“Duly noted. Okay, quirky. I can handle that. Keep going. What else do you think you know about me?”
“Well, you’re bold. Brave. I would even go as far as to say that you’re irritatingly feisty. You speak about three hours before you think. You ask way too many goddamn questions. You have this dimple on your left cheek that comes out when you’re smiling, but it also shows up, along with the one on the right cheek, when you’re pissed off.” Embarrassment burned my neck as if I was standing too close to a fire. “Your neck and your face get red when you’re embarrassed. It starts at your neck. Right here.” King lightly wrapped the palm of his hand around my throat. “Then, it jumps up to your cheeks.” He brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “Then, it travels all the way up to these ears.”
He leaned in and sucked my earlobe into his mouth, trailing his tongue along the delicate flesh of my ears sending sparks of pleasure down my body. My nipples hardened and pressed up against my shirt.
King chuckled and pulled back. “So don’t say that you’re empty, pup, because you are anything but.” There was a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. Something I hadn’t seen before. “I think you are, by far, the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But stop trying to imagine what it would be like without your memory. You’re lucky you know who you are and where you belong.”
King pulled at the label on his beer and sighed. “Sometimes, I wish I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I could chose to wake up tomorrow and not remember who I am, the shit I’ve done, the people I would be leaving behind, I would do it. I could just start over. Be someone else.”
“I don’t want you to be anyone else,” I blurted, interrupting his confession.
“You should hate me,” King said, taking my plate from my lap and setting it on the table. “If I were you, I would hate me.”
“I thought I did.”
“And now? What do you think of me now?” King asked, leaning in closer.
“I think you are the most stubborn, overbearing, anger inducing, obnoxious, complicated, and beautiful man that has ever lived.”
“I think you are beautiful, too,” King breathed. In one graceful movement, he had me out of my chair and onto his lap.
His hands had just slid into my hair when a loud crash sounded from the other side of the mangroves.
“Stay the fuck here,” King ordered. He stood and tossed me off his lap. I crouched behind the cement retaining wall that separated the dock from the yard. King leapt over it effortlessly and ran in the direction of the garage, toward where the sound had come from.
It seemed like I was there for hours, waiting for King to come back or for something to happen.
Nothing.
My stomach growled, and I was reminded that I had barely started my lunch. I scooted down to my ass and stretched out my leg in an effort to drag the chair that held my plate toward me. I hooked my foot around the leg of the chair and slowly pulled. It made a horrible scraping noise against the wood planks of the dock. I paused and waited.
Nothing.
So, I continued. Slowly, inch my inch, I dragged my lunch closer to me until my Cheetos smushed sandwich was within my reach. I pulled my plate off the seat and picked up my sandwich. I opened my mouth and was about to chomp down on victory when someone cleared their throat.
With my sandwich still in launch-into-my-mouth position, I looked up from behind the bread to see both King and Bear standing on the top of the seawall, peering down at me.
Bear looked just a good as he did the night I met him, but now, he looked even better. Because he was shirtless. His ab muscles glistened with sweat. I thought King had a lot of tattoos, but Bear didn’t have a single inch of available real estate left on his skin.
King spoke first. “Oh no, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Just went to check out what that bomb like noise was, but you go ahead and finish your sandwich. We’ll wait.” He was smiling out of the corner of his mouth.
Bear crouched down. “Oh shit. Check you out. Didn’t think you’d still be alive.”
I put my plate down and stood up. “If you two are done mocking me, can one of you tell me what the fuck that noise was?”
“Oh shit. Sorry, that was all me. This girl came over, and she’s got this old Volkswagen Bug. One thing led to another…”
“I don’t want to know,” I interrupted.
Bear continued, “All I was going to say is that while her lips were wrapped around my cock, I vaguely remembered promising to fix her bug for her. What you heard was that very car backfiring. For what I’m thinking was the very last time, because it’s dead. Like super dead. Like there is no coming back from that dead. Which totally blows cause the girl could suck the—”
King held up a hand. “Okay, Bear, cut the bullshit, you can tell her what really happened.”
Bear nodded and his phone rang. He pulled it out of his back pocket and clicked a button on the screen. “Yeah.” He scratched his beard. “Fuck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell him.” He clicked the phone again and put in back in his pocket.
“Isaac is on the move. Jimmy and BJ spotted him and his boys in Coral Pines this morning. Looks like they’ve got business there. BJ spoke to a guy in Isaac’s crew. They’ll be riding into our corner of the world in a week or so.”
“Shit,” King cursed.
“I told you to fucking get out of town, dude. You knew he was coming.”
“Yeah, and when you told me that, I didn’t care if he came right up to my front door, guns-a-fucking-blazing.”
“But now?” Bear asked.
King nodded to me.
“Ah. I see. What do you want to do, man? Your call. You know I’m behind you no matter what.” Bear lit a cigarette.
“I think we go on the offense,” King said.
“Wait, what does all this mean? Who is Isaac?”
King ignored me. “I’ll get her to Grace’s before then,” he told Bear.
“King, who the fuck is Isaac? Who the fuck is Grace?” I shouted, jumping up and down to make my presence in the conversation known.
“Pup, when Preppy took you out with him, did he tell you that when he and I started the granny operation, we cut out our main supplier?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“Well, Isaac, was that supplier.”
“Shit,” I said.
Bear took a long drag of his cigarette and blew out the smoke through his nose, looking very much like the bird recently tattooed on King’s hand. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“What you heard was a warning,” King said.
“What kind of warning?” I asked.
Bear stubbed out his cigarette into the concrete of the retaining wall. “The kind that goes boom.”
“What was blown up?”
Preppy’s wail broke through the air like another explosion.
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY MOTHERFUCKING CAR?”
Chapter Seventeen
Doe
Any sign of the playful version of King from lunch were gone. He gave me ten minutes to get ready and get my ass in the fucking truck.
I didn’t know where we were going, and something about the way he’d barked it at me made it clear he didn’t exactly want me to ask.
We traveled together in a silence so heavy it had its own presence in the truck. Like an uninvited guest, it awkwardly sat between us on the bench seat. We turned down a narrow, dirt road. My curiosity piqued when King pulled over to the side of the road next to the gate of a yellow ranch style home with a short, white picket fence lining the front yard.
“Let’s go,” King said.
Getting out of the truck, he unlatched the gate and started up the cement walkway. I followed behind him, jogging to catch up to him and match his long strides. Several pinwheel lawn ornaments spun as we passed them, our motion creating the only breeze in the stagnant heat of the day. I thought that maybe King was making a pickup for Preppy, and that this was another one of their Granny Growhouses that I had not yet seen.
When we reached the door, King didn’t knock, just shoved it open and walked inside. For a split second, my heart skipped a beat because I thought that maybe he was robbing the place, but I quickly squashed that idea when I heard him call out, “Grace?”
Grace. I recognized the name from earlier.
I followed him into the house and closed the door behind me. When I turned back around, I came face to face with a thousand tiny eyes staring back at me. The small living room was covered with them. From the plant shelves to the buffet style table in the entryway to the coffee table and on top of the old TV, ceramic rabbits of all shapes and sizes were everywhere.
King didn’t pay them any attention as he strode through the living room to the sliding glass doors on the back of the eat-in kitchen where large stuffed rabbits occupied all six chairs of the table like they were about to enjoy a meal together.
I guess Grace likes rabbits.
“Out here!” shouted a high-pitched, yet scratchy voice.
King held the sliding glass doors open so I could pass, but he didn’t step aside. I had to brush against his chest to get through. In my attempt to touch him as little as possible, I stumbled outside onto a wooden deck where a little woman with pixie–style, gray hair sat in a plush navy blue deck chair. Her feet were resting on top of the table, crossed at the ankles. She drank out of a tall glass with light green liquid. A leaf floated on the top of the ice.