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  called earlier and she’s worried and wants to know if you want her to come over and take a look to make sure you’re okay,” Ray offered.

  “I’m fine, but thank you.” Thia shook her head, offering Ray a small smile that could barely qualify as a smile. She’d been in the same position, staring at nothing ever since.

  I followed Ray out, leaving Thia in the bedroom. “Sorry about the door. I’ll take care of that before I go,” I said, picking up the sword and the door knob from the carpet. I’d forgotten how heavy the sword was, Thia must have been really determined to leave if she was able to not only lift it, but swing it hard enough to sever the fucking knob.

  Ray crossed her arms under her chest. “What’s your plan with her?”

  “Fuck if I know. She wants to go. I told her the MC was out to get her. I showed her the fucking newspaper article. She’s dead one way or the other, but she still wants to go, so who the fuck am I to keep her here?”

  “You’re a guy who knows a little bit of what she’s feeling.”

  “How do you figure that?

  “Oh I don’t know, maybe because she’s been displaced and has nowhere to go. Maybe because she’s had some terrible shit happen to her that she doesn’t want to talk about,” Ray said, cocking an eyebrow at me. “Any of this sound familiar?”

  “I didn’t think about it like that,” I said, leaning against the wall, running my hand down my beard.

  “You boys never do,” Ray said with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “Grace is coming by tomorrow, you might want to pop your head in and say hello so you don’t catch hell for it.”

  “Fuck. Grace. I haven’t even thought to see how she’s doing.” The small radio looking thing in Ray’s hand started to cry, she held it up and waved it in the air. Grace had been battling cancer, but around the time I’d left she declared she wasn’t ready to die and just like that she suddenly seemed well again.

  Stubborn women seemed to be a trend in my life, but I was glad for Grace’s stubbornness, if anyone could go to war with death and come out a winner, it was her.

  “Gotta go, but you might want to make a plan when it comes to that girl in that room over there. Either let her go or keep her here, either way, you need to decide what’s going to happen, because none of this is fair to her.” She pushed open the broken door and made her way into the garage. I hit the automatic opener and followed her out. “Take that from someone who knows what that’s all about.” I watched Ray leave, following her with my eyes through the window until she made her way into the house by way of the back steps.

  Ray was right. I needed to make a decision, but I couldn’t think of one that would result in her being both safe and gone. I could sneak her out of town and get her somewhere the MC didn’t have reach but if the law caught up to her it didn’t matter where she was, if she ended up in a prison or jail somewhere, she was as good as dead.

  Unless…

  I dug my phone out of my pocket and as my fingers pushed each number I cringed at what I was about to do. “Bethany Fletcher’s office.”

  After my call I found Thia exactly where I left her.

  “We couldn’t get down your street,” I started, rounding the bed to stand in front of her. Her gaze shifted to the floor. “Law already had the place roped off and were lifting up the tape to let the coroner’s van through. We put our heads down and kept fucking driving.” I kneeled down in front of her and again tried to get her to look at me, but she turned away, this time crawling up the bed and climbing under the blanket. With her back to me she pulled the blanket up to her chin.

  “Leave me alone. I just want to sleep,” she said, her voice flat and empty.

  “Fuck this,” I said, pushing off the wall. I wanted to tell her what the fuck happened because I thought she’d want to know. What was I doing? Ray was wrong. I couldn’t relate to the girl in any way, and just because she was stupid enough to believe one of my lies a hundred fucking years ago didn’t mean I owed her shit. I didn’t need to stay to watch some kid turn inward and self-destruct.

  Speaking of self-destruction.

  I rummaged through my saddle bag on the floor, searching around the internal side pocket until I found exactly what I was looking for. I walked over to the only surface in the room, the little night table Thia was facing.

  I didn’t care that she could see what I was about to do.

  I didn’t give a shit what she thought about me.

  I tapped some powder out onto the wooden table into three jagged lines. I felt Thia’s eyes on me as I snorted all three lines of false happiness up my fucking nose.

  I tipped my head back and pinched my nostrils together as the blow set a cold fire to my brain.

  That’s better.

  Now I really didn’t give a shit what she thought of me.

  Now I could leap off the roof and fly to the other side of the bay and not give a shit.

  “Fuck,” I said, pressing my finger into the remaining residue and rubbing it against my gums.

  “That recreational, or you got a problem?”

  “Look who can suddenly talk again.” I rolled my eyes and took off my shirt, throwing it on top of my bag. “Does it look like I’m having a fucking good time to you?” I snapped. “It ain’t a problem either, least not right this second.” I thought about what I’d just said and as my high got better and better I agreed even more with my earlier statement. “Actually, right this second, I don’t have a problem in the world,” I sang, enjoying the few moments before I crashed when I could fool myself into thinking that everything was okay.

  “No, you just feel like you don’t,” she corrected.

  “I know, but I just don’t give a fuck.” I turned toward the door.

  “Can…can I have some?” she asked. I paused mid-step.

  “What?” I asked, turning around. Thia sat up.

  “You said you don’t care now. I don’t want to care either,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “No,” I said without having to think about it.

  “Why not!?” she asked angrily, tossing the blanket off her lap and standing up off the bed. She walked toward me, her limp from earlier almost unnoticeable, her braless tits bouncing against the thin material of her tank top as she stalked toward me. “Why do you get to erase your problems and I don’t. Chop told me you aren’t in the MC anymore, so you snort cocaine to make it go away right? To pretend? Well, I want to pretend too.”

  Chop had obviously done more than work her over at the MC. Apparently he’d taken the time to run his cocksucking mouth as well.

  “No,” I said again, although she had a point. Then I remembered what Ray said and suddenly wished I hadn’t just used the last of my stash.

  “It’s okay for you to forget, but I’m not allowed a few minutes to not feel like the world is crumbling around me? Like I’m not all alone? Like I’m not trapped? Like I won’t wind up either dead or rotting in some prison?”

  I didn’t want to tell her that if she did go to prison that the MC would likely send an ole lady or a friend of the club to kill her in there.

  Prison was like summer camp for the Beach Bastards.

  Summer camp with a side of homicide.

  Thia was close to me now, so close I could see the agony in her eyes and the freckles across her forehead. I could smell whatever girly soap Ray had given her to use, some sort of vanilla mixed stuff. Her hair was still damp, falling in heavy waves around her shoulders. She was a tiny thing, only coming up to my chest. Her thighs and calves were muscular and surprisingly lean and long for such a little thing. When she stood up on her tiptoes in challenge and was about to say something else I had the sudden urge to bite the sensitive skin between her neck and shoulder. “What did he do to you?” I asked, using a much softer tone than I had been. “Chop. Tell me what he did.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I answered honestly.

  And just like that, with that one question, she
began to wilt away again. She lowered herself off her toes and took a step back. Her shoulders fell. She got back in bed, again lifting the covers to her chin. “Nothing,” she lied, turning onto her side, her back to me, effectively shutting me out. “Nothing that matters.”

  “I tell you what,” I said. “I’ll make you a deal. You tell me what happened and I’ll help you forget for a while,” I said, and I meant it, just not in the way she was thinking. I wasn’t above bribery.

  Actually, I was fucking amazing at bribery.

  Hot damn this was good blow.

  “We’ve already established that you don’t care,” she said, throwing my words from earlier back in my face.

  I stomped to the edge of the bed and flipped her onto her back. She tried to swat me away but I caught her wrists and held them still. “You need to take those bloody shorts off, but something has you keeping them on. They’re wet, so I know you didn’t even take them off in the fucking shower. So why don’t you tell me what the fuck happened at the MC, before I strip you naked, haul you over my shoulder, and throw you in the fucking bay.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said, her eyes finally containing the fear I was used to seeing in the eyes of someone I was threatening, yet had been oddly missing from her except for the brief moment she’d first woken up in the bathroom.

  “Fucking. Try. Me.” I warned, loving that I was finally getting the reaction out of her I wanted. Vacant and distant was bullshit that pissed me off. Anger. Anger I could work with.

  A wayward tear dripped down the side of her face and her shoulders shook silently.

  What the fuck?

  “Do what you have to do,” she whimpered, the nothingness from earlier firmly back in place. “I don’t want to talk about it. Any of it.” I let go of her wrists and she rolled over again. “Please, Bear. Leave me alone. I just want to sleep.”

  Never in my life had a chick made me so angry. Following through on my threat wouldn’t work on her like this.

  I grabbed a bottle of whiskey from my bag and hit the light switch on the way out.

  Dude, she’s hot when she’s angry, Preppy chirped in my head.

  “Shut up,” I muttered. He was right, but I wouldn’t exactly call her hot. Without makeup or without even having brushed her hair in a while, she was devastatingly sexy, and that didn’t even begin to cover it.

  Cock achingly fuckable was a little closer.

  I adjusted myself and settled on the couch for a long fucking night of avoiding sleep with my buddy Jack Daniels.

  * * *

  A violent scream shot through the door. “Fuck you!”

  I picked my gun off the table and ran to the door, throwing it open, ready to kill any motherfucker who was bold enough to come at me in the middle of the fucking night. Thia was on the bed, screaming like she was being attacked, but the room was empty. Her eyes were closed and her back bowed off the bed with each new outburst. The back of her head hit the wall above the mattress with a thud but it didn’t even slow her down.

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! I hate you! You can’t fucking do this to me! You can’t! I won’t fucking let you!” she raged. I didn’t know what to do, but I did know if she kept up her thrashing against the wall she was going to fucking hurt herself. I knelt down on the mattress and picked her up into my arms, crushing her to my chest, but she didn’t stop. She slammed her closed fists against the sides of my face, my chest, anything she could make contact with again and again. She clawed her nails into my skin, raking them across my shoulder blades.

  “Stop!” I growled, holding her arms down at her side. “Wake the fuck up!”

  “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck this!” she screamed, still wailing away on me, her little fists feeling more like a vibration against my chest than a beating.

  “Ti, it’s me, wake the fuck up!” I said even louder. “Goddamnit, girl you’re going to fucking hurt yourself. Wake the fucking fuck up!”

  She stilled, but I continued to hold onto her. It took several minutes but I felt the moment the fight left her body as she sagged against me. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t said a word in so long I’d thought she might have fallen asleep until she spoke against my skin, her breath brushing over my nipple. “I killed my mom.”

  “I know,” I said, unsure of what else I was supposed to say. “Come with me,” I said and for once she actually listened, sliding off the bed and following me outside into the night. I walked over to the bonfire, the very place where Eli and his men laughed as they tortured me. I was going to take her down to the dock but decided against it, because if she pissed me off again I didn’t know if I’d be able to resist carrying out my earlier threat and tossing her ass into the bay. For at least a little while the shitty flashbacks that followed me around like a possessed puppy dog nipping at the heels of my memory would have to take a backseat to the girl with the pink hair.

  “Sit,” I ordered, pointing to a white plastic lawn chair. Thia sat and watched me as I lit the end of a small piece of straw. When it glowed brightly I gently set it on the inside edge of the fire pit and set two small cut logs on top of it.

  “Why the fire?” she asked.

  “The fire is for a little light and…” Thia smacked her arm, and when she pulled her hand away she revealed the crushed up body of a big mosquito.

  “And a little keeping the blood suckers away.” She wiped the bug off her arm as the smoke started to billow into the sky from the pit. “That should take care of it.”

  I sat on the edge of the brick bonfire, facing Thia in her chair. She pulled her legs up into the chair and under her little white tank top, stretching the material over her knees, killing any chance I had of staring at her tits.

  I packed the little one-hitter and grabbed my lighter. “Watch,” I said, as I set the weed aglow, keeping my thumb over the hole on the side until it was time to inhale all the smoke I’d just created. I exhaled and held the lighter and bowl out to her. “It’s not blow, but it will take the edge off.”

  Thia turned the lighter over in her hand and examined the bowl like it was an artifact from a museum, running her fingers over the smooth blue glass. She attempted to light it but dropped the lighter when the only thing she managed to light was her fingertips. “Here,” I said, picking up the lighter from the grass I held the flame over the bowl as she did what I’d showed her, taking her thumb off the hole and taking a shallow drag, releasing the smoke on a cough.

  “I didn’t kill my dad though,” she said when her coughing subsided. “My mom did. I came home and she was sitting there in my brother’s old room. She had my dad’s pistol on her lap,” she said, continuing her confession.

  As much as I thought Thia could have been working for Chop it never occurred to me that she maliciously killed her parents, but I stilled at the mention of a brother, wondering if she was about to tell me there was a third body out there somewhere, but she filled in the blanks before I could draw my own conclusions. “My brother died when we were kids. We weren’t that far apart in age. We were playing on the porch. There was always spiders out there. Groves give off a lot of moisture and spiders love a good wet heat and a little nook or crevice to hide in. The porch had all that. We saw a spider climb into my dad’s work boot by the door, I was going to stomp on it, but my brother wanted to check it out. He reached into my father’s boot…” She trailed off. “They took him to the hospital but it was too late. Brown widow. Not always fatal in adults, but in kids…”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I said, not wanting to send her back into a state of shock that her story might trigger. “I know what it’s like to not want to relive the horrible shit over and over again.”

  Thia continued anyway. Looking up at the smoke from the fire as she spoke. “My mom started to slip away. Growing more distant every day. Most days went by and she didn’t even talk to me. Business started to go to shit. They were always fighting. Then one night I came home and,” she sniffled, “there was no more fighting.

  “My dad
was already dead. I made a run for it, but I tripped. She wanted to send us all to the same place. Said we were all going to be together. I convinced her that we should go at the same time. I switched guns with her, giving her one I knew always coughed on the first pull. She was so determined. There was no arguing, no getting out. I could have shot her in the arm, in the leg, but I couldn’t be guaranteed she’d drop the gun, or that she’d stop firing. The look of determination in her eyes told me that shot or not she’d keep on coming. I couldn’t let that happen. I thought about my dad. About him always telling me to be his strong girl. So I did what I had to do to be his strong girl, and I aimed at her chest and I fired.

  “I’m going to remember this as the worst time in my entire life. The very worst.” She shook her head. “There is nothing I can do to change that. Girls my age are playing sports, going to dances and parties, kissing boys. And that’s never been me. I’ve had a full-time job at the grove and a part-time job at the Stop-n-Go. I’ve done nothing over the last few years except work my ass off and watch my family fall apart. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse…now all this.” She waved around to the house and to me and let out an awkward laugh. She took another hit off the bowl, passing it back to me. Her coughing much less than it was on her first try.

  “Ti, how old are you?” I asked, clearing my throat as I ventured into territory I knew I shouldn’t. She was a pistol, even if she was a sad one, but there was a wave of innocence about her that had me both feeling bad for her and salivating for a taste of her.

  This is for her, not you. I told myself. It was only a partial lie.

  “Seventeen,” she said, sniffling. “Eighteen soon.”

  “You ever been kissed?” I asked, and her eyes met mine. “And not a peck on the cheek or a brief smack of the lips, but a real