“But, Bastian,” Raine continued, “even though you might not be able to answer the questions people ask, that doesn’t mean you get to blow up at them and storm out, leaving me to try to explain and defend you. You can’t do that.”
Well, yeah, obviously I could. I had in the past, and I’d probably do it again in the future.
“You think I should just stick around and tell them to fuck off instead?”
“No,” Rain said with a loud sigh. “There are other options, you know.”
I took a deep breath as the anger inside me began to bubble again at the thought. There was one option I had considered but didn’t take.
“I didn’t think you’d appreciate me hitting him,” I said.
“You’re right,” Raine replied. I could hear the tension rising in her voice again.
“It’s better if I just leave,” I rationalized.
“Maybe for you,” Raine agreed, “but what kind of questions and comments do you think I get when you do something like that?”
I hadn’t thought about it. Once I left, everything that happened afterward had never really concerned me before. I wondered what Lindsay and Nick had to say after I took off and how Raine responded.
“I spend enough time trying to get them to understand you,” she said. “When you do something like that, I can’t defend your actions. It just gives them more justification when they start telling me I ought to get rid of you.”
I secured my grip on her clothing as a wave of panic crashed over me. It was just one more thing my selfish ass hadn’t considered. Of course Lindsay would be telling her to dump me, and Nick would be right behind her. They probably had another guy already picked out as a better suitor for Raine, and he probably hadn’t killed anyone lately.
“What did they say?” I growled. She had known Lindsay since they were kids. Raine was bound to listen to whatever advice Lindsay had to offer. The thought kick-started my paranoia.
“It doesn’t matter,” Raine said. “I’m not going anywhere, Bastian.”
I relaxed slightly, but the idea of Raine with someone else continued to terrify me.
“That doesn’t stop them from saying I should, though. When you behave like that, it makes it a lot harder to explain to them why I love you.”
The tension inside me began to build again, and I fought against the desire to tell her all the reasons she shouldn’t have anything to do with me. Her friends were probably right, but I felt like I was looking out over the proverbial cliff, and if I opened my mouth to say what I was thinking, I was going to fall.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered instead.
Raine moved her hand up into my hair and held my head against her shoulder. Closing my eyes, I tried to understand the shit that was going through my head, but as usual, I couldn’t make anything of it. My brain just didn’t work right, which I realized was the problem.
“I know there’s something seriously wrong with me inside,” I said quietly. “I can’t deny it.”
“Bastian-”
“Let me finish,” I said quickly. If I didn’t get it out now, I never would. “This isn’t about not being worthy of you or whatever—there’s more to it than that. There is something wrong with me, and don’t tell me you don’t know that.”
I paused, but she didn’t interject.
“I don’t know that I can control those…those urges. There’s a need inside of me to lash out. It’s so fucking deep, and I can’t explain it; I just know it’s there. As far back as I can remember, it’s always been there.”
“Sometimes you do okay,” Raine said. “You do all right when John Paul is around.”
“That’s different. He doesn’t ask those kinds of questions.”
“So you feel comfortable around him.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Most of the time.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
Well, fuck if I knew. It just was.
“He’s…he’s always been there for me.”
“And what? You don’t think Lindsay and Nick care?”
“They care about you, not me.”
“That’s not fair,” she said. “They’ve both tried to get along with you. You aren’t very receptive.”
“It’s fake,” I said. “They do it for you, not me. It’s kinda hard to take their shit seriously when it’s all an act.”
“How do you know that?”
“I can just tell, okay?” I snapped. “It’s like knowing when a chick is faking an orgasm; if she’s not clenching down on my cock, she’s not coming.”
And just like that, I was back to being a dick again.
“Being crude and obnoxious doesn’t help,” Raine growled. “It’s just me here now, so why don’t you stop the shit?”
Raine almost never cussed, so it usually caught my attention when she did. Recognizing it didn’t even change my behavior though. When push came to shove, it was always the same for me—get the fuck out. I shoved myself off of the bed and away from her, grabbed my smokes, and went to the balcony.
Raine followed.
“You can’t just walk away from the conversation,” she informed me.
“I dunno,” I said, still in pissy-mode, “I’ve done it before.”
I knew I was being a jerk, but I also thought if I came right out and told her that I’d love to send Nick flying off this balcony, she would like that even less. I wanted to say or do something to make it all right again, but as usual, I was clueless.
I turned toward her, and the small light near the top of the balcony door shone over my face, making me squint. Raine narrowed her eyes, and she took a step closer to me. Her fingers brushed over my cheekbone, and though I tried not to, I flinched as she touched the bruise on my face. Her eyes went wide.
“What happened to you?”
“It’s nothing,” I said.
She straightened up and leaned forward to get a better look at me. With her hand on the side of my face, she tilted my head into the light and glared a bit.
“What happened?”
“Just a little tiff,” I said with a shrug. “Seriously, it’s no big deal.”
“You got in a fight? With who?”
“Just some dude,” I shrugged again. “I went riding, stopped for a bit to walk it off, and then ran into a guy who wasn’t all that pleasant. It’s all good—he got it worse than he gave.”
“Is that really all you have to say about it?”
I took a slight step back but was stopped by the balcony door. I looked off into the distance and watched the waves slipping back and forth over the beach.
“I guess I’ll take that as a yes,” Raine mumbled.
“Pretty much,” I replied. I looked back to her. “I’m fine.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t be pissed.”
“It’s kind of late for that,” Raine sighed. “I just don’t know what to make of you sometimes.”
“I’m a dick,” I said. “You already know this.”
“Not usually.” Raine reached up and ran her fingers through her hair. I tried not to get distracted by the way the dark strands lay against her neck and shoulder. “When you are, I usually understand why, but not with this. I don’t understand why you don’t realize Nick is trying to be your friend, and I don’t understand why you react to it by going out and beating up someone else.”
“He was asking for it,” I said quietly.
“Nick or the guy you beat up?”
I wasn’t really sure myself, so I went back to the ever-present and noncommittal shrug.
“You’re really trying my patience,” she said.
I looked back at her, realizing how angry she still was. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say—all this relationship shit was a mystery to me. I never said the right shit, and I certainly didn’t do the right shit. I was probably the worst match for my gentle Raine as I could possibly be, and that just made me want to cling to her, so I did.
I stepped forward and wrappe
d my arms around her. I pulled her close to me and kissed her gently on the forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” she asked.
“Everything I do wrong,” I replied. “I’m a shitty boyfriend, you know that.”
She took a deep breath and blew the air across my shoulder as she laid her head against my chest. Her arms came up around my neck.
“You are my hero,” Raine said. “You’ve always been that to me. My savoir, and despite your flaws, I still love you. I just wish you’d tell me what was going on in your head in a way I could understand.”
“My head is fucked up,” I told her. “I don’t know how much of that is fixable, babe.”
I leaned back a little and looked down into her eyes.
“Seriously,” I said. More tension flowed through my body as I tried to choose the right words. “If…if your father was still alive, do you really think he’d approve of you being with me?”
I felt Raine tense in my arms. Bringing up her father might not have been the wisest thing to do, but it was the best way to get my point across. After all, I was right there when he was tortured and murdered, and I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it from happening.
I hadn’t known Raine then and had no idea who her father was other than being a small-town cop in the wrong part of the big city at the wrong time. Why he was there I didn’t know, only that once he was discovered, Landon’s crime boss, Joseph Franks, wasn’t about to let him live. Everyone in the area who was considered a threat to Franks and his organization was rounded up, brutally tortured, and eventually executed.
I had watched it all, unable to intervene.
I shifted my eyes back to Raine’s face and observed her far-away expression. Tightening my arms around her, I pressed my lips to her shoulder. I hadn’t meant to upset her by bringing up her deceased father, but I needed to make the point.
“He wouldn’t want you dating me,” I said.
Raine flicked the tip of her tongue over her lips.
“I don’t know,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t like what you used to do, obviously, but neither do I. I think if he got to know you—really know you—I think he might have been okay with it.”
I snorted through my nose at the ridiculousness of her statement.
“I mean it,” Raine said. “I don’t know if I can honestly say he would have liked you or wanted to hang out with you on the weekends, but I think if he saw how you are with me, I think he’d understand.”
“You’re crazy,” I muttered. “What exactly do you think he would see? Me snapping at you for no fucking reason? Running out on you when I get pissed off? What do you think he’d like more—the chain smoking or the bike?”
I laughed dryly.
Raine turned to look at me. She stared into my eyes, and I watched her expression go from annoyance at my harshness to something softer. She reached out and ran her finger from my elbow up to my shoulder.
“Sebastian,” Raine whispered, “when you look at me, I can feel how much you love me. Sometimes it’s a little overwhelming—like a tidal wave—and it can make me feel like I’ve been turned inside out. I can feel it in my skin and in the pit of my stomach. When you look at me like that, I can feel your love for me in my soul. When you wrap your arms around me at night, I can feel your desire for me, and I don’t think there is any woman alive who has ever felt more wanted than I do when you’re close to me.”
She touched the side if my face.
“Dad would have seen that in you, too.”
Her point was made. At least for now, I wouldn’t argue with her.
“Lilliana,” John Paul said as he slid into the booth seat across from me. He had to duck his head a bit to keep from hitting the low-hanging lamp poised above the middle of the table.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“It’s her name,” he said.
“Whose name?”
“The chick I was banging last night.”
John Paul was my one and only true friend. We’d both fought for Landon in the tournaments, and when I had to go into hiding, John Paul came with me. Now that I was beached in the south of Florida, he’d taken up residence in North Miami Beach, which wasn’t too far from our condo, and we tried to meet up regularly.
I rolled my eyes and sucked the straw in my glass of iced tea while John Paul ordered a beer and a pile of nachos.
“Since when do you eat that shit?” I asked.
“I worked it all off already,” he claimed. “She was fucking phenomenal. Luscious Lilliana. She’s got one of those nice, round asses you just want to squeeze and bite. I hate how skinny most of the chicks around here are. I need a woman with some meat on her bones.”
“Like that bro-hemoth you dated in Seattle?”
“Stacey?” John Paul leaned back in his seat. “She was a beast.”
“Yeah, exactly,” I replied as I remembered the dark-skinned woman who was all muscle and no tits. She wasn’t that tall, but you couldn’t tell it by her attitude. John Paul had dated her for a couple of months, which was probably a record for him. “She took more steroids than half the guys we worked out with.”
“Ah, you’re just pissed she could squat more than you could.”
“She fucking could not!”
“She did that one day.”
“Fluke,” I waved my hand dismissively. “I was off one day, and you started all that bullshit just to fuck with me.”
John Paul laughed and adjusted his black cowboy hat as he leaned over the table and looked more closely at me. His eyes narrowed slightly as his lips smashed together.
“You look like shit, ya know.”
“Fuck you,” I replied.
“Just sayin’.” He leaned back again and started drumming his fingers on the table. He watched me for a minute as the server deposited a huge plate of nachos with all the extras in the center of the table. “So what’s up with you?”
“Meh.” I shrugged. “Been fighting with Raine a bit.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
His choice of words vibrated in my ears and sent unwelcomed tingles down my back. In paradise there hadn’t been any trouble.
All right, that was total bullshit, but it was the sort of trouble I could handle. Raine had been attacked by a bunch of shit-bag human traffickers who promptly died by my hand. Aside from that, there had been bad storms and my ever-present grumpiness. I’d always been moody, and Raine had to put up with my shitty attitude on a regular basis while we were stranded, but now it was worse. I still had a shitty attitude, but here I also had five thousand extraneous variables to set me off instead of just the fucked up shit inside my head. I had no idea how Raine put up with me at all.
“I’m an asshole,” I said with a shrug.
“No shit! Really?” John Paul placed his hand in the center of his chest and made his mouth into a big “O” before he started laughing. “Is she tired of your crap?”
“I dunno,” I said. “Probably.”
“So what did you do?”
I shrugged again. I didn’t really want to get into it, but I also couldn’t stop thinking about the whole situation. Maybe it would be better to tell him everything.
“Lindsay and Nick came over for dinner,” I finally said. “That dude pisses me off. I was a dick, Raine got mad, and I left.”
“Sounds like you handled that superbly.”
“You can shove your sarcasm up your ass, you know.”
“You going to argue the point?”
I wasn’t, but I also wasn’t going to justify the remark with a response. I was still thinking about what I had revealed to Raine and—quite frankly—to myself. I didn’t like talking to people because I didn’t have anything to say.
“It’s not them, really,” I said. “I know it’s me. I just…don’t have any purpose here, ya know?”
“What kind of purpose?”
“In Raine’s life,” I said. “She needed me there, and she doesn’t ne
ed me here. I just…exist beside her without anything to do.”
“Get a job,” he suggested.
“Yeah, right,” I snorted. “Doing what? With what resume? I’ve got a master’s degree I’ve never used and no employment history I can actually put on paper. What should I apply for? Parking attendant or McDonald’s? Oh wait…all the parking around here is automated. There’s also probably some hippie health group around here trying to make fast food illegal.”
“Bouncer?”
“You trying to get me back on the booze?” I glared at him, challenging. I wasn’t about to admit I made a trip to a bar almost every day. He didn’t need to know that shit.
John Paul tossed his hands up in the air in acknowledgement. He sat back for a moment and took a long swig of his beer before speaking again.
“Raine’s pretty into you,” he said. “I don’t think she’s looking to have you around just to bust up any dickhead that comes close to her. For some fucked-up reason, she likes you.”
He stared at me for a while.
“You want to go back there, don’t you?”
I nodded. There wasn’t any need to clarify where there was.
“She won’t have anything to do with it.”
I nodded again.
“Yeah, you’re fucked.”
“Thanks a lot.”
John Paul just grinned and scratched the dark beard on his chin. I grabbed a handful of nachos and shoved them in my face, effectively ending the conversation.
“You been going to that gym in your building?” John Paul asked.
I stared down at my glass and didn’t answer.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” he snickered. “You’re getting soft, motherfucker. Get yourself in there before I beat the shit out of you.”
“Whatever.” I flipped him off. I knew he was right, but I wasn’t going to admit it.
“Seriously, bro,” he said as he leaned forward again. “Hit the weights. Five days a week, just like we used to.”
“Why?” I looked back up into his eyes, and they flickered away from me.
“Because,” he said as he lowered his voice and looked back at my face, “you may not be in the wilds of your island paradise anymore, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t shit she needs to be protected from here. They know where you are, and they know what she knows. It’s only Landon’s reputation that’s keeping them from busting down your door and taking you both out. You go soft, forget your training, and you just might miss something.”