CHAPTER FIVE
Thia
There isn’t much out there in the world that scares me. Life is way too scary to waste time being afraid of the unknown when the known is frightening enough. I was never scared of the boogie monster or anything lurking under my bed or in my closet at night when I was a kid.
The only thing I was scared of were things that could actually happen.
Like tornadoes.
It’s not like Jessep, Florida, my hometown, ever saw the kind of tornadoes that inflicted real catastrophic damage. The kind we got were the small ones. The occasional shingle-shifter or tree-toppler.
Yet somehow, all of my nightmares since Bear went away have revolved around the descending spirals of doom. Leveling buildings, farms, towns…
Lives.
The afternoon storms had been rolling in with a vengeance over the past several days. Darker. More menacing. Like they were trying to send me a message of darker days ahead.
The clouds were at war with the sky, just like I felt as if I was at war with myself. Love and hurt both existing in equal measure inside me. It turned physical and after a few days had developed into a devastating full body ache.
A dark line of clouds approached, encroaching on the blue sky as the afternoon’s impending storm made itself known. Rolling and billowing toward me, my nightmare coming to life.
I was swept up in the fear that—at any second, I was certain—spiraling clouds would descend from the sky right above my head. I found myself waiting for the moment that the tornado was going to strike and inflict more damage than most people could possibly imagine.
Than most people could handle.
I could almost feel the wind, the wreckage. The sensation of being picked up and slammed back down over and over again.
To me, a tornado has always been the force of nature capable of the most damage.
Until I met a force of nature that would make a tornado seem like a morning breeze. One that picked me up, made me feel like I could soar as it tossed me around, sent me reeling, and threw me back down to the ground, leaving me broken and fighting for my life.
And his.
Bear.
Before my brother died and well before my mother went off the mental deep end, my father used to stay out in the orange grove late into the night. I’d assumed he was fixing the always broken irrigation system or any of the other run-down and failing equipment.
One night I grew curious and snuck out of the house, but instead of finding him attached to the generator or the broken pipes, I found him on his knees in the dirt. The full moon shining down on his face, illuminating his watery eyes as he looked up at the trees as if they were more than just fruit on branches.
It wasn’t even the sight of him talking to the trees that surprised me.
It was that he was begging them.
Begging for a good harvest. For the Sunnlandio Cooperation to miraculously increase the contract, for gas prices to drop, for the workers to stop striking for more money, for the forecasted record frost to skip over our farm.
Then finally, for my mother to love him again.
My heart broke for him right there.
That was the night I realized that all the “Everything is fine, sweetheart” remarks my father gave me every night at the dinner table was the lie I’d always suspected it was.
On some of those nights when my dad was out late, my mother would come and drag me from my bed and into hers. We’d cuddle up and watch cheesy romantic comedies.
It was those movies, and not my parents’ cold/colder relationship, that gave me my first glimpse into what love was. I got so upset when the couple faced an obstacle that could prevent them from being together. I lived for the big romantic gesture at the end. The one that would finally bring them together forever.
Every single time when the movie ended and the credits rolled, my mother would sigh and brush my hair off my forehead. “You know that none of that is real, right? Movies are make-believe. That kind of love doesn’t exist.”
Unrealistic is what she’d call it.
Except, that was another lie, even if she didn’t know it at the time.
Because that kind of love did exist.
What I felt for Bear had simmered under the surface since I was ten years old, and when we met again, albeit under shitty circumstances, it had exploded into something more powerful than any cheesy romance could ever depict.
With one major difference.
Our story didn’t have a happy ending.
There was no chasing after me on horseback or confessing our feelings to one another in front of a crowd of teary-eyed people.
No, our story ended with Bear in jail, hell-bent on taking the rap for the murders of my parents, which my mother was ultimately responsible for.
When Bear’s lawyer, Bethany Fletcher, explained that Bear had signed a confession to spare me from facing the same threat from his former brothers, one that he himself now faced within the walls of the county jail, I didn’t want to believe it.
He threw himself onto the fire for me.
King is taking you home.
Stay there. Wait.
Trust me.
Bethany passed me a note in Bear’s handwriting minutes after he’d been arrested while I was still looking down the road as if he’d be back at any moment. I held on to it with shaky hands and turned it over and over wondering where the rest of it was.
“I don’t understand,” I said to Bethany through my teary eyes.
“Do what he says,” she’d said, you don’t need to understand. You just need to listen.
“Why did he do this?” I asked.
Bethany cocked an eyebrow at me like I should already know the answer. “The reason why any man does anything foolish and ridiculous. For love, of course.”
“It’s not safe for him there. We need to get him out!”
“Thia,” Ray said, coming to stand beside me. “Don’t you see? They were going to arrest you. Bear’s at least got a fighting chance where you wouldn’t. He grew up in the club. He knows how to handle himself. He knows what he’s doing. Bethany’s right. As hard as it is, you have to trust him, and in the meantime she’s going to do everything she can to get him home. We all will.”
King came to stand beside Ray and placed his hand on her shoulder.
I shook my head. “It should be me. He didn’t do anything. I did!” I turned to Bethany. “I’m the one who shot my mother. I’m the one who killed her. It should be me! Please, we can’t let him—”
Bethany clucked her tongue and waved her index finger back and forth. “That’s not what happened, my dear. Bear crashed his bike into their grove. He went up to the house to use their phone since his had no service. When he got up to the house, your mother was standing outside ranting about killing your father, waving a shot gun around. Bear grabbed a pistol from the porch and shot her with it in self defense before fleeing.”
“That’s not what happened,” I said flatly.
“According to his confession that’s exactly what happened,” King said. “You need to trust him.”
Trust?
Trust is a funny thing. Especially when both my patience and my sanity had already reached their limit, and the man I love had been arrested for something I did, leaving me with an empty heart and an infuriating note, ordering me to go back to the place I hated most in the world. I trusted him and I knew in my heart he was doing what was best for me.
What I didn’t trust was that he wasn’t going to get himself killed in the process.
“Get some rest. I’m taking you back in the morning,” King said, and that was that.
I didn’t even try to sleep right away, knowing full well it would be impossible when I would probably still be able to smell Bear on the sheets. Instead, I sat in the same little rowboat where Bear confessed his feelings for me, except this time, I left it tied to the seawall, not having the strength to fight the current.
I took a swig of the half empty bottle of Jack I’d found in the garage apartment and looked out over the water of the bay. The amber liquid burned my mouth and throat, bypassing my newly broken heart and igniting a fire in my stomach.
With each swig, I swore I could still taste Bear’s lips on the bottle.
It was late. The air was stagnant. The humidity so high that little drops of water beaded up on my arms and dripped into the creases of my elbows.
Everything happened so fast, yet it was like no time passed at all.
How was that even possible?
How long had I even known Bear before he decided to sacrifice himself for me?
Days? Weeks? Months?
Time blended together until it slowed to a stop and I watched in horror as Bear was dragged away.
It hurt that he didn’t tell me what his plan was although I understand why he didn’t tell me.
He knew there was no way in hell I would have let him do it. If I would have known, I would have driven to the sheriff’s station and beat him to the confession.
It’s not like I loved him from the moment I first laid eyes on him. No, I was a just a kid, but I was infatuated. Something inside me changed that day. It may not have been love, but more like an extension of myself walked through that door. From that day on, with Bear’s skull ring tucked under my shirt, it was like I could breathe.
Like I was complete.
I’d reached for Bear’s ring every time Erin Flemming bullied me in the fifth grade, and I drew strength from it on the day I’d finally had enough and socked her square in the stomach. I was sent home from school and didn’t even flinch when my mother grounded me for a month.
It had been totally worth it.
I’d rubbed it for good luck before my shooting matches. I still held the record for most blue-ribbons in three counties. And late at night, I laid in my little twin bed, and held it against my lips, wishing it could somehow make my parents stop fighting.
Even after I learned that the promise I’d been wearing around my neck for eight year’s was an empty one, I was no less elated when Bear had given it back to me.
I pulled the ring out of my shirt and looked down at the one eyed skull. The light of the moon reflected off the diamond, making it look as if it were winking up at me.
The longer Bear was in jail, the more likely it was that he was never coming back out, yet no one would tell me exactly what it was I was supposed to be waiting for.
My heart twisted and bile rose in my throat, the whiskey burned its way back up just as it had burned on the way down.
I couldn’t linger on that thought. I couldn’t let my mind go there.
But I couldn’t just wait either.
Promise me that no matter what, you won’t give up on me. Promise me, Ti.
Fuck waiting.
I launched the bottle into the air with a guttural roar. It spun around and around until landing in the bay with a splash, causing a ripple in the glass-like surface of the water. By the time the ripple reached the boat, I decided that although I trusted Bear, there was no way in hell I was just going to sit back and let his fate rest in the hands of others. I was going to do something at the very first opportunity.
I just had to figure out what exactly that something was.