Bittersweet Chronicles: Pax (8 page)

“Holy hell.”

“So, the way I met her was because she was being hassled by one of the loan shark’s soldiers.”

“I hope you’ve been to the cops, son. This isn’t stuff to mess with.”

“Here’s the thing. Apparently, the dude has connections with the cops. We’re kind of thinking the cops might not be the best idea.”

“Pax—” he says with a tone of warning in his voice.

“But Vaughn and I have a plan. We just need a little help from you.”

He sighs, and even a few thousand miles away, I hear the exasperation.

“Pax, you can’t save everyone.”

“I know that, but it’s Vaughn’s cousin, and…” I hesitate, wondering how much of what I’m about to say is true and how much is more manipulation. To be honest, I don’t even know at this point. “She’s special, Dad. I mean, there’s something about her.”

“And the plan is?”

I take a deep breath. “You loan Vaughn and me the hundred and twenty grand, we pay off the loan shark, and then we’ll pay you back over the next five years.”

“Jesus, Pax.”

I know that, if I were Skyping with him right now instead of just calling, I’d see him running his hand through his mess of brown hair before rubbing the stubble on his jaw. I tend to frustrate him these days—I’ve become very familiar with the reactions.

“We’ll sign a loan agreement, interest, monthly payments—the whole deal.”

“Aw, son. I don’t think you realize what you’re doing here.”

“Dad. We do. You know Vaughn. He’s a standup guy. We’re both good for it, and we’ve already talked to the bastard who’s after Carly. He’ll back off if we just give him the money. That’s all he wants. He was only going to put her to work in his strip clubs to take her earnings. He wants money. He doesn’t care about anything else.” My lie is heavy in my gut, making me feel like the world’s worst son and a generally reprehensible person.

“Look,” he tells me with the ‘I’m about to lecture the bejeezus out of you’ tone in his voice. “I know that you realize a hundred and twenty K isn’t a big deal to me. But I want you to also realize that it’s a big deal to most people, and it’s an amount of money that needs to be respected, not treated like pocket change.”

I grit my teeth. “I know that. I do. It’s enough money to buy a house or several cars or feed a family of four for years. It’s also one thousand, eight hundred forty-one dollars and sixty-five cents a month at a rate of four percent for five years, which means nine hundred twenty dollars and eighty-two cents each for Vaughn and me.”

My dad huffs out a bitter laugh. “Where the hell are you going to get that much money every month? For that matter, where is Vaughn? His old man’s a good friend of mine. I know what he earns.”

I realize that, in the scramble to fix Carly’s life, I neglected to consider the details of how I was going to make the loan payments.
Genius.
I struggle to come up with an answer.

“I’m going to get a roommate. That should cover at least half of it. Then I’ll take on some more guitar lessons and maybe start commuting up to Birmingham to play some bigger venues there. Blake, who owns The Taphouse bar, has been trying to get me to do that for a while now. He’s worried I’ll get too comfortable here, where the market just isn’t big enough.”

“Glad to know you’re willing to take career advice from a two-bit bar owner,” my dad grits out unable to cover the bitter.

We’ve worked hard to maintain an uneasy peace over my refusal to let him help with my career. Hearing that I talk to other people about it never sits well with him. While this normally might be the point at which the tentative peace is disrupted, I bite my tongue to keep the focus on that money.

“So, what do you say? Can we borrow the money?”
      “You’re sure he doesn’t know who you are?” he asks, cutting to something that is always a concern for all of us for various reasons. “He gets a clue and this could turn on you in a second. I don’t care how great the girl is—I won’t lose you to a kidnapping for her sake.” His voice is hard, brooking no argument.

He never really got over what happened in that game arcade all those years ago. I know he works hard not to be too protective, but if he thinks Lyric or I might be at risk, there’s no reasoning with him.

“If the paparazzi haven’t figured out I’m here by now, this guy won’t. He’s a sleazeball in a tiny town who gets his highs off of exploiting women and trying to beat up teenage girls. He’s not smart enough to figure out who I am, Dad.” God, let’s hope I’m right about that.

“And what makes you think this guy will
lay
off if you
pay
him off?” Dad questions. “He’s a criminal, Pax. He belongs in jail, not waltzing around with a hundred twenty thousand of my hard-earned dollars.”

I tug on my hair and take a deep breath. I knew this was going to be hard, but I think I underestimated my dad’s parental tendencies.

“This is important to me,” I tell him. “I need to be able to help her. I don’t know how to explain why, but I can’t stand the idea of these guys after her, and I don’t want to just turn it over to the cops, especially if they might not be on the up-and-up. I want to be the one. I want her to know that a guy like me can make her problems go away.”

“Oh, kid,” he says, chuckling all of a sudden. It’s like I can feel the energy shift. I’ve broken through his rational ‘Dad’ barriers. I wish I knew how I’d done it. “You have it bad, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

He chuckles again. “Did I ever tell you about the time I jumped off a stage in the middle of a performance to punch a guy who was hassling your mom?”

I roll my eyes. “I don’t think so, no.”

“It was when I was living with Ronny and Leanne, working at the ranch in Texas…”

Thirty minutes, a secret vow not to tell my mother, and a couple of stories later, I have the money transferred right into my bank account, courtesy of Walsh Clark, the rock star.

**

The exchange with Lagazo is surprisingly civil. I hand him a cashier’s check and he hands me the loan papers Carly’s dad signed.

Yeah, there is actual paperwork.

Then his guy Nicky, who I’ve come to hate after our various tussles, gives me my first assignment. I need to go to an amusement park a few miles outside of town, collect an envelope from the accounting department, and then deliver it to Lagazo at one of his strip clubs. Sounds simple enough, and I have until the next night to do it.

When Vaughn and I get back to the condo, Carly is a wreck, pacing the floor of the living room like a caged cat.

“Oh my God,” she cries as we open the front door. “Are you okay?” She looks over both of us like she expects to see blood gushing or limbs missing.

I preen a bit, thinking that she might care if I got maimed.

“We’re fine,” Vaughn tells her indulgently. “We had money for the dude. He wasn’t going to complain about that.” He throws himself down on the sofa and rubs his hand over his face. “Beer me, will you, Carly?” he says, tossing a grin her way.

She rolls her eyes and heads to the fridge.

I sit down in the armchair across from Vaughn. “So, the first job sounds simple enough.”

Vaughn smiles at Carly as she hands him a bottle of beer.

She sits next to him then looks at me with worry. “What do you have to do?” she asks.

“Just pick up an envelope at Fields of Play Amusement Park then deliver it to Lagazo tomorrow night.”

“What’s in the envelope?” she asks, her eyes darting between Vaughn and me.

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” I answer, kicking my booted feet up on the coffee table. I made it in shop class in eighth grade, so I get to treat it however I want.

“What if it’s explosives…or drugs…or national security secrets for some foreign dictator?” she asks, her face covered in panic.

“It’s not,” Vaughn answers with some snark before I can respond. “I’m sure it’s cash he’s skimming from the amusement park or paperwork of some sort. He’s not involved in international espionage, Carls.”

Carly sticks her tongue out at him, and I relish the way her cute little nose crinkles up as she does it. I can also envision some better uses for her tongue, but I bite mine to keep from suggesting them.

“So listen,” Vaughn interrupts my very inappropriate thoughts. “When I checked in with work to have them reassign my clients, they said they want me to do some last-pass stuff. Clean up on things that have already been edited. There’s a sound studio in Birmingham that they’ve reserved for me tomorrow and a few other days this month.” He looks at me from under the blond bangs that hang down on his forehead. “This’ll be worth it. It’ll keep the money coming in so that, when the month is up, I won’t be strapped for cash.”

I nod, knowing he’s wondering how the hell we’re going to pay my old man back too.

“Well, if you can go back to work, then I can go back to school,” Carly announces.

Vaughn and I have a secret conversation with just our eyes. Finally, he gives me a slight nod and turns to Carly.

“I think it’s cool for you to go back to class, but you’re going to need to stay here with Pax and me,” he tells her.

She crosses her arms, hostility radiating from her eyes. “I’ve had about all the babysitting I can take, Vaughn. You guys have stomped all over this whole thing, risked your lives, and pretty much ignored anything I said or wanted. I can take care of myself. I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to walk.”

“Just because you’ve had to—and gotten lucky, I might add—doesn’t mean you should be
or
that you’re safe.”

“Lucky? Lucky?” she snarls.

Oh man. I can feel the explosion coming from across the room.

“You have no idea…”

And so it begins. I’ve had enough fights with my sister to know where this is headed. Anyone who thinks cousins aren’t a whole lot like siblings has never seen Vaughn and Carly in action. Not wanting to be in the middle, I get up and snag my guitar and case from the stand by the back door. Then I go out to the patio, listen to the rhythmic whooshing of the ocean, and start to strum.

It’s an hour later, after the shouting has subsided and Vaughn has slammed out of the house, that I hear the glass door behind me slide open.

“Hi,” Carly says, taking a seat on the porch swing next to me.

“Hi,” I smile as I continue to play one of Lush’s old songs,
Your Air
.

My dad says that no one knows who the song is about—Uncle Joss wrote it alone—but I’ve heard rumors that it’s actually about my mom. Some sort of weird stuff that went down between my parents and Uncle Joss back before I was born. I don’t believe it though. My mom’s only ever loved my dad, and Uncle Joss would never do that to Dad. They’re like brothers.

“Sorry.” She grimaces. “About the fighting. It’s nice of you to let us stay here. I guess repaying you by having a screaming match in your living room is pretty trashy.”

“Nah. It’s just family. Sometimes, families fight. I have a younger sister. I know how it is.”

She smiles and it’s like the blazing, bright light outside on the white sand beach just got a thousand times brighter. The warmth I feel when I’m near Carly is so much deeper and all encompassing than the heat that comes from the sun. I look at her and it suffuses me all the way to my bones, turning them liquid and achy. I want to touch her so much that I have trouble keeping my fingers on the guitar. But as a breeze gusts and her long hair whips around her face, I give in and reach out, tucking a silken strand behind her ear. She watches me with her big eyes, not moving a muscle.

I reluctantly pull my hand back. “He’s just worried about you,” I tell her.

“I know, but I’ve been on my own a long time. Even more, I had to take care of my dad too…” Her voice fades, and her eyes shine with moisture. “At least I tried to take care of him.”

I set the guitar down in the case on the concrete beneath us and put my hand on her wrist, rubbing little circles on her soft skin. “It’s not your fault, Carly. What happened to your dad isn’t your fault.”

She bites her bottom lip to contain her emotions. Then she looks into my eyes with anguish. “I was late that day. We had the one car, and I needed it to get to the job I had. After my shift ended, he called me wanting a ride. I was at the bookstore, and it was the first time I’d had enough money to buy a new book in months. I was so excited, and then there he was, telling me I had to leave right away to pick him up at some convenience store. I was pissed.” She shakes her head, her eyes sad. “I took my sweet time and I was twenty minutes late picking him up. When I got there, he was gone. He never answered his phone again, and the police found him three days later.”

I see a single tear roll down her cheek as she looks at her hands, which are folded in her lap. I reach over and put my arm around her, pulling her head onto my shoulder. She melts into me, and my heart flutters inside my chest.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper. “He lived a dangerous life, and his luck ran out. If it hadn’t been that day, it would have been the next. Or the week after that. It was bound to happen, Carly.”

She sniffs. “He was the unluckiest guy I’ve ever seen,” she laments. “Kind of ironic for someone who spent his whole life doing things that were all about luck.”

I look down at her and we’re both caught, locked in that moment and in each other’s eyes. I put a finger under her chin and tip her lips up to mine. “I want to make it better,” I whisper before I kiss her.

What starts out slow and sweet, like syrup pouring over a stack of pancakes, quickly turns hot and stinging. I nip at her full bottom lip and she moans, pressing her breasts against me. I can feel her hard nipples through our thin T-shirts, and my dick strains against my shorts.

“You’re so hot,” I gasp as I palm her breast over her shirt and then run my tongue along the edge of her ear.

“Touch me,” she breathes, and I swallow, trying to maintain control of myself. I move my hand down to the hem of her shirt, but before I lift it, I make a detour and press the heel of my hand against her core. I can feel the heat through her shorts and she rocks against me gently.

“Do you feel that,” I whisper into her mouth.