Bray

I grabbed the bag from the sand and held it out to the girl. “Sorry about that,” I said. “I was just borrowing it.” Her hair was so damn long, tumbling like a blonde wave down her back and nearly past her waistline.

She snatched it from my hand and began digging inside to see if I’d stolen anything. The brown-haired girl standing next to her looked at me once unemotionally, but she never said anything. “Borrowing it?” the girl said with harshly narrowed eyes. “No, bitch, it’s called stealing.”

I stepped toward her in a challenging fashion and Elias put his arm between us.

“I didn’t steal it,” I said through my teeth. “We just… needed it.” She was completely in the right, but I couldn’t help but snap back after what she called me.

“Look, we apologize,” Elias said, surrendering. “Bray found it by the pool. The security guard was on our asses about being out here.”

The tattooed guy listened to all of us quietly, a faint smile resting in his hazel eyes. A part of me got the feeling he thought the whole thing was amusing.

“Don’t ever touch my shit—”

The guy hushed her by gently pushing her back a few steps with his muscular arm.

“It’s obvious what’s going on here,” he said in a pretend authoritative tone. “These two are trying to slum it on the beach.” He grinned and looked me over once before turning to Elias. “The question is why. Homeless or stranded with no other place to go. Or just looking to fuck in the sand. It is, after all, one of the things on the universal bucket list.”

“Tate, let’s just go before I beat this bitch’s ass,” the blonde-haired girl said.

I pushed my way past Elias’s arm and went toward her. “You can fuckin’ try,” I said mere inches from her face.

We were both dragged away from each other. Elias had his hands around my upper arms.

“Calm down, Jen,” the guy said, setting the blonde back on her feet. He laughed under his breath and added with his mouth on her ear, “Damn, baby, save it for me later.”

I yanked my arms out of Elias’s hands angrily, but I stood there rather than going after Jen again. Then Elias grabbed my hand and started walking with me away from them. I bent over at the last second to snatch my flip-flops from the sand.

“Hey, man, wait!” the guy said, and we stopped. “No harm done. Look, tell me what’s going on. Maybe we can help you out.”

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Elias said and started walking off again. “We’ve already been ‘helped’ by someone who relieved us of our car just over an hour ago.”

“No shit?” the tattooed guy said, coming around in front of us. We stopped. “Are you fuckin’ for real—someone stole your car?”

“Yeah,” Elias said. “So we’re fresh out of trust. But thanks anyway.”

“Help them?” Jen shouted from behind. “Tate, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me! They steal my stuff and now you want to help them?” She slung the bag over her shoulder, grabbed the quiet girl by the elbow and started tramping through the sand back toward the hotel. “Asshole!” She said and gave the guy the finger.

The guy just smiled and waved her off.

“Don’t worry about her,” he said, turning back to us. “She’ll forgive me later. Where are the two of you from?” Then he pointed at me. “Bray, was it?”

Neither Elias nor I had realized until now that Elias had called me by my real name. It was too late to try being John and Julia, so we went with the flow.

“Yeah, this is Bray, and I’m Elias.”

“Tate Roth,” he said, and shook Elias’s hand.

“And we’re from Indiana,” Elias added.

Good idea to keep with Indiana, at least.

“Indiana, huh? What brought you to Florida? Vacationing before the summer crowds?” Tate asked.

We didn’t answer.

Tate was tall, with short, blondish-brown hair that was somewhat longer on top, tousled and spiky, and it looked like he never really brushed it. But the look worked for him somehow. There was a full-sleeve tattoo down his right arm and tattoos on both of his calves. And he was built a lot like Elias, not too overly muscular where his shoulders dwarfed his head, but rather just right. He seemed harmless. Charming, even. The kind of person you can’t help but instantly like despite that cocky sort of grin he wore and his hot-tempered company.

“Why don’t you come up and hang out with us in our room?” Tate said. “No shady shit here. Just a friendly offer.”

“We’ll pass,” Elias said and interlocked our fingers.

“From the looks of it,” Tate said, “it’s either up there with us or out here with the sand fleas and the security guard who makes rounds every hour.”

Tate’s offer was enticing, despite our unfortunate run-in with Anthony and Cristina. But I could tell that Elias wasn’t up for finding out if Florida had a lot of Anthonys.

“Can you give us a second?” I asked Tate, putting up my finger.

“Sure thing,” he said with a nod and a confident smile. Then he lit up a cigarette.

I pulled Elias by the hand and we stepped several feet away from Tate.

“I think we should,” I whispered.

“Well, I don’t,” Elias came back. “That guy almost fucking shot you tonight and I couldn’t do anything about it. We’ll figure this out on our own, Bray. I’m not going to risk something happening to you again.”

“What other choice do we have?” I asked, my whisper becoming harsher. “And you’re right, you couldn’t do anything when Anthony had that gun on me, but that wasn’t your fault.”

“I let them in the car with us,” he said. “It wasn’t any different from picking them up off the side of the road somewhere.”

“We both let them in the car,” I corrected him. “Neither of us could’ve known he was going to pull a gun. He seemed perfectly harmless.”

“Like this guy?” Elias noted, pointing toward Tate with his thumb.

“Seriously, what are the chances that we’d get robbed twice in the same night? We don’t have anything left to steal.”

“Something worse could happen,” Elias said. While that was true, I had to believe that it wouldn’t, and Elias was just being overly protective.

“Like what?” I asked, shaking my head but still trying to be understanding. “There’s two girls and one guy. And the girls….I could take either one of them.”

“Uh, actually,” Tate said from his far-off spot, holding up his middle and index fingers with the cigarette wedged between them, “there are five of us. My brother and his current lay are upstairs in our suite. But you’re right, you could probably take Jen or Grace. Though Jen is a spitfire. She won’t go down easily.”

“Come on, Elias.” I took his hands. “We have nowhere else to go.”

Elias sighed and shut his eyes briefly.

Minutes later we were walking into a fifth-floor suite set up like a small one-bedroom apartment. Coming in behind Tate, we were greeted by the casual glances of two more people we hadn’t seen before. The first was another blonde, this one with much shorter hair than Jen’s, a vacant look in her eyes, and freckles splashed across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Something bothered me about her, and she hadn’t even spoken yet. And there was another guy, who looked younger than Tate but very much like him, with the same light-brown hair and soft hazel eyes. Those two lost interest in us quickly. But Jen, who had been out on the beach with us, held her glare on us all the way through the room.

Grace, on the other hand, smiled at me. Of the three girls, Grace was the one I felt the biggest connection with. She had a kind and caring air about her, and I liked her instantly.

Jen snarled and then gave Tate one helluva pissed-off look. He bent over and kissed her on the side of her temple. I blinked, stunned, when her hand shot out and slapped him across the side of his neck. “Get the hell away from me,” she snapped.

Tate was surprisingly unfazed by the blow. I halfway expected the smile to drop from his face and for him to snatch her up from the couch and at least yell at her for slapping him. But his smile remained, and he just kissed her again. Ultimately I shrugged it off, realizing quickly that we weren’t the only people in the room with a complicated love life.

Jen went back to her quiet conversation with Grace sitting beside her.

“This is my baby brother, Caleb,” Tate announced. Caleb nodded from his spot on the floor. And then Tate pointed at the blonde sitting behind him in the chair with her knees at each of his shoulders. “That’s Johanna. And you’ve met Jen and Grace.” He turned to Jen, who refused to give him her attention, let alone look at us. “Say hello to our guests, Jen. No need to be rude.”

I got the feeling Tate was taunting her in his own quiet way, but I also got the feeling that Jen was used to it and probably liked it more than she was letting on. Still so pissed off at him that she would probably slap him again if he stuck his head near her too closely, but she liked it just the same.

“Pick a seat,” Tate said, waving his hand about the room. “We’re only here for tonight. Headin’ out in the morning back to Miami. Home sweet home.”

I sat down on Elias’s lap at the table by the window overlooking the beach. Tate opened the mini fridge in the kitchenette and reached inside. He had three bottles of Heineken wedged between his fingers when he straightened up, and he held two of them out to us. Elias took them and opened mine before handing it to me.

Tate plopped down on the couch beside Jen, slouching down far into it with his long, tanned, and muscular legs splayed into the floor. Jen made a hateful face as his shoulder pressed against her back, but she continued to give Grace all of her attention and didn’t exactly push Tate away. She and Grace were looking into a cell phone screen, Jen’s finger moving across the glass.

“So if your car was stolen,” Tate said, “how are you getting back to Indiana?”

These were the kinds of questions that Elias and I didn’t want to answer. Me, worried about screwing up whatever story Elias had in mind to tell them, I just kept quiet and let Elias do all the talking.

“We’re not going back anytime soon,” Elias said. He drank from the bottle and set it on the table, then rested his elbow next to it. “We’re just traveling.”

“By foot now?” Tate pointed out and took a sip.

“I guess so.”

When Elias didn’t offer any more information and the room got quiet, Tate took the hint.

“Hey, it’s all right,” he said. “I understand. TMI too soon.” He looked at Caleb and said, “Why don’t you roll one up?”

Caleb leaned back and away from Johanna’s chair and reached inside his back pocket. A rolled-up plastic sandwich bag appeared in his hand. He settled between Johanna’s bare legs again and started rolling a joint. I watched him for a moment, still struck by how much he and Tate looked alike. Same hair color and build, except Tate appeared taller and Caleb only had one tattoo that I could see, an Asian girl on his left arm surrounded by swirling wind or water, I couldn’t tell at this angle. He and Johanna seemed the quiet type, or maybe they were just really into that movie playing on the television in front of them. Caleb kept looking up at it while rolling the joint.

Here I was thinking Johanna was Caleb’s girlfriend, not remembering Tate had called her Caleb’s “current lay” when we were out on the beach. But then Grace left Jen on the couch and walked over to Caleb, too. She sat down in between his legs when the joint was fully rolled, and he wrapped his arms around her from behind. Johanna leaned forward and rested her hands on his shoulders.

All kinds of sexual images began flitting around inside my head. And then, Caleb caught my eyes. I looked away quickly and turned sideways on Elias’s lap, laying my head down on his shoulder.

I heard the grinding snap of a lighter, and then the sweet aroma of what Tate called “grade-A shit” filled the air.

“Someone turn on that bathroom fan,” Tate said. “Fucking smoke alarm will go off.”

Everyone seemed to be either really comfortable or too far away from the restroom, so I got up from Elias’s lap and did the honors. Then just before I left the restroom doorway, I snatched a washcloth off the rack next to the mirror. I went over to where the smoke alarm was mounted on the ceiling, stepped up onto the side of the bed so I could reach it, and covered the round plastic nuisance with the cloth.

“Good thinking, baby doll,” Tate said, holding out the joint for Jen now.

Without giving Tate the luxury of a look, Jen reached around her shoulder and took the joint from his fingers.

“You said you all live in Miami?” Elias asked from the chair as I went back over and sat on his lap.

Tate let out a long, deep breath and stretched one arm above his head across the back of the couch. “Yeah, Caleb, me, and Jen live in Miami. Those two—” he motioned toward Johanna and Grace “—they wouldn’t survive in Miami.”

Grace’s head fell to one side and she propped her hands on top of Caleb’s bent knees.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. It was the first time I’d actually heard her talk, and I thought her voice was sweet and soothing, much unlike her fire-breathing companion, Jen.

Jen still sat peering into her cell phone.

“You’re too damn white, girl,” Tate said and laughed.

“White? Like Caucasian?” Johanna said with an air of curiosity. Immediately, I got the dumb-girl vibe from that one.

“No,” Tate said and rolled his eyes. “White like a vampire. Don’t get me wrong, Grace, that milky-white skin will give any guy a hard-on in a second, but you know what I mean.”

Jen whirled around at him and punched him in the chest, hard. Tate’s body reacted by jerking forward, his feet raising from the carpet a few inches. He laughed and held one hand over the spot.

“Tha fuck you say that for?” Jen said. “I’m sitting right here.”

Tate was trying not to laugh, but the smile on his face pretty much gave it away.

“Damn, baby, chill the fuck out.” He reached out for her arm, but she snatched it away. “You keep that shit up and I’m going to fuck you up.”

Whoa… I wonder what he meant by that. He definitely didn’t seem the abusive type—Jen wore the championship belt in that category from what I’d seen—but his threat made me wonder.

Tate, with his smile still intact, turned back to us. “No, we just got back from a long drive to Norfolk to pick up my brother.” He motioned at Caleb. “It was just me and Jen on the way up. Didn’t know we’d have a car full on the way back.” Then he pointed at Grace and Johanna again. “These two bobbleheads are friends of Caleb’s. They wanted to get out of Virginia for a while. We had room in my Jeep. You can paint the rest of the picture.”

“Why didn’t you just fly?” I asked.

Tate and Caleb looked at each other and then Tate looked back at me.

But Elias was the one who answered, “Because they couldn’t carry their drugs on the plane.”

A smirk tugged the corners of Tate’s mouth.