Текст книги "King"

Автор книги: T. M. Frazier

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

He made us laugh.

I looked over to King, who wasn’t smiling at all. I tugged on his hand, but instead of getting his attention, he stood up.

Before the preacher said his final words, King was already long gone.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

King

My girl had been raped, and it had been a week since we put my best friend into the ground. In that time, I didn’t know where to place my anger at the person I hated most in the world.

No, not Isaac. I killed that motherfucker. Splattered his head wide open with a bullet at close range.

The person I hated most in the world was me.

After everything Doe had done for me, after everything we’d been through, she deserved better than to live a life in fear of being raped or shot. As much as I wanted out of the life, it wasn’t something I could just jump out of in an instant. I needed to do something for her, but no matter what came to mind, it wasn’t big enough to make this huge wrong, right again.

Then, it came to me.

There was one thing I could do for her.

One fucking reverse GOOGLE image search. That’s all it took to find out who Doe really was. I’d uploaded a photo of her I took from my phone the first night she’d slept in my bed and pressed search and there she was, staring into the camera like she was looking right into my eyes. I wished I’d never done the search. I wished I’d never known who she really was.

I’d used the fact that I knew who she was and what that could do for me as an excuse to bring her back to me. Even though it was her I wanted since the very first moment I saw her.

I’d planned to keep her forever, and her secret even longer if need be.

Until now.

Seventeen year old Ramie Elizabeth Price.

Either the police were really shitty at their jobs, or they never really tried to find out who she was to begin with, because for the second time after searching her image, less than a second after pressing search, I was staring at multiple images of the girl I’d fallen in love with on my laptop.

There were no articles about her going missing, just pictures of her from various events. Balls, galas, fundraisers. It was her in the pictures, but it wasn’t. The gowns, the makeup, the fake smile, if there was any smile at all.

The last picture of her I found was taken almost a year ago. She had a blank look on her face. Her eyes were vacant.

I knew that look. I’d regrettably put it on her face myself. It was a look that broke my fucking heart.

Indifference.

She was holding the hand of a boy who looked a little older than her, who was smiling from ear to ear.

I wanted to reach through the computer and break his fucking hand and then break every single one of his pearly white teeth.

Senator Westmore Bigelow Price, with daughter Ramie Elizabeth and long-time beau Tanner Preston Redmond at the Heart Ball Gala to raise money for pediatric cancer.

Even though it was my second time scanning the pictures, my blood boiled. I don’t know what made me madder. The boy who was touching my girl. Or the man they listed as her father.

A senator running for president. A man who would want to avoid scandal at all cost. That’s probably why they didn’t even try to find their missing daughter.

Fucking asshole.

I stood from the kitchen table and threw the laptop across the room. It smashed against a cabinet and fell to the floor in a million pieces.

Bear came storming into the kitchen. “What the fuck?” he asked, looked over at the broken laptop. “You on the rag man?”

“We have to take a trip,” I said, staring down at the now broken laptop as though the image of Doe or Ramie, or whatever the fuck her name was and her boyfriend were still up on the broken screen that was flashing from blue to black over and over again.

“Where we going?”

“Tell me something, Bear, and be honest. What are the chances of us getting the kind of money we need for the payoff to the senator for Max?”

My eyes met his for the first time since he came into the kitchen.

“Slim to fucking none, man” he answered honestly.

“Then, get the fucking truck. I’ll drive.”

“But you still haven’t said why I’m getting the truck.”

“Because, my friend, there is a deal with the devil that needs to be made.” I looked down the hall at the closed door of my bedroom, where the girl I’d fallen in love with slept peacefully in my bed. She was mine, and I would always think of her that way. But she deserved a better life than the one I could give her, which seemed to only hurt her at every turn.

After Preppy’s funeral I was thinking about giving her the truth.

Now, I was just going to give her away.

“And who is the devil in this scenario?” Bear asked, shrugging on his cut.

I was going to see the senator and offer Doe in exchange for him making sure that I had signed custody papers for Max.

The only family I had left.

I stared out the kitchen window, but couldn’t see a thing. It was like I was staring into a white abyss, a place I was about to go, that I wasn’t ever going to be able to come back from.

“Me.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

King

When you fall in love, you know it’s the real deal because you come to the realization you would take a bullet for that person. And when you become a parent, you realize that you would not only use your own body but the body of the person you love as a human shield to protect your child.

That is the place where I existed.

The Senator had a daughter who had a life, a boyfriend. I wasn’t doing Doe any favors by keeping her with me, involved in shit she shouldn’t be involved in. It got Preppy dead. I wasn’t doing my daughter any favors by leaving her hanging out there in the world without protection. She needed her father. She needed her family.

She needed me.

I was going to give it all up for her. I couldn’t manage the payoff, but if the senator accepted my offer of a trade, then I could keep what money I did have and that was enough to sell the house, and disappear of the radar to somewhere where nobody knew who we were.

Me and Max.

I was going be a good father to her. A good influence. A good role model. I would get us a house in a good neighborhood and send her to a good school. I would read to her at bedtime. I would make this fucking work because it had to fucking work. I was going to disappear because my life was going to reappear.

I lost my best friend, and that made me realize that sooner or later I was going to lose my girl, too. Because as soon as she learned that I’d known who she was from the very beginning, she would hate me forever.

I needed Max because she was all I had left, and I was bound and determine not to fuck that up. I prayed to any god who listened that if I could just be with her, I would make things right. I would give her my all.

My love.

My heart.

My daughter.

My everything.

I made a decision that broke my fucking heart and made it sing all at the same time. So what if I felt like a piece of me would always be missing? Fuck it. I would have my daughter.

And she was my heart.

In exchange for Max, I was going to give Doe, or Ramie, or Pup, or whatever you want to call her, back to her father.

By not telling Doe about what was going to happen, I wasn’t giving her an option. But there was no doubt in my mind that when she found out what I’d been hiding all along that she was going to look at me like the monster I am.

But then again, she might be grateful to me for giving her her life back.

Maybe, not.

I pretended not to care all the way to the senator’s office.

I was going to have to be prepared to pretend for the rest of my life.

“Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist with curly black hair and dark freckles across her nose asked, without looking up from her computer.

“My name is Brantley King, and I don’t need a fucking appointment. Let him know I’m waiting. Give him this. He’ll want to see me.”

I placed the folded up picture on his desk, one I took of Doe this morning while she was sleeping. I didn’t wait for her to answer. I took a seat in the waiting area in a plastic chair that faced her desk. When she finally looked up from her computer, her jaw dropped. She’d probably never seen someone who looked like me waiting to see the senator. I didn’t have the patience to be inconspicuous. I needed to make shit happen and make it happen before I changed my fucking mind.

The receptionist stood and walked down the hall. She emerged a few moments later and dialed a number on her phone. She held her hand up over her mouth as she whispered into the receiver.

“Senator Price will see you now,” she said, with a fake smile, setting the phone back on its cradle.

She stood, and I followed her down the hall until we came to an office with a double-door entry. She opened it and stood aside to let me through. When I stepped inside, she shut it behind me. There was another click, which I’m sure meant that she locked it as well.

“I know who you are, Mr. King, and the only reason I’m even letting you in this office is because I know you had to pass through the metal detectors. So, I know you’re not armed,” the Senator said, standing up from behind his oversized mahogany desk, holding the picture I’d given his receptionist in his hand. He was trying to even the playing field, but he didn’t seem to understand that I was the one holding all the cards.

“That’s where you would be wrong, Senator.” I lifted up the front of my shirt and removed the pistol from the front of my pants. I was wearing my big metal junior rodeo belt buckle trophy. The one I got for looping a sheep at the fair. “Crazy thing about those metal belt-buckles. They make the alarms go off every single fucking time.”

The senator sat back down and folded his hands on the desk, gesturing to the chair in front of him. “Let’s cut the shit then, shall we?”

A picture on a shelf beside his desk caught my eye. It was my Pup, several years younger than she was now, on some sort of beach, her smile bigger and brighter than I’d ever seen. She’d been happy once, and it was seeing that bit of happy that made it easier to propose my deal.

“I have your daughter. You have ten seconds to tell me why you don’t know where she is and why you aren’t looking for her. The truth. Not some bullshit lie either,” I warned.

The senator’s eyes grew wide. “You better not have harmed my daughter so help me…” He stood abruptly, his chair tipped backwards and crashed onto the floor. “What do you know?”

“Calm the fuck down. What I know is that she has big blue eyes and a tendency to talk too much when she’s nervous.” And then just for fun I added, “I know how her heart beats faster when she’s turned on.”

“What the fuck did you do to my daughter?”

“Oh, no. That’s not how this works. You need to answer me first. Why haven’t you reported her missing? Why haven’t you looked for her?”

“Why do you think we haven’t been looking?” the senator asked, settling back into his seat, nervously wringing his hands.

“Because if the senator’s daughter went missing, you would think it would be kind of a big deal. All over the news and whatnot. And it isn’t.”

Senator Price picked his chair up off the floor and sat down, rubbing his hands over his eyes.

“We’ve been telling people she’s studying abroad in Paris. But as you already know, that’s not the truth,” he admitted. “We didn’t report her missing because Ramie is a troubled child. She started hanging with the wrong crowd. Disappearing for weeks at a time. This time, it’s been months, and she hasn’t so much as used my credit card. Her mother and I thought she was rebelling, teaching us some sort of lesson. We’d gotten into a huge fight before she stormed out. We haven’t seen her since.”

“So, you didn’t report her missing, because she was a troubled child? Or because you were up for reelection and you were afraid the story would taint your oh-so-perfect political image?”

“Did you see what happened to Sarah Palin when they found out she had a sixteen year old who was unwed and pregnant? It killed her! I couldn’t do that to my party, and I knew Ramie wasn’t really missing. She’d just run away like she’d had so many times before. So I made up excuses, lies. I told people what they wanted to hear, and her mother and I prayed every day she would at least call.” He looked distraught. “Tell me she’s okay.”

“Yeah. She’s fine.”

The senator let out a relieved breath.

“Why did she never come home? Does she really hate us that much?” he asked, his fingers pressed to his temples.

“She doesn’t remember. She was in some sort of accident. She woke up with no memory. She doesn’t even know her own name.”

“What?” He stood up again. “Take me to her. Now! I need to see her!” he demanded.

“Not so fast.” I held up a hand. “Sit the fuck back down, Senator. It seems we have a little trade we need to work out.”

He sat back down. “Yes, of course. What are your terms?”

“No bullshit. No money. What I’m offering is a flat trade. Ramie for Max. My daughter. Here is her information.” I placed a receipt on his desk. “On the back is my daughter’s name, social security number, and the address of the foster home she’s been living in, as well as all my information. Be at my place. Tomorrow at noon. Bring Max and all the custody papers, giving me full rights to my daughter and then and only then, you’ll get yours back.” The words hurt coming out of my mouth, but they needed to be said because the trade needed to be done.

“That can be arranged, but I’ll need more than a day,” the senator said, nervously shuffling his thumbs one over the other over and over again. I stood and walked to the door.

“Tomorrow at noon. If you’re not there, if you don’t bring Max—” I turned and faced him one last time. “I’ll slit your girl’s throat. No hesitation. If I can’t have my daughter, I won’t let you have yours. I don’t give a shit what happens to me after that.”

I waited until I was in the car and Bear was driving out of the parking lot to exhale.

“How did it go?” Bear asked.

I sighed.

“That bad?”

“It went about as good as it could have gone. It’s what I did that I’m sighing about.”

“What exactly is it that you did in there?”

“I just traded, Doe.”

“For what?” he shouted.

“Who,” I corrected.

“Okay, for who?”

“Max. I just traded Doe for Max.”

“Oh. My. Fuck.”

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” I said, running my hand over my head. “If I wasn’t sure whether I’d ever sold my soul, I’m positive I have now.”

Chapter Thirty

King

I was in bed with Doe. It was almost midnight, and I was already counting down the hours to noon. Noon was when I would see Max for the first time since I held her in my arms the night I let my mom burn in the fire.

Noon was also the last time I would ever see my girl.

Doe was going to become the person she was supposed to be, the person she was born as, Ramie Price. She probably wouldn’t bother glancing back at me in the rearview mirror after realizing the life of luxury she was heading back to. I was never good enough for her to begin with, and this was going to be both the most selfish and selfless thing I’d ever done when it came to her.

I was giving her back.

I was getting my daughter back.

I’d never been so miserable, and excited at the same time. A few months ago, I didn’t think that if I got Max back I would be doing it all alone. I thought at least I’d have Preppy. Then, I thought Doe would be in the picture.

Now, it was down to just me.

I lifted my leg over hers. I couldn’t get close enough. I’d convinced her to let go of the person she was to be with me, but unlike Preppy, her past life had risen from the grave and had been haunting me since I hit the search button.

I was tossing her back like a fish that wasn’t worth keeping.

But she WAS worth keeping.

She was worth fucking everything.

Everything I couldn’t give her.

There was no doubt in my mind if something like soulmates did exist that Doe was mine. The problem was that Ramie wasn’t. Ramie had a boyfriend. Ramie had money. Ramie had a future that didn’t include a felon with tattoos and a penchant for violence. Ramie wasn’t going to have to put herself in danger, risk getting shot, or ever have to worry that either one of us was going to get hurt or end up dead.

I wanted more for her. I wanted to break her heart and mine and get it over with so we could both heal.

Her with her family.

Me with mine.

I turned her onto her back and rolled on top of her. Spreading her legs, I lowered myself until I could taste her sweetness one last time. I slowly lapped at her folds as she woke with a moan on her tongue. Water welled up in my eyes. I’d licked her into her first orgasm by the time the first tear fell. I was glad her eyes were closed when I entered her and began thrusting fiercely into not just the greatest pussy I’ve ever had, and the greatest girl I’d ever known, but the greatest love I knew I’d ever have.

The only love.

If things were different, I’d put a ring on her finger. A baby in her belly. We’d have Max. We’d have Preppy. We’d be the family I always wanted but never knew could exist.

Because it didn’t exist.

Preppy was fucking dead, and my girl was about to return to the life of privilege she was born into.

I told her I loved her with each thrust of my hips. I told her I was sorry. I told her that I wanted her to stay forever. I told her I wished she would have my child. I told her everything with sex that I dared not speak out loud. I told her that if things were different that we would be together forever.

Forever.

I’d never spoken the word in my life, but looking down at Doe, still half-asleep as I brought her to the brink of another orgasm, I saw what forever would look like.

And it was fucking beautiful.

A wayward tear dripped from my chin. I reached out and caught it in the palm of my hand before it had a chance to wake Doe from the state of sleepy ecstasy she was currently in.

Before she could find out how I really felt.

Before she was gone.

Forever.

The next morning, for the first time in my life, I made love to a woman. I didn’t fuck. I didn’t have sex.

I kissed her the entire time. I held her as close as two people could be. I told her she was beautiful. That I loved everything about her.

I waited until she was in the throws of her orgasm to whisper, “I love you.” I don’t know if she heard me, but I was saying it more for me than for her.

I needed to say those words while I still had the chance.

I think a part of me loved Doe from the first moment my eyes landed on hers. Haunted, beautiful, scared. I wanted her, body and soul.

I would only have her for a few more hours, and I was going to spend every second of that time, inside my girl.

While she still was my girl.

*     *     *

Doe

Every time I woke during the night, King was touching me. It was like no matter how close we were, it wasn’t close enough.

I dreamt that he told me he loved me. Once before, after finishing my tattoo, he’d told me to shut up and let me love you. But what I heard in my dream was the real deal.

There was something wrong. I felt it in my bones. I’d asked him what was bothering him, but he brushed me off and just kept making love to me.

For hours.

Maybe, he was lost in thoughts of Preppy, and just needed me to be there for him.

So, I was.

Out time together that morning was so unlike anything I’d experienced with him before.

I told him over again that I was okay after Isaac forced himself on me. It was a moment in life, a horrible one. But I know I’d be okay. As long as I had King, I would be okay.

It would all be okay.

I was helplessly, passionately, in love with the complicated man who touched me like I was a thin square of glass, and he was afraid I was going to shatter.

He whispered to me how gorgeous I was as he dragged his cock against my clit. He pulled out of me and rubbed against my sensitive bundle of nerves when he thrust back in.

I was alive with sensation, and full of questions.

He whispered how much he loved being inside me. How much he wished he wasn’t so much of an asshole. How I deserved the world. How he wasn’t good enough for me.

And then it hit me like a fucking freight train with no brakes, and my heart seized inside my chest.

King was saying goodbye.

*     *     *

The sun was already high in the sky by the time I woke up and got dressed. At any second, I expected King to burst through the door and tell me he wanted me gone. It was a horrible thing to be waiting for. I was going to pack, but there was nothing there that was truly ever mine.

I threw on some clothes and headed outside to find King. Rather than waiting around with my neck stretched out on the block, I went in search of the executioner. I found him outside, rocking in the swing I’d recently convinced him was the only thing missing from the porch.

“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.” He buried his face in his hands.

“Everything, baby. Everything is wrong,” King said, looking up over the porch railing.

I walked over to him and he ran his hands up and down my arms. I sat on his lap and draped my arms around his neck. He burrowed his nose into my chest.

“Tell me. Please,” I begged. “I can help.”

“You can’t. Nobody can.”

“You’re scaring me. You need to tell me what’s wrong.”

“My fucking heart is broken,” he said, raising his raspy voice.

“Why? Who broke it?” I asked.

“You did,” he said, looking up at me with tears in his eyes.

I was taken aback. What did I do to break it? Did I even have that kind of power over him?

The sound of an approaching car turned both of our heads to the driveway. A black town car with dark tinted windows pulled up in front of the house.

“Will you remember something for me?” King asked, snapping my head back around from the car to him.

“Anything,” I answered. And it was true. I would do anything for him.

“Remember that I love you,” he whispered.

He had said it. I didn’t just imagine it.

“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked, finding it odd that King wasn’t even acknowledging the approaching vehicle.

I wanted him to love me, especially because I’d known I’d been in love with him for so long, but the way he said it, and what had transpired that morning told me there was a lot more to what was going on.

“Tell me what the fuck is going on!” I leapt from his lap.

“Baby,” he said, reaching for me.

“No! Don’t baby me! Tell me what the fuck is going on!”

King finally looked toward the town car. The driver got out and walked around, opening the door of the back seat.

A boy a little older than me, with dark blonde curls stepped out of the back seat. He wore black Chucks, grey shorts, and a red batman t-shirt. It wasn’t until he looked up at me when I recognized him. Or at least, his eyes.

Chestnut brown.

The eyes from my dream.

I was stunned into silence, frozen on the porch as the boy approached.

“Ray? Ray is that really you?” he asked, looking right at me.

I looked up at King whose expression had completely changed from troubled and weary to angry and vengeful. He was staring daggers at the boy. His jaw tensed so hard I swear I could hear his teeth grinding.

“Who is Ray?” I asked King.

“Don’t fucking do this,” Bear snapped from the doorway.

“Go the fuck back inside,” King barked.

“Fine. It’s your fucking life. Fuck it up more than it already is. Preppy would’ve kicked your fucking ass for this. I’m going to visit my sister. I can’t stick around and witness this shit.” Bear stepped out onto the porch and pecked me on the cheek. “Love you, pretty girl,” he said before disappearing around the side of the house. A moment later, his bike whizzed by, kicking up dust in its wake.

“You,” King finally answered. “You are Ramie Price.”

“Ray, don’t you remember me?” the boy asked. “I’m Tanner. Don’t you know who I am?”

I turned to King. “What is this? Who is he? Why is he here?”

“He’s your…boyfriend.” He forced the words off his tongue like they were stabbing him in his mouth.

“My what?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “You knew he was coming?” Then, it hit me, and I sucked in a strangled breath. “You knew who I was?”

King didn’t say anything, but most importantly, he didn’t deny it.

“How long have you known?” I whispered.

King looked down at his shoes.

“How long have you fucking known?” I shouted.

“Since the very beginning,” he admitted. “Since before I came for you again after you escaped.”

“Escaped?” Tanner asked, reminding me of his presence.

“The entire time?” I asked, feeling as if he just stabbed me in my chest. “You knew who I was this entire fucking time?”

“What the fuck do you want me to say? I’m a shit person, and I do shitty things. You knew that. I fucking told you that, but you went and fell for me anyway.” He ran his hand over his head in frustration. “Well, it’s over now. Welcome to your new life. Or I should say your old life,” King spat.

He lowered his eyes. “You deserve better than all this shit anyway.” He waved his hand toward the house. “You deserve better than me. You’ve got a family. Go be with them, and forget I exist.”

His eyes darted down to Tanner who stood in the front yard with confusion marring his face. He glanced back and forth between me and King.

“What’s going—” Tanner started to ask.

“Shut the fuck up,” King snapped, effectively silencing the boy.

“That is NOT your decision to make,” I told him. “You don’t get to say where I go or who I go with.”

“Actually, it is,” King argued.

“What the fuck does that mean? What the fuck did you do?”

“Ray!” the boy shouted over our argument.

King looked down at him as if he were going to leap down the steps and crush his skull with his hands.

“Come down here,” Tanner said in a gentle voice. “Just for a second. I just want to see you. Talk to you.”

I looked back at King, and it dawned on me. It wasn’t my decision to make because he was giving me away.

That’s what last night and this morning were all about. He was saying his goodbyes.

King nodded to me as if to say I had his approval to go talk to Tanner. I rolled my eyes at him. I didn’t need his fucking approval.

I tentatively descended the stairs one at a time. When I got to the bottom, I sat on the bottom step. “Do you know who I am?” Tanner asked, crouching down and resting his hands on his knees.

I shook my head. “I recognize your eyes, but nothing else,” I admitted.

“As I said, my name is Tanner. We’ve known each other our entire lives. We were homecoming king and queen all four years of high school,” he said with a chuckle. Then his face grew serious. “I love you. You love me. Always have.” Tanner blushed and rocked back on his heels. “It feels weird to introduce myself to you when we’ve known each other since we were in diapers.”

“Who am I?” I asked hesitantly.

Tanner took a seat on the step next to me, careful to keep some distance between us. I didn’t need to look back at King to know he was watching Tanner’s every move. I felt his gaze on my back as if they were rays of the sun singing my skin. Tanner smelled like the beach. His unruly hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it out of the way as he spoke. A huge smile spread across his face, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.

“You are the lovely Ramie Elizabeth Price. Daughter of Dr. Margot Price and Senator Bigelow Price. You live in East Palm Cove, about an hour from here. You were enrolled in art school, and you were supposed to start in the fall. You and I were going to backpack around Europe for the summer first, but then you disappeared.”

I had a name.

Ramie. Ramie. Ramie.

“Ramie,” I whispered, testing the name out on my tongue.

Still nothing.

“I went to the police. They said no one was looking for me. No missing persons report. Why didn’t you look for me if I was missing?” I asked.

Tanner shook his head. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but you had this friend, and she was going through some bad stuff. She got in trouble a lot. You left a note, said you were running away. They didn’t look for you because they didn’t think you wanted to be found. You had just turned eighteen. You were an adult. There was no missing persons report because you weren’t missing. You were just gone.”

“I left?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I left you?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “You left me. And your mom. And your dad. Everyone.”

I had a mom.

“Why isn’t my mom here?” I asked.

“We didn’t want to overwhelm you. Your mom is at home, waiting for you to arrive, but your dad is in the car.” Tanner said, pointing to the town car with the blacked out windows, still running on the driveway.

“I still don’t remember. I thought I would remember if I saw someone from my past, if they told me who I was, but I don’t.” My head spun. If I didn’t remember him face to face, would I ever remember him?

Would I ever remember anyone?

“You will, but it will take time. You just need to get back into the groove of things for a while. Your normal routine. It will come back to you. We won’t rush it. Your mom’s got the best doctors already on call. Specialists. You’ll be back to your old self in no time,” he said, nudging my shoulder.

King had already told them everything. At least enough for my mom to already have doctors at the ready.

The girl who I’d given up on might be back after all.

The back door of the car opened again, and out stepped a tall man in a sharp black suit and a solid red tie.

“Who is that?” I asked Tanner.

“Your dad,” he told me. “The senator.”

“Ramie,” the man said. “Your mother is worried sick. Let’s go. Get in the car,” he said sternly, buttoning the bottom button of his suit jacket.

It was ninety degrees outside, and there wasn’t one drop of sweat on his forehead. No redness on his cheeks. It’s like he was too important to be affected by the heat.

From above me, King leaned forward over the railing. With the light of the sun directly overhead, his massive frame cast a shadow onto the ground.

He really did look like a King. A force to be reckoned with. Zeus, on his perch above the world.

The senator stepped out of King’s shadow as if he were too good to be standing in it. This irked me.

He wasn’t better than King.

No one was.

King was a bad guy, but he was my bad guy. He was more than that. He was my world. My heart. These people may have known who I was before, but I knew who I was now, and the two versions of me were going to have to figure out how to merge before I uprooted what I had with King in search of something unknown.