I was in bed with Doe. It was almost midnight, and I was already counting down the hours to noon. Noon was when I would see Max for the first time since I held her in my arms the night I let my mom burn in the fire.
Noon was also the last time I would ever see my girl.
Doe was going to become the person she was supposed to be, the person she was born as, Ramie Price. She probably wouldn’t bother glancing back at me in the rearview mirror after realizing the life of luxury she was heading back to. I was never good enough for her to begin with, and this was going to be both the most selfish and selfless thing I’d ever done when it came to her.
I was giving her back.
I was getting my daughter back.
I’d never been so miserable, and excited at the same time. A few months ago, I didn’t think that if I got Max back I would be doing it all alone. I thought at least I’d have Preppy. Then, I thought Doe would be in the picture.
Now, it was down to just me.
I lifted my leg over hers. I couldn’t get close enough. I’d convinced her to let go of the person she was to be with me, but unlike Preppy, her past life had risen from the grave and had been haunting me since I hit the search button.
I was tossing her back like a fish that wasn’t worth keeping.
But she WAS worth keeping.
She was worth fucking everything.
Everything I couldn’t give her.
There was no doubt in my mind if something like soulmates did exist that Doe was mine. The problem was that Ramie wasn’t. Ramie had a boyfriend. Ramie had money. Ramie had a future that didn’t include a felon with tattoos and a penchant for violence. Ramie wasn’t going to have to put herself in danger, risk getting shot, or ever have to worry that either one of us was going to get hurt or end up dead.
I wanted more for her. I wanted to break her heart and mine and get it over with so we could both heal.
Her with her family.
Me with mine.
I turned her onto her back and rolled on top of her. Spreading her legs, I lowered myself until I could taste her sweetness one last time. I slowly lapped at her folds as she woke with a moan on her tongue. Water welled up in my eyes. I’d licked her into her first orgasm by the time the first tear fell. I was glad her eyes were closed when I entered her and began thrusting fiercely into not just the greatest pussy I’ve ever had, and the greatest girl I’d ever known, but the greatest love I knew I’d ever have.
The only love.
If things were different, I’d put a ring on her finger. A baby in her belly. We’d have Max. We’d have Preppy. We’d be the family I always wanted but never knew could exist.
Because it didn’t exist.
Preppy was fucking dead, and my girl was about to return to the life of privilege she was born into.
I told her I loved her with each thrust of my hips. I told her I was sorry. I told her that I wanted her to stay forever. I told her I wished she would have my child. I told her everything with sex that I dared not speak out loud. I told her that if things were different that we would be together forever.
Forever.
I’d never spoken the word in my life, but looking down at Doe, still half-asleep as I brought her to the brink of another orgasm, I saw what forever would look like.
And it was fucking beautiful.
A wayward tear dripped from my chin. I reached out and caught it in the palm of my hand before it had a chance to wake Doe from the state of sleepy ecstasy she was currently in.
Before she could find out how I really felt.
Before she was gone.
Forever.
The next morning, for the first time in my life, I made love to a woman. I didn’t fuck. I didn’t have sex.
I kissed her the entire time. I held her as close as two people could be. I told her she was beautiful. That I loved everything about her.
I waited until she was in the throws of her orgasm to whisper, “I love you.” I don’t know if she heard me, but I was saying it more for me than for her.
I needed to say those words while I still had the chance.
I think a part of me loved Doe from the first moment my eyes landed on hers. Haunted, beautiful, scared. I wanted her, body and soul.
I would only have her for a few more hours, and I was going to spend every second of that time, inside my girl.
While she still was my girl.
* * *
Doe
Every time I woke during the night, King was touching me. It was like no matter how close we were, it wasn’t close enough.
I dreamt that he told me he loved me. Once before, after finishing my tattoo, he’d told me to shut up and let me love you. But what I heard in my dream was the real deal.
There was something wrong. I felt it in my bones. I’d asked him what was bothering him, but he brushed me off and just kept making love to me.
For hours.
Maybe, he was lost in thoughts of Preppy, and just needed me to be there for him.
So, I was.
Out time together that morning was so unlike anything I’d experienced with him before.
I told him over again that I was okay after Isaac forced himself on me. It was a moment in life, a horrible one. But I know I’d be okay. As long as I had King, I would be okay.
It would all be okay.
I was helplessly, passionately, in love with the complicated man who touched me like I was a thin square of glass, and he was afraid I was going to shatter.
He whispered to me how gorgeous I was as he dragged his cock against my clit. He pulled out of me and rubbed against my sensitive bundle of nerves when he thrust back in.
I was alive with sensation, and full of questions.
He whispered how much he loved being inside me. How much he wished he wasn’t so much of an asshole. How I deserved the world. How he wasn’t good enough for me.
And then it hit me like a fucking freight train with no brakes, and my heart seized inside my chest.
King was saying goodbye.
* * *
The sun was already high in the sky by the time I woke up and got dressed. At any second, I expected King to burst through the door and tell me he wanted me gone. It was a horrible thing to be waiting for. I was going to pack, but there was nothing there that was truly ever mine.
I threw on some clothes and headed outside to find King. Rather than waiting around with my neck stretched out on the block, I went in search of the executioner. I found him outside, rocking in the swing I’d recently convinced him was the only thing missing from the porch.
“What’s going on?” I asked him. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.” He buried his face in his hands.
“Everything, baby. Everything is wrong,” King said, looking up over the porch railing.
I walked over to him and he ran his hands up and down my arms. I sat on his lap and draped my arms around his neck. He burrowed his nose into my chest.
“Tell me. Please,” I begged. “I can help.”
“You can’t. Nobody can.”
“You’re scaring me. You need to tell me what’s wrong.”
“My fucking heart is broken,” he said, raising his raspy voice.
“Why? Who broke it?” I asked.
“You did,” he said, looking up at me with tears in his eyes.
I was taken aback. What did I do to break it? Did I even have that kind of power over him?
The sound of an approaching car turned both of our heads to the driveway. A black town car with dark tinted windows pulled up in front of the house.
“Will you remember something for me?” King asked, snapping my head back around from the car to him.
“Anything,” I answered. And it was true. I would do anything for him.
“Remember that I love you,” he whispered.
He had said it. I didn’t just imagine it.
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked, finding it odd that King wasn’t even acknowledging the approaching vehicle.
I wanted him to love me, especially because I’d known I’d been in love with him for so long, but the way he said it, and what had transpired that morning told me there was a lot more to what was going on.
“Tell me what the fuck is going on!” I leapt from his lap.
“Baby,” he said, reaching for me.
“No! Don’t baby me! Tell me what the fuck is going on!”
King finally looked toward the town car. The driver got out and walked around, opening the door of the back seat.
A boy a little older than me, with dark blonde curls stepped out of the back seat. He wore black Chucks, grey shorts, and a red batman t-shirt. It wasn’t until he looked up at me when I recognized him. Or at least, his eyes.
Chestnut brown.
The eyes from my dream.
I was stunned into silence, frozen on the porch as the boy approached.
“Ray? Ray is that really you?” he asked, looking right at me.
I looked up at King whose expression had completely changed from troubled and weary to angry and vengeful. He was staring daggers at the boy. His jaw tensed so hard I swear I could hear his teeth grinding.
“Who is Ray?” I asked King.
“Don’t fucking do this,” Bear snapped from the doorway.
“Go the fuck back inside,” King barked.
“Fine. It’s your fucking life. Fuck it up more than it already is. Preppy would’ve kicked your fucking ass for this. I’m going to visit my sister. I can’t stick around and witness this shit.” Bear stepped out onto the porch and pecked me on the cheek. “Love you, pretty girl,” he said before disappearing around the side of the house. A moment later, his bike whizzed by, kicking up dust in its wake.
“You,” King finally answered. “You are Ramie Price.”
“Ray, don’t you remember me?” the boy asked. “I’m Tanner. Don’t you know who I am?”
I turned to King. “What is this? Who is he? Why is he here?”
“He’s your…boyfriend.” He forced the words off his tongue like they were stabbing him in his mouth.
“My what?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “You knew he was coming?” Then, it hit me, and I sucked in a strangled breath. “You knew who I was?”
King didn’t say anything, but most importantly, he didn’t deny it.
“How long have you known?” I whispered.
King looked down at his shoes.
“How long have you fucking known?” I shouted.
“Since the very beginning,” he admitted. “Since before I came for you again after you escaped.”
“Escaped?” Tanner asked, reminding me of his presence.
“The entire time?” I asked, feeling as if he just stabbed me in my chest. “You knew who I was this entire fucking time?”
“What the fuck do you want me to say? I’m a shit person, and I do shitty things. You knew that. I fucking told you that, but you went and fell for me anyway.” He ran his hand over his head in frustration. “Well, it’s over now. Welcome to your new life. Or I should say your old life,” King spat.
He lowered his eyes. “You deserve better than all this shit anyway.” He waved his hand toward the house. “You deserve better than me. You’ve got a family. Go be with them, and forget I exist.”
His eyes darted down to Tanner who stood in the front yard with confusion marring his face. He glanced back and forth between me and King.
“What’s going—” Tanner started to ask.
“Shut the fuck up,” King snapped, effectively silencing the boy.
“That is NOT your decision to make,” I told him. “You don’t get to say where I go or who I go with.”
“Actually, it is,” King argued.
“What the fuck does that mean? What the fuck did you do?”
“Ray!” the boy shouted over our argument.
King looked down at him as if he were going to leap down the steps and crush his skull with his hands.
“Come down here,” Tanner said in a gentle voice. “Just for a second. I just want to see you. Talk to you.”
I looked back at King, and it dawned on me. It wasn’t my decision to make because he was giving me away.
That’s what last night and this morning were all about. He was saying his goodbyes.
King nodded to me as if to say I had his approval to go talk to Tanner. I rolled my eyes at him. I didn’t need his fucking approval.
I tentatively descended the stairs one at a time. When I got to the bottom, I sat on the bottom step. “Do you know who I am?” Tanner asked, crouching down and resting his hands on his knees.
I shook my head. “I recognize your eyes, but nothing else,” I admitted.
“As I said, my name is Tanner. We’ve known each other our entire lives. We were homecoming king and queen all four years of high school,” he said with a chuckle. Then his face grew serious. “I love you. You love me. Always have.” Tanner blushed and rocked back on his heels. “It feels weird to introduce myself to you when we’ve known each other since we were in diapers.”
“Who am I?” I asked hesitantly.
Tanner took a seat on the step next to me, careful to keep some distance between us. I didn’t need to look back at King to know he was watching Tanner’s every move. I felt his gaze on my back as if they were rays of the sun singing my skin. Tanner smelled like the beach. His unruly hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it out of the way as he spoke. A huge smile spread across his face, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.
“You are the lovely Ramie Elizabeth Price. Daughter of Dr. Margot Price and Senator Bigelow Price. You live in East Palm Cove, about an hour from here. You were enrolled in art school, and you were supposed to start in the fall. You and I were going to backpack around Europe for the summer first, but then you disappeared.”
I had a name.
Ramie. Ramie. Ramie.
“Ramie,” I whispered, testing the name out on my tongue.
Still nothing.
“I went to the police. They said no one was looking for me. No missing persons report. Why didn’t you look for me if I was missing?” I asked.
Tanner shook his head. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but you had this friend, and she was going through some bad stuff. She got in trouble a lot. You left a note, said you were running away. They didn’t look for you because they didn’t think you wanted to be found. You had just turned eighteen. You were an adult. There was no missing persons report because you weren’t missing. You were just gone.”
“I left?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I left you?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “You left me. And your mom. And your dad. Everyone.”
I had a mom.
“Why isn’t my mom here?” I asked.
“We didn’t want to overwhelm you. Your mom is at home, waiting for you to arrive, but your dad is in the car.” Tanner said, pointing to the town car with the blacked out windows, still running on the driveway.
“I still don’t remember. I thought I would remember if I saw someone from my past, if they told me who I was, but I don’t.” My head spun. If I didn’t remember him face to face, would I ever remember him?
Would I ever remember anyone?
“You will, but it will take time. You just need to get back into the groove of things for a while. Your normal routine. It will come back to you. We won’t rush it. Your mom’s got the best doctors already on call. Specialists. You’ll be back to your old self in no time,” he said, nudging my shoulder.
King had already told them everything. At least enough for my mom to already have doctors at the ready.
The girl who I’d given up on might be back after all.
The back door of the car opened again, and out stepped a tall man in a sharp black suit and a solid red tie.
“Who is that?” I asked Tanner.
“Your dad,” he told me. “The senator.”
“Ramie,” the man said. “Your mother is worried sick. Let’s go. Get in the car,” he said sternly, buttoning the bottom button of his suit jacket.
It was ninety degrees outside, and there wasn’t one drop of sweat on his forehead. No redness on his cheeks. It’s like he was too important to be affected by the heat.
From above me, King leaned forward over the railing. With the light of the sun directly overhead, his massive frame cast a shadow onto the ground.
He really did look like a King. A force to be reckoned with. Zeus, on his perch above the world.
The senator stepped out of King’s shadow as if he were too good to be standing in it. This irked me.
He wasn’t better than King.
No one was.
King was a bad guy, but he was my bad guy. He was more than that. He was my world. My heart. These people may have known who I was before, but I knew who I was now, and the two versions of me were going to have to figure out how to merge before I uprooted what I had with King in search of something unknown.
“Senator,” King acknowledged the man.
“Mr. King,” the senator greeted, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.
“Where’s Max?” King asked, bitterly.
“Soon, she’ll be here soon. There is another car on its way here with her in it.”
“Trade means trade.” King said. “She isn’t going anywhere until Max gets here.”
Then, it hit me. King had said I didn’t have a choice, and now, I knew why.
If I stayed, King wouldn’t get his daughter back. The trade he mentioned was me for Max.
“There she is now,” the senator said as another town car pulled up into the driveway. King bounded down the steps jumping over me as he made his way over to the car. The second it stopped, King opened the back door.
“Max?” he shouted into the car.
The driver rounded the vehicle and produced something from his jacket pocket. He slapped a metal cuff around King’s wrist.
“She’s not in there,” King shouted, pulling at the cuff. “What the fuck is this? Where is she?”
The man I thought was the driver twisted King’s other arm forward and secured the cuffs in front of him.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, running up to King. “Let him go!” A pair of strong arms grabbed me from behind and stopped me from getting any closer. “What the fuck is going on? I need to go to him!”
I kicked my feet in the air as the man I was told was my father lifted me up off the ground. King’s nostrils flared as the man who’d just put King in cuffs, wrestled him into the back seat of the car.
“Mr. King, this is Detective Lyons. You’re being arrested for the abduction of my daughter,” the senator said, all the while maintaining his hold on me.
“But he didn’t kidnap me! He didn’t do anything. He saved me. He SAVED me!” I shouted, biting at his arm as I tried to break free of his grip.
And I meant it. King had saved me. In every way. He’d saved me from myself, from a life of standing still. Because of him, I was moving forward.
I wanted to move forward with him.
“You motherfucker!” King shouted. Detective Lyons closed the car door, and I lost sight of King behind the heavy tint of the windows.
“No!” I called out. The car took off and disappeared under the trees. “Let me fucking go!”
The senator turned me around to face him and grabbed me roughly by the shoulders. “Calm down, Ramie, or you’re going to scare him,” he warned.
“Who? What the fuck are you talking about?”
Tanner walked over to the car and opened the door. A little boy with curls like Tanner’s and hair as white as mine tumbled out of the back seat.
The little boy saw me and opened his arms. He came bounding up to me and crashed into my thigh.
The senator released his hold on me. The little boy nuzzled his face into my leg.
I looked down at him, puzzled.
Because it wasn’t the way his eyes were as icy-blue as mine, or how the dimple on his chin matched mine that alarmed me the most.
It was what he shouted that made my heart stop.
“Mommy!”
