Twenty-One
Five Years Ago
Later – years, months, weeks, days, sheer minutes later – Ava would say that she knew the moment she read the text that something was off. As her eyes passed over the words, a little note of nervousness played across her skin. Hormones, again, she told herself.
It was from Carter: Can we meet at my house 4 tutoring 2nite? Folks don’t want me at the clubhouse anymore.
Another set of parents swayed by the running black dog on the sign out in front of Dartmoor.
She texted back: Thought they already knew?
Um…not rlly. Mason ratted on me. Dad says NO. Hasta be our house.
Fine, need address, she texted back, and heaved herself to her feet. Already, she felt heavy, misshapen, the baby affecting her mentally.
What she really wanted was a good cry. Tissues, chocolate, curled up in bed – just sob and sob until there was nothing left inside her.
What was she going to do? Do like Becky and have it taken care of?
No. No, it was hers and Mercy’s and she couldn’t imagine that. Not even if Mercy hated her now.
Mercy…her throat ached thinking of him, of the coldness on his face and in his voice that morning.
How was she going to tell her parents? Maggie would hold her hand, would chide her in a supportive way. But Ghost would hit the roof. She didn’t like imagining his wrath.
She pulled a hoodie on over her t-shirt and collected her backpack, made sure her copy of Jane Eyre was inside.
On the way, she texted Carter, and started punching the address into her phone’s GPS.
**
“I’ve realized something,” Tango said, from the sidelines. “Merc always lets you win, brother.”
Aidan scowled as he leaned over the pool table and lined up his next shot.
“He’s got the eye of the tiger tonight, though,” Tango said, a laughing glance thrown toward Mercy. “In it to win it, man.”
Mercy wasn’t laughing. And he wasn’t tortured by the thought of loss the way Aidan was.
He felt like shit. Like he had the flu, minus all the symptoms. Every time he blinked, he saw Ava’s betrayed face, heard the catch in her breathing when he’d burned the word fuck into the air between them like that.
Oh, I’m sorry, fillette. Come here, baby. I’ll make it better, I swear. Just come sit in my lap, part of him wanted to say. He’d almost called her five times that day, not giving a damn that he was a grown-ass man hooked like a caught gator to that teenage girl.
But a larger part of him was swamped with Maggie’s warning. He knew, and had known all along, that he stood to unleash a shitstorm on this whole club. He couldn’t do that, not to his brothers, to the men who’d saved him from a Louisiana jail cell.
And so with every crack of the cue ball against the colors, he felt the anger boiling in him, screaming for an outlet. Beating Aidan’s ass at pool wasn’t helping much, but it was better than nothing. It was better than looking for a groupie, now that Jasmine had told all of them about the feel of his hand around her throat. There were a few who liked the brutal shit who’d given him the side-eye, but he couldn’t find anything appealing about their invitations.
He wanted his girl, and he couldn’t have her, and he wanted to crack someone’s head open with his cue stick.
By the end of the night, he would want to crack his own head open, for not pulling her into his arms that morning and asking her what was wrong.
Carter lived in a seedy neighborhood, full of unkempt lawns and rusted-out decades-old cars. All the angles seemed a little off, a little saggy, a little too slanted. The houses gave the impression of slitted eyes peeping from the wilderness, sleeping beasts who didn’t want to be approached.
“But my place, no, that’s too shady,” she muttered to herself as she parked in front of the narrow brown bungalow with the chain link fence.
There was a pyramid of Coors Light cans in one corner of the fence, like shiny drifted snow. His dad must have been a plumber, going by the dozens and dozens of Kohler boxes under the carport. The window sashes were water-swollen and termite-eaten. The front of the house gave off the impression of a depressed basset hound.
At Carter’s, she texted Maggie. Will call later.
The front steps were littered with cigarette butts. Ava felt a hard twinge of sadness for Carter. He was so popular, so golden and so handsome, it was hard to imagine him in a place like this. It put her own problems in perspective: she might be seventeen and pregnant, just like her mother, but her home was clean. It was a place of love. People in love didn’t live in a house like this.
She was reaching for the doorbell when she heard the scrape of shoes on the concrete behind her.
She turned – flash of dark blue, a jacket sleeve, a shape, taller than her –
Pain exploded in her skull. The blast of it so sharp and acute, so brilliant – her vision went white, then black.
Then nothing.
Carter had grown so accustomed to the sight of her – her back to him, bent over a book, wind playing with her hair – at the picnic table in front of the Dogs’ clubhouse, that her absence was a shock to his eyes. She was always here before him, always had her books spread out and was ready with a list of questions for him.
He searched for her black truck, and couldn’t find it. Sitting in his car, he dialed her cell. It rang out and finally went to voicemail.
Hi, this is Ava, leave a message.
“Um…where are you? We have tutoring tonight.” He waited, like he expected to find an answer in her voicemail box. “Call me, I guess, if you get this.”
Going inside was a risk, but one he took. As he crossed the pavement to the clubhouse, an uneasiness settled over him. Something was off. Ava had been all spaced out in calculus today. Her not being here now – that meant something. He knew her well enough at this point to know that something heavy weighed on her mind.
He opened the door on the sound of pool balls clacking together. The German shepherd, Ares, greeted him with a tail-wag; they were friends at this point. The common room was at its usual weekday capacity: couple guys at the bar, couple guys playing pool. At the pool table, he spotted Ava’s brother, the punk rock friend, and Mercy.
Carter frowned automatically. If there was ever a pamphlet passed around to girls’ parents warning what kinds of men to steer them away from, Mercy’s photo was on it.
As if reading his thoughts, the big biker lifted his head, and his gaze came laser-guided straight to Carter.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked, and the other two guys turned around, curious.
Aidan, without any of Mercy’s hostility, said, “Ava’s not here.”
Duh. “I know, but she’s supposed to be. We had tutoring tonight.”
“Did you not hear him?” Mercy said. “She ain’t fucking here.”
The friend – spiky hair, earrings – glanced over at Mercy. “Bro.”
“This is a clubhouse, do you get that?” Mercy said, his dark eyes boring into Carter, cold and furious. “Not an after school program. Get lost.”
Carter held eye contact, just a moment, to prove he wasn’t afraid. Inwardly, he quaked at the idea of that big monster coming around the table to get to him. But he hated the idea of someone like that winning. He’d been slapped around too much growing up to be afraid of another asshole, no matter what kind of patches he wore on his back.
“Yeah. Sure,” he said, and made a slow show of turning. He would leave, but because he wanted to, because he was beginning to worry about Ava, but not because of that bastard. When he finally got hold of her tonight, he’d tell her she had sucky taste in men.
The sun was sliding behind the tree line when Carter got home, fat fingers of gold and orange streaking upward, toward the purpling high point of the sky. Carter spotted Ava’s truck parked at the street, and his first reaction was complete embarrassment. He’d hoped she’d never see his house. He never had friends over, never posted any photos to Facebook. And here was Ava, little miss biker princess Ava, seeing his hidden truth up close and personal.
He could envision the confusion in her: But, your car…
Yes, it was red and shiny and new. Because he’d worked four summers to pay for it, and because his grandmother had left him a chunk of change in her will that his father hadn’t been able to drink and piss away.
He walked up to her driver door, head already ducked in shame. But when he looked through the window, he saw the truck was empty.
He walked up to the house, found the front door locked. No Ava.
He called her, and heard a phone ringing beside him, down low.
It was almost dark at this point, just the faintest blush of color along the horizon. When he turned, he saw the lit face of a cellphone, down in the black grass beside the stoop. When he hung up his outgoing call, the screen blackened over on the one in the grass. When knelt to retrieve it, his heart turned over.
Ava’s phone, the bright orange case and the Harley sticker pressed onto the back. He pushed the screen, lit it up, and started opening apps, searching for some clue.
In her inbox, he found a text from him, one he hadn’t sent. One asking her to meet him here for tutoring tonight.
His mind went spinning back to breakfast that morning, the faux angst, the undisguised hatred of Ava. “She’s just the kind of whore cops find dead on the floors of abandoned houses.”
“Mason,” he said like a curse, and took off sprinting for his car.
**
In the mirror, Mercy watched his fingers pluck the tape away and peel the bandage back, uncovering the fresh ink on his chest. It was time for the gauze to come off for good; time for the tat to get some air, breathe and get settled, comfortable under his skin. The flesh was still red and raw, irritated around the edges where the needle had gone in, but the swelling was down, mostly, and the series of black shapes was a more regular, more recognizable imprint. There would be brothers who lifted their brows and wondered silently: what the fuck is that?
But to him, it was glaringly obvious. When he looked at it, he saw Ava’s mouth against his skin in the moonlight, the flicker of her lashes as she pulled back, tip of her tongue licking his blood from her lips. Her bite mark, preserved permanently in ink over his heart. When the boys stopped for lunch on the road, he’d found a tattoo parlor and skipped the chicken and waffles, opting for this instead. The bite had healed by that point, all but the faded pink marks where her teeth had been, and the artist had traced them in black.
He was twice as glad he’d had it done, considering the state of things now.
He pulled the vitamin E ointment from his pocket, smeared a dollop across the tat with his finger, then pocketed the tube and dropped his shirt back down.
Some of the boys – Aidan, for one – were consumed with the need to cover themselves in as much ink as was humanly possible. Mercy didn’t share that sentiment. He had his dog, for the club that had kept him alive, the war paint for his grandmother, and now this, the way Ava had sunk her teeth deep into the beating heart of him.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door. Tango’s voice floated through. “Hey, Merc, that kid’s back. I think you’re gonna want to hear this.”
“Jesus Christ.” He shrugged his cut back into order and opened the door faster than Tango expected; he jerked back a step as Mercy brushed past. “Can’t the little dipshit take a hint?”
There was something careful and off-center about Tango’s voice as he followed. “This is different. Just hear what he has to say.”
Carter – and what kind of douchebag name was Carter? – stood in the center of the common room, eyes traveling between them in nervous skips. Beside him, Aidan was examining something he held in his hands. Something orange.
Ava’s phone. Mercy recognized it with a jolt. Under the new tat, his heart started a slow pounding.
“Are you brain damaged?” Mercy snarled as he bore down on him. “I told you to–”
“Merc,” Aidan said, head lifting. His face was an unusual jumble of worries. “Ava’s missing.”