It was the breath I let out that brought his attention back to my face and again his expression straddled somewhere between irate anger and fretting like none I’d ever seen from him before.
There was no sense in lying. Dempsey would believe me even if no one else would. No one who mattered to me anyway. “That Joe Andres was drunk and snuck up on me on the north side of your daddy’s sugarcane field.” He nodded once, and his jaw worked hard again so I hurried to keep him calm. “Likely he’s too drunk to know what he done…”
“What did he do?” The pressure of his fingers on my shoulder tightened.
“Nothing, Dempsey, he didn't get to do nothing.” When his expression didn’t change, I grabbed his hand, twisting my fingers with his and pulled them both from my shoulder. “He tried to grab me and got hold of my shirt but… I… well, I socked him good in the eye.”
Dempsey’s laugh came quick, like a streak of lightning that makes the darkest night light up. It was a nice sound, something I didn’t hear near enough for my liking. “You punched that fat jackass?”
“Dempsey Simoneaux!” He shrugged, ignoring how I fussed at him for the cursing. Couldn’t be helped. Dempsey had probably never used such crude words out loud before now.
“Well, I’m speaking the truth. I doubt the good Lord would mind so much me calling a spade a spade.”
The laugh that pulled from me felt nice, but not as much as how I lit up with things I didn’t know how to name when he pulled me close and let me rest my cheek against his chest.
I could have counted the seconds of my breath just then; I could have set them inside me like moments that would be precious if ever there came a time when the world had gone all black and dark and I needed something to remind me of the lightness I’d known. That moment, with Dempsey’s strong arms around me, would have been the brightest light in my memories. It would have split away the darkness and made me happy for the blindness it caused.
It wasn’t smart to hope for things that would never be. It wasn’t my life that was charmed. When you live here, when you are as I was, as all my people would ever be, hope was a funny thing, especially when there was trouble stirring around the edges of our days. Like the rim of the levee just before it breaks, worries were coming. I knew that because they always did and no amount of wishing me and Dempsey could disappear from the world right then would keep the waters from spilling over.
“Dempsey… what if he comes after me?” I spoke that low, against the fabric of his cotton shirt. It smelled fresh, like he’d pulled it right off the line.
“Don’t you worry over that, Sookie.” He pulled back, lifting my face with his knuckle. “You don’t ever have to worry about anyone hurting you, so long as I’m around.”
He was so sweet. Maybe a little stupid about how things worked, but Dempsey sure was a sweet boy. The frown came back on his face when I shook my head. “You can’t say that.”
“Can so.” I liked the way he tilted his head, how there were so many things he thought just then, each one showing themselves in the shift of his mouth; how it moved from frown to smile and back to something in between the two. He moved his hands around to touch my face, holding my head still like there was something he wanted to make sure I heard and knew to the marrow of my bones. I couldn’t breathe when he looked at me the way he did then, all serious and fierce. One look and he stole the air from my lungs.
“No matter where I am. No matter where I go, I won’t let anybody hurt you. Not ever.”
I wanted to believe him. There was a truth he spoke just then, something he uttered without a sound that lit up his eyes and made those high, sharp cheekbones look pink and bright. He had a nice face, good enough for the pictures, I’d wager. He was handsome and sweet, but not so smart about how our lives would always be.
“I wish I could believe that.” He went on holding my face and I stared at the shine in his eyes, how the dim light through the cracks and spaces between the walls around us shone bright in his gray eyes. “It would be nice, I think, to have someone always watching over me.”
“I mean it, Sook. With everything I am.” His touch got firmer when I shook my head again and Dempsey pulled me closer, my head resting on his chest. “As long as there is breath inside me, I’ll protect you.”
“I don’t need you protecting me.”
“Maybe not, but I need to do the protecting.”
He circled me in his arms, holding me to him, and I could feel his heart beating in his chest, strong and regular, safe.
“Why?”
It took him a long few seconds before he answered. Around us, the night went on as it always had, as it always would. The owls and crickets made on with their noisy business, as the wind swept cool relief through the leaves around us. I stopped worrying about Andres and whether he’d be coming after me. Just then, everything went away: my thoughts, my worry, even the breath in my lungs until I heard Dempsey’s answer.
“Because, sweet Sookie. I love you something fierce.” And right then, the world stopped spinning. The axis of life became uneven and slow as Dempsey Simoneaux, a boy who’d been my friend, bent close to me, breath hot and sweet against my face and kissed me so slow, so soft just enough that my body felt electrified. Just enough that I knew that at that moment, my world slowly began to unravel.
Seven
Nash
On any given Thursday night at four a.m., I relive the accident.
The skyline is different. The noises of sirens and the low howl of dogs, and animals skirting along the tree lines, they’re different too. There are no coyotes in Brooklyn and few moments that are quiet enough to hear the damn things if there were. But sometimes, on a Thursday morning at four, my body shakes me awake and there I am, twelve years old, holding my sister’s hand, listening from the hallway as the cops explain to the sitter about the accident.
“He was drunk. He’s been arrested. She didn’t make it.”
There wasn’t anything I remember more clearly from my childhood in Atlanta than those words.
It took a village, literally to keep me and Nat out of the system, even though the village was full of blood-sucking mercenaries. There were enough Aunts and Uncles, enough cousins, that took pity on us after our grandfather died four years later—or, to be honest, took more to wanting the government payouts supposing watching over us gave them—to let us stick together until we could get the hell out of Atlanta as soon as we finished high school. Most of the time I manage to keep all that past low down, hidden someplace where I keep all the things I don’t want to remember—like the memory of being fired for the first time, or the first girl who told me I wasn’t good enough for her. Those things got locked away with the memory of a parentless childhood. It stayed there and I never touched it. Until it comes on its own at four a.m. on any random Thursday.
“He was drunk.”
That bastard lived in the low down.
Four-fifteen and I watched from the roof deck of my building as two kids argued on the sidewalk outside of my building. A guy and girl, Latin from the look of them. The yelling sounded like Spanish anyway. I caught puta, understood what that meant, and shook my head when the guy started in with excuses his chica wasn’t feeling. The sky was dark, cloudy. Despite the noise and overhead fog, I could still catch a scent of rain peppering the air, kind of bitter, and it set something cold and weary in my bones. The yelling got louder, pulling my gaze away from the dotted cityscape and small stars lighting up the night. He was on his knees now, voice high and pathetic, reminding me why I didn’t mess around with anyone for too long. There was always drama. There was always stupidity that weighed you down and I’d never met anyone worth all that drama. This poor jackass was begging for her to stay, begging for the drama to slip around him like a noose.