Lawless (9 page)

“The water.”

“For what?”

I scoff. “What do you think, Lawson?”

“Be mad at the shark, not the ocean. It’s not the ocean’s fault.”

“I can’t find the shark.” I point to the water swirling around him. “I can find the water.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Tell it to my leg.”

“Come over here.”

I frown at him. “What?”

He holds out his hand to me. “Come over here. Stand in the surf with me.”

“No.”

“No shark is coming up this far on the beach,” he reasons patiently. “If you know it’s the shark’s fault and not the ocean’s, then you shouldn’t have a problem getting in the water.”

I hesitate, my skin turning hot. “I could have drowned.”

“Because the shark pulled you under. You’re a strong swimmer. You were fine until he got there so again, not the water’s fault. Get over here.”

“You’re being bossy,” I stall. “Normally you ask me to do things. You don’t tell me.”

He sighs. “Rachel, will you please come stand in the water with me?”

“Well, since you said please.”

I don’t move.

“I’m missing some serious time out there,” he laments.

“Then go back out.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because this is important.”

I take a deep breath and a slow step toward him.

He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t even move, but the water does. It comes to greet me, slow and easy. Gentle and full of foam that tickles and pops effervescently over my skin. Up to my ankles. Then my shins. It leaves me, pulling out and taking the sand around me with it until I’m standing in a small hole created by my weight and resistance. By my reluctance. I step outside of it, moving slowly. I keep my eyes on Lawson’s hand and it when I can reach it I put my palm against his just as a new wave washes over me. It reaches my shins, making me gasp, but Lawson threads his fingers through mine and he pulls me the last step toward him until I’m in it up to my thighs and my scar is almost under the water and my chest is against his, warm and wet.

He looks down at me with admiring eyes, a ghost of a grin on his lips. “You see?” he asks deeply. “You’re still alive.”

“I don’t want to go any further,” I reply rapidly.

“Okay. We won’t.” He squeezes my hand still clasped in his. “Thank you for coming this far.”

I laugh shakily. “Thank you for getting me here.”

“It feels good, doesn’t it?”

The waves rush forward, knocking Lawson in the back of the legs. He’s sturdy but he leans forward with the force, pushing into me. His face comes closer, his eyes look deeper, and his hold on my hand is softer. Warmer. Everything about him so strong and beautiful. So natural it’s hypnotic.

“It does,” I breathe, his mouth only inches away and closing. “It feels really good.”

“You slept with him, didn’t you?”

“No.”

Katy raises a skeptical eyebrow but I keep my poker face. I hold my ground and I deny it, not because I’m ashamed of it but because I like it. Because I’m protecting it. I don’t know what Lawson will say if one of his boys asks him if we’ve had sex, but judging by the fact that he didn’t know I slept with Baker back in high school I’m inclined to believe they’re at least a little bit mute about their extracurricular activities.

“Are you sure?”

I laugh, taking a greedy lick of my ice cream as it tries to dissolve down the side of the cone. “I think I’d know.”

“That kiss on the beach was pretty legit.”

“I was wasted. I barely remember it.”

“You didn’t seem that wasted.”

“That’s because I’m better at it than you are.”

Katy’s shoulders sag. “Are you really going to bring this up again?’

I smile. “I’m never going to let you forget it.”

“Fine, whatever.”

“Sophomore year. Behind the football field in the woods. Mac Gibson, or Ol’ Mac Donghold as he was known to some for mysterious and probably disgusting reasons. A four pack of wine coolers and a full pack of cigarettes.”

“Are you enjoying yourself?” she asks blandly.

“Shh, this is my favorite part,” I whisper before raising my voice way too loud. “You, Katelin Reynolds, were nearly caught rounding second base with Ol’ Mac Donghold when he heard the fuzz coming. He, the brave and chivalrous boy that he was, ran into the woods and left you behind. You, being utterly wasted and totally shitty at it, cried, vomited, got caught, and spent the majority of that summer grounded in your room. Did I miss any of it?”

Katy stabs her hot fudge sundae angrily. “Mac ran away with my bra and showed it to the whole school the next day,” she mumbles.

“Mac ran away with your bra and showed it to the entire school the very next day,” I announce loudly.

Heads turn. Kids giggle. Mother’s frown. Mac’s dad glares at me from his place in line at the Frosty Freeze register.

“Fucking small towns,” I grumble under my breath.

Katy laughs, her mood instantly lighter. “Serves you right.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“How’s the job going? Are you saving up enough for the plane ticket?”

I groan in annoyance. “I think so, but I lost my deposit on the apartment I had set up. I’ll have to find a new one along with a fresh deposit.” I reach over and throw my melting ice cream into the trash, giving up. My hands are coated in an invisible stickiness that I brush at fruitlessly with a brown napkin. “It seems like every time I think I’m done paying for what happened something else comes up. I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just say screw it and wait another year.”

“You can’t do that,” Katy tells me seriously. “You already put it off for two years after we graduated. If you put it off again you’ll never go and you
have
to go.”

“Why? What’s the point?”

“The point is you’re good!”

“And the other students there will be better.”

“So what? If you’re not the best you’re not gonna go?”

I shrug, looking out the window. “I don’t know.”

“Big fish in a little pond?” she asks knowingly. “Scared of being the little fish in the big pond?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, if you need to talk about it I know just the person you should go to. Kind of an expert on the subject.”

I turn to her, my brows pinched in confusion. “Who?”

She laughs, kicking me gently under the table. “Lawson Daniel, dummy.”

“I can’t bring this up with him.”

“Oh, okay. You can share saliva with him but you can’t talk to him?”

“We talk.”

“About what? How hot he is? How he wants to do you? His favorite yoga pose on a surfboard? Is it downward facing dolphin? Tell me it’s downward facing dolphin.”

“No,” I laugh.

“No it’s not or no you won’t tell me.”

“No, to everything.”

“Even sleeping with him?”

“Ugh, let it go.”

“Not until you let Mac Donghold go.”

I smile, shaking my head vehemently. “Never.”

***

The room is cool. It’s dry and dark, the outside world kept out. Kept locked away behind the curtained windows that let in little shafts of light speckled with clusters of dust kicked up by my fingers flying over the keys. An old xylophone sits silently in the corner, it’s golden wood notched and abused. A set of drums worn white by countless palms percussing its surface stands still. Listening. The entire room is listening, absorbing as I play. As I pour myself into the song. As I give it everything I have and come up short.

“Holy shit.”

My fingers stumble, my timing thrown off and my focus gone.

I spin on the stool to shout at whoever burst in and startled me, but my anger dies on my lips when I meet his eyes.

“Sorry,” Lawson apologizes immediately. He stands straight, pulling himself up from where he was leaning against the doorframe. “I kept my mouth shut as long as I could. But holy shit.”

“What are you doing here?”

Only a faint light is coming in from the hallway behind him, his face almost entirely cast in shadow, but I catch the flicker of a grin on his lips. “Believe it or not, your dad told me where I could find you. I think he did it just to get me off his property.”

“I doubt that was it,” I assure him, completely sure that it is.

He moves slowly into the room, circling wide. “You don’t have to lie. Dads don’t like me. It’s no secret.”

“He should at least wait to get to know you before he hates you.”

“He thinks he already does.” He stops on the opposite side of the gleaming black piano, one of the only instruments in the music room that’s undamaged, and puts his palms on the surface. “It’s creepy being back here.”

“It’s an elementary school,” I chuckle. “How creepy can it be?”

“How often do you come here?”

“Often. I’ve been coming here after hours since the fourth grade to practice.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have a piano at home.”

I hover my head over the keys, hiding behind my hair. “No, we do. The acoustics are better in here, though. And I play the same thing over and over again for hours. It gets irritating for anyone else in the house.”

And the piano my parents spent the entire household Christmas fund on six years ago is old and always out of tune.

“What were you playing just now?” Lawson asks. “It sounded complicated.”

I laugh, nodding my head. “It is. It’s not an easy one. It’s Schumann.
Fantasie
.” I drag my fingers unceremoniously over the keys, sending a string of nonsense through the air. “I’m not good at it.”

“It sounded good to me.”

“Because you’ve never heard it played well before. I’m clumsy with it. I get distracted, I dismantle the tempo. It throws everything off.”

“Distracted by what?”

“The song. The story.”

“It has a story?”

I grin at him. “All music has a story.”

He smiles, taking a seat in a metal chair to my right and leaning forward on his elbows. “What’s this one about?”

“Schumann was in love with a girl. She was nine years younger than him but a piano prodigy. They fell in love. Her parents didn’t approve.”

“Lot of that going around,” Lawson says dryly.

“Ha ha,” I laugh theatrically. “Anyway, they wouldn’t let them see each other so he wrote her music with hidden messages.
Fantasie
was one of them. It was a love letter. One she could play over and over again, knowing it was for her. When she turned eighteen he proposed, she accepted, her parents said no, and they sued them for the right to get married. A judge gave them the go ahead and so they did.”

“It’s a nice story. I can see why you like the song.”

“Yeah, well,
that
part is nice. Eventually Schumann tried to commit suicide, was tossed into a mental hospital, and died.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. But the song is good, right?”

He frowns. “I don’t know anymore.”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “Me either.”

“Play me something else.”

“What do you want to hear?”

“What do you want to play?”

“
Fantasie
. Flawless.”

“No. What do you like to play? What makes this fun for you?”

I stop to think, absently plucking at the keys as I do.

I look at Lawson. At his patient face, dark and daring in this space. Invading it and making it his. Taking it and giving it back to me better than it was before. He carries this unfailing peace, a natural calm he learned from the sea. A certainty he has in his heart that he’s trying so hard to teach to me and I remember it in the feel of his hand on mine by the water. I clung to it. I needed it, needed him, to survive.

My fingers start to move, my mind made up before I know it. Before I realize what I’m doing.

What I’m saying without uttering a word.

I play
Stay With Me
by Sam Smith. And I play it for Lawson.

I close my eyes, playing from memory and making up the rest as I go. I take it and mold it, make it mine, give it life and form and I don’t give a damn about the rules because there are none. I’m lawless. Weightless. Unfettered and flying, and when he starts to sing along, his beautifully rich voice filling the room, I feel myself start to slip.

I’m sliding under the surface. I’m stepping deeper into the water with him, going past my knees, past my waist. It’s up to my chest, to my heart, and it’s filling it, flooding it.

And as afraid as I am, I’m not fighting it.

When the song is over, when my fingers have gone still and my heart is barely beating, I open my eyes.

He’s there. He’s in front of me and he doesn’t hesitate to lift me up off the stool as though I weigh nothing and put me carefully down on the flat top of the piano. His hips are between my thighs, his hands rising up my ribs, and I don’t hesitate to descend my mouth to his. To devour him, taking with my tongue as he takes with his hands, filling them with my body as I pass each shuddered, desperate breath I take into his mouth. As I pull air from his lungs to fill my own.

He works his magic, my clothes disappearing instantly along with his until we’re all heat and heart, skin and sweat pulling and pushing in all the right places. He moves me back, lowering me until I’m lying flat against the piano. His hands ride up my stomach to my chest, soothing my skin and bringing my blood to a boil. Then he chases them with his lips. With his tongue.

The way he plays me, I’m sure he could play
Fantasie
to a T. Every note, every chord, plucked to perfection.

I stretch my arms high over my head, curling my fingers around the edge of the piano top, my legs still draped around his hips on the opposite side.

“Lawson,” I moan, unable to hold it inside.

My body arches, bowing at the waist, and he runs his arm under it to keep me that way. To line me up with his body, ready to play the finale.

“Say it again, Rachel,” he murmurs, his lips against the sensitive skin of my stomach. “Say my name again.”

“Lawson,” I sigh.

He groans, his mouth racing up my body between my breasts as he slides inside me.

It’s not the way it was before. It’s faster, harder, more aggressive and more grappling, but it’s the same song in a different key. I still know it. I still recognize it, and the way we play it together is better than anything I’ve ever known. It’s tender and raucous. It’s sweet and desperate.

It’s Lawson and I.