Conviction (26 page)

“What?”

“Oh yeah, princess. Boss man gave us the go ahead to get rid of you if we could find for certain that you weren’t just messing around on Jackass here, but that you were working with the Feds. Your roommate said it herself you had a boyfriend named Adam.”

“Oh yay! Hey, I know, that’s the girl you called pretending to be a reporter with, right, Reid? Right?”

“What?”

“Jackass said he wanted to be the one to off you. I leave him to it, right? But if you want something done right, you should do it yourself.”

He lunged then, but Charlie was faster, ready to block or give punches, no matter the consequences.

They knocked over the coffee table before Yuri and Ben could stop them, bending blinds at the window and almost taking out a lamp.

“All right, Kids, that’s quite enough. We have…problems to tend to.”

But I was already out the door, filled with disgust, anger, and something else I couldn’t quite see my way though.

Elise called after me, maybe Charlie too, and there was the faint feeling of stubbing my shin on the tipped over coffee table, but I ignored it, swore, and went on. I must have slammed the door as I ran outside because the patio light flashed on; motioned sensored, it went away a few seconds after I ran past it. And though I ran aimlessly, I knew enough to not go any further than the moonlit path, remembering rumors about barbed wire and my own lack of direction.

Many of Tyler’s toys littered the side of the lake, but I went past them, trailing out to the side of the woods, where large boulders and roots broke the ground. Thoughts wove their way around my brain, stemming sharp things into me that I didn’t want to admit. Charlie had agreed to kill me, convinced Reid enough that he’d do it himself. I knew he’d never hurt me; instinctually felt it in my bones. Yet, he had once made me believe he didn’t love me, and easily made Reid believe he’d hurt me. For us, there didn’t seem to be much of a line between deception and truth.

Chapter 20

I stared out at the lake, completely different from the ocean, though a body of water just the same. I marveled that it could be so still one instant, then could ripple from one excited fish. That the ripple could travel, changing everything it touched.

“Addie?”

I barely turned before he kissed me, madly, violently, like I hadn’t been kissed in months, like I didn’t think I’d ever been kissed before, and even when we pulled apart, it was only for a second before we started again, hands eager, my legs climbing. He pulled me closer still, his tongue trying to exploit me, but I wasn’t going to give in that easy.

I shoved him from me. “How could y-you—”

“I’d never hurt you!” he shouted.

“You already did!”

He kissed me again, but this time I bit him. Not hard, just enough to get him to back off. Because this time I wasn’t embarrassed, this time I was mad.

“How could you leave me like that?” I kicked a boulder with my foot and instantly regretted it. I saw him smile but drop it immediately.

“Me?” he scoffed. “Me? You were gonna throw yourself into the sea without me, Vicious! It doesn’t get any meaner than that.”

“You should have never listened to Reid!”

“You shouldn’t be listening to that cop!”

“If you weren’t so jealous, we could both have our friends.”

We collided into each other, kissing and cursing between breaths, calling each other names we didn’t mean, pulling and clawing at both flesh and clothes alike. And though I was never entirely sure how we migrated away from the lake and into the woods with the thickets of pine and stars overhead, I was slightly aware that neither one of us had enough coherent thought to care.

We took our grief out on each other.

Later on, long after everyone had gone to bed and Reid stormed out for what everyone presumed was the last time, we lay in bed and listened to the crickets and the occasional call of owls and coyotes.

I buried myself in his arms, inhaling his smell and trying to memorize it. “I can’t tell you how much I missed you, Charlie. Do you know what the worst part was?”

“Tell me.” He stroked my hair.

“I was afraid I’d forget.” I felt him tense in confusion. And sure enough, as I looked up, his brow was slightly furrowed.

“Yeah, I was one of the few people who knows how great you are. And it was up to me to remember that forever and ever, especially since the media was saying the opposite.”

In the dark I felt him shrug, the muscles of his abdomen ripple with laughter.

“I’m serious! It’s a big responsibility. What if I woke up one day and couldn’t remember if this scar was on this thumb or the other one?”

He laughed harder.

“Don’t laugh.” My voice was just above a whisper. “It’s not funny.”

“I had the opposite problem.”

I shivered when his knuckles ran over my bare hip.

“You wanted to forget me?”

He sighed. “Yeah, I wanted it to be like we never knew each other. I wanted you to have never happened, so it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

“Did it work?”

He ran his thumb along my collarbone. “When Reid first brought it up, I chipped one of his teeth. But after that, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. The more I tried not to think ‘bout it, the worse it got. Drinking helped at first. But then it didn’t, and I had to do it more just to get to sleep at night.”

“You acted as though I had died.”

“No, but I wished I had.”

“I know what you mean.”

“Huh?”

His head came up to meet me and any pretense of relaxation was long gone as I fell back on the pillow alone. Towering above me in the dark, I could see the glare of rage on his face from the slits of moonlight emerging into the room, how his lips went thin from a frown he was trying to control.

“What?”

“Tell me.” He pinned me to my sides one elbow just outside of the other, his chest pressing into mine. Even if I had wanted to, I didn’t have a chance of getting away.

“You weren’t the only one who had trouble sleeping, you know?” I tried to sound defiant. Failed. His face softened just a little and I took advantage, staring up into the green centers of his kaleidoscope eyes. “Sometimes I took sleeping pills, or stayed up all night so I could sleep the next day…I didn’t want to explain the nightmares.”

He swallowed hard and released me enough so I had my arms back. I promptly put them around him as he leaned into the crook of my neck, inhaling and exhaling in rapid breaths. “What else?”

I poked him in the ribs. I was willing to tell him the honest truth of it, but desperate to make him laugh at the same time. “Did you know that restaurants are one of the largest producers of workplace accidents in the United States?”

“Don’t tell me you were tryin’ to balance things on trays.” I felt his lips smile just a little.

“Even better.” I laughed. “I was in the kitchen.”

“Oh hell.” He laughed. “With knives and burners?”

I nodded as he looked at me, resting his head on his elbow. “And slippery floors, electrical equipment, chemicals—”

He swallowed hard. “Were you tryin to get hurt?”

I sat up and shrugged. “Sometimes.”

When I looked back over, he was awestruck. “Why?”

How could I explain this part? That when the best thing you knew was gone and never coming back, that your motivation for living was null and void. That no one in the world could ever understand what I had done, and even death wouldn’t redeem me?

“I-it felt like penance, sort of. I could never fix what I had done, and death was too good for me, so I made the outside hurt as much as the inside. Does that make any sense?”

He pulled me into his lap, fast and strong, eyes like fierce jewels that screamed at me. “Hey—”

“Hay is for horses.”

“Could you quit being a smart ass for one minute?”

“I don’t know. Could I?”

He pulled up my legs and tickled me just beneath my knees until I begged for mercy and promised to be good.

“Addie, don’t ever hurt yourself because of me, okay?”

“You’re allowed to but I’m not?”

“Yeah.”

“No! No more double standards. No more lying to each other, no more hurting ourselves. We can’t do that anymore.”

“No,” he agreed. “I guess we shouldn’t.”

“And you can’t be jealous.”

He sighed. “I’ll try.”

***

The ringing penetrated eardrums like overaggressive football players running over the field-goal and back. Once an ear were exposed to the noise, there was no turning back, no hope of returning to sleep, and certainly no way to avoid the wave of panic that accompanied the threshold of sound. And unlike the sounds I made up when I first heard Charlie had turned himself in, these sounds were very real.

“Charlie? Charlie?” My voice was muffled by my hands over my ears, the beeping echoing off the cabin walls. There could have been more, but I couldn’t hear anything else.

“Get down!” I think he shouted, though I only saw his mouth move the words. And I could see them so clearly with the search light coming from the outside in as they penetrated the deep woods and the room we had been sleeping in only a moment ago. But now Charlie reached for something in the nightstand drawer. After I rubbed my eyes I could easily see it was a gun. I paid little attention to it though, sliding out of the bed and sitting beside it instead while Charlie quickly and cautiously peered out the windows.

I moved my hands back over my ears. “What’s going on?”

The only response was the continuing noise.

“Charlie!”

I saw him peering still from the windows, and hoped faintly that maybe he’d hear me better if I moved to the other side of the bed. Yet before I could shout out for him again, I saw Elise running through the doorway, dressed in only a nightgown and robe but not seeming to care about it. 

She ducked down next to me, eyes large and searching. “Is Tyler with you?”

“What? No!”

Noticing her beside me, Charlie hopped down from the bed frame to kneel beside us both.

“The alarm system,” he mouthed.

I nodded, trying to speculate if this system was any better than the one the girls rigged up.

Elise was oblivious. “Tyler?”

Charlie shook his head before looking back at me. 

“He must have crawled out of bed again,” she shouted, not bothering to hide her tears.

Charlie ignored her hysterics, shoving both of us towards the basement. “I’ll find him. He has to be in the house somewhere.”

“That’s right, Elise. He’s probably hiding anyway.”

Charlie pulled me to him one last time. “There’s armor and guns down there, but just stay down there ‘til I come for you.”

“And sit down there like a wildflower?”

“Just listen to me for once, Goddamn it!”

Meanwhile Elise had wandered off, hysterically shouting for Tyler, looking in cupboards and under the table, behind couches…

“You need to make sure she doesn’t do nothin’ stupid.”

“Just come back to me.”

He grinned a Charlie grin and kissed me. “Of course.”

I wanted to say something else but he was gone in an instant, and Elise was a handful in herself, though I couldn’t blame her. Logic told me Charlie was safe, and a lover was entirely different from one’s offspring. I wrapped my arms around her, shouting her name, though it was tough to know if any of it actually got through. The ringing of the alarm was busting my ears and giving me a headache like nothing else, and while trying to be discreet about it, I’d take quick glances out the window, looking for Charlie. All I’d really saw though was the shimmering moon shadows over the lake, nothing else.

I did my best to sound positive. “Elise, he might be in the basement already,” I shouted.

That seemed to be enough to prompt her into trying for the underground cellar. She was borderline excited, eyes wide that she hadn’t thought about it before, and though I had enough common sense about the windows, I crawled up to the front door and peered through the stained glass, hoping for some kind of an idea about where we stood, or at least who our enemy was.

That was where I saw him, sitting on his Big Wheel with no idea at all that the world was coming to an end. That we were under attack and his mother was in danger of a nervous breakdown. I heard Elise call out, and looked back. If I told her he was out there, she would freak out and run out there after him, screaming and drawing attention to herself, with how hormonal as she was, she probably wasn’t thinking properly anyway and would get both of them killed. I could try to lure Tyler inside, but he probably still didn’t remember me very well and wouldn’t even hear me over the sirens anyway.

“Addie! Addie, he isn’t in there.”

I stopped her halfway across the kitchen and draped my arm around her. “I think I know where he is.” I made my voice harsh.

“Where?”

“Just stay in here until I come back.” I shoved her as gently as someone can be shoved into the basement and locked the door behind me, knowing she was fine when she started demanding to be let out.

I crept out from the front door since I didn’t know any other way. If nothing else, I didn’t need a flashlight with the moon and search lights spiraling from the side of the cabin. I didn’t see anyone immediately as my eyes adjusted to the night. Maybe Charlie had been wrong, and it was only a false alarm after all. I crossed my fingers and hoped so, scaling the yard and keeping low as I made my way down toward the lake. It felt like a short eternity but the Big Wheel was empty and for an instant, my heart decided to stop on me.

“Ty?” I stood up and cupped my hands to my mouth, trying to call out for him without being obvious. “Tyler, where are you?”

Headlights alerted me to the presence of someone else around the bend and I got down quickly behind one of the boulders, closed my eyes and willed myself to breathe. Maybe I had only wanted to see Tyler out here, imagined him, but on the sandy gravel, fresh little footprints told me otherwise, and I knew he was close by.

However, someone else was close by, too. I could smell expensive men’s cologne and hear the crunch of sandy gravel under lighter shoes, leather, I guessed by the smell.

One husky voice said something to another and though my Mandarin was way out of practice, it wouldn’t have mattered, anyway. The vowels they used were harsher, dictated by short v sounds and long u’s, easily Eastern European. But it was quickly lost to me at the sight of Tyler sitting just behind a pine tree. I couldn’t see all of him, of course, just his toes squirming through the poor excuse for lake sand, and his thin legs. Every few seconds, if I squinted, I thought I could see his hands reaching to the ground and sifting for sand.