Ben…
Stormy emerald eyes raged at me one last time.
Dark lashes lowered in a heavy blink.
A flash of black silk disappeared out a closing door.
Feeling began to return. Agonizing pain followed. Sweet scathing medicine burned down my throat.
My head blessedly spun again. The world tilted with it.
Round and round, the whirlpool sucked me back down into numb oblivion...
Off in the distance, an announcer blared. “...year’s tournament is none other than our very own Benjamin Bishop.”
A bizarre distorted Kiki stepped into my hazed line of sight. “What did you say to her?”
The broken record of events played again: voices muted yet echoed, images colored but faded.
The gut-wrenching emotions? Sliced deeper, became more painful with every uncontrollable rerun of what had gone down.
I stared over Fun-house Kiki’s shoulder—at the closed door. “It’s what I didn’t say. Or what I should’ve said.”
The door loomed closer as I pushed past Kiki.
Her superhero iron grip clamped onto my arm. “Where are you going?”
“After her.” My voice sounded tinny, otherworldly.
“No, you’re not. She wanted you to win for her, for the charity. You need to get up on stage and announce that. I’ll go.”
War raged within me as I stood there. I didn’t give a fuck about the event.
And it didn’t matter to me whether Shay had stolen the bracelet or not.
I knew that in my heart. She needed to know that too.
Emerald eyes raged.
Dark lashes lowered.
Black silk flashed.
The door closed.
Searing pain torched my heart, agonizing...devastating.
Too much. Overwhelming.
Medicine downed. Throat burned.
Blackness returned...
“Why so glum?” Whoosh asked, face strange and twisty. “You just won the tournament.”
“Yeah, but I lost the girl.” My otherworldly voice had weakened, had grown thready.
Emerald eyes glistened with tears.
Dark lashes lowered to mask her emotion.
Black silk flashed to hide a disappearing act.
The door slammed shut.
Consciousness returned in slow drips of awareness. The wrenching pain followed, merciless and absolute. But somehow the fucked-up dreamscape torture felt better than my empty reality. I deserved it. I’d sure as hell earned it.
And so, I drank. Down, down, down into oblivion...
A trippy-looking Trin stood in the hall, stared down at a pink sparkly phone.
“Is that Shay’s?”
Bulging eyes narrowed to slits. She clutched the phone to her chest. “Mine now.”
“Where is she?” I rasped, voice barely registering.
Trin shrugged with one shoulder. The action cartoonishly bounced her joint sky-high then snapped it back into the socket. “Gone.”
Emerald eyes filled with emotion.
Black silk caught in the door.
A slice of light glimmered from in between.
Loud coughing jarred me awake. I cleared my parched throat. My head throbbed. Which wake-up is this? The tenth? The hundredth?
But I didn’t want the drunken dreams to end. They’d begun to evolve. Like my subconscious had discovered the end of an unraveling thread and decided to pull on it.
I lifted my thousand-pound head, squinted at the bottle in my hand, and stared at the last inch of amber liquor. “Inch is for beer,” I groused. “I still got three-quarters left.” I tightened my hold on the neck of the bottle and began gulping.
A hard jerk yanked the bottle from my grip. Narrowed blue eyes glared at me from a pissed-off face. Kiki. The real one.
“Hey! I was drinking that.”
“Already drunk. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Hey, if it worked for my father.”
“It didn’t. He’s in prison.”
“Yeah, well, so is she.” News delivered courtesy of front-page headlines. I yanked the bottle back from her and took another healthy swallow. Then I laid my cheek on the cool cement and closed my eyes.
Seconds later, I heard Kiki from over in the kitchen. “Code red.”
Nails drummed on the counter in rhythmic clicks. “I dunno. Whatever color the highest level of alert is for your best friend hugging a bottle and kissing the floor.”
A loud gasp sounded, followed by a heavy sigh. “No. He is not pushing your baby out of his vagina.”
Keys clattered onto the marble. Her phone got tossed beside them. “Apparently, someone is. Any minute now. Out of her vagina. Ewww...now I just thought about Hannah’s vagina. Brain bleach! STAT!”
“I don’t have a vagina,” I grumbled.
“Suck it up and prove it, Bishop.” Something hard nailed my ribs.
“Ow. Did you just literally kick a man when he’s down?”
“Get up. You got five minutes.” Her voice trailed down the hall.
“To do what?” I pushed myself up off the floor, ignoring my throbbing head, the spinning world. “And where you going?”
“Grabbing Shay’s stuff.”
Tapping a hand down the wall with every step for balance, I followed her into my bedroom just in time to catch her shoulder one of Shay’s bags, then the other.
“What’re you gonna do with it?” I wanted to yank them away from her. Shay belonged here. So did her stuff.
“She asked me to give the duffel to Trin. She wants the backpack thrown into the trash. And then we’re heading to the hospital. The first Michaelson of the next generation is about to be born.”
My brain got stuck on the she asked part. “You talked to her,” I whispered. Then I blinked, shocked, trying to absorb that.
Kiki scrunched her nose and pushed a hand between us as she stepped back. “Keep your distance. You stink.” She strode into my closet, yanked a shirt off a hanger, then threw it at me. “Change into that.”
I attempted to catch it but missed. I left it on the floor and just stared at her.
Kiki folded her arms and stared back at me a beat, then she sighed heavily and walked out of the room. “She left me a note,” she called out from down the hall.
I did as she asked, scraped the sweaty shirt off my back, tossed it onto the bathroom floor, then scooped up the clean one and shrugged into it as I followed her down the hall.
“I didn’t get a note.”
Back in the kitchen, Kiki handed me a glass of water. “I know.”
I gulped down the entire glass as I glared at the Sunday newspaper on the counter between us. Then I clunked the glass down and pinched my eyes shut to block the headline above the fold: ROBIN HOOD TURNS HERSELF IN FOR HACKING SCHEME. She’d also confessed to a handful of other petty theft crimes, like Mr. Financial District and Miss Louis Vuitton. The spotlight piece covered where the stolen Robin Hood dollars had gone, the unsuspecting victims of financial crimes, and the growing plight of the city’s homeless.
No way you could’ve fed a reporter that info in a few hours Saturday night.
The paper had to have known for days.
Why the hell hadn’t she told me?
Why didn’t I see the signs?
But I had spotted them: her growing hesitance, the wistfulness. Only I’d brushed the symptoms off, believed we had time to fix it all. And her questions directed at me? Had been tests from her. That I’d failed, spectacularly. Fuck, I wish I could steal back time, our secret wish on the train.
I let out a heavy sigh and scrubbed a hand down my face.
“She won’t talk to me.” I’d tried. The prison had explicit instructions from Shay: Deny all contact from Benjamin Bishop.
“I know,” Kiki repeated. “She did it to save you. To try and save them all.”
My heart damn near exploded right there in my chest.
My superhero.
Right then and there, I vowed she wouldn’t be the only one. Her sacrifice wouldn’t go to waste.
“What day is it?”
“Tuesday.”
“Fuck me.” Three whole days wasted with me sunk at the bottom of bottles. I blinked out the window and stared at the setting sun.
I grabbed my phone and keys, but pocketed both. “Drop me off somewhere?”
She frowned. “You’re not coming to the hospital?”
“I will. Got an important errand to run first.”
To begin with, I gorged myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. Had to have been Saturday.
Then I walked down a lower-income residential street. Laundry still hung from clotheslines. The same chained dog barked. Beater cars along the curbs continued to rust.
The same young kid with blond hair and blue eyes popped out from the alley, hair shaggy and wild again, clothing back to threadbare jeans and a faded tee.
“No blue dress?” I teased.
Trin narrowed her eyes at me. “One-time thing. Party’s over.”
I held out the tray of Cokes, then gave a nod to the five Mickey D’s bags cradled in my arm.
She leaned in, reached out, and swiped one of each without getting too close, then stepped back a good ten feet, eyeing me warily.
“Not on your good side?” Not that I’d expected much. I got the drill. I remained a foreigner in their world. For now.
She slurped a couple of swallows of Coke through the straw as she watched me. Then she gave a headshake. “You dance cool, but you’re a grown-up. And my loyalty’s ta Shay.”
“Fair enough.”
We kept up the staring contest for another dozen seconds or so.
She remained motionless, unblinking, expression blanked.
One more thing. “You got Friday covered?”
I got her classic Duh! expression. “As promised ta Shay.”
Right. Obviously, Shay’d talked to Trin. And Kiki. I’d been the one kept in the dark.
None of that mattered. Shay had been brutally betrayed in her life. The people she’d trusted back then, the family that should’ve had her back, had let her down.
I never should have questioned her. I’d betrayed her. I’d let her down too.
Control. What she’d needed. So, she’d taken the uncertainty of us recovering from my fuck-up right out of the equation.
I tipped a nod at Trin, then headed toward the rest of my new weekly Tuesday stops.
“You’re wrong, Shay. We can recover. I won’t ever doubt you again.”
Still standing here. Not going anywhere.
My unspoken thought from Saturday night echoed in my mind.
And I planned to wait however long it took to prove my loyalty...and tell her in person.
After three more dinner deliveries, to Charlene, Lando, and Decker, I began to walk down the alley from that very first night. I shuffled my feet in a coded fast-fast-slow rhythm, exactly as Shay had instructed me on last Tuesday’s food run. The scuffing noise announced the approach of a friendly, she’d explained.
And as I neared the vicinity of the dumpster, a giant shadow appeared in the dim moonlight, right on cue. “Who you?” Bear growled.
“Ben. Shay’s friend. Yours too.”
I held up the last Coke in one hand, the last food bag in the other. When squared off with a grizzly, hand them your food.
To my relieved surprise, the dark giant waved me closer with a tilting sweep of his head, fuzzy dreadlocks swaying. “Come close, Ben.” The same slow and soft words vibrated out, the same hooded eyes stared me down, but thanks to last Tuesday’s feed-and-greet with Shay, I knew Bear tended to be more bark than bite—once he’d had the time to sniff someone like me out.
With eyes that darted beyond my shoulder often, he eventually reached for my offering of food and drink. “No Shay.” More a statement than a question.
“No.” Unfortunately for all of us. “Looks like you’re stuck with me awhile.”
“Shay can’t lose you like I lost...Shay can’t...she can’t...lose you...lose you...” Bear clutched his food bag while he stared vacantly over my shoulder, rocking his massive frame forward and backward. The repetitive speech was a thing for him. The rocking too. Shay had warned me to be patient, to listen. Because even though Bear had social issues, difficulty dealing with emotions, and a patent refusal to assimilate into society, he had a ferocious protective instinct and a genius-level IQ. Asperger’s syndrome.
I sighed, nodding. “I can’t lose Shay either.”
“Love hurts.” He put his Coke on the closed lid of the dumpster, then opened his food bag.
“Yeah, it does.”
“Love hurts.” He grabbed a fistful of fries, then shoved that giant paw in front of me, ends sticking through grimy fingers in every direction. “Blink hurts.”
Not wanting to offend the guy—the one Shay had instinctively run to, the guardian who’d looked after her as she’d grown up—I did my best to choose a fry that wasn’t touching his hand.
I twisted it around and popped the free-air end into my mouth.
“Love hurts,” he repeated.
Yeah, it does. Shay had explained to me that his riddled phrases and repetitions told a story.
“Blink hurts.” Bear rocked forward, then back again. “Love hurts...Blink hurts.”
Shay’s advice flowed into my head: There’s a story to everything from his mind. Be patient. Listen. You’ll puzzle it out.
“Love hurts.” He shoved half the burger into his mouth. Once he swallowed, he repeated once again. “Blink hurts.”
The sequence was important. He was trying to tell me something.
“Love hurts,” I repeated as the meaning dawned on me. “Blink hurts.” My drunken fog cleared enough for it to crystallize. “Shay’s hurting because of love. She...loves me.”
Bear gave a hard nod. “Love hurts.”