Fearless

by Lauren Gilley

  Ava slid the knife through the head of romaine, cutting tiny crinkled ribbons of lettuce. Forward and back. Forward and back.

  “I shoulda had boys,” Nell said. “Then I wouldn’t be having this problem. They could ride bikes with Aidan and not have their damn panties in a bunch about everything.”

  Yes, Ava thought, it was easier for boys. Boys could join the club. Boys knew their place.

  “Speaking of boys,” Mina spoke up shyly, and passed a hand over her belly. “I went to the doctor today–”

  The rest of her sentence was cut off by a collective whoop from the other women.

  And Ava jerked the knife too fast and sliced into her thumb.

  The congratulations were shushed as she hissed in pain.

  “Shit, baby.” Maggie spun to her and was around the island and at her side in a flash. “Lemme see.”

  Ava pulled her fingers away and a bright slash of blood welled and overflowed. Her head gave a little spin.

  “Ava,” Maggie crooned, her mother-voice on. “You’ve gotta be more careful. Here, come here. Put it under the water and see what we’re dealing with.”

  She towed her over to the sink, a supportive arm around her shoulders, and Bonita pulled dishes out of the way so she could stick her hand under the tap.

  The blood had traveled over across her knuckles, down into the creases of her palm. The wound was too new for there to be any pain: that sharp killing of sensation right after the knife slices through.

  The water was warm, and it stung. Ava winced as the blood was washed away; it bubbled again and the process repeated, until the sink basin ran red.

  “That’s deep,” Bonita said with a clucking sound. “You have to be more careful, bambina. You could have chopped your thumb off!”

  “Well that’s a little dramatic,” Nell said.

  Ava’s eyes began to lose focus as she stared at the blood and water swirling around the drain in the bottom of the porcelain farm sink. Without her permission, her mind detached, floating away from the moment, until the voices of the women around her were just dim murmurings of indistinct sound.

  Just like that, as easy as breathing, pain had slid across her. One wrong pass of the knife, and there was blood all over. Tiny droplets on the tile at her feet. There had to be more of them on the curly green lettuce leaves. Injury was this thing that lay dormant, she reflected in this strange cartwheeling bubble of detachment, ready to shred you if you made one little slip. One miscalculation, and there was the blood.

  She thought of the blood on her comforter, on her thighs.

  Thought of Mercy’s hands on her.

  For a moment, standing at the sink with her mother’s arm around her, she believed in premonitions, because she thought she was having one.

  “Let’s see,” Jackie said, materializing at her elbow with a first aid kit.

  Someone shut the water off and Maggie patted her hand dry with a paper towel, little bits of it getting stuck in the gaping slice in her thumb.

  Pliant, doll-like, she watched Jackie dress the wound and pronounce it just fine.

  Maggie flicked Ava’s hair back off her shoulder, pressed the back of her hand to Ava’s cheek. “You alright?”

  “Fine,” Ava said. “Just a little faint.”

  In autumn, Bonita and James spent most of their downtime on the three-season porch on the back of the house. Floored with wide tiles and covered with a half-dozen cozy rugs, the room was lined on three sides by picture windows that could be opened to screens in the summer and spring. A wood stove in one corner heated the space, along with half the house, and the furniture was deep, casual, comfortable. James had wired a flat screen TV to the wall that attached to the main house, so there was always a game of some sort on, year-round.

  They ate mole chicken, rice, salad, and chilaquiles off plates balanced on their laps, the whole crowd of them scattered throughout the house. Mercy ate with RJ and Dublin, and drank Coronas like water as he stole glimpses of his girl.

  His girl. That’s what she’d always been. How stupid of him to think that sleeping with her would change that somehow, wreck it, make it less important. How truly foolish to underestimate just how much stronger the connection would be after they’d been together.

  She sat in the dining room, beside her mother, picking at her food, a long curtain of hair shielding her from some female conversation she didn’t want to be a part of. The bandage on her thumb snared his glance, spiked his worry. That hadn’t been there before. She must have done something to herself in the kitchen, while she was pretending to cook. Bless her heart, she was a klutz in the kitchen. Someone should have been watching her better. Someone shouldn’t have given her a job that involved sharp objects.

  Her safety had been his responsibility for too long; he couldn’t stop the spin of accusatory, protective sentiment. He wanted to shake one of those women, ask who had let his girl get hurt.

  That separation, in his mind – She wasn’t one of the women to him. Not a part of that mysterious cluster of chatting females he’d never understand. He didn’t categorize Ava that way – as a woman. She was…she was just this person. His person, that he’d always understood and loved. She was just Ava, and the three letters of her name held an essential meaning for him, one that he didn’t have to justify or explain to himself. There was not, nor had there even been, any confusion when it came to her. Guilt, yes – plenty of guilt these days. But his complete comprehension of her as a living thing couldn’t he shaken by something as simple as sex.

  After dinner, his brothers piled onto the porch, quiet and full of food. Mercy saw a flash of dark shiny hair, a wedge of leather jacket, and knew Ava had slipped outside.

  He waited a moment, said, “I need a smoke,” in case anyone cared, and let himself out the storm door, into the crisp, dark evening.

  The moon was a high white wedge, wisps of cloud scudding across it, the stars bright as tiny torches. Someone on the block had a wood fire going, the sweet-and-smoke tang shifting through the air, tickling the inside of his nose. And somewhere under the smoke and fermenting crunch of fallen leaves, he imagined he smelled Ava.

  She was tucked around the corner, out of sight of the porch, against a patch of house with no windows. Her arms were folded against the chill, one boot propped on the siding of the house, head tipped back as she stared up at the sky, the half-moon reflected in her wide dark eyes.

  She noticed him, but she didn’t react right away. He saw the fast twitch of her lashes, the anxious flick to her fingers as she pulled a strand of hair out of her lip gloss. She was pleased; she had that excitement, deep in the pit of her stomach, at the sight of him with her alone like this. But she wasn’t going to leap on him. Seventeen, and she was learning how to contain herself already, grown up in a way that most of the thirty-something women he knew weren’t.

  He was content to prop a shoulder against the house and watch her fight down her exuberance.

  Ava lifted a hand and pointed to the sky. “Orion.”

  “What?” He followed the aim of her finger, up at the aimless dotting of stars.

  “The constellation.” There was a breathless catch to her voice that might have been about him and might have been about the stars. He didn’t know, and for some reason, that made him smile. “Orion. The hunter. See, there’s his belt, and his arm, his bow, his legs.” She traced the shape with her fingertip.

  “Bad enough you grill me on Shakespeare. Have I gotta learn astronomy too?”

  Her eyes cut to him, bright and moon-shaped as she grinned. “Actually, Orion’s the only one I know. Just don’t tell Aidan. I may have told him I could navigate a ship by starlight when I was eleven, and this would kill my reputation.”

  Mercy turned and put the flat of his back to the wall, digging a smoke out of his cut pocket. “Good way to get yourself dumped outside of town and told to ‘navigate’ your way back, knowing your brother.” He found his lighter and stuck a cigarette between his teeth.

>   “Nah. There’s a line between torturing me and running scared from my mom. He wouldn’t be that stupid.” She watched him light up, gaze trained on the movements of his hands. When she reached absently to tuck her hair behind her ear, he saw the white flash of the bandage on her thumb.

  “What’d you do to yourself?” It came out sharper than he’d meant.

  Her eyes widened a fraction and she pulled her hand down, glancing at the injury. “I cut my thumb slicing lettuce.” She shoved her hands in her pockets – tried to anyway. He grabbed her left hand before it could disappear. “It’s nothing.”

  Mercy turned her palm up to the moonlight, her skin pale and almost translucent; he could see the faint tracks of veins beneath the surface. Someone had wrapped her thumb up tight, but he saw the shadow of blood seeping through the gauze.

  “This was deep.” It was a reprimand, one he couldn’t seem to twist into a simple comment.

  Ava’s fingers closed around one of his, the index that probed the edge of the bandage. She said, soothingly, “It’s no big deal. Just clumsy me and a sharp knife.”

  He glanced up at her face, at her soft expression, the little notch of concern between her brows.

  “What’s that about?”

  “You’re worried,” Ava said, straight-faced. “And that’s sweet, but I’m okay.”

  Anger shot through him before he recognized what was happening. “Yeah? When in your little life have you ever been okay?”

  A moment – a shared memory – burst to life between them, full-color, each detail laser-etched.

  The two men coming through the bedroom window. Ava’s scream. Flash of the knife. The blood all over Maggie’s carpet. Ava eight and trembling, staring in open-mouthed shock at the gutted corpses.

  As he shoved the memory back in its mental filing cabinet, Ava stepped in close, through the fuzzy projection of the past, and slipped her arms around his waist, inside his cut, laying her face against his chest.

  “My hand’s okay,” she whispered against the running black dog silk-screened onto his shirt. “You know it is. Don’t be mad.”

  It wasn’t just about her thumb, he acknowledged with an inward sigh. It was boys giving her hassle at school; it was her future jeopardized by this suspension bullshit; it was the idea of her going to college, a place he could never go, that would never accept the presence of someone like him; it was football douchebags smiling at her; and it was his own taint, his regrettable influence on a life that would have been better off if she’d never been associated with this club, or him.

  “Mad,” he echoed, smoothing a hand down the back of her head, through her silky hair. “Fillette, you haven’t seen mad. This is overjoyed.”

  She chuckled and he felt the small reverberations through his chest.

  The faint swell of voices filtered through the walls from inside.

  Mercy had never, not in his memory, been content to exist alongside a woman like this, the way he was with Ava. Women were treacherous, slippery creatures; he didn’t trust them. He didn’t dislike them, didn’t fear them or resent them – not most of them, anyway – but he was too smart to let them get to him. He knew their games, their favorite lies, the way their lashes batted when they were trying to flatter him. Ava, somehow, miraculously, was still the child he’d half-reared, underneath the woman she was growing into.

  Her hands shifted at his back, slid under his shirt so she was touching skin. She had narrow palms, skinny fingers; he still wasn’t quite used to the familiar feel of them in this new unfamiliar capacity. He loved it.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her hands shifted up, moved forward, as she traced his lowest rib, nails scratching lightly, teasing. “No one can see us out here,” she said, mischief curling in her voice. Up, her hands climbed, up the ridges of his abdomen, pushing up his shirt under his cut, going for his chest. The fast glimmer of moonglow in her eyes told him she knew he liked it.

  Little brat.

  “Isn’t is supposed to be me putting a hand up your shirt?” he asked.

  “Probably–”

  He spun her around, so her back was against the wall, his shadow closing over her and sealing them in.

  Ava could see the moon-silvered yard, swaying shadows of trees, and the outline of Mercy’s broad shoulders. But right in front of her was all darkness, this pocket of space that was just theirs. And when he made good on his word, and put his hand up her shirt, it was all the more stirring because she couldn’t see what he was doing.

  They didn’t kiss. She could sense his face hovering above hers as she tilted her head back and let the wall support its weight. She wasn’t distracted, that way; she was attuned to every pass of his fingertips as he pushed her bra straps half-off her shoulders and tugged down the cups, stroked her breasts until they were heavy and tight.

  “Can we?” She reached through the dark and found the waistband of his jeans. “Out here. Just…quickly. Merc.”

  “You’re trying to get me in trouble.” But his voice was that low French-flavored purr that meant she was going to get her way. “You just want your old man to try and beat my ass, dontcha?” He flicked one hardened nipple with the pad of his thumb, back and forth again and again, rasping it until the sensation was so acute, she bit down hard on her lip and thrust her chest against him.

  Her voice was a high, thin tremble, but she said, “You afraid?”

  “I said he’d try to beat my ass.” Her other nipple got the same treatment – she was squirming now, as she unbuttoned his jeans, daring him. “That’s how you want it?” he taunted as she worked the zipper down. “Up against the wall in the dark like some groupie?”

  If there’d been anything but desire in his voice, she might have stepped back and slapped him for that comment. But he was all Cajun loverboy at this point, and he was hard for her; she felt his cock against her knuckles, heard the little catch in his breathing.

  “Up against the wall in the dark,” she said, “like you want me too bad and you can’t help yourself.”

  That did it.

  She barely had time to toe off her boots before he had her jeans undone and was skimming them down her legs, pulling them off her feet. He lifted her, and she wrapped her legs around his waist, felt the gooseflesh as the cool air chased across her bare skin.

  Rustling of his clothes, some arranging, his warm finger sweeping her panties to the side, gliding against her wet sex.

  And then he entered her on one hard thrust, drawing her down the length of his cock until it hit deep and she gasped.

  His hands latched onto her ass and he pressed her hard into the wall.

  “Brat,” he said, breathless, and nipped at her throat. “You manipulative brat.”

  The power of him. He was strong beyond comprehension. Each time, each new position, left her stunned and marveling. Left her melting and reeling.

  It was raw and savage, the way he took her up against the wall. He pounded into her, boiling with the primal lust her egging-on had brought up in his blood.

  Ava pressed her head back and dug her fingers into his shoulders, her breath a high whining sound she didn’t recognize, the pleasure just as desperate as the act itself.

  He cursed as he came, his hands locking onto her ass, body bowing with the force of climax.

  Ava almost swooned as her own orgasm tackled her.

  For a long moment, they panted and spasmed and waited for their breath to stop pluming like smoke.

  When Mercy finally withdrew, he lowered her slowly to her feet, kept an arm around her as she swayed.

  “Baby,” he said, and he sounded drunk. “C’mere.”

  She squinted, in the dark, and finally realized what she was looking at. He’d pulled his shirt all the way up, his golden skin silver beneath the moon, the shadows carved deep between the pads of muscle.

  “What?” Her brain wasn’t working right; it was on a delicious post-coital vacation.

  “Bite me.”

  She sho
ok her head, trying to clear it. “What?”

  One hand held his shirt up out of the way, and the other cupped the back of her head, brought her face in close to his chest, until she drew up on her tiptoes and was eye-to-eye with the smooth skin covering his heart. “I want you to bite me. Right here.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Very.”

  Ava tried to take a step back, but he held her fast. “Mercy–”

  “Just do it.” His voice was ragged now. “Please, Ava, just because I asked.”

  Like she’d asked to be done up against the wall.

  Fair enough.

  She leaned in – salty smell of his skin, faint whiff of the soap in his shower, salt on her tongue – parted her lips, and set her teeth against his pec.

  “Hard,” he instructed. “Leave a mark.”

  She glanced up at him from beneath her lashes, saw the harsh line of his jaw tensed, the intensity of his black eyes fixed to her mouth, and her stomach turned over, heat filling her again.

  She put pressure, felt his skin dent beneath her teeth.

  His hand pressed the back of her head. “Harder.”

  She hesitated.

  “You won’t hurt me.” In a low, dark voice: “I want you to draw blood.”

  She clamped down, hard. The copper tang of blood hit her tongue and she drew back, licking her lips, the blood-taste moving deeper into her mouth, down her throat.

  Mercy didn’t even flinch. He leaned down and kissed her, and she wondered if it tasted the same to him, like the realest thing in the world.

  **

  Suspicion was acidic, eating one drop at a time at a person’s sanity and confidence. But suspicion only got you so far. Maggie had suspected for days now that there had been a tidal shift between Mercy and Ava, some line crossed that had changed everything; shoved all the old affection and trust into boiling, deeper waters that would drown them or burn them. She wasn’t a tenth as oblivious as Ghost – she’d seen that propensity in Mercy from the get go, years ago, the way he wanted something shiny and special to keep in his pocket.