“What, love? What are we?”
“I can’t say it. I sound so pathetic,” I whispered, almost ashamed of how my brain worked.
“Nothing you could do or say is pathetic,” Saint murmured huskily, and he was there again, but this time at my back where he’d been at my front before. “Tell us.”
“If I had to wake up to a world without you three? I couldn’t do it. I’d rather die.”
The stunned silence that came from my revelation had me burning up from mortification.
Then, Saint ground out, “You know what I hate?”
“W-What?” I inquired, startled, because I hadn’t expected him to say that.
“I hate the fact that I know you’re speaking the complete and utter truth. I hate the fact that you mean every word you said, and it terrifies me because this ain’t a fairy tale, baby girl. This is life. And our life? It’s mean and nasty, and you could lose us to a prison cell or you could lose us to a bullet wound. I don’t want to think of you hurting yourself because we’re—”
“Wait a minute. These kinds of thoughts don’t come out of nowhere,” Keys interrupted, and he cupped the back of my neck and forced me to stare up at him. “Tell me, Ama, fucking tell me you’ve never tried nothing like this before,” he pleaded, and in his eyes, there was a kind of terror I’d never come across before.
A terror that was for me.
Not for himself.
For me.
Seeing that, knowing he truly worried for me, gave me the courage I needed to be truthful, vulnerable.
I licked my lips. “Some nights, I feel like I’m going crazy. I-I feel like if I see him again… I want to rip out my eyes.” My mouth wobbled. “I looked. Ink told me to look away, and I did, but I opened my eyes. Just a second too soon. I saw him. His head all blown out, his eyes vacant and dead. I saw his crotch, saw the piss ballooning on his trousers.
“Mostly, I remember how much it stank and how I hurt. He never gave me water, never fed me. I-I had to pee myself, and he kept my eyes covered all the time unless he ripped off the blindfold to hurl nasty things at me. But even though I remember all that, when I dream of him, he looks like he did dead. He comes to me every night. Every night,” I cried. “I get no peace, no rest. He’s there. Always. Every time I close my eyes.”
Keys pressed his forehead to mine. “If I could take that from you, I would.”
“You do,” I breathed. “I always know the next morning, when I find you, you’re there and you’ll keep me safe. Not just me, but my sanity. You’ll tease me and poke fun at my hair if I have bedhead. You make me feel real, Keys.” I reached up and cupped his face. “Nothing makes sense without you. Any of you.
“When I was sixteen, I almost did something stupid. I admit it. I was going to… I just needed a break. Just needed to sleep without him being there. I almost did something that particular night, but I couldn’t. The next day, you and Saint began teaching me how to shoot a gun.”
He stiffened. “I remember that. You looked like you’d been crying.”
“Fuck, I remember too,” Saint rasped. “Jesus, Ama. Jesus.”
I shuddered. “It was bad. I had so much going on at school, so many things to do, and even drawing wasn’t helping. I mean, you haven’t even seen what I draw when I’m in my room, alone. It’s messed up, I’m messed up. I know that, but you make me normal, and I love what I am around you.”
“We love who you are around us too,” Keys murmurs softly, pressing a gentle kiss to my lips. “We love you even if you are fucked up.”
A soft giggle escaped me. “I’m allowed to say that. Not you.”
He winked at me and pressed another kiss to the corner of my mouth. “Perks of being a… what? Am I your boyfriend now?” He mocked, “Girlfriend, it’s your solemn duty to tell me when you want to rip your eyes out because those bombshells are too beautiful to destroy.”
I sucked down a breath as I stared up at him, loving him for doing what he always did—making me feel like Amaryllis. Not the victim, not a woman who couldn’t get over something bad that had happened to her.
To him, I was Ama.
To Saint and Ink, I was too.
That was why I was addicted to them. Why they were my drug and poison of choice. I’d kill for them, die for them, but more importantly, I’d live for them, and that was the greatest gift I had to give them.
And they didn’t even know it.
19
Keys
This woman had the power to decimate me.
And she didn’t even fucking know it.
I swear, she could look into my eyes, and I’d see those gorgeous gray crystals staring back at me, but I saw the terror burrowed within. I saw the past and the present uneasily coalescing.
The torment in her eyes could tear me apart, but only Ama had the power to build me back together again.
I shuddered as I pressed my forehead to hers. “Do you know how much I need you? How badly I need you to be okay?”
She licked her lips. “I think I do. It’s why I never do anything. I know you l-love me.”
“No stuttering required,” I told her on a sigh. “I do. I love you, Ama. I have since I was a kid and didn’t really know what love was. Well, aside from the way my dad used to look at my mom.” I swallowed thickly. “I’d go insane if anything… if you did anything, Ama.”
She scowled. “I’m not going to. I was in a different place back then, but that’s in the past. Not my present. And even if you don’t want to be with me in that way, I’m not going to do anything either. I-I’m stronger now. I can do things, but you have to be a part of my life. Even if it’s only texting me a few days a week…”
I reached up and pressed a finger to her lips. “Shut up.”
“Charmer.”
“None of that crap,” I grumbled, ignoring her. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere. If you haven’t realized that by now, then there’s no hope for you. I would have gone to Rhode Island for you, baby girl.”
Her eyes widened. “You would have?”
I nodded, but then I pulled back and looked around the tattoo parlor. “But I get the feeling this is where you intended on being all along, am I right?”
She hitched a shoulder, nibbling at her lip until she muttered, “I knew if I had that validation, if the acceptance came through, that my dads would let me. They’d feel bad about what happened and would want me here rather than me having to fight for it.”
“Manipulative little mare,” I grumbled, but my lips twitched.
“I had to,” she defended. “You know what they’re like. They’d say it was too dangerous for me to be here otherwise. At least this way, they think they’ve done something proactive and it gets me where I want to be.”
“That tattoo, babe, it was phenomenal.”
She beamed at me. “You really think so?”
“I fucking know so.” Nervously, I asked, “Would you do one for me? My ma?”
Her lips parted. “Seriously? You’d want me to?”