The wiry little tattoo artist was the best in the city, and his cramped parlor was papered in wall-to-wall sketches and designs, the paint beneath hot pink, the floor tiles black and white check. His fellow artist and business partner, Ursula, with a bull ring through her nose and dyed black pixie cut, came around to see for herself.
“Nice,” she said, nodding. “Subtle. Cute. Plenty of detail.”
Ava rested her chin on her raised knees and smiled down at the new ink on the top of her left foot. Very small, very tasteful and realistic, an alligator looked up at her, head raised, tail curled, ready for battle. A way to mark the tiny gator growing inside her that she’d lost. A reminder for her to be careful. A tribute to the man she loved, all rolled into one.
Once Ziggy had dressed the tat and she’d stepped back into her sneakers, as she and Maggie left the parlor on a mission for ice cream and a wasted day of playing hooky, Ava checked her phone.
Still nothing from Mercy.
“Does it hurt?” Leah asked, bending her head low over Ava’s red-around-the-edges raw tattoo.
Ava wiggled her toes and the leaping tendons made the gator look like he was snapping his jaws. “A little. It kind of throbs. Hurt like a bitch while he was doing it.”
Leah sat back and shook her head a little, disbelieving. “Do you know what my mom would say if I told her I wanted her to take me to get a tattoo?”
Ava grinned. “I can guess.”
“Like I keep saying: your mom is the coolest.”
Leah had come by to bring Ava notes from class, and to visit. They sat on Ava’s bed with a bag of Skittles between them.
“How do you feel?” Leah asked, growing serious. “Are you still - ?” She grimaced and gestured to her own stomach.
“I stopped bleeding,” Ava said with a shrug. “And most of the cramping’s stopped. The doc said I was lucky I wasn’t that far along.”
Leah blinked, and gave her that same odd look everyone had been giving her.
“Oh, not you too,” Ava said. “Come on. Everyone’s acting like I’m some sort of freak show.”
“Sorry. Totally not doing that.” Leah was the first person to let it drop and change the subject, but that look…Ava was so tired of that look.
And still, nothing from Mercy.
Twenty-Six
Five Years Ago
It seemed fitting that the pain would bleed through at the pinnacle of her insanity. That her peace was undercut by a secret fragility that grew exponentially, just beneath the surface.
She went back to school at the end of the week, and she heard the whispers, felt the stares, read the avoidance for what it was: she was a leper now, officially. And she didn’t care.
Mason was still not back, but the rumor was that his parents were enrolling him in private school. Beau and Ainsley, she quickly learned, weren’t going to turn stool pigeon. They were too terrified by what had happened to meet her gaze, or open their mouths to spread gossip. Ainsley’s last defiant act had been tampering with Ava’s phone, and now, she was done.
By the time the dismissal bell sounded, Ava had her plan all locked down. Everyone knew about her and Mercy: no need to hide anymore. No sense pretending it was less serious than it was. She only had a few months of high school left, and then she’d be free to start making plans for the future. She was underage, but she wouldn’t have to move in with Mercy until she was eighteen. She could wait that long. She wouldn’t go away to school. She could take day classes at UT, work at the nursery. And once she and Mercy bought a house together, they could have children, sanctioned ones, ones that she didn’t lose thanks to a kick in the stomach. She could see it all now, picket fence-enclosed and glorious. She was giddy and spinning with the idea of it, her whole future, laid out in glossy Technicolor before her, smelling of Mercy’s leather jacket and feeling like his heart beating against hers.
She left school and drove to his apartment. She couldn’t park in the alley, though, because there was a U-Haul truck blocking her way. Leaving her truck at the curb, she skipped up the iron staircase.
Something was wrong.
The apartment door stood open, and just inside, she saw the short stacks of cardboard liquor boxes. Air from inside came through the door, stirring against her face: a sense of human energy abandoning the place. The ghost of Home leaving to haunt somewhere else.
Ava braced a hand against the jamb and felt her pulse pick up a notch.
“Mercy?”
He stepped out of the kitchen, in jeans and white long-sleeve t-shirt, sans cut. His expression was guarded, an unfamiliar spark of regret in his eyes.
Her pulse went up another notch.
“What’s going on?” she asked, stepping into the living room.
He didn’t answer her. His hands went in his back pockets and he sighed, eyes skittering toward the window.
Ava stepped closer and heard herself laughing. “Are you moving?” She meant it as a joke. Mercy loved this apartment.
But he said, “Yeah.”
She laughed again, a hollow brittle sound she didn’t recognize. Her body sending up the warning alarm to her brain. Wake up, stupid! Something’s wrong!
“If you get a bigger place,” she said, “make sure there’s enough room for a king sized bed.” Smile, little nose scrunch. Blatant, girlish flirting.
“Sit down, fillette.” He gestured to the couch, which was still in place. The bookshelves under the window behind it, though, were stripped bare. It was an unsettling sight.
“Okay…” She perched on the edge, hands folded together in her lap. “What’s up?”
Mercy came to sit beside her, his movements deliberate and slow, like he was in physical pain. He sat close, so their arms touched, and he looked at her face for a long moment, naked longing etched in his features. Ava didn’t speak, transfixed by the rapture in him, the way he watched her, the way he traced every detail of her face; she felt his eyes on her eyes, on her nose, her brows, the curves of her lips. She shivered. And then he reached up and placed one large hand on the top of her head. He touched her like that, his demeanor reverent, and then he withdrew and stood.
“Mercy.” Her voice was breathless now. “What’s the matter?”
His cut was hanging off the doorknob, on the inside of the front door, and he plucked it up, shrugged into it. When he faced her, he did so decorated with all his patches, the stains and scars in the old leather. And his face hardened. The worship, the sweetness, the tenderness – all replaced by a professional steel. This was Mercy the extractor. Mercy the club man, the Lean Dog. Not her companion and protector, her lover and friend.
Ava felt her heart become a drum inside her chest, beating out a dire rhythm. Danger. Danger.
“I’m going back to New Orleans,” he said. “I’m moving back there.”
Her brain refused to compute that. “You hate New Orleans.”
“I’m heading out first thing in the morning.”
“But…you hate New Orleans.”
“Bob down there says he has work for me.”
“You love Knoxville,” she insisted. “You have work here.”
Mercy gave her one long, flat look. “I’m leaving, Ava.”
It hit her then. She surged to her feet. Her voice trembled. “You’re leaving me, you mean, right?”
“Ghost brought me in to keep you safe. You don’t need me anymore.”
“Yes I do! You know I do.” She stepped toward him, reaching out with both hands, and Mercy turned his shoulder to her and staved her off with a raised hand. “Mercy, I love you.” She grabbed his hand, but didn’t have the strength to curl his fingers down around hers. When he didn’t move, the shock began to turn to anger. “Are you – are you going to stand there and pretend that everything between you and me is just about protection?”
“Everything between you and me is disgusting,” he said, his voice awful. “And it’s a mistake.”
Hot tears burned her eyes. “No it’s not!” she scream
ed, surprising him, and herself. “Don’t say that!”
She launched herself at him, in a fury, not sure if she wanted to claw him or throw her arms around him.
Mercy caught her by the shoulders and held her back, gave her a little shake. “Stop it.”
“No.” She grabbed at his hands, sinking her nails into his skin. “Why are you doing this?” Her voice cycled from irate to anguished, pleading. “Is it because I got pregnant? You didn’t want a baby with me?” The tears flooded her eyes. “We’ll be more careful, from now on. I’ll get on the pill. We can use condoms…Mercy…” Deep, shuddering breath. “You’re leaving? You’re leaving…you’re leaving…”
Through the blur of tears, she saw his mask crumble, saw her own torture reflected back to her, in his face.
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he murmured, caving and pulling her into him, wrapping his arms around her. His voice, soft and broken: “Fillette, don’t.”
Ava pressed her face into his shirt, fisted the halves of his cut, trying to burrow as deeply into him as possible. Her shock came loose, all that frigid disinterest, the false acceptance; she ripped to bits, her seams coming undone all at once, and sobbed, utterly heartbroken.
“Our baby,” she whispered. “Felix, he killed our baby.”
“I know.” He stroked her hair, kissed her forehead. “I know.”
She was dimly aware of moving her feet, and realized he’d steered her to the couch when her knees bent and it rushed up to catch her. She leaned into Mercy, letting the sobs shake her because there was no stopping them.
“Don’t leave me,” she begged. “Please. I’ll do whatever you want. Please, please don’t leave.”
He cleared his throat, a low, guttural sound. “I have to, sweetheart. You’ll thank me for it one day.”
“No.” She closed her eyes against fresh tears. “No, no, no. Please.”
She felt his lips against her hair. “It’ll get better. It won’t hurt forever.”
She fell asleep, exhaustion tackling her in the wake of her emotional release. She opened her eyes on faint evening light. She felt utterly, completely empty on the inside, dry and brittle and ready to blow away in a gentle wind.
Mercy was gone. His absence was a cold weight against her. The apartment didn’t feel like him, smell like him, sound like him anymore. She lay on her side, on the couch – the same couch where he’d shown her the pleasure that his body could inspire in hers – but the boxes were missing.
Maggie stood leaning back against the wall, one booted foot propped behind her, her golden silhouette like something off a playbill.
Ava swallowed, saliva burning her raw throat. “He left,” she said.
Maggie nodded, and when she spoke, her voice was clouded with tears. “He did.”
Twenty-Seven
Five Years Ago
Even years later, Ava couldn’t recall the details of the rest of her senior year. She woke, she dressed, she ate some of the time, she grew thin and wan – thinner than normal – and she went to school. Her report cards were stellar. Her teachers were glowing. And somehow, Mason Stephens’ parents were convinced, through her own parents’ street savvy, that it was in everyone’s best interest if the police were not involved and if the incident at Hamilton House was allowed to fade into rumor, Mason and Ava kept apart, never crossing paths. The drugs weren’t mentioned again; Ava didn’t know if the boys found who’d sold them to Mason, and she didn’t care.
Ghost didn’t disguise the fact that he thought Ava’s miscarriage was a blessing.
Ava wanted to kill herself.
She wasn’t her anymore; she was this ruined husk of a human being. She didn’t know how to live in a world without Mercy. It felt like learning how to walk again after a tragic accident. She didn’t smile, didn’t laugh, didn’t care, about anything. Life was a pattern of routine behaviors.
In April, when her acceptance letter from the University of Georgia arrived, she didn’t throw it in the trash like she’d always thought she would. Knoxville was tarnished now; it didn’t glitter for her anymore. And one night, over glasses of white wine, Ava watched Maggie come to tears, begging her to go off to school, because it might be the only thing that brought her back to life.
Carter got a full ride football scholarship to Texas A&M. Leah applied to a local technical school. And Ava made plans to move to Georgia, to the college town of Athens, where Ghost procured her an off-campus apartment that was all her own.
He bought her a gun. And Maggie cried the evening they left for home, and left her behind.
**
She’d been at school three weeks when Maggie’s usual phone call took on a shivery edge. They talked about class and Aidan’s typical stupidity back home as Ava picked through a microwavable lasagna at her tiny apartment table. All alone. No roommates. Just her and her books and her mother’s voice.
Maggie said, her words becoming tiptoe careful, “I got a phone call today.”
Ava knew, before she swallowed her burned hunk of noodles, exactly who’d called. “Really?” she asked, tone casual, as her heart accelerated.
“Ava,” Maggie said. “I gave him your address.”
She studied the tomato sauce glob sliding down her fork. “Okay.”
She skipped her last class of the afternoon the next day, and was in her Cracker Jack box apartment when a heavy knock moved through the door, stirring the dust motes in the air, pounding against the rhythm of her heart.
The sound crippled her. For one regrettable minute, she grabbed the back of her chair and steadied herself, breathing in, breathing out. The months of separation dissolved, and the doom returned, full force, the dread up the back of her neck and in the pit of her belly. And with it, the most acute love, the desire bold as lightning. She hated herself for being affected.
And then his voice floated through the door. “Ava.” Just the sound of her name gave her an impression of both his hands braced on the door, black forelock of hair falling across his brow as he let the wood hold his weight, too exhausted from fighting the distance between them. “It’s me, baby.”
Defiance sparked inside her, just a tiny ember, a speck of red off a dying coal. But it gave her the strength to stand and walk to the door. She laid her palm against the center panel, imagining she could feel Mercy’s warmth through the wood. “Which you?” she called back. “The Mercy who left? Or the Mercy who knows he should have stayed?” It wasn’t much, but it felt like a victory to her.
There was a pause, then: “Open the door.” Not aggravated, just curious, a little taken aback.
Ava constructed a killer comeback in her mind, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was: “You left me.” Because that’s what it all boiled down to. All the years, all the blood, all the silken threads strung up between them, the abandoned sanity and the lost baby, and he’d left. Just left.
He said, “Yeah,” voice muffled through the door.
Ava turned and put her back to it, gave in to the weakness in her legs and sank slowly down to the floor, until she sat leaning back against the door, her fingers threaded through the fibers of the rug beneath her. Her throat tightened, and she said, “You’d think, after all the books I’ve read, and all the shit I’ve seen growing up in my family – you think I’d understand this. But I don’t. I can’t, Mercy. How does a person just leave? How can there have ever been anything there that was real if you could walk away?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? It wasn’t real.”
The door bounced hard against her spine as he thumped it with something, his foot, his fist. “Don’t say that.” An order, one he didn’t expect to be ignored.
Ava tilted her head back and felt the tears pool at the outer corners of her eyes. “I thought I knew you,” she said, voice choked. “And it never mattered who you were or what you’d done, because I knew you, and I understood you. I was wrong, and maybe that’s what hurts the worst. I never kne
w you; not at all.”
“Ava.” This time it was definitely a kick, down low, right at the small of her back. “Open the goddamn door.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll kick it to fucking pieces.” She heard him take a deep breath. “And then you’ll have to go with me to Home Depot and get another, ‘cause I can’t let you sleep in an apartment with no door.”
The tears started down her cheeks, thin cool trickles against her burning skin. “I’m trying to be all Jo Dee Messina and stand my ground here, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, and that’s stupid.”
She closed her eyes; she felt sick and miserable, desperate inside. “Please just go away. I hate fighting with you.”
Silence on the other side of the door. He wasn’t moving.
“Mercy, go!”
A beat passed, and he said, “Is that what you really want?”
“Yes,” she lied. But when she heard his footsteps begin to retreat across the landing, she stumbled to her feet, threw the locks, and yanked the door open. “Wait, Merc–”
He caught her around the waist as he charged into the room, lifting her up and kicking the door shut behind him. He kissed her while she was still gasping in surprise, and his hands clutched at her with an unchecked strength she could feel leave instant bruises.
Ava didn’t care. Her mouth opened under his and her hands dove inside his cut and the smell of wind in his hair crowded all thought from her mind.
They ended up on the floor, on the rug in front of her sofa, in a tangle of frenzied hands and half-torn-off clothes. It was over too soon, so Mercy pinned her hands up over her head, stretched over her like a big cat, and took her again, more slowly, no less fervently.
After, he slumped down onto the rug and pulled her against his side. He was still in his t-shirt and jeans, the fly just undone, and she was in nothing but her bra, with the straps tugged down.
Ava rested her head against his shoulder and tried to catch her breath, still stirred by the echoes of spasms, too limp to move.
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