Chapter Seven
Present Day
Danny
“There is no instinct
like that of the heart.”
-Lord Byron
I don’t want to believe this trip is cursed, but the universe is making some pretty compelling arguments.
First, Sam and I both have our phones stolen. Then the rental car ends up being twice the price Sam was quoted online, due to a bunch of bullshit fees. And when we finally get to our hotel, after getting lost in downtown Auckland for nearly an hour, we discover our reservation was for the night before.
Sam forgot to add on the extra day we lost while we were flying through a dozen time zones, but her card has already been charged, the hotel won’t refund the money, and the excessively unhelpful man behind the counter seems to enjoy assuring us that The DePaul has no rooms available for tonight.
We head out the door onto the sidewalks of downtown Auckland and for the rest of the afternoon we wander from hotel to hotel, but it’s fashion week and all the hotels are booked. Finally, just as the winter sun is sliding behind the rooftops around five o’clock and the cool air is acquiring a bite, we find a studio with a loft bed at a boutique hotel near the bay.
Sam plunks down her card just as the woman behind the desk says the charge will be five hundred dollars, plus tax.
I snatch Sam’s Visa back fast enough to give the clerk whiplash.
“Thanks, but that’s way over our budget.” I shoot the brunette my most winning smile, the same smile I use to put nervous wives at ease before I take their husbands on camping expeditions where they’ll sleep suspended from ropes anchoring them to the sheer face of a mountain. “Do you have a student discount?”
The woman’s forehead wrinkles sympathetically as she shakes her head. “No, unfortunately, we don’t. On a normal night, I might be able to knock a bit off since you’re renting late in the day, but with it being fashion week…”
“I understand,” I say, smile still in place, grateful that she seems more helpful than the douche who practically kicked us out of the first hotel. “Would you know if there are any youth hostels in the area? Our phones were stolen so we haven’t been able to do an internet search. We just need a place where we can get a bed for the night, even if we can’t find a room.”
The clerk nods. “There’s a YHA about ten minutes from here. Would you want me to call them for you and see if they have beds available?”
“That would be amazing,” Sam pipes up from beside me. “Really. We would appreciate it so much.”
“Of course,” the clerk says as she backs away. “Just let me pop into the office.”
Sam sags against the desk as the brunette disappears around the corner. “I’m so sorry, Danny.”
“Don’t be sorry.” I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a cheer up squeeze. “We’ll find somewhere to sleep, and wake up tomorrow to a new day.”
Sam sighs. “I thought I had everything planned. I can’t believe I forgot about the time change.”
“Everyone makes mistakes.”
She looks up at me, but I can’t tell if I’ve made her feel any better. She’s so exhausted her eyes aren’t giving her away the way they usually do. “Well, I promise I won’t make any more. The rest of the trip will be flawless. I’ll double check all the other reservations as soon as we get settled.”
“It’s okay,” I assure her. “Really, Sam, when have you known me to get mad about stuff like this?”
“Never, but I still feel terrible,” she says, biting her lip before she adds in a small voice. “Do you think the fates are against us?”
“No,” I say, as the clerk returns, an encouraging smile on her face.
“You’re in luck,” she says. “They don’t have any private suites available, but there are beds free in both the male and female dorm rooms. They’re holding one for each of you. I told the gentleman at the front desk you’d be over in a few minutes.”
“Thank you so much,” I say, too relieved that Sam and I won’t be sleeping on the street or in the back of our tiny rental car to be too bummed that we won’t get to share a bed.
Sam’s obviously beat anyway. I’m dying to be alone with her, in a place where we’ll have the privacy to talk and finish what we started on the plane, but right now I’m grateful for a sign the universe has decided to have mercy on us.
No matter what I said to Sam, until this scrap of good news I wasn’t sure how the fates were feeling about our trip.
We get directions from the clerk and a paper printout of downtown Auckland to take with us and step back out onto the sidewalk. I take Sam’s pack and swing it over one shoulder—ignoring her protests that she’s not too tired to carry her own bag—hook mine over the other, and we head east, following the route the clerk outlined to the hostel.
The sun has set completely by now, and the streetlights are flickering on along the busy street. People bustle by in large, laughing groups, all of them bundled up in heavy jackets, and all of them in a hurry.
Downtown is coming to life as the office buildings empty out and well-dressed people grab a bite before the fashion shows slated for later tonight. The restaurants and bars Sam and I pass are all crowded, with tables filling up fast and would-be diners overflowing onto the sidewalk. There’s a festive, end-of-the-year holiday feeling in the air, which is strange considering it’s nearly June, but nice.
It reminds me of my first Christmas on Maui, when we took turkey sandwiches down to the beach for dinner on Christmas Day and made snowmen out of sand.
“I bet a lot of people do Christmas at the beach around here,” I say as Sam and I turn the corner onto a narrower street and the upscale restaurants and boutiques give way to bulky looking apartment buildings and smaller Mom and Pop shops. “They wouldn’t think your mom’s mermaid Christmas tree was weird.”
“I don’t know about that,” Sam said. “You saw what she did to it last year, right? With all the sparkly, shirtless mermen hanging at the top.”
I snort. “It looked like a gay underwater strip club.”
“Or the kinkiest Disney film ever,” Sam said, laughing, that low, husky laugh I haven’t heard in what seems like forever.
“I’ve missed your laugh.” I nudge her shoulder with mine. “It’s one of my favorite things.”
Sam smiles but keeps her gaze on the gum-pocked ground in front of us. “Thanks.”
“Really.” I shift closer to the street as we pass a darkened apartment building with overflowing trash cans muscling in on the left side of the sidewalk. “It ranks right up there with your smile and your ass and that place right behind your jaw that smells so good when you get out of the shower.”
She laughs again. “You’re so weird about that place.”
“I’m not weird,” I say, grinning. “I’m a connoisseur.”
“You’re absolutely weird,” Sam says with a wink I almost miss as something moves behind the trash cans, pulling my focus. “That’s one of the reasons—”
She breaks off with a startled cry, but by the time I realize the thing moving behind the trash cans is a rangy teenage kid, he’s already got his arm locked around Sam’s shoulders and the knife in his right hand jabbed against her throat.
The second I see the knife pressing into her pale skin, fear unlike anything I’ve felt since I was a kid trying to hold my shit together the night my sister was kidnapped floods through me, filling my mouth with a poisonous taste.
All I can think is No. No way. No fucking way is this piece of shit going to take Sam away from me, not after everything we’ve been through, not before we’ve made things okay again, not before we’ve had the life we’ve dreamed about, and the adventures and the kids and the grandkids and all the rest of it.
I want to lunge for him and squeeze the life out of him with my bare hands, but before I can grab for his arm, he tugs Sam several steps back, increasing the distance between us.
“Give me your wallet and anything else you got that’s worth anything,” he says, his voice breaking in the middle of the last word. “Do it or I cut this bitch!”
“Relax, okay,” I say through gritted teeth, holding up my hands as I size him up.
He’s a little taller than Sam’s five seven, but the arm locked around her neck looks strong beneath his stained white thermal. Judging solely by his fuzz-free face I’d peg him as no more than thirteen, but his body looks older, solid enough to be in high school.
But it doesn’t matter if he’s thirteen or sixteen, or how easily I could take him if circumstances were different. Right now, all that matters is the knife at Sam’s throat and how quickly I can make it go away.
“Hurry the fuck up, man,” the kid says, head jerking as he casts a nervous glance up and down the street. “I’ll cut her. I swear I will. I don’t give a fuck.”
“I’m getting the money right now.” I slide Sam’s pack off my shoulder to rest on the sidewalk and then set mine down beside it. “Give me ten seconds.”
I try to catch Sam’s eye, to silently assure her that I won’t let this little monster hurt her, but her eyes are closed.
Her lids are squeezed tightly shut, her lips are pressed together, and she’s trembling so hard her curls are vibrating around her head. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I’d say she was scared out of her mind, but I was there that day in seventh grade P.E. when Sam jumped the girl who’d been calling her pube head all year. I was there when we were sixteen and caught two homeless guys torturing a dog behind the Mana Health food store in Paia. One moment, Sam was vibrating on the sidewalk next to me, the next she was shoving the bigger guy so hard he ricocheted off the Dumpster before falling flat on his drunk ass on the pavement.
The man was nearly twice her size, but he was a coward who got off on torturing animals and he didn’t have a knife. If she decides to fight back right now, it could end with her throat getting slashed open in the middle of the street and her life isn’t worth the risk. Not even a little bit.
I’m opening my mouth to beg her not to do anything crazy, but it’s too late.
My words die on my lips and my heart lurches into my throat as she reaches up, grabbing the arm that’s holding the knife with both hands. The kid reaches for her hair with his other hand, but she’s already turned her head, opened her mouth wide, and bitten down so hard I can see the tendons in her jaw pop as her teeth dig into his flesh.
“Fuck!” The kid screams and the knife clatters to the pavement.
He fists his hand in Sam’s hair and pulls hard enough to make her cry out, but before he can do any more damage I’m all over him.
My first punch connects with the center of his forehead, bone hitting bone with a satisfying thud, sending a wave of pain up my forearm I barely notice because it feels so fucking good to know Sam’s free and this trash is getting what he deserves. As he stumbles back, Sam slips out of the way, giving me a clear shot at the rest of the creep. Before the kid can recover his balance from the first punch, I’m pummeling him in the stomach, hunching my shoulders, ducking my head, and getting in close, protecting my torso as I make him wish he didn’t have one.
It’s been years since I’ve been in a real fight, but it comes back to me like I never left that rough, sad schoolyard in South Carolina. Like I was never spirited away to a softer existence in Maui, and an even softer one in Croatia, where Gabe’s money made sure I was never treated like a waste of flesh again.
Back in Giffney, I’d been nothing but Chuck Cooney’s oldest son, the kid most likely to get sent to juvie. I’d grown up in a neighborhood where you had to fight to prove you weren’t an easy victim, and I’d learned my hood lessons well. I was a runt until my fifteenth birthday, but by the time I was eight, I could level kids twice my size.
I learned to fight like a monster because I knew no one was going to take it easy on me if I didn’t. If you lost a fight in my old neighborhood, there was a chance you’d lose a few teeth or an eye, as well. I once watched a kid get beaten so badly he was puking blood by the time the two guys beating the shit out of him got bored and went to go steal cigarettes from the corner store.
When you grow up like that, you don’t see any other way. Beat or get beaten.
Learn to be tougher than the people who want to hurt you, or get used up, battered, and abused.
If I were still the little beast I used to be, I wouldn’t feel an ounce of regret for beating the fucking shit out of this kid. Back then, I knew the laws of the jungle. I had absorbed them into my blood stream, been born with them encoded in my DNA. Weak fucks who try to take what the stronger fucks have deserve what they get. They deserve to suffer and to die if they’re unlucky enough to get punched in the wrong place one too many times. This kid had tried to hurt someone under my protection and take what was mine, and he’d lost, and now it was my right to make him wish he had never been born.
But I’m not that monster anymore. I don’t have a taste for blood, or the freedom to risk killing someone with my fists. I have a conscience that would eat me alive if I took a life for any reason other than self-defense, and I have so much to lose.
I have Sam and our future and that is…everything.
“Get out of here.” I shove the kid away, breath burning my lungs, making me aware of how much energy I’d been exerting.
He falls to the ground near the trash cans with a groan and doesn’t get up for a long moment, making me wonder if I took too long to regain control.
I silently start counting, promising myself I’ll go find a phone to call for help if he doesn’t get up by the time I reach ten, no matter how fucked I’ll be if I end up in jail in a foreign country. But finally, after another groan and a whimper that makes me think he was closer to thirteen than sixteen, he staggers to his feet and lurches away around the edge of the apartment building.
I watch him go, torn between feeling relieved and disgusted with myself.
A quick glance at the building reveals sheets hanging in the windows, a Christmas tree still visible in a second story apartment, and an air of poverty so heavy there is no mistaking the building for anything other than the slum that it is. This is where the people who are just a few rungs above rock bottom are clinging to the shit splattered concrete before they’re swept away into the sewer.
This is a place like the one where I grew up, a place where almost no one gets out and no one gets better.
Generation by generation, people are sucked into ever more crushing poverty until kids are born knowing it’s pointless to hope for something better. The only way out is to take what the world won’t offer you, to steal what the powers that be will never give you a chance to earn.
As awful as it was to see Sam with a knife at her throat, a part of me knows where that kid was coming from. And I know if things had been different, if Caitlin hadn’t met a millionaire with a trust fund who loved her crazy family as much as he loved my sister, and if Sam hadn’t made me want to change, I might have been that kid.
“Are you okay?” Sam appears in front of me, her eyes so wide in her thin face she looks like one of those Japanese cartoons, reminding me of the other thing that’s been bothering me since I pulled her into my arms at the Kahului airport.
“I’m fine, but you’re too skinny,” I say, sucking in a relieved breath as she lunges into me, hugs me tight, and proves she doesn’t think I’m a monster. “I’m going to buy you a big stack of pancakes as soon as we get checked into the hostel.”
“We should probably get cleaned up somewhere first,” she says, pulling back to look up at me, eyes still wide. “Your knuckles are split and I…I think I have blood in my mouth.”
I capture her face in my hands, running my thumb over her full bottom lip. “No, you don’t. You’re fine. No blood.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, bringing her fingers to her mouth and wiping too hard at the edges. “I swear, I taste blood. It’s like my mouth is full of it.”
“I can’t see anything, but that was dangerous, Sam.” I bend, scooping up our packs, ready to get away from the scene of our near mugging. “If anything like that ever happens again, just give the guy the money. It isn’t worth risking your life.”
“I know.” She crosses her arms at her chest as we make quick time down the street, toward the green hostel sign glowing at the end of the block. “I don’t know what happened. One minute I was scared, and the next I was so angry I couldn’t think straight. I don’t even remember deciding to fight back. I just…did it.”
Her fingers drift to her lips. “I bit him so hard, Danny. I think I felt something…snap. A tendon or something?”
“It’s okay.” I study her face in the glow of the streetlights, not liking how pale she looks. “Don’t worry about him.”
“I’m not, I just…” She brushes her sleeve across her lips hard enough for the fabric of her fleece hoodie to rasp as it drags across her skin. “It’s nothing. I just need to get the taste out of my mouth. I’ll brush my teeth as soon as we get there. It’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.”
I want to believe her, but my gut tells me nothing is fine and maybe the fates are still against us, after all.