“What is all this?” I asked, staring down at the plate upon plate of sliced meats and cheese.
“Sandwich stuff.” King said, tossing me a roll.
“Yes, I can see that. But why are we making sandwiches on the dock?”
I wondered what his ulterior motive was. King didn’t seem like the type to picnic on the dock, no matter what the situation. Plus, in the entire time I’d been staying with King, he’d never once made a meal for me.
Or even eaten a meal with me.
“Because it’s a nice day to be outside, and because who the fuck doesn’t like sandwiches?” King sat on one of the plastic chairs surrounding wooden table that was screwed to the dock so it wouldn’t fly away during a storm. “And Preppy said…I don’t fucking know, just go with it.” King loaded his roll with salami and cheese and dug out a huge scoop of mayo from the jar with a spatula.
“That’s enough mayo to choke a horse,” I said, carefully selecting turkey and bacon for my own sandwich.
“Have you actually seen a horse choke from ingesting too much mayo?” he asked.
“I very well could have. I just don’t remember.” I grabbed a handful of Cheetos from the bag and smushed them into the top slice of bread with both hands. King pulled the other chair up along side his until the arms were touching and motioned for me to sit down.
And then OUR arms were touching.
“So what’s it like?” King asked, popping the top off a beer and handing it to me.
“What’s what like?” I asked, setting my paper plate in my lap.
“Not remembering anything. I keep thinking about what that would be like and I can’t imagine it.”
“It’s…” I searched my brain for the words but only one popped into my mind over and over, “…empty.”
“You’re a lot of things, pup, but empty isn’t one of them.” King tucked an unruly strand of hair behind my ear.
“Oh yeah? Then, you tell me what I am, because I can’t think of anything that doesn’t have to do with me losing my memory.” I took a bite of my lunch that was so big I could barely close my mouth around it.
King laughed. “Well, for starters…you’re kind of quirky.”
“Quirky?”
“Pup, did you or did you not just put Cheetos on your sandwich?”
“Duly noted. Okay, quirky. I can handle that. Keep going. What else do you think you know about me?”
“Well, you’re bold. Brave. I would even go as far as to say that you’re irritatingly feisty. You speak about three hours before you think. You ask way too many goddamn questions. You have this dimple on your left cheek that comes out when you’re smiling, but it also shows up, along with the one on the right cheek, when you’re pissed off.” Embarrassment burned my neck as if I was standing too close to a fire. “Your neck and your face get red when you’re embarrassed. It starts at your neck. Right here.” King lightly wrapped the palm of his hand around my throat. “Then, it jumps up to your cheeks.” He brushed his thumb over my cheekbone. “Then, it travels all the way up to these ears.”
He leaned in and sucked my earlobe into his mouth, trailing his tongue along the delicate flesh of my ears sending sparks of pleasure down my body. My nipples hardened and pressed up against my shirt.
King chuckled and pulled back. “So don’t say that you’re empty, pup, because you are anything but.” There was a mischievous glimmer in his eyes. Something I hadn’t seen before. “I think you are, by far, the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
“Thank you,” I said. “But stop trying to imagine what it would be like without your memory. You’re lucky you know who you are and where you belong.”
King pulled at the label on his beer and sighed. “Sometimes, I wish I didn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
“If I could chose to wake up tomorrow and not remember who I am, the shit I’ve done, the people I would be leaving behind, I would do it. I could just start over. Be someone else.”
“I don’t want you to be anyone else,” I blurted, interrupting his confession.
“You should hate me,” King said, taking my plate from my lap and setting it on the table. “If I were you, I would hate me.”
“I thought I did.”
“And now? What do you think of me now?” King asked, leaning in closer.
“I think you are the most stubborn, overbearing, anger inducing, obnoxious, complicated, and beautiful man that has ever lived.”
“I think you are beautiful, too,” King breathed. In one graceful movement, he had me out of my chair and onto his lap.
His hands had just slid into my hair when a loud crash sounded from the other side of the mangroves.
“Stay the fuck here,” King ordered. He stood and tossed me off his lap. I crouched behind the cement retaining wall that separated the dock from the yard. King leapt over it effortlessly and ran in the direction of the garage, toward where the sound had come from.
It seemed like I was there for hours, waiting for King to come back or for something to happen.
Nothing.
My stomach growled, and I was reminded that I had barely started my lunch. I scooted down to my ass and stretched out my leg in an effort to drag the chair that held my plate toward me. I hooked my foot around the leg of the chair and slowly pulled. It made a horrible scraping noise against the wood planks of the dock. I paused and waited.
Nothing.
So, I continued. Slowly, inch my inch, I dragged my lunch closer to me until my Cheetos smushed sandwich was within my reach. I pulled my plate off the seat and picked up my sandwich. I opened my mouth and was about to chomp down on victory when someone cleared their throat.
With my sandwich still in launch-into-my-mouth position, I looked up from behind the bread to see both King and Bear standing on the top of the seawall, peering down at me.
Bear looked just a good as he did the night I met him, but now, he looked even better. Because he was shirtless. His ab muscles glistened with sweat. I thought King had a lot of tattoos, but Bear didn’t have a single inch of available real estate left on his skin.
King spoke first. “Oh no, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. Just went to check out what that bomb like noise was, but you go ahead and finish your sandwich. We’ll wait.” He was smiling out of the corner of his mouth.
Bear crouched down. “Oh shit. Check you out. Didn’t think you’d still be alive.”
I put my plate down and stood up. “If you two are done mocking me, can one of you tell me what the fuck that noise was?”
“Oh shit. Sorry, that was all me. This girl came over, and she’s got this old Volkswagen Bug. One thing led to another…”
“I don’t want to know,” I interrupted.
Bear continued, “All I was going to say is that while her lips were wrapped around my cock, I vaguely remembered promising to fix her bug for her. What you heard was that very car backfiring. For what I’m thinking was the very last time, because it’s dead. Like super dead. Like there is no coming back from that dead. Which totally blows cause the girl could suck the—”
King held up a hand. “Okay, Bear, cut the bullshit, you can tell her what really happened.”
Bear nodded and his phone rang. He pulled it out of his back pocket and clicked a button on the screen. “Yeah.” He scratched his beard. “Fuck. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell him.” He clicked the phone again and put in back in his pocket.
“Isaac is on the move. Jimmy and BJ spotted him and his boys in Coral Pines this morning. Looks like they’ve got business there. BJ spoke to a guy in Isaac’s crew. They’ll be riding into our corner of the world in a week or so.”
“Shit,” King cursed.
“I told you to fucking get out of town, dude. You knew he was coming.”
“Yeah, and when you told me that, I didn’t care if he came right up to my front door, guns-a-fucking-blazing.”
“But now?” Bear asked.
King nodded to me.
“Ah. I see. What do you want to do, man? Your call. You know I’m behind you no matter what.” Bear lit a cigarette.
“I think we go on the offense,” King said.
“Wait, what does all this mean? Who is Isaac?”
King ignored me. “I’ll get her to Grace’s before then,” he told Bear.
“King, who the fuck is Isaac? Who the fuck is Grace?” I shouted, jumping up and down to make my presence in the conversation known.
“Pup, when Preppy took you out with him, did he tell you that when he and I started the granny operation, we cut out our main supplier?”
“Yeah. He did.”
“Well, Isaac, was that supplier.”
“Shit,” I said.
Bear took a long drag of his cigarette and blew out the smoke through his nose, looking very much like the bird recently tattooed on King’s hand. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
“What you heard was a warning,” King said.
“What kind of warning?” I asked.
Bear stubbed out his cigarette into the concrete of the retaining wall. “The kind that goes boom.”
“What was blown up?”
Preppy’s wail broke through the air like another explosion.
“WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY MOTHERFUCKING CAR?”
