Текст книги "Song of the Fireflies"

Автор книги: J. A. Redmerski

Соавторы: J. A. Redmerski
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

“Tha fuck you say that for?” Jen said. “I’m sitting right here.”

Tate was trying not to laugh, but the smile on his face pretty much gave it away.

“Damn, baby, chill the fuck out.” He reached out for her arm, but she snatched it away. “You keep that shit up and I’m going to fuck you up.”

Whoa… I wonder what he meant by that. He definitely didn’t seem the abusive type—Jen wore the championship belt in that category from what I’d seen—but his threat made me wonder.

Tate, with his smile still intact, turned back to us. “No, we just got back from a long drive to Norfolk to pick up my brother.” He motioned at Caleb. “It was just me and Jen on the way up. Didn’t know we’d have a car full on the way back.” Then he pointed at Grace and Johanna again. “These two bobbleheads are friends of Caleb’s. They wanted to get out of Virginia for a while. We had room in my Jeep. You can paint the rest of the picture.”

“Why didn’t you just fly?” I asked.

Tate and Caleb looked at each other and then Tate looked back at me.

But Elias was the one who answered, “Because they couldn’t carry their drugs on the plane.”

A smirk tugged the corners of Tate’s mouth.

Chapter Fourteen Elias

Tate stopped midsmile and pointed at me from across the room, beer dangling from his hand, and said, “You’re not a cop, are you?” I think he knew I was as much a cop as he was.

“Hell no,” I said, shaking my head.

His smile returned and his arm dropped beside him again.

Grace, the brown-haired girl sitting between Caleb’s legs, pushed herself forward on her knees, raising her ass in front of Caleb, and she stretched out her arm toward us. Bray leaned forward on my lap and took the joint from her fingers and then put it to her lips.

Caleb saw an opportunity and smacked Grace before she sat back down. Grace looked back at him with an awry smile. I was having a hard time figuring the two out. I didn’t sense any real emotional attachments between them, but a sexual attachment was unmistakable.

We were all fairly high after the joint made its third pass around the room. Bray and I were warming up to our new friends quicker than either of us expected. Maybe it was the weed, but even Jen began to ease up on Bray some. Every now and then she’d make a nonsarcastic comment to something Bray said, and things were beginning to look up between the two. Though Jen wasn’t about to ease up even a little on Tate, who finally gave up trying to talk to her and zoned out on the couch.

I had no clue as to how much time had passed when I noticed how much Grace and Bray were hitting it off. Bray and I had moved from the chair to the floor at some point, sitting with our backs against the wall. Grace sat beside Bray, and they talked nonstop for a long time while I zoned out like Tate and stared across the room at the television. I wasn’t completely fried, but my mind wandered so much I couldn’t say what I was watching. I saw their lips moving on the screen, but I couldn’t hear a word.

Caleb snapped my mind back into reality when he called for Grace and looked at me with a familiar predatory gaze. Taken aback by it, I paid more attention to what was going on around me. Did I miss something? I had no fucking clue why Caleb looked at me like that, but when Grace got up and went over to sit with him, I got the feeling he was threatened by me when it came to Grace. It was odd. I had barely said two words to her. Bray was the one doing all the talking. I just shut my eyes and leaned the back of my head against the wall and ignored him. I stayed like that, Bray now lying on the floor with her head in my lap, until Jen and Tate arguing woke me up again.

“I’m going to bed,” Jen spat. She pushed Tate away when he tried to slip his arm around her waist. “You can sleep in here.”

Tate laughed and followed her toward the separate bedroom.

“Take your clothes off when you get in there,” Tate said. “I’ll be in there in a minute.”

Jen whirled around and slapped him across the face so hard that I felt the sting. I drew my head back, my eyes widening in a mild display of shock. Bray lifted her head from my lap.

Tate was still smiling, but I noticed his teeth grinding behind the handprint that started to appear on his cheek. He grabbed Jen’s wrists.

“Leave. Me. Alone,” she growled.

Tate let go.

For a second, it looked like a standoff as the two of them stood face-to-face, unblinking, each waiting for the other to make a move. Finally Jen turned around and walked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

Among the seven of us, only Bray and I seemed to find their display concerning.

Tate stretched his arms high above his head and yawned, stretching his whole face. Then he dropped his arms back at his sides and looked at us.

“Crash wherever you want,” he offered. “I’m going to hit the sack.”

“Sure thing,” I said somewhat distantly.

Tate disappeared inside the room with Jen, and before he even got the door closed all the way, Jen’s shouting at him to “Get the fuck out!” among other things, was what I heard.

“I said take off your fucking clothes,” I heard Tate say through the wall.

“Go fuck yourself,” she told him.

Then I heard a loud thwap and felt my eyes widen in my head.

“You fucking want to hit me?!” Tate roared. “Fucking hit me again! Do it!” I could picture him turning the other cheek.

I glanced over at Caleb who sat just as he had been all night between Johanna’s legs and Grace between his. He ran his fingers through Grace’s hair and his other hand brushed against Johanna’s knee.

Thwap!

Jen screamed, and then I felt the floor shake and what sounded like a scuffle. I stood up. It was instinct. Jen may have needed to shut her mouth a long time ago, but I couldn’t stand to know she was being hit on the other side of that door.

“Don’t worry about it,” Caleb said stoically.

I glanced down at him, but then just looked back toward the door. There was definitely some kind of physical fight going on in there. Bray was standing next to me. I was so focused I didn’t even know when she got up from the floor.

“Why the hell not?” I asked Caleb. I kept looking back and forth between him and the door.

Caleb remained impassive, or maybe he just didn’t feel I was worth wasting any more of his breath on. He shook his head and lay back against the cushion between Johanna’s legs.

“It’s not what you’re probably thinking,” Grace spoke up instead.

“Well it sure as hell sounds like it,” I said.

Bray grabbed my hand. “Baby, don’t get involved. Please.” She was scared, because we were outnumbered.

Grace added, “Tate would never hit Jen.” Her face softened and she tilted her head to one side, leaning her back against Caleb’s chest. He slipped his hands up her shirt. But she kept her eyes on me. “The only one in there you have to worry about is Tate,” she added with a small chuckle.

Caleb dragged his fingertips across the skin on her neck.

Squeezing Bray’s hand, I looked away from them and focused all of my attention on the sounds coming from the other side of that door. Soon, I began to understand. Before long, the argument and the scuffle turned into moans and whimpers and the sound of the bed hitting the wall.

The thought of their fiery relationship made me hard. And, I admit it, so did Caleb’s relationship with Grace and Johanna.

Before the night was over and after the lights and television had been shut off, bathing the room in partial darkness, Caleb was fucking Grace and Johanna on the couch, which had been folded out into a bed. They didn’t care that Bray and I were still wide awake in the same room. And it wasn’t exactly something new to me, by any means.

But I realized for the first time, by how easily Bray accepted it, that it wasn’t exactly anything new to her, either.

She crawled on top of my lap as I lay on my back against the floor. She leaned over and pinched my bottom lip between her teeth, pushing herself against my hardness through our clothes. She wanted me as much as I wanted her. And I was about to fucking burst. Maybe she was as turned on by everything going on around us as I was. I couldn’t fault her for that. But I never expected her to want to fuck me out in the open. With a threesome happening just across the room. Hell, I wasn’t about to ask questions. I just wanted her on top of me. Naked.

“Ride my cock,” I whispered hotly onto her mouth.

She grinded her hips against mine even harder then. I grabbed the sides of her face in my hands and kissed her with predatory intent.

“Take off your shorts,” I said with an air of demand.

I reached down and slipped my hand behind the elastic of her shorts and felt that she was already wet. I pushed my finger between her nether lips, and she threw her head back and shut her eyes.

“Take ’em off,” I repeated, and she complied without hesitation.

I raised my ass from the floor long enough to get my cargo shorts and boxers off. She sat on top of me, moving her hips up and down with my cock pressed between her wet lips. I thrust upward, growing impatient, wanting to be deep inside of her A growl rumbled quietly through my chest as I dug my fingers gently into her skin, my hands locked around her hipbones.

“How bad do you want me, baby?” she whispered, peering down into my eyes.

I slid my hands from her hips to her breasts underneath her shirt.

“So fucking bad,” I said, squeezing her breasts in my hands, and her mouth collapsed around mine.

She teased me for a moment, my cock so hard that it was getting painful, until I couldn’t take it anymore and I shoved it deep inside of her. She raised her chest from mine, sat upright on my lap, and began to fuck me; her body moved like a wave, her warmth tightening around my cock with every thrust. I about fucking died.

As much as I just wanted to let go, to give in to my own pleasure and come deep inside of her, I forced myself to stop. I pulled out, then rotated her into a 69 position on top of me. I pushed her thighs apart with my hands; her sweet ass and that warm, wet thing I longed to taste were right there for my viewing pleasure. I moaned and thrust my hips upward when I felt my cock pressing between her lips and being sucked into the back of her throat. I dug my fingers into her thighs harder and forced her down on my face, licking and sucking on her clit until she was breathless. Her upper body fell forward; her breasts, still covered by her T-shirt and bra, pressed into the tops of my legs. My cock sprung back against my stomach, still as hard as a rock. She couldn’t suck it anymore; her entire body was too busy reacting to my mouth.

She rocked her hips gently against my face, and a whimper shuddered past her lips. She started to get still. I always knew when she was on the cusp of an orgasm: her body would harden like one tense muscle, and it felt like she was suppressing her breath. So I seized her thighs tightly with my hands, knowing she would try to crawl away from my mouth when the orgasm reached its apex. She let out another moan as her legs began to shake and her sex began to pulsate against my lips.

She tried to crawl away, but I held her still and licked her with furious intensity, her thighs clamping around my head. She gasped and let out a small noise I had never heard her make before, and then her body collapsed on top of mine.

I just breathed on her lightly while she tried to catch her breath.

Moments later, she was facing me again, our chests pressed together, her lips mere inches from mine. I could feel her heart beating in time with my own. I kissed her softly. On the mouth. On the tip of her nose. Underneath her eyes. Her forehead. I could feel my cock in her hand below, and even though I knew she was about to put it inside of her again, I focused only on her gaze.

“You don’t have to—” I started to say, but she shook her head gently and touched her lips to mine again.

While I ached to get off, I never wanted her to feel that my need was as necessary as hers was to me. I would make her come again and again without expecting her to return the favor, if that was what she wanted.

But something always told me that she felt the same way.

She slipped off her shirt and unfastened her bra before laying her bare chest against mine. Instinctively, I reached down a hand and found her, moving my fingers against her softly, before she finally slid herself back onto my cock.

I arched my head back a little against the floor. “Oh goddamn….”

“We could’ve been doing this for seventeen years,” she said in a soft voice as she rode me with slow, precise movements, her breasts heaving against my chest.

I thrust my hips upward, burying myself inside of her, my hands fitted firmly against her ass. I nudged her chin up with my mouth and dragged the tip of my tongue upward to the center of her throat and found her lips. “We’ll make the most of the next seventeen,” I said and took her bottom lip between my teeth, tugging on it before I kissed her hungrily.

I pulled out of her moments later, every muscle in my body hardening by the intense pleasure searing through every nerve. My eyelids were closed, but I could feel my eyes rolling into the back of my head as I came, both of our hands moving against my cock. My body shuddered and trembled, and Bray’s breath was hot against my lips. And when I began to calm and my muscles began to relax, she kissed me before lying down, her cheek pressed against my chest. I speared my fingers through the top of her hair.

We fell asleep wrapped in each other’s arms.

*     *     *

It was a tight squeeze by the time we made it to Miami. Tate and Jen occupied the front seats while Bray and I shared the back with Caleb, Grace, and Johanna. And it became clear to me that Bray did, in fact, have bones in her ass somewhere, despite me always assuring her that she didn’t have a bony ass.

Tate and Jen were an enigma, needless to say. After that so-called fight they had in the hotel, the very next morning it was as though it had never happened. They were like an entirely different couple. Jen was all smiles and flirtatious with Tate, and they couldn’t keep their hands—or mouths—off of each other.

Liam, Tate’s roommate, was a hardcore-personality type with a Mohawk who reminded me of Mohawk Guy. Except Liam wasn’t your average systems engineer who made the ladies “swoon,” as they call it. No, Liam Foster was another kind of animal who enjoyed making the ladies come. Worse than Caleb Roth ever thought to be, Liam was the reigning king of womanizing.

He was screwing some chick on the couch when the seven of us walked into their apartment in Miami.

The light-haired girl looked up at us in horror and tried to worm her way out from underneath him, but Liam wasn’t having it and pushed her back down.

“Fucking be still, girl,” he said, thrusting in and out of her.

“Liam, there’s people in the fucking room!” she said through her teeth.

“So what?” he said. “They’ll get over it. I’m almost done.”

“Fuck, Liam!” she shouted.

“That’s what I’m trying to do!” he said in return.

“Ugh! You know what I mean!”

Liam stopped midthrust. He looked over at us.

“Is this bothering any of you?” he asked.

“Fucking yes it bothers me!” Jen spat. She pushed her way through us and went into the kitchen.

The rest of us pretty much shook our heads and averted our eyes. Tate waved it off and headed into the kitchen after Jen. Bray and I started to follow, while Caleb sat down in the recliner and brought Grace down in his lap. Johanna just stood there.

Liam looked down into the girl’s aghast face. “Are you satisfied?”

“Hardly,” she said with a sexually sarcastic undertone.

“Well, you will be soon, but you’ve got to let me finish.”

As if that was enough reason for her, she said “Fine” and dug her fingernails into Liam’s back.

We entered the kitchen before he returned to business.

“Sorry, I know it’s really not my place to ask, but doesn’t he have a room?” Bray spoke up.

“Dammit, Tate,” Jen snapped, “that’s fucking nasty. Why do you let him do that shit?”

Tate opened the fridge and leaned over inside. “I’m sorry, babe. I’ll talk to him.” He looked at me then. “Yeah, he does have a room. But Liam is… well, he’s hard to explain.” He came out with a bottle of mustard and a package of sandwich meat and set it on the counter.

“Liam’s a sick man-whore. Simple to explain, really,” Jen retorted, got a bottle of water from the fridge, and left the kitchen.

“He’s moving back to Phoenix in a few months,” Tate said. He reached inside the bread bag that had been pushed up against the toaster and pulled out two slices. “I love Liam and all, but I look forward to having this place to myself.”

“Does Jen live here?” Bray asked, probably trying to imagine how that would work with Liam’s broadcasted activities.

“Want a sandwich?” Tate cut in real quick.

Bray shook her head and I did, too, when he glanced at me.

“No, Jen has her own apartment not far from here. We can’t live together. Tried it once. Didn’t work out. She can’t stand my shit bein’ all over the place, and my biggest fear is getting so used to each other that she thinks it’s OK to take a shit with me in the bathroom. Not. Fucking. Sexy.” He pointed the mustard bottle at us to emphasize each word.

“So, we’re going to a party tonight,” he added. “A great underground band is playing. Liam’s brother is the bass player. You up for it?”

Another party. I had a feeling we’d be doing a lot of that from here on out.

“Yeah, definitely,” I said and Bray agreed.

Miami ended up being more a drop-off place. After watching Liam’s brother’s band play we spent only one night there, most of us laid out on beanbags and furniture in a tiny two-bedroom apartment. The next day, Tate drove Caleb to some guy’s house, and the rest of us sat outside in the Jeep while Caleb went inside and did business with the drugs he brought back with him from Norfolk.

I liked our new friends, but something about Caleb kept me on edge. Part of it was the drug dealing, but there was something else, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I got really bad vibes from him. He never talked much. Mostly he gave his attention to Johanna or Grace, or both at the same time, and at times he spoke to Tate. But he wasn’t the kind of guy to warm up so easily to someone new. Maybe never. But he left us alone, and that was good enough for me.

It seemed that my and Bray’s problems—the small ones, anyway—had been solved now that we were with Tate. Jen and Grace both shared clothes with Bray. And Tate, realizing that I was just as needy in the clean clothing department, offered me some of his extra stuff. We had a ride and always a place to go, whether we were crashing at some random beach house with friends of Tate’s, or in a hotel room somewhere on Tate’s dime, or just on the beach in places Tate knew we wouldn’t get caught. Bray and I were finally able to breathe since Jana’s death. Life became more relaxed. Our safe zone had started to cocoon us. And we had only been with them for a little over a week.

Things were going smoothly—so smoothly, in fact, that the changes I started seeing in Bray didn’t concern me as much as they would have if I had been in a more alert frame of mind.

It took one night in a waterfront beach house to know that I didn’t know my girlfriend, the love of my life, as much as I thought I did.

And it broke my fucking heart.

Chapter Fifteen Elias

The beach house was one of the most immaculate I had seen, overlooking the ocean. It had a massive boat dock just steps away from the backyard, which itself looked like something you’d see in a landscaping magazine. Every room in the house was like walk-in luxury, with expensive ceramic tile floors and intricate paintings and designer furniture that I was afraid to touch and leave fingerprints on. I thought that a place like this, so rich and clean, couldn’t possibly belong to any of Tate’s friends. The last few houses we had visited looked more like my apartment did back in Georgia: a bachelor pad.

Turned out, this was Jen’s parents’ house, and they were in the Bahamas on vacation. So, naturally, we turned it into a party spot.

The music bumped through the speakers in the living room ceiling. Bray and I were sitting together, kicked back on the couch with a mixed drink in our hands while Tate and Jen and a few others danced to “Pony” by Ginuwine in the center of the room. There were people sitting on every piece of furniture, and as I got up and went into the kitchen to trade my mixed drink for a beer, I saw that even the countertops were occupied.

Caleb was one of the occupants. He sat near the sink with a half pint of Jack Daniels between his legs. Johanna was on his left, leaning her head against his shoulder. She had a dazed look in her eyes, but with her that wasn’t unusual—she always appeared dazed even when she was sober.

“I have a question for you,” Caleb said.

I was surprised by his voice. He had never made much of an effort to have a conversation with me before. Now that he had, I was leery of it.

I shut the fridge and leaned against the counter beside it, twisting the top off my beer.

“Yeah, what’s that?” I asked before taking a swig.

Caleb moved the whiskey from between his legs to one side. He took his time. “Why didn’t you call the cops when your car was stolen?”

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

“I heard you talking about it with your girlfriend the other night.”

So Caleb was the quiet, observant type. I didn’t give him enough credit. Up until this point I didn’t take him for the type to give any kind of shit about what other people had to say.

“It wouldn’t have done any good,” I answered, and I knew my excuse was lacking but I couldn’t tell him the truth. I really just needed to avoid this conversation altogether.

Caleb smiled slimly. I didn’t think I’d ever actually seen that guy smile before. He was onto me.

“The only reasons someone wouldn’t call the cops if their ride got stolen would be either you stole the car first, you’re in some kind of trouble and can’t call the cops, or you’re lying about it.” He smirked subtly.

I wanted to punch him, but I couldn’t punch him for being intelligent.

“Hey man, no judgments here.” He put up his hands briefly. “I can’t talk. I’m not exactly Kirk Fucking Cameron. Whatever you two did, it’s none of my business. I just don’t want you getting us mixed up in your shit, all right? I’ve got enough of my own to last me the rest of my life.”

It takes a criminal to recognize the actions of a criminal, I thought.

I couldn’t really agree to his request in good conscience. As long as we were with them there was a chance they’d get mixed up with what we did. But to be fair, Caleb was right: he couldn’t talk. From what I knew about him, he was an asshole and a drug dealer. And from where I was standing, drug dealer trumped accidental death by a long shot.

“Nothing to worry about,” I said and pushed away from the counter.

“For your sake,” he said, “I hope you’re right.”

I left the kitchen without any further conversation.

Caleb would always be the mood killer for me as long as we were around them.

But Caleb did something more than kill the mood, he got me to thinking. Were the police looking for Bray and me yet? Had they found Jana’s body? Suddenly, I had to know. I left the kitchen and weaved my way through people standing in the hallway until I found Jen. I asked her if there was a computer in the house I could use, and she directed me to her father’s office.

I closed myself inside the office. Alone. Just me and the Internet. I sat down at the desk in the leather office chair with wheels and cupped my hand over the cordless mouse, bringing the flat-screen monitor to life in front of me. The light from the screen illuminated the dark room. I opened a web page and started to type in our names and “Georgia” and a few other random keywords, until I realized it wasn’t such a good idea to do it that way on someone else’s computer. I backspaced and typed in one of Georgia’s news station names instead.

And then I just stared at the list of results, my finger wanting to click the mouse button. But I couldn’t. As much as I needed to know, I was too afraid. Bray and I were having such a great time together, able to forget about the looming future that I knew would eventually come, but I wasn’t ready to bring it on sooner. I wasn’t ready to see that smile on Bray’s face I woke up to every morning disappear and become only a memory.

I wasn’t ready.

I erased my search from the browser’s history and then closed the page out, leaving the room the same way I found it. Dark and empty and with all of the answers.

I went back into the living room, and as my gaze fell on the couch where Bray had been sitting, I saw that she wasn’t there. I looked around for her, casually making my way from room to room and between Tate and Jen practically fucking each other while still dancing to “Pony,” which seemed to have been put on repeat. As I glided past the sliding glass door in the sunroom, I saw Bray sitting outside in a patio chair talking to Grace.

Feeling playful and deprived of screwing with Bray’s head the past four years, I quietly crept my way out the door and approached the two of them from behind. It was much quieter out here; I heard the sound of the breeze coming off the ocean and the calm waves brushing against the dock nearby. The bumping music inside the house was muffled by the walls.

I snuck up quietly, intent on scaring Bray enough to make her pee herself. But as I drew nearer and caught snippets of their conversation, my steps began to slow and my ears began to burn.

“God, I just can’t imagine…,” I heard Grace say with a gasp.

I saw the top of her head from over the back of the patio chair, and she leaned over as if to look down at something.

“Grace, just… please don’t say anything else about it,” Bray said, and I noticed her move her hand from between their chairs. “I don’t want Elias to know.”

Grace nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sure. Not a problem.” And then she added, “Is that why you wear so many?”

I stepped up as close as I could to better see, but not enough to be seen. Grace was looking down again. I cocked my head at an angle to get a better view between their chairs, and I saw Grace’s fingers probing the hemp bracelets around Bray’s right wrist.

And then Bray noticed me standing there.

She jerked her hand back from Grace again and scrambled to finger the bracelets back in place. I walked the rest of the short way over to them.

“Hi baby,” she said to me, looking over the back of the chair with a forced smile.

I leaned down and pecked her on the lips.

I glanced at Grace and then back at Bray, hoping Grace would get the hint and leave. But she didn’t. I looked down at Bray’s hands, my eyes scanning the bracelets.

Suddenly, I felt betrayed by them. Not by Bray, but by the bracelets.

I gave Bray a moment, a chance to just fess up, because she must’ve known that I’d heard parts of their conversation that she never wanted me to hear. But no one said anything. It was an awkward moment; Grace being there was what made it the most awkward.

“What did you not want me to know?” I came out with it.

Bray looked away.

I glanced over at Grace again, but now that she felt trapped, she wanted out of there. She looked back up at me squeamishly, stood up and said, “I need to find Caleb,” and then scurried across the brick walkway, which was laid out in a mosaic pattern.

A new song filtered into the night air for a moment until it was shut off by Grace closing the sliding glass door.

I pulled the empty chair around in front of Bray and sat down. Her knees were drawn up, and to the side, her bare feet on the seat. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at me.

I reached out for her hands. “Are you going to tell me?” I turned her hands in mine, my thumbs caressing the delicate skin of her palms.

“No, Elias. I can’t.”

I pressed down on her hands with all of my fingers and she tried to pull them away. “No,” I said and held them tighter, forcing her gaze. “I want you to tell me.” I searched her face for emotion, her eyes for information, but found only pain. I already had an idea about what I was going to find, but I didn’t want to believe it.

She tried once more to pull her hands away, but I held them firm in mine and gently pushed my thumbs underneath the bracelets. My heart fell. I stopped cold. I couldn’t move or say anything to her. And she still couldn’t look at me for longer than two seconds at a time.

I took a deep breath into my lungs and then rubbed the pads of my thumbs over the scars on her wrists. I closed my eyes to compose myself, but my moment of calm was shattered when Bray snatched her hands away when I was at my weakest, leaped from the chair and ran past me.

“Bray!” I ran after her. “Stop! Please!”

She kept running, over the mosaic bricks and then through the landscaped grass and past the dock, heading toward the rocky beach.

“Stop! God damn it, stop!”

I grabbed her by the elbow and she swung around to face me, her long, dark hair whipping about her face. She tried desperately to push my hand away, but I refused to let go. The more she struggled, the firmer my grip became.

“Please, Elias! Just leave!” she roared. Tears streamed down her face.

I pulled her toward me, but she still fought, and with her free hand she tried to shove me backward.

“Talk to me, Bray!” I screamed. “Tell me why you did it!”

Having no other option, she let her weight drop and she fell against the sand. I let go before I went down with her. She wailed into the night and buried her face between her knees, rocking back and forth. I sat down in the sand with her. I tried to comfort her. I tried to touch her. Talk to her. Understand her. But she was inconsolable. I was lost. This wasn’t the Bray that I knew, the girl that I grew up with. This wasn’t the fun and crazy and life-loving beautiful girl I shared my entire life with. She was still the girl I loved, no matter her flaws or her weaknesses. That would never change. But this girl sitting in the sand in front of me with suicide scars across her wrists and such pain in her heart that it shook me to my core… this was another side to that girl I loved. A side that I never saw, never even knew existed.