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During the year Sam and I spent apart, I almost picked up a bottle at least a dozen times.
On those long nights, when I lay in bed feeling so lonely and sad I wasn’t sure I wanted to be alive anymore, the oblivion I knew I’d find at the bottom of a fifth of Jack sounded pretty damned good.
But then I would think about that last night with Sam in New Zealand and all the cruel things I said to her after I drank those bottles of wine and I would go for a run or a swim, instead. And while I ran or pulled hard through the water I would think about luring Sam’s attackers into the middle of nowhere and torturing them to within an inch of their lives.
That is how I filled the hole inside of me and I will use that hatred now, to end Todd before he can hurt anyone else.
“Do you think so, Danny? That harnessed is the best way?”
I turn to see Paola, the trilingual Italian girl serving as my translator, looking up at me with an expectant expression. Knowing I’ve been caught zoning out, I grin and run a lazy hand through my hair.
“I’m sorry, P.” I play up the dumb surfer bit, wanting to make sure the other tour guides remember me as a laid back guy way too chill to have killed someone. “I was already halfway up the mountain in my mind and missed the question. What was it again?”
Paola repeats the question, we chat with the other guides for a few minutes about the importance of keeping all campers in their harnesses and secured to the rock face, even when it’s time to head into the tents for the night, and then we break for iced coffee and Galletas Maria cookies. I spend another thirty minutes hanging out, shooting the shit with the other guides, pretending to be psyched about our first training expedition tomorrow.
Only when most of the others have retreated to their cabins, do I grab extra cookies for Sam and head back across the compound.
The sun has set, but pale orange light still lingers in the air, illuminating the dust motes drifting by on the breeze, giving the three monkeys hanging out in the tree next to our cabin a glowing, fuzzy halo around their little heads. I pause to watch them, amazed all over again at how strange and exotic this part of the world feels to a person who has never spent time in this kind of tropical rain forest.
I’ve been all over Europe and spent every summer since I was a kid on Maui with Sam, but I’ve never been somewhere that feels so wild and primal. Costa Rica is beautiful, but it’s also a place where it’s easy to get in touch with fears and desires that have been lingering below the surface, ignored until they’re sweated out in the jungle heat.
It is the perfect place to commit a murder.
It’s also the perfect place to fall in love again.
I head up the stairs to the cabin, wondering if it’s possible for me and Sam to have one without the other, if we will be able to recapture what we’ve lost if we fail to finish what we’ve started.
“I brought cookies.” I swing through the front door, forcing an upbeat note into my voice, pretending I haven’t been dwelling on the best way to murder a man for the past hour and a half.
But my performance plays to an empty room.
Fear that Sam has changed her mind about being a team and left to do something crazy on her own makes my stomach clench, but then I see the note on the dining table.
I went down the river trail to that hot spring they were talking about. Come join me when you’re through. I have towels and bug lanterns.
Just bring yourself.
Swimsuit optional ;).
Aside from when we were kissing in the car earlier, my cock’s been fairly well-behaved the past few days. I know Sam’s not in a good place and as much as I want to be with her again, sex is pretty much the last thing on my mind. I’m more preoccupied with revenge and wondering what it’s going to feel like to become the latest Cooney to kill another human being.
Now, my body responds to those last two words and wink face like I just watched a twenty-minute strip show.
But even as my blood rushes and my mind fills with images of Sam naked in the water, her breasts bobbing close enough to the surface for me to see her nipples pulled tight, something cold snakes up my spine from the opposite direction, warning me not to get my hopes—or my cock—up. I don’t know how to be with her now.
