. “I’m sure. But I don’t want the bite. Not exactly. I was thinking more like…”

  It’s not a high concept, but the words to explain it are somehow fleeting. Instead, I lift up from where we’re sitting, hoisting myself forward and grabbing for my backpack. I can feel my skirt sliding up towards my waist again, but by now, I definitely couldn’t care less.

  Besides, there’s a part of me that’s always liked his eyes on me, ones I know he can’t tear away even when he’s been convinced he hates me. I don’t know where we stand now, but I can feel the old animosity between us dwindling as new feelings bloom and take its place.

  Retrieving a paper and pen from my bag, I fall back into the backseat and get to work. My hand is hesitant at first, but I find my flow, tracing simple lines that curve and stretch over the paper in a design of my choice.

  When I’m done, two small hearts have been etched into the paper, a single initial scrawled into each of them. “One for my dad,” I explain. “And one for Jessa. After that, I’m done losing people forever.”

  “I wish that was a guarantee I could make you,” Damien murmurs, taking the paper from my hands and examining it before glancing back at me. “Why me? Why let me do this to you?”

  I stare back at him, looking for the words to explain how I feel. That it’s not only important to me that he was my best friend’s brother, but that it’s important to me that it’s him in the first place. We had been a part of each other’s lives for so long, falling apart and then coming back together again, shattering and picking up the pieces of what’s left. It just feels right.

  “You’re the only person I know with a tattoo gun,” I murmur instead. “And who could refuse a free tattoo?”

  He smirks, meeting the playfulness in my gaze with his own. “Now you want to see things my way?”

  A nervous laugh escapes my lips, but as soon as it’s out, I feel better. I give him a nod. “Let’s do this.”

  He shifts closer to me, resting my arm on his lap as the gun buzzes to life again.

  “Fuck, I’m stupid,” I murmur, biting my lip.

  He glances up at me, needle poised over my skin. “What do you mean?”

  I shake my head. “That doesn’t sound like my vibrator at all.”

  Damien grins. “Alright. Last chance.”

  “Go,” I say. “Do it. I’m ready.”

  “That’s what she said,” he murmurs, and a laugh sputters from my lips at nearly the same time the needle pierces past the first barrier of my skin. My laugh turns into something else, a noise not based in humor, but in pain.

  I make the decision to harness it, knowing I’ve walked through the flames of much worse, and survived. This tattoo means something to me, something I can’t quite put into words, but feel just the same. I soldier through it, my ears seeking out the ambient noise of the waves crashing against the beach below us to calm myself as my eyes focus on the blue horizon out the window behind Damien. The sky and sea are almost identical colors, bright and bold, and only separated by the thinnest of lines. The setting calms me, enough that I’m able to return my attention back to what’s going on in front of me.

  The first curve of a dark line has already cut its way down my skin, and there’s no going back. “Is that blood?” I say as droplets of red join in with the ink.

  Damien reaches down and pulls a clean T-shirt from his bag, using it to wipe away at my arm and leave a clean line underneath. His silence is enough to tell me he’s concentrating, and I zip my lips, lulling back into the ceremony of letting him leave his mark on me forever.

  But I have a feeling that happened a long time ago.

  I could never let go of the mythology of him, my best friend’s brother, the bad boy who couldn’t stop getting into trouble despite being the Sheriff’s son. I had romanticized his story in my head, only to find out later that everything I had thought turned out to be entirely true.

  Including all the feelings I thought I could suppress forever. If he could, I would, two ships passing in the night, sharing the darkest of secrets and the heaviest burdens of pain. Now I can’t help but want every last droplet of pain he can give to me, because in the end, it makes me feel more alive.

  The tattoo gun continues to buzz along my arm, continually tricking me into thinking I’m going numb, that I won’t feel anything anymore, that I’m used to it, and then injecting me with a fresh dose of sharp darkness.

  Such is life, I think, waxing poetic in my own head.

  I may be a little drunk, enough for me to still feel like my thoughts are semi-prophetic, but whatever can get me through this the better.

  With one heart complete, he lines up the next, freehanding with surprising accuracy. I watch with a curiosity that turns my stomach but one I can’t look away from, because it makes me feel closer to him. Both hearts are marked onto my arm, and then he begins the first initial.

  ‘M’ for my dad, and tears fill my eyes, ones I try to convince myself are due to the pain of the tattoo, but I know it’s only the pain of losing him creeping back into my consciousness, the way it’s going to for the rest of my life.

  With the M done, Damien turns his attention to the final heart, pausing before he connects the needle with my skin. I had never thought about what tattooing Jessa’s initial on me would mean to him, whether he would find it hard, or a good way to honor her.

  “I l
oved her,” I murmur, a single tear rolling down my face. I don’t bother to wipe it away.

  “Me too,” he replies softly. “Still do.”

  The needle slides into my skin again, marking me forever, and I watch with solemn eyes as ‘J’ for Jessa is etched onto my body forever. I’ve already been carrying her around with me, and it’s high time I started to show it. I want to be able to talk about her again without it feeling like a secret, because there was more to my best friend, and Damien’s sister, than just how it was that she died.

  I close my eyes, nearly relishing the final moments of pain before it’s over. It feels like I’ve just gotten used to it when it stops, the final line drawn on my skin with one last stroke. The buzz of the tattoo gun disappears, giving way to the sound of the beach, and I open my eyes.

  “You’re done,” Damien tells me. Before today, hearing those words spoken from his lips would have shaken me, because I would have taken them to mean something entirely different.

  I pull my arm back towards my body, examining the fresh ink. The tattoo is small enough to fit underneath a band-aid, but it means something big to me.

  “We should figure out something to bandage you up with,” he notes.

  Before I know what I’m doing, I lean forward and kiss him. Our lips meet for only a moment before I feel him pull back to look at me.

  I find his eyes, willing to lose myself in them despite the self-conscious nagging creeping into my every nerve. “Sorry,” I murmur. “I just wanted to… thank you.”

  “Thank me,” he murmurs back with a quizzical shift of his brow.

  I gasp as he grabs hold of me, shifting me onto his lap as his lips find mine again. My knees land on either side of his hips and I push myself flush against him, sucking in a breath through my nose when I accidentally press the tender flesh on my arm against his shoulder. I know I should be more careful but a part of me doesn’t want to be, not right now.

  He steadies his hands on my waist, locking them above my hips and stilling a body I didn’t realize was writhing desperately against his. His tongue delves between my lips to move against mine in a teasing caress, one that makes a groan emanate from the back of my throat in response.