by Portia Moore
It’s driving me crazy.
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For two days, I’ve been texting her. Megan, call me.
What the hell is going on, call me ASAP!
Please call me babe, I’m worried out of my mind.
If you don’t call in the next hour, I’m calling the police.
I wanted to call the police when there was no word, even after that. The night of the gala, Blue and I drove around for hours in his little hatchback car, looking for any sign of her. We stopped at every gas station in a fifty mile radius, asking if anyone had seen a girl with Megan’s description stop. No one had. It didn’t mean anything, I insisted…she might not have needed to stop for gas, or whoever took her didn’t need to stop, or they just didn’t go inside and weren’t noticed. When I tried asking to see security tapes, I was told firmly that they needed a warrant for that.
Blue finally convinced me to go back to my parents’ house. I couldn’t go back to the apartment, not without Megan there. I’d drive myself mad trying to figure out what was going on, but it wasn’t much better at their place. Instead I paced the living room, going over every detail of what had happened since Megan and I left the dance floor.
“Son, you’ve got to calm down,” my father tells me, guiding me towards the couch. My mother is somewhere else in the house—my constant pacing is making her crazy, and she’s worried out of her mind about Megan, too.
“I want to call the police,” I tell him firmly. “What if somethings happened to her, the longer we wait, the more likely they don’t find her!
“You’ve been watching too much television, son,” my father says, with that same calm tone that usually soothes me, but right now makes me want to scream. “Look, we can’t call the police. It’s pretty clear that Megan left of her own accord.”
“No, she didn’t…”
“I know you don’t want to believe that, but there’s absolutely no evidence that she’s been kidnapped. She got into a fight with George, she slapped him, and then she left. We know that much. It follows that she got upset, for whatever reason decided she couldn’t come back, and ran off. She’s probably waiting for things to settle down to call you. Until then, you just have to wait.”
“I have to do something,” I insist.
“I’m doing something, son.” My father sits down next to me on the couch, hands on his knees as he looks at me. “I’ve hired a private detective to look into Megan’s past.” He holds up a hand. “I know you don’t like the idea of that, but it has to be done. There’s our family, and your future to protect. I know you love her, and I’m not suggesting that you have to be done with her if she comes back, but we need to know who she is and who she was before you met her.”
My father’s tone isn’t allowing for any argument.I love Megan, deeply. If she walked back into the room this second, I’d take her back without questions, but I want to know the truth, too. There’s something that she’s not telling me. I’ve known it since the night George crashed our anniversary dinner, and I know that we can’t move forward without my knowing, as my father just said, who she was before and who she is now. I believe that she loves me and that she’s the girl I fell in love with, but there’s things that I don’t know. And I’m secretly relieved that my father has taken it into his hands to find them out, and relieved me of the burden. Now it won’t be a betrayal from me, when the truth comes out.
Blue finally rescues me and takes me for a drink. We go to a popular dive bar in town, and Blue orders us two whiskeys with Coke as we sit at the bar. I stare morosely down into mine. “This is driving me insane, Blue,” I tell him. “I miss her. And I want to know what happened. Why would she just leave like that?”
“So you’ve given up your kidnapping theory?”
“I just don’t see why she would take off. We were having a good night. Everything was perfect. We hadn’t fought, she wasn’t unhappy…we were in love. Why would she just leave me?”
“Perfect until your uncle accused her of being a gold-digging whore and she slapped him,” Blue reminds me. “And quit with this ‘were in love,’ shit. You still love her, right?”
I nod, taking a deep slug of my whiskey.
“And she still loves you. There’s no reason to think that she doesn’t.”
“I thought I knew her, Blue.” I look at him sadly. “But I don’t know where she came from, just what she’s told me about foster care. I don’t know her past, the things she’s seen or done. There’s always this…sadness in her…even when she’s happy. I know there’s more to it, but I never wanted to push her or make her feel like she had to tell me. And now I wish I had, because she’s gone anyway, and I have no idea why. I don’t know her past. And it makes me feel like I didn’t know her.”
“Hey.” Blue pats me on the back, waving to the bartender for another drink. “Dude, listen. She’s going to come back. She still loves you. She’s just cooling off is all.”
“So what? Every time something bad happens she’s going to run off and ‘cool off’? I can’t do that. We have to deal with problems like adults. We have to face them together. I want to ask her to marry me, Blue.”
He looks at me, surprised.
“Not now,” I correct myself quickly. “In a few years, when we’ve been together long enough and my parents won’t freak out. But eventually. She’s the one. Or I thought she was. And now she’s gone, and I have no idea what’s happened to her. She could be dead. Or hurt. Or in trouble…”
“She’s fine, I’m sure,” Blue repeats. “Physically, anyway. Maybe she’s a little messed up in the head, but hey, we all are. And she’ll come around. You can tell her how much you need her to talk to you when she’s upset instead of running off, and maybe she’ll open up more. These are things to work on in your relationship, sure, but you gotta calm down, man.”
“And what if she doesn’t come back?”
“She will,” he repeats.
And then my phone vibrates in my pocket, and I snatch it out. I see Megan’s name on my phone, and it’s like all the breath leaves my body. I open it to see the text that she’s sent.
I’m alive. I’m sorry. I’ll call you soon.
That’s all. That’s all I get. I don’t know whether to be relieved or angry. I let out a long breath and show Blue, and he frowns.
“That’s it?”
“That’s what I thought.” I look at the text again, worried anew. “What if someone’s making her send that? What if…”
“Man, you gotta chill. She’s fine. No one’s kidnapped her. You just have to wait for her to call, okay?”
“Can you find out…” I know Blue has connections to people that I don’t and aside from that I think they have some sort of connection.
“I’ll do what I can,” Blue consoles me. “But if Megan needs space, you need to respect that.”
He looks at his phone then and frowns. “I’ve got a job I’ve got to go to, buddy. Look, I’ll drive you home, and I’ll check on you later. Quit texting her, alright? She’ll get in touch with you when she’s ready.”
I know I’m supposed to stop worrying. But I’m not ready for this. I wasn’t ready for the future that I saw two nights ago with Megan to be snatched away.
And I can feel in my gut that I’m definitely not ready for whatever it is that I’m about to find out.
13
Alana
I was afraid when I woke up the morning after the wedding that everything that happened would just have been a dream—but it’s not. Instead I wake up in a room with a balcony that overlooks the water, with beautiful white curtains flowing in the breeze that’s filtering in. The air is humid and I can smell baked goods and fried foods wafting in from the street, and I remember how we got here.
After the wedding, we took off to the casinos with Shauna and Devin, my fingers linked through Ian’s as we headed straight for Caesar’s Palace still in our wedding attire. I threw my bouquet to a random passerby, giggling as we ran across the street, and in those
few minutes I was blissfully lost in the world that I inhabited with Ian, without a single thought of Megan.
It’s the first thing that comes to mind as I peer up from my pillow at the sunshine streaming in, but then I see Ian stretched out next to me, still blissfully asleep. The sheets are down around his hips, leaving his muscular chest free for me to take in. I trail my fingers through the light blond hair scattered across it. He moans softly in his sleep, and I touch my neck, feeling a hickey he left there from the night before. I can still hear his voice after we hit an insane win on the slot machines—fourteen hundred dollars, and then he won another two hundred at roulette.
He’d grabbed me, spun me into his arms and kissed me, laughing with the kind of abandon you can only feel when everything in your life is clicking into place for once. “Let’s go to Mexico,” he’d said, murmuring the words against my lips as he kissed me in the middle of the casino.
I’d argued, said it was crazy, that we were supposed to be hanging out with Devin and Shauna.
“They’ll be glad for the alone time. It’s their honeymoon. They don’t want to hang out with us, they want to stay in bed and fuck all day.” He’d looked at me, his eyes bright with excitement. “It’ll be our honeymoon.”
“But we have a honeymoon planned already,” I’d said hesitantly. We’d only just planned it on the flight over to Vegas, and I liked what we’d come up with, but the other reason was this would be a major test of my docs. My ID and birth certificate all passed easily for what I needed them for but I’d never used my passport before and it wasn’t only that. Since falling for Ian I’ve been more cautious; I’ve had to with her looming in the background. I never really cared about Megan finding out about me or my life. I sort of thought it would be funny if she took over while I was on stage or in the middle of a job, let her get a taste of reality, but now it’s me held hostage by secrets. She’s the monster under the bed that if she wakes up at the wrong moment will ruin everything. I’ve been so careful to do everything I can to avoid her interrupting.
“A pre-honeymoon then.” He’d kissed me again, slow and deep. It’s never been easy for me to say no to him, and I couldn’t then, either.
Now here we are, in a breezy hotel room on the beach in Cancun. I don’t know how much it cost. Ian made all the arrangements from his phone after we’d hopped onto the plane, hardly two hours after we’d decided to go. Devin and Shauna had thought we were crazy. He had to buy extra flights for us to go back home and grab our documents but once the initial resistance wore off, I was thrilled. I had always thought that if I found a partner, I would want someone as spontaneous as me. And here we were, hardly a day married, off on our first adventure.
I nuzzle up to Ian, kissing the side of his neck, and I see his eyes flicker open. He groans, turning to kiss me, and I start to hook my leg over the side of his to pull him in closer to me, but he stops me.
My eyes fly open, widening with surprise. “Don’t tell me we’re already at the ‘sex is stopping forever’ part of marriage?”
“No,” he says, laughing as he slides his hand down my hip. “But I booked us a cave tour this morning, and if we don’t eat breakfast and get out of here, we’re going to miss it.”
I wrinkle my nose. A cave tour? Staying in bed and having sex for hours sounds like a better plan to me. But I don’t want to disappoint him after he’s put so much effort in, so I just smile and kiss him. “Sounds fun,” I say, swinging my legs out of bed and fishing for a sundress out of my bag.
While I’m in the bathroom taking a quick shower and getting dressed, Ian orders us room service. I walk out, my hair piled on top of my head, tying the strings of my bright blue-and-white patterned sundress around my neck.
He’s ordered everything I can think of—eggs, sausage, pancakes, French toast, fruit, mimosas. We both tear into it, and then before I know it we’re done with breakfast and heading down to the beach to meet the rest of the group.
Groups aren’t really my thing either, but I play along. I want Ian to be happy. He looks as if he’s having fun as we all head down the beach towards the caves in the distance, some of them half underwater. I swallow down the fear attempting to creep up my spine, but it’s quickly replaced by curiosity.
We don’t go through any small spaces like I feared, and I start to relax as Ian threads his fingers through mine, leading me through the caves. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m staring up at the ceiling of the cave when I feel him tug at my hand, pulling me down a small side path.
Before I can ask him where the hell we’re going, he’s pushed me up against the damp stone wall and is kissing me, his hand raking through my hair. “This fucking suit you have on,” he whispers, his hand sliding up the outside of my thigh. I kiss him back, laughing, and wriggle away from him. But when I glance back down the path I see everyone else is gone. “Oh shit, Ian,” I gasp. “Where is everyone else?”
We hurry back onto the main path, but they’ve already taken another turn. For the next few seconds, we try to pick up where they’ve gone, but it’s dark and we can’t seem to find any footsteps or hear the sound of voices. I feel a cold fear starting to gather in the pit of my stomach, and I glare at Ian. “Now we’re fucking lost.”
“What? I didn’t get us lost. It’s not my fault I can’t keep my hands off of you!” he says, wearing a stupidly handsome lopsided grin.
“If we stayed at the hotel you could have had your hands all over me! But no, you wanted to come look at caves!” I say, irritated.
“You wanted to stay in the hotel?” he asks, his voice raising to match my tone.
“Yes, but you planned this for us, and I didn’t want to disappoint you!”
“You were worried about disappointing me?” Now he looks surprised. “You really do love me,” he says, a small smile starting to flicker on his lips, and I feel some of the hostility between us start to dissipate.
“Of course I love you, you idiot,” I mutter, trying not to smile back. “But we’re still lost.”
“I know how to get us out of here,” he says confidently. “But first…”
Before I know it, he’s led me down another small path, this one leading to the mouth of one of the underwater caves. He leans forward again, kissing me softly, and I feel him slide the fabric of my swimsuit aside, inch by inch.
The stone is cool against my back. His hands find their way through my hair, sliding down my throat, over my breasts, down to my waist. I can feel him pressing against my leg, hard and ready, and I forget where we are and what we were supposed to be doing and that we’re lost in a cave somewhere in Mexico.
I relax into his arms as he wraps them around me, my legs locking around his waist as he leans forward, his hand pressed against the back of my head as he kisses me deeply. His tongue slides into my mouth.
I’ll always remember this, floating in his arms in a faraway cave, how he tastes like oranges and syrup, and how in this moment, I want him more than anything else in the world.
I feel him nudging the fabric of my bikini bottoms all the way aside, his fingers slipping between my legs, and he groans against my lips when he feels how wet I am. I moan in answer, my hips rocking against his hand as I grind myself against him, wanting him to slide inside of me, bring me over the edge that I can feel myself nearing as his fingers caress me, touching all of the places that he knows drive me mad. I bite at his lower lip, dragging my fingers through his thick hair, and I feel him reach down, freeing himself from his swim trunks as I tighten my legs around his waist.
And then he’s inside of me, thick and hard, and I arch my back, sliding down onto him as he groans, his hands splayed on the small of my back as I rock my hips, pulling him as close as I can. I kiss him hard, tongue tangling with his, teeth sinking into his lower lip as I moan, desperate for all of the pleasure that I know he can give me. I don’t care if anyone hears or sees us. All I want is him, this, right now. He groans my name in response, backing me up against one of the walls of th
e pool so that he can thrust, bracing himself to drive himself hard inside of me, his eyes fixed on mine. I’ve never seen anyone else look at me the way he does, full of passion, the kind of raging desire that could consume us both, and no one has ever made me feel the same in return. I gasp as he thrusts into me hard, my nails digging into his shoulders as he groans “Babe, I’m gonna come,” into my ear. I’m almost there too, and all it takes is one more thrust, the deep shudder of his body against mine as he spills into me for me to go over the edge too. I cry out against his mouth, my nails scoring his shoulders as my hips buck against him, the water splashing around us as he shudders against me.
I don’t let go of him for a long moment, pressing my lips against his shoulder as the last aftershocks pass through us both. When we finally untangle, Ian starts to laugh.
“What?” I ask, narrowing my eyes at him.
“You remember the day we met, what a smart ass you were?” he says with a teasing smile. I roll my eyes at him.
“I knew we’d be here.” His voice is a little quieter, more sincere, and my heart does a flip.
“You knew you’d fuck me?” I counter back pretending to be offended.
“No. I knew I could love you, and I fucking hoped you could love me,” he says with not a hint of playfulness in his tone.
I feel swallowed up by love, the feels…everything I thought I’d never feel for another person. I look away from him trying to not let him see how much his words have an effect on me. Trying not to feel it so deeply because sometimes when I do I can feel her almost at the cusp wanting to push her way out, wanting to experience what I have, what’s mine.
I don’t say anything but take his hand and squeeze it tight as we try to find our way out of the cave.
By the time we do, the rest of the tour is waiting for us. Seeing our damp skin and wet, tangled hair, a few of the other tourists give us knowing looks, but I don’t care. It’s our honeymoon, what do they expect?
