Текст книги "Reckless"
Автор книги: Devon Hartford
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Текущая страница: 25 (всего у книги 26 страниц)
Chapter 26
CHRISTOS
I held Samantha in my arms. “I’m so sorry, agápi mou,” I whispered.
She shook with tears and burrowed her face into my chest.
Samantha’s parents were truly insane. Did they not realize their life plan for their daughter was all wrong and was making her miserable? What kind of fucked up people were they?
My parents had never treated me like this. Not even close.
In a perfect world, I would’ve moved Samantha into my house this weekend, and told her I had plenty of cash to cover her living expenses and whatever tuition she had left over.
But I didn’t live in a perfect world.
In my world, I was going to trial on Friday. I could be in jail by Saturday. I wouldn’t be able to help her move in. And the money? Shit, after I finished paying Russell for defending my ass in court, I wasn’t going to have any money left.
That was my world.
“I’m so lucky, Christos,” Samantha wept, “I’d be freaking out right now if you weren’t here.”
I kissed the top of her head gently.
How was I going to tell her I might not be here in five days?
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let her down. Not right now. She was still reeling from her fucking parents.
I felt jitters in my feet. This always happened when shit hit the fan. I wanted to take action. Bust some heads. Knock shit over. Or, fuck, the opposite. Go build something. Throw up walls and nail shit together, bolt stuff down. But none of that would make a fucking difference. My trial date was barreling toward me and I was chained to the train tracks.
All I could do was wait.
Samantha clutched my shirt in her little fists and sobbed. “Oh, Christos…”
Fuck, I couldn’t do shit to help her.
I tried to calm myself. If I didn’t, I was going to missile through the ceiling. This was killing me. I needed to think this through. I needed to help Samantha somehow.
What were my real options?
On the plus side, I had my grandpa. I even had my dad. No, fuck that. I wasn’t calling my dad. But my grandpa would make sure Samantha got moved into the house no matter what. He would make sure Samantha had a roof and ate three squares every day. At least the basics were covered. Samantha was safe physically.
That took a huge load off.
But what about mentally?
That’s what was worrying me, big time. I knew my grandpa would be supportive, but I couldn’t expect him to be Samantha’s personal grief counselor, not when her parents were trying to shove their bullshit down her throat. I imagined my grandpa wouldn’t want to butt his nose into their family business, especially without my input.
Problem was, Samantha desperately needed someone to butt in and tell her parents they were fucking lunatics. That’s where I came in.
I wanted to help her fight the inevitable battles that were coming just down the road on her journey to becoming an artist, the ones every artist faced, and the ones she faced against her parents.
How was I going to do that from a jail cell?
And what was Samantha going to do when her tuition bills came due? Throw it in and do what her parents wanted? I wouldn’t blame her if she did. Cast adrift like she was, who wouldn’t be scared shitless? Most people would grab the life preserver her parents were throwing out, no matter what strings were attached.
The idea of Samantha sinking her dreams while saving her skin like that broke my heart.
Worse, I was on the verge of bailing out right after her parents had kicked her heart to the curb.
What kind of a fucking prick did that make me? I tensed as revulsion broiled in my stomach. I suddenly realized I was becoming my mom. Running out when shit got hard, just like she’d done to my dad.
Fuck me.
I vaulted from the couch, tumbling Samantha into the cushions.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” I growled through clenched teeth.
“What is it, Christos?” Samantha pleaded, tears streaming down her face.
“My life is fucked,” I said hoarsely, pulling on my hair with both fists, like if I ripped the top of my head off, all my frustration would blow out, releasing the pressure in my head. Too bad it didn’t work. My skull was still capped and I was ready to blow. “It’s always been fucked.”
She blinked at me, panic setting in. “I don’t understand?! What’s wrong?!” She stood up slowly and walked over to me tentatively, almost like I was dangerous.
I ground my jaw. I’m sure she was completely freaked. We’d gone from her parents losing their shit to me losing mine two minutes later. But she had no idea why. I had a brief moment to laugh at myself. I was going insane. How could I tell her the truth now? It would only make things worse.
“Please tell me, Christos,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes.
I could tell she was desperate and confused.
She didn’t want to lose me and I didn’t want to abandon her. But chances were good that’s how it would play out. I would be walking down a concrete hallway in days to spend years behind bars. What good would I be to Samantha then? Every time she came to visit me, she’d be thinking about how her mom was right, how I was a fuck-up. Because, when you got right down to it, that’s who went to jail.
Two-bit toughs.
Fuck-ups.
Like me.
I stood in Samantha’s living room with my head hanging between my shoulders. It may as well have been hanging from a noose based on how good I felt about myself at that moment.
She wrapped her arms carefully around me and hugged me tightly. “Whatever it is,” she begged, “I’ll understand. I can’t help you unless you tell me. We can get through anything if we do it together.”
I grit my teeth, holding in a laugh. That was the problem, wasn’t it? How together can you be with phone calls and inmate visits? You can’t. It’s a ghost of a relationship. You could wish the person on the outside well, but you literally couldn’t be there to catch them when they fell.
“Please, Christos,” she said in a trembling voice.
My heart was about to snap in half.
I wanted to bolt. I wanted to stay.
Fuck!!
“Agápi mou,” she said, holding her hand to my cheek, gazing up at me. “Tell me. Please.”
The look of love in her eyes was breaking my fucking heart. I was a fucking piece of shit for holding back on her. She’d given me everything and I wasn’t giving her anything.
“I’m here, agápi mou,” she said.
Man, the tables sure had turned.
I hissed a hard sigh as my heart calmed.
I’d held out on her long enough. It was grinding us both down. She deserved better. At the very least, she deserved to know the truth.
I ran a frustrated hand through my hair and said, “Remember last year, before we starting going out, I told you my life was a shit storm waiting to happen?”
“Yeah? I never understood that,” she said skeptically, as if it couldn’t possibly be true. “You have a grandfather who loves you, you live in an awesome house, and you have all that new work from Brandon. Your life and career is what I dream of having twenty years from now, if I’m lucky.”
I stifled a laugh.
The grass was always greener, wasn’t it? I didn’t want to spoil the fantasy for her. I was pretty sure every job had aspects that drove people nuts, but that wasn’t the bitter truth I needed to reveal to the love of my life right now.
I took a deep breath.
It was one thing to tell someone that dream jobs had thorns, but another when you had to tell your beloved you were a bad person. “I never told you why my life was about to become a shit storm.”
She gazed up at me courageously, ready for anything. I was in awe of her strength. Maybe I was the idiot, and telling her really would somehow fix things.
“I’ve been awaiting trial for the last several months,” I said. “I’ve been out on bail since the day I met you. There’s a good chance I’m going to end up in jail. Or prison.” I winced, ready for her to tell me what a fuck-up I was.
“For what?” she asked with zero judgement.
It was then that I realized the person judging me most harshly had always been myself. Looking into Samantha’s eyes, I saw only her belief in me. It gave me the courage to continue. “For aggravated assault and battery,” I answered.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“It means I punched a guy out,” I said, expecting the worst.
“How come you never said anything?” Her brows cinched together and she looked heartbroken.
“Because of the look on your face right now,” I muttered, sensing her acceptance had gone up in smoke a second ago.
“All you did was punch a guy out?” she asked skeptically, holding both my hands in hers.
I nodded. “One punch.”
“Did he die or something?”
“No,” I smiled.
She hugged me tightly. “Christos, it doesn’t matter. It sounds like it was nothing. You should’ve told me. I still love you. You have no idea how much I love you.”
The thing was, there was way more to my story than punching out one guy one time. “That’s because you don’t know me, Samantha,” I said quietly. “You don’t know about my past.”
“What past?”
Up to this point had been the warm-up. Now it was time for her to hear the cold, hard truth. “All the times I’ve been locked up. There have been many. I’m a convict, Samantha.”
She scoffed. “What, like a drug dealer or gangs or something?”
“No, not like that. But I’m a guy who’s been in jail enough times that it’s normal. I’m on a first-name basis with more criminals and corrections officers than I can count.”
“What have you been in jail for?”
“For racing and doing crazy shit on my motorcycle, some of which has caused other people to get seriously injured and in one case, killed.”
“Oh my god,” Samantha gasped, holding a hand in front of her mouth. “Wuh—what happened?” she stammered. “Did…did you, I don’t know, run him off the road or something?”
“No. But I may as well have. Guy tried to keep up with me on a canyon road, but he didn’t have the skills to follow. High-sided his bike right over a guard rail at sixty miles an hour. Tumbled down a rocky hillside. He was probably dead by the time he hit the bottom two-hundred feet below.”
Her face knotted with horror as she backed up a step and hugged her elbows against her chest.
Who wouldn’t be horrified? I know I had been. I couldn’t sleep for three days after the guy died.
“Oh, no,” Samantha said. “That’s…that’s awful, Christos.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “It is.”
“But you didn’t cause the accident, right?”
I clutched my fists in front of me, squeezing the air in frustration. “You’re missing the point, Samantha. The thing is, I was watching the guy in my rearview for three miles. He was lagging farther and farther behind after every turn. He started trying to make up lost ground by coming into the corners too hot. All I would’ve had to do was slow my bike down, let him catch up, keep a pace he could safely manage. If I’d done that, we would’ve been toasting beers at the end of the day. But I didn’t. I had an ego about the whole thing. I wasn’t gonna let some hothead beat my shit, no fucking way.”
Holding fingers against her lips, Samantha searched my eyes. “When did this happen?”
I could see her wheels turning. She was desperately trying to make sense of this. But there was no sense to be made.
I indulged her. “Three years ago,” I sighed.
She took a step toward me, resting one hand on my arm. “Oh, Christos. You were nineteen. You were just a kid. I’m nineteen. I still do stupid things all the time. If that guy hadn’t followed you that day, the next time, he would’ve followed someone else he shouldn’t have been following. It wasn’t your fault.”
“But that’s not what happened,” I argued, shaking my splayed hands in front of me. “He died when he was following me,” I sneered, dropping my arms to my side in defeat, “because I got too competitive. Not some other rider. I wasn’t thinking to myself, ‘Oh, this young fellow is terribly outclassed. The responsible thing for me to do as a grown-up is take the poor boy aside and set him straight before he injures himself. Teach him to mind his own limits, and follow the rules of the road responsibly.’ Nope. I was just thinking that his sorry ass wasn’t going to catch me. Now he’s dead.”
Samantha chewed on her bottom lip and frowned. She was silent.
Because there wasn’t a good argument in this case, was there? That’s why they called it reckless driving and criminal negligence.
I rubbed my hand across my face and tipped my head back in frustration.
“And that’s just the tip of my iceberg,” I sighed. “I’ve been in so many punch-ups, I’ve lost count. I’ve hurt a lot of people, put them in hospitals countless times. Broken bones, knocked out teeth, all because deep down,” I was seething now, “I’m a fucking hot-head who didn’t know how to control my shit for years before I met you.”
A pained, disgusted grimace stretched across Samantha’s face. Her arms dangled uselessly at her sides.
I’m sure any desire she’d had left to hug me or tell me everything was going to be all right evaporated when the truth came out. I couldn’t blame her. I was disgusted with myself too. Because I knew that beneath my shiny, chromed-up good looks, I was a monster.
She took a hesitant step back, toward the coffee table. If she was backing away from me, I couldn’t blame her. When you smelled trouble, that’s what a smart person did.
“But you never started any of those fights, right?” Samantha asked seriously.
I had another can of disappointment for her. I pulled it out of my back pocket and popped the top.
I huffed out a laugh, “Yeah.”
She was frowning and chewing her lip again. “What do you mean, yeah?” she asked.
“I mean, I’ve started tons of fights. Shit, even the ones I didn’t? I could’ve walked away. But I decided to stay and fight. I wasn’t going to let anybody out-man my shit.”
“Christos, that isn’t like you,” she frowned sternly.
Sadly, she was in total denial. Because I knew the truth. I could be a fucking prick when I was trying to deal with the rage that had boiled in my veins for a decade…since my mom…
Mom…
Samantha shook her head definitively. “That’s not the man I know,” she said passionately, “the man I fell in love with.”
And there went my silver lining, my hope that this would all work out. Because she hadn’t fallen in love with the real me. She’d fallen in love with the thin veneer I’d pasted over my brutish past in the last two years. She didn’t want to know about my shit. Fuck, I didn’t want to know about my past, but I was fucking stuck with it. I chuckled to myself. What difference did it make if I got locked up after my upcoming trial? I would forever be chained down by my history.
I sneered at her. “That’s because I’m really not the man you think you know. I’m a fuck-up, Samantha.”
“That’s not true.”
“It’s not?”
“No,” she protested softly. “I know you.”
“No you don’t,” I laughed. “I’m not a Boy Scout, Samantha. I’m the bad guy.”
“But you never start fights!” she pleaded. “You’re always protecting me.”
I chuckled. “Maybe now. Two years ago? I was the asshole. I was the guy starting shit everywhere I went.”
“I can’t picture you doing that,” she whispered.
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t.” I was ready to jump out of my skin.
I wanted to ram my head into the wall. I should’ve told her sooner that I was a Class-A fuck-up and let the chips fall, instead of jumping into a relationship with her. Then she could’ve calmly decided to keep her distance. That would’ve been okay. I could still have mentored her. But I’d been too much of a coward to tell her. A fucking yellow-backed coward.
Samantha had needed a guide through her art career when I’d met her, not a fucked-up lover.
But I had been so head-over for her after only a few short weeks, I’d let my heart overrun my good sense. I’d let my greedy need take over. The next thing I knew, after spending a month or two with her, I loved her so much, the idea of scaring her off by telling her the truth about my past and my impending trial had freaked me to the point I just buried everything.
For the last five months, it had felt so good being the good guy she thought I was. Maybe I thought her love for me as the good guy would make my bad guy go away, like he had never existed.
How wrong I was.
Now I had the most amazing woman I’d ever met staring at me like I was the fucking monster I’d always been.
At least now she knew the truth.
I was Jekyll & Hyde.
Too bad Samantha had fallen in love with Jekyll, because I was Hyde to the core.
I couldn’t hide my Hyde anymore.
I took a deep breath and stared at her. May as well put the final nail in this shit and bury it. She didn’t need me bringing her down.
I said, “Remember when you were talking about Jake’s surprise Valentine’s Day plans for Madison?”
“Yeah?” she said, her voice quivering nervously.
I opened my mouth to finish things off while glancing at Samantha’s innocent, tear-stained face.
“Tell me, agápi mou,” she said softly.
I couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t break her heart any further than I already had. I couldn’t tell her that what Jake had planned for Madison on Valentine’s Day would be a million times more awesome than sitting in court behind me, watching the burners heat up under my ass. Shit, Jake could buy Madison one of those boxes of candy hearts with the messages printed on them and mail it to her a week late, and that would still be way better than Samantha sitting in the back of the court room with me on February 14th.
Man, I was a fucking prick.
Sharp as a tack, Samantha said, “What about Valentine’s Day?”
I couldn’t tell her.
“Is…is your trial on Valentine’s Day?”
After an interminable guilty silence, I nodded.
“Oh, Christos,” she said. Her eyes were tearing up again. She held one hand to her mouth, as if to cover her shame. There was this sad tone to her voice that made me want to chuck biscuits all over her carpet.
That was when my final surprise came.
Clarity.
I finally saw it in the form of one of those forty-foot earthquake waves that washes inland for miles and destroys everything in its path. That wave was Samantha’s parents.
If they found out I was in jail, it would confirm everything her mom had said on the phone about me. It would be hard, ugly proof. Then they would go to war for their daughter.
The thing Samantha didn’t realize was her parents cared about her. A lot. Sure, they were thick-skulled about it, thinking a stable 9-to-5 was the path to satisfaction.
They may’ve been misguided, but they cared. That’s why they weren’t going to tolerate their daughter dating a two-bit tough in lock-up.
No fucking way.
Earlier, on the phone, Samantha’s mom had been a momma bear backed into a corner. She wasn’t giving up her daughter to me.
I wouldn’t put it past her to hop on a plane to San Diego to stage an intervention on Samantha’s behalf. Round her daughter up and take her back home to D.C., just to get her away from me for good.
Shit, if some guy like me was dating my daughter, I’d probably do the same thing.
There was only one way to fix this.
I stalked over to the door and yanked it open. “I have to go.”
“No, Christos, wait!” She grabbed after me, but I slipped free. “Don’t leave! I need you!”
I couldn’t bear to look her in the eyes. My heart was already broken into too many pieces.
I was out the door and hopping on my bike seconds later.
CHRISTOS
The lane lines on the freeway machine-gunned at me like tracer bullets.
My Ducati screamed between my legs. I was tucked beneath the fairing as wind pounded the front of the bike.
It was three in the morning and I was doing 175mph on the Five.
The pain inside me was so big, nobody could save me from it. My only option was to speed away from everything, go so fast, nothing could catch me.
Somewhere far behind me were my problems.
Samantha’s broken heart. There was no way I could fix that, not unless I could magically rewrite history and erase my past.
Her parents. Something in my gut told me they were coming for her. They weren’t gonna let this two-bit fuck-up take their daughter away. No way.
My pending trial, two days away. The possibility of jail time, maybe even prison time.
In all three cases, I had no control over the outcome. Everything was up to the people around me. It was driving me nuts. But there was one thing I could control.
I could control my fate.
The only thing stopping me from high-speed death on this freeway was me.
This I could control.
My bike. The pavement. I was in my element.
I ignored the demons behind me as I concentrated on the road ahead. The surface was damp but not wet. It had drizzled just before sundown, hours ago. Traffic had dried twin wheel-tracks into each lane. The tracks were about two feet wide. As long as I kept my bike inside the track, I was on dry road.
If I hit the wet strips on either side at 175? I didn’t fucking care.
All I could think about was keeping my bike in the dry track. There was no time to think about anything else.
At this speed, the lazy curves of the freeway became dangerously sharp. If I kept my eyes trained in the distance, I could time things tightly enough.
If you went the speed limit, the ride from Samantha’s apartment to Pacific Beach took about twenty minutes. I’d made it in seven. I got off the freeway at Garnet to turn around. The cops always got heavier near downtown.
A minute later, I was back on the freeway heading north, and winding through the gears past one-forty.
I eased up carefully on the throttle as I hit the curve around Mount Soledad. As soon as the road straightened at La Jolla Village, I opened the throttle back up and blasted past SDU. When I shot beneath the overpass at La Jolla Village Drive, there was a brief concussion as the cement roadway overhead smacked the roar of my Ducati’s engine back at me.
This section of straightaway was about three miles long. I cleared it in just over a minute. I had hoped to catch air over the top of the grade at Genesee, but the pitch was too shallow, even at 175.
I relaxed the throttle again as I neared the merge with the 805. I scrubbed off some speed and toed the shifter while blowing past two cars heading into the turn. I think I was still holding one-thirty as I rounded the curve.
The bike leaned as I hit the apex of the turn and feathered the gas. As I started coming out of it, I brought the bike up to standing while winding out the throttle.
The engine screamed as I worked my way back up the gears and arrowed across four lanes, cutting a razor line between an eighteen wheeler and an SUV.
I rocketed northward with the hounds of hell nipping at my heels.
They couldn’t catch me.
SAMANTHA
I dreamt of a fallen angel.
I woke up in the middle of the night, gasping for air.
Alone.
“Christos?” I asked the emptiness that enveloped me.
My darkened apartment was empty. I shook off my nightmare and reached for my phone, sensing deep in my heart that something was wrong with Christos. I dialed his number for the fiftieth time that night. It rang four times, then went to voicemail.
For the fiftieth time.
I had tried following him when he’d left my apartment earlier, but there was no way I was going to catch his Ducati with my VW.
After driving all over my neighborhood for thirty minutes, feeling lost only blocks away from my own apartment, I’d given up and gone home.
I had then texted and called Christos repeatedly, but he’d never answered. Eventually, I’d given up trying, exhausted from the worry.
After the draining conversation with my parents, the frightening conversation with Christos, and the panicked calls to his phone, I’d had zero energy left. I was so exhausted, I didn’t even consider ice cream before crawling into bed and sobbing myself to sleep.
Now that I was awake, the images from my nightmare still haunted me.
A fallen angel.
Darkness.
Alone.
I couldn’t just sit still. I needed to make sure Christos was okay. Maybe he’d finally gone back to his house?
I needed to check. I threw on clothes and ran to my car. If I could see him with my own eyes, see that he was safe, everything would be all right.
As long as I still had Christos, everything would be all right. I didn’t care about his trial, or jail, or my parents. None of it mattered if I had Christos.
He had no idea how deeply I loved him. He wasn’t a criminal. He was a beautiful man.
He was my angel.
My savior.
I needed him.
I drove to the Manos’ house fearing the worst. I told myself it was nothing, just nerves. I tried to imagine the soothing calm I would feel the second I laid eyes on Christos. He would be sleeping peacefully in his bed. I would crawl into bed with him and curl up beside him. I would whisper to him that everything was going to be all right, that we would get through this dark journey together.
As long as I could feel his touch, his warmth, and his love, I would be fine.
We were going to be okay. No matter what.
I shook my head, smiling to myself as I turned onto Christos’ street. Any second, I was going to pull into his driveway and see his motorcycle parked beside the house.
When I drove up, the driveway was empty. That was okay. His motorcycle was probably in the garage.
I’m sure he was fine.
Dread.
When I parked my VW, I jumped out and ran into the entry court. I pounded on the front door. There was no answer.
I ran out of the entry court and looked up at the front of the house. All of the windows were dark, each one a black pit echoing the dread in my heart.
Dread.
I ran back to the front door and pulled out the key Spiridon had given me. I had never had to use it because either he or Christos had always been in the house.
Dread.
The door creaked open ominously as I crept inside. The entry hall and living room were dark. Only a light in the kitchen cut through the gloom.
“Christos?” I called nervously. “Spiridon?”
My words were sucked into the darkness of the house. It was eerie being inside this place alone. The sense of emptiness was heavy and foreboding.
I went from room to room, calling out.
“Christos? Are you here? Is anybody home?”
Dread.
The studio was cavernous and empty when I flipped the lights on. It had never seemed so barren. I don’t know why, but I half-expected to find Christos curled up in a corner, staring into oblivion like a mad man. I dismissed the notion as crazy. Yet I feared my dark vision was preferable to what the storm in my stomach told me I was going to find.
There was no one downstairs.
I trudged up the staircase to the second floor, lifting each heavy foot, almost afraid to go farther, to find out what awaited in the darkness. Images of what I would find flashed through my mind.
Christos in a pool of blood, his body torn and broken beyond repair…
I cringed, pushing away my terrible thoughts. I tried to focus on something else. My mind went straight to…
Bitch. Slut. Whore.
No!
I got rid of you!
Emo. Goth. Suicide Watch…
Leave me alone!
Suicide Watch…
My old pain, my damage. It was all still there. I had never healed any of it. I’d wanted to think I had. But it had barely been two months since I broke my silence about Taylor Lamberth.
Who was I trying to fool? I was still broken.
The stress of this moment had brought it all crashing back. And it was going to rip my head and heart apart.
Suicide…
The only thing that could possibly hold me together was Christos. I had to find him. And he was…
An insane laugh was about to rattle out of my throat. I stifled it down, worried that if I allowed it to escape my body, it would take my sanity with it.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. I was acting crazy. This was crazy. Christos was fine. He was probably out with Jake or, or, or…
No!
Christos was fine.
He was fine!
I walked calmly down the upstairs hallway, toward his bedroom. The door was closed.
I winced as I touched the doorknob, fearing what I’d find inside.
I could do this.
Christos was fine.
Christos was…
–I yanked open the door—
…not in the room.
I checked the bathroom, just to be sure. Empty.
I searched the rest of the upstairs.
“Christos? Spiridon?”
No one was home.
I returned to Christos’ bedroom and sat down on his bed. I tried calling him. He didn’t answer. I sent him a text,
<3 Please call me. I love you. <3
I’m sure he was fine.
I crossed my legs and leaned my forearms on one knee, slumped over, preparing to wait. My foot started bouncing. Christos was probably out someplace having a good time with Jake again. He was…
Christos’ sketchbook caught my eye. It rested on the night-table beside his bed. I leaned over and picked it up. There was a pen keeping place in the middle of the book.
I opened the sketchbook all the way.
The marked page was the last one with anything on it.
On it were written the following words:
“Alone
I must brave this day
Alone
I have sealed my fate
Alone
I will touch the sky
Alone
I must die”
Beneath those words was the date. Today’s date.
Oh no.
Suicide…
“Christos?” I whispered to the empty room.
Dread.
