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Redix is practically fucking Angie on the dance floor. Everyone in the ballroom knows he has the moves to do it. Those blockbuster male stripper movies he made tortured me for five years. The billboards and ads with Redix’s shredded torso all oiled up? They stuck pins in my aching eyes.
“You’re a big boy.” Jameson rubs against me. “Control yourself, or I will.”
“We’re just dancing, Bryant.” Jameson smiles at my subtle rebuke. “Every man and a few women in the office want you, but we all know… you’re off limits.”
“Like your investigations?”
He chuckles, turning us more. Redix and Angie are right there. My heart tightens. My ankles wobble. The sight silences me, but I can’t look away. Redix is caressing Angie with his nose buried in her long brown hair, and it’s wrong. My body’s in Jameson’s arms, knowing where it truly belongs. It’s not right.
Redix and I belong together.
We always have.
All whip-smart comebacks leave me. Only the pain of missing him for so many years remains. It’s left me not knowing what love is anymore. I haven’t felt it since him. I can’t. Redix left and took my soul with him.
“It’s been a while, you know?” Jameson’s tone is grave. Oblivious to my pain, he’s talking shop instead. “It’s been six months since the last case. Another one’s coming along with the spring break tourists.”
That snaps me into focus; the job. The one I give everything to. The twists of bitter fate that find me here—I was called to do it. “I know.” The certainty unnerves me too.
The string of sexual assault victims who remember nothing about their attack has plagued this island and me for years. Someone’s targeting the tourists—a fact that the powers that be on this island move heaven and earth to hide.
“That’s why I sleep with my radio by my bed.”
“Yeah,”—Jameson’s shoulders tense under my touch—“me too.”
See, that’s why I like Jameson. He can whine all he wants; we’re a good team.
But the unsolved cases are piling up. Five last year. Two the year before. One the year before that. They’re escalating.
Jameson is chasing the forensic evidence or lack thereof. I focus on the human side—the survivors who remember nothing but going out, hitting a string of bars, and then waking up in a parking lot or on a park bench. It makes me clutch Jameson. I’m desperate. I need to stop the person targeting young women.
The young women who look like me when I was eighteen.
The song changes.
I need to check on Mama to make sure she’s not ready to leave. But the notes of the next tune drop along with my heart to the floor. My eyes flick up, catching Redix’s. They’re glued to mine while his hands hold another woman—no way the DJ randomly picked this song.
Redix did. He’s looking right at me.
No…
His look is plunging straight into my heart, plowing through every memory we made to this song, leaving behind broken pieces of me, the debris of my life.
A sob constricts my throat, burning like hot ash through what we shared to the intensity of these lyrics.
“Chasing Cars” by Snow Patrol.
Why is he killing me? Didn’t we suffer enough? Didn’t we share every first to this song, only to have it all stolen, leaving us smashed like shells on the beach? That beach? Where we were both left in pieces that no one can glue back together.
The lyrics sing across the dance floor, across a decade. There’s no space between the look in Redix’s eyes and my soul, knowing exactly what he’s thinking, despite who he’s touching. It doesn’t matter. I have his heart. And he has mine. It’s a curse killing us both.
So many secrets we created together to this song, sharing a depth of love we couldn’t explain. And I can’t explain now, why it’s wrecking me again.
“I gotta go.”
I pull away from Jameson. Away from any man who’s not Redix. Since I can’t have him, at least I’ll have this…
The tears that are coming, no matter how hard I fight them back. My steps take me fast, kissing Mama’s cheek goodbye. She whispers she’ll be fine. There’s a room full of her friends who’ll dote on her. And if anyone understands, it’s my mama, witnessing my pain and raising me to leave with my dignity.
