CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Danny
“Nothing shows a man’s character more than what he laughs at.”
-Goethe
I can tell the question of what to do with the SBE brothers is weighing on Sam in a way it wasn’t before, but I’m not going to try to talk to her about it again.
No matter how much I love her or hate the men who hurt her, my opinion doesn’t matter. This is her war. She has to make the final call and give the marching orders. And if she says we walk away, I’ll walk away, no matter how much I want to punish those assholes or how much they deserve it.
If Sam doesn’t think she’ll be able to live with herself after, I will take her hand, get on the plane to Thailand, and do my best to forget about the men who stole a year of our lives together, forget that they are still out there, living a life without scars or consequences.
I’m a different person than I was a year ago.
I still want to do the right thing, but more importantly, I want to do the right thing for Sam. Nothing is more important than that. I let her down once by being too focused on an ideal instead of the woman I love. I won’t make the same mistake again.
Saturday morning, I ease out of bed quietly, figuring at least Sam should be able to sleep in after the late night. I dress quickly and tuck my toothbrush into my bag so I can go straight from the mess hall to the visitor center after breakfast.
On my way out, I pause at the door, looking back at the bed.
Sam is curled on her side with one arm tucked under her pillow, her lighter hair making the smattering of freckles on her nose stand out more than they did before. With the freckles and her face soft with sleep, she looks so much younger. She could be fourteen, thirteen, that same girl in the fluffy black dress and combat boots who cared enough about the new kid to step in and speak up when I was about to get my ass kicked.
She’s always been a good person. I’m not surprised that she’s reached a crossroads with her own conscience now that the time to act is so close. I just hope she understands that I meant what I said last night. I’m not going to judge her, either way. If she wants to walk, I’ll walk. And if she needs vengeance, I’ll help her take it. I would take it for her if she would let me, but she’s always been one to fight her own battles, even when she was a little girl standing up to bullies twice her size.
My heart turns over, my chest aching with love so fierce it feels like it might tear me apart.
I’m tempted to cross to the bed and kiss her awake, just to hear her say goodbye, but instead I shut the door and start toward the mess hall. She needs rest if she’s going to look all the hard questions in the face and find answers and I have to get food in my belly and my tired ass ready for work.
As I cross the hard-packed ground, the air around me is filling with the sounds of the compound coming to life. But gently, the people and animals and the sounds of both starting their days in harmony with each other. This is a special place, so unspoiled that I can’t help wishing Sam and I were here just to enjoy the peace.
This is a place where Nature rules and though she isn’t always kind, she at least gives you a fighting chance. Nature doesn’t believe in inequality. The weaker animals have superior numbers and adaptations to protect them, and the stronger animals have to fight to survive every bit as much as the creatures they prey upon. There’s harmony in that and in the way these people have carved out an existence from the jungle without disturbing the natural order.
It’s easy to find your center here, and by the time I’ve had coffee and eggs with rice, I’m looking forward to a day outside in the sun, enjoying the simple things.
But I should have known better than to drop my guard.
It’s a small world, especially this corner of it, and no red-blooded American frat boy can resist the call of an Extreme Zip Line. Still, when I jump out of Paola’s jeep at the visitor center to find the entire Sigma Beta Epsilon frat sprawled across the benches outside the office and spilling down the front steps, I can’t believe my shit luck.
But there they are—J.D., Jeremy, and Todd, who is already hitting on a pretty, way-too-young-for-him blond girl in a black tank top. He’s wearing a faded orange tee shirt and that smug look that makes me want to punch him in the mouth a few hundred times.
My gut screams for me to get out of here, but I can’t. If I play sick, Paola won’t be able to get anyone else here in time to help her lead the tour.
Besides, Todd has already spotted me.
As I climb the steps behind Paola to grab the manifest and make sure the waivers have all been signed, I can feel his eyes on me. There’s no question now. He recognizes me—either from the pool or the pictures on Sam’s phone. If it’s the first, I can play it off and say that I have friends at the resort who let me come use the pool on my days off.
But if it’s the second…
I force a smile for Paola as she makes a joke about the amount of testosterone on the tour today—aside from the girl Todd is flirting with, who’s here with her parents and younger brother, there are only two other women—but inside I’m making plans.
There are fifteen different zip lines and the platforms in the middle of the tour are over two hundred feet in the air. We’re strapped in at all times—either to a platform or the zip line—but if someone were to accidentally become detached, stumble, and take a fall off one of those bigger platforms, it would be deadly. It’s happened before at other zip lines. That’s why everyone on these tours is required to sign a waiver acknowledging that they won’t hold the company responsible if they’re seriously injured or even killed.
If Todd recognizes me as Sam’s boyfriend, it will no longer be a matter of what she wants. The decision will be out of her hands. I’ll have to take care of him today.
Todd is a monster, but he’s not an idiot. He’ll realize it’s no coincidence that the boyfriend of the woman he raped is in a tiny vacation town in Costa Rica the exact same week that he is. He’ll suspect something and he’s not the type to consider all the options before he acts. He’ll take steps to neutralize the threat to his safety and if I’m not careful, I could be the one taking a fall.
I’m going to have to keep a close eye on him, all while pretending to be fine and keeping a bunch of hungover frat boys from getting hurt in the process.
The thought obliterates the last of my Zen.
The beer fumes rising off the group are so potent I’m pretty sure it’s a violation of my sobriety to breathe the air around them for too long. It makes me feel sorry for the six people on the tour who weren’t up all night chugging beer.
As Paola and I gather the group of twenty-five together at the trailhead and she starts briefing them on the safety procedures, I notice the family of four and the two German women are careful to stay at the far edge of the press of stinking bodies. I’m disgusted on their behalf.
The privileged, American, twenty-something male is an embarrassment to our country. I exempt myself from the group by virtue of the fact that I’ve lived in Croatia since I was thirteen, and though my sister married into money she used to finish raising me, I started my life in the gutter. And the marks of the gutter never truly leave you.
A part of me is still that feral little shit who learned to scare the bullies away by hitting harder than any of the other runts. He will always be with me, like my damaged molars, a result of childhood tooth decay fucking up my adult teeth. Before Caitlin took over as my surrogate mother, worked her ass off to afford trips to the dentist, and forced my ungrateful ass to brush, no one cared if I went to bed dirty with teeth that hadn’t been cleaned in a week.
My inner hood rat is awake and watchful now. Even as I smile and introduce myself, seeming to scan the entire group in front of me, my focus is on Todd, waiting for him to confirm that he’s a threat. I remember the violent lessons of my early childhood well. Destroy or be destroyed, throw the first punch or wish you had when you end up in the hospital pissing blood because the guy who got the jump on you damaged your kidneys.
Those lessons had begun to fade from my conscious mind, but the past year has brought them all back to the surface, where they’re going to stay. I won’t make the mistake of believing in the end of hard times or happily ever after again.
No matter how much I wish the world were a safe place for good people, it isn’t.
It isn’t enough to do your best, love your fellow man, and try to do no harm. Sometimes you have to be ready to fight back, and fight dirty because the one thing you can be sure of is that the bad guys never play fair.
“Any questions?” Paola asks in her strange little accent that has half the frat boys smirking at each other beneath their ball caps.
Paola is petite, with long dark hair she wears pulled back in a ponytail, big brown eyes, and a perpetually friendly expression on her makeup-free face. She’s more cute than sexy, but I guess the accent is enough to get the SBE brothers going.
Great, another thing to add to my list: keep an eye on Paola.
She’s wiry and a lot tougher than she looks, but she shouldn’t have to defend herself from sexual harassment while she’s at work. If these booze-soaked losers step over the line, I’ll make sure they know to take a step back.
“All right, if there are no questions, then let’s get started! It’s going to be a beautiful day.” Paola grins and turns to lead the way up the trail to the first zip line platform.
I hang back, waiting for the rest of the tour to fall in behind her before I follow up from the rear. On his way by, Todd smiles and nods his head in my direction. “What’s up, man? You always let the lady do the talking?”
I grin and stretch lazily, forcing myself to act like I don’t want to smash his head against the nearest rock until it explodes. “She’s better at it than I am,” I drawl. “Especially this early in the morning. If I were on vacation, I’d still be asleep, dude.”
He laughs. “Yeah, I had to drag half these assholes out of bed this morning. Some people have to be forced into a good time.”
I tell myself he’s not talking about Sam and what he bullied the rest of his friends into doing to her. I tell myself I can’t lose control three fucking steps into the hike. I tell myself that if I break now I will have tipped my hand and Todd will have the advantage from here on out.
In the five seconds it takes to form my reply, I tell myself a lot of smart things, but it still takes all the self-control I possess to force another smile and say, “I hear ya. But it’s great out here. Your friends are going to have a blast.”
“No doubt, man,” he says, his eyes narrowing on my face for a second before he turns and starts up the trail.
I notice that he’s managed to fall in right behind the girl he was talking to when I drove up—the girl who is here with her family and probably no more than sixteen years old. I wonder if that was the reason for our conversation. Maybe he was just stalling to get closer to the girl.
Or maybe he intended every word to be a double-edged sword shoved straight into my gut.
I don’t know, but the brief interaction puts me even more on edge.