the boat, leaning against a pole shaped like a T next to the motor so he could steer us with a lever sticking out from the top. “So, Sterling?” Finn asked, not letting go of his earlier question.
Finn was a complicated creature. Not all of his reactions were good and bad. He wasn’t that cut and dry. However, I was tempted to evade his question some more. A small part of me enjoyed the look of torment on his perfect face.
However, his scowl told me I’d better not push my luck. “He comes into the bar. He likes to talk a lot.”
“Some things never change,” he said flatly.
“He’s NICE,” I emphasized the word NICE.
“He’s not as nice as he seems,” Finn argued, pushing us off.
“Why do you say that?”
“Trust me,” he said. “Stay far away from him.”
“Trust you? How can I trust you if you won’t tell me anything?” I asked, throwing my hands up in the air. “And you don’t get to tell me what to do. No one does. Not anymore.”
“Have you really never been on a boat before?” Finn asked, changing the subject.
“Yes. I’ve never done a lot of things before,” I answered, looking around in complete and utter wonderment at the water surrounding us. “I’ve never lived on my own in a real house. I’ve never seen a movie in an actual movie theater. I’ve never made dinner for anyone besides my parents unless you count helping other women of the church make pies to sell at the farmers market. I’ve never been to a library and just sat down and read a book of my choice. No warnings or bans or approval needed. Maybe I’ll do it and sit there and read a seedy romance or…or Harry Potter! I’ve always wanted to read that one. Maybe I’ll even work at a library someday. That way I can read all day long.”
The trees surrounding us were growing thicker until we were under a canopy of foliage with just hints of the sun’s rays peeking through making every gap appear like a shining star. “Until I came here, I’d never even traveled outside of the state. There are so many other things I don’t really even know yet,” I admitted. “But I’m going to find out…and I’m going to do them all.”
“Is Critter’s your first job?” Finn asked.
“It is,” I answered cheerfully.
“Was I your first kiss?”
My heart had been pounding wildly, but when he asked that question it stilled completely. I pretended to be very interested in a pair of tall grey birds drying their wings on the shore while trying to remember how to breathe. “You were.”
I heard Finn make a noise that sounded like a hiss followed by a groan but I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face.
The birds from the shore took that moment to dive under the water and thankfully it was a sharp enough ice pick to create a hole in the tension that had formed between us.
Finn was quiet for a moment. “This conservative family of yours, it sounds more like a cult, keeping you sheltered from the modern world.”
“It was and it wasn’t,” I answered as a snake slithered in an S form in front of the boat. I watched it swim all the way to the other side of the waterway before disappearing into the reeds. “We didn’t live on a compound or anything. We actually lived in one of those cookie cutter developments where all the houses looked the same, but lots of different kinds of people lived there. Not just members of the church. However, women were rarely allowed out in public without a male family member to escort us. I was only allowed out alone for simple errands, like the grocery store or bank. We did have a television in the basement, but it only got a few channels. I would sneak down and watch reruns of a show called M.A.S.H. in the middle of the night on mute.”
“M.A.S.H.,” Finn said. “Good choice.”
I blushed.
“For the most part, growing up how I did, was very boring. But as I got older and my father… let’s just say I preferred the boring to the alternative,” I said, not wanting to dredge up a past that I wanted to keep buried deep in the swamp waters of my brain. “I’m here now,” I added. “That’s all that matters.”
“Yes, you are,” Finn said and I couldn’t tell if he meant it in a good way or a bad way.
I laughed nervously. “Do you want to hear the crazy part? I never even thought about leaving. I know that sounds stupid, but it was never an option. I couldn’t leave my mom and I knew she’d never leave my dad, so it didn’t occur to me that I should leave until after she died. After she’d suggested it to me in a letter.”
“Where is your dad now?”
I shook my head. A frog croaked loudly nearby. “I’m not entirely sure. The church travels during the summer. They do this big tent tour, traveling to spread the word to little towns all over the southeast. He was planning on going with them this time around as assistant reverend. He could be anywhere.”
Finn steered us between heavy brush so thick I thought we’d hit it for sure but we didn’t, skating right through with precision accuracy like he’d done it a million times before and knew the location of every stump and tree in the swamp.
“So, I took the camper and truck that my mom left for me,” I continued, “and set out to find a real life of my own. Where no one could tell me what I can do and who I should or shouldn’t be friends with.”
An eternity of silence stretched out between us.
BASIN CANAL was spray painted in block lettering on a sign on the shore with an arrow pointing the direction we were going.
I glanced back at Finn whose eyes were sparkling under the sunlight. He was looking at me but it was more. Like he was finally seeing me. All of me. “Have you found it yet?” he asked.
“Found what?”
“A real life of your own. What you came here to find.”
My erratic heart was all over the place. My hands started to sweat. “Too soon to tell,” I finally answered.
We slowly puttered and at one point I had to duck under a curtain of moss as we passed underneath. The other side of the curtain looked completely different. The waterway in the center was only wide enough for two boats to pass one another at the same time. Steam rose off the water creating a mist all around the boat.
It was beautiful.
“This isn’t anything like I thought a swamp would be. It smells like rain and…” I inhaled deeply. “Like…fresh cut grass.”
“That’s probably because every movie ever that takes place in a swamp is a horror movie,” Finn commented. Almost immediately he realized his error and continued without apologizing or making me feel small.
“Out here the water moves around a lot better than up by the house,” Finn explained. “Up there all the dead plant and animal matter sinks deep in the muck. That’s why you smell that sulpher rotten-egg smell. It’s usually worse after a rain storm, but it’s all a part of nature. A part of setting things to right and keeping everything moving.”
We passed under another curtain of moss. Finn sat down behind me, lowering the handle of the motor. He had to part his legs in order to fit his large frame on the bench, a knee on either side of me, his jean clad thighs brushed up against me with his movements.
“I love all the Spanish moss,” I said, looking around. There was barely a branch that wasn’t covered completely in it.
“It’s actually not moss. It’s not Spanish either.” Finn leaned forward so his chin was hovering above my shoulder. The base of my spine tingled with awareness. He pointed to a tree so covered in moss you couldn’t see a trace of the bark.
I swallowed hard. “It’s not?”
Finn leaned back and I exhaled. “It’s actually more related to a pineapple than moss.”
“Then why do they call it Spanish moss if it’s not Spanish and it’s not a moss?” I asked.
“Probably because southern logic is a little bit different than most,” he said, his eyes dipping to my thighs where my shorts had ridden up on my legs.
I turned back around so he wouldn’t see my heated cheeks. “I’m learning that.”
Finn turned the boat to the right to avoid a huge tree stump that looked like a knee sticking up from the middle of the waterway. “The moss reminded the French who came here a couple of hundred years back of the Spanish Conquistadors with their long beards, so they started calling it Spanish Beard, which somehow over time turned to Spanish Moss.”
“You know a lot about the swamp.”
“I should. I grew up here. Plus, history was the only class in high school that didn’t bore me to tears, so I picked up a thing or two.”
“I’m not a big fan of the past,” I commented. When I stole a glance back I noticed him staring blankly at the shore. “I know where I’ve been, enough to know I’m never going back there.”
When I turned back around, Finn’s eyes were again on me until something on the shore caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. “What’s that?” I asked, grateful for the distraction.
“It’s a gator slide,” Finn said. “During the hotter months, they’ll make these nest-mounds at the edge of the water to lay their eggs. You see those reeds up ahead? The green ones with the lily-pad looking thing at the end?”
“Uh huh,” I followed to where he was pointing off the front of the boat.
“There isn’t much that can crush those over just from wading through, so if you see any of those bent all in one direction it’s usually a good sign that you got gators nearby. There’s also one other telltale sign they’re close. The most important one to remember.”
“What?”
“It’s the fucking swamp,” Finn said. “Of course there are gators nearby.”
“So he does know how to joke,” I said sarcastically.
When we passed the back of a huge white house I screamed. “Stop!” I shouted and Finn slowed the boat down. “That’s it!” I exclaimed as we floated past it. “This is the house I first saw when I came into town. Isn’t it amazing? It’s like a much bigger version of the park model in the junkyard. Do you know who lives there?” I asked.
“Nobody worth mentioning,” Finn grumbled.
I ignored him. “It’s almost pretty in a really messed up way. Almost like she doesn’t know how beautiful she is,” I lamented, looking around in wonderment at my surroundings before turning back to Finn. The heat of his gaze firmly fixed on mine. I bit my lip and my heart began to race as his eyes trailed from my eyes to my neck down to my t-shirt and my nipples tingled when they raked over the front of my t-shirt.
“No, I don’t think she does,” Finn said. His lips turned upward into a smile that made my pelvis clench and my skin heat.
A shadow crossed over the boat and Finn’s half smile fell. His gaze shifted over my head. Finn slowed the boat to a crawl as we approached the abandoned water park.
“Wow,” I mouthed as we passed under three huge intertwining slides. “You really can get everywhere by water.”
Back on the land there were tall palm trees artfully arranged around empty pools. Crumbled landscape curbing surrounded downed palm fronds and weeds covered the ground beneath them covering at least a few feet of the trunks themselves. A few small pavilions and some downed lockers came into view. The sign was missing letters but I’m pretty sure S K SH C once read SNACK SHACK.
The place was the water park equivalent of a ghost town. Like when the wind whistled through the tunnel of the slide it was like I could almost hear the echoes of laughter from kids who never got the chance to slip down the twisting slides and the cries of the toddler who dropped their ice cream cone the second his mom handed it to him at the Snack Shack.
“It looks sad. Like it was meant to bring happiness and now it’s just a reminder of what it’s never going to be,” I thought out loud.
Finn remained quiet.
“So, I take it you don’t like Sterling?” I asked in an attempt to get him to use words again.
Finn’s expression remained unreadable. His lips in a straight line. His shoulders squared.
“I mean, was he a friend of yours? Like Miller and Josh were?”
“Fuck no,” he snapped.
My frustration was growing. I’d just shared so much with him and in the course of a few seconds he’d completely shut down on me. Which was why I asked a question I knew I shouldn’t have, and pushed a button I knew I shouldn’t have pushed. “Finn, why aren’t you friends with Josh and Miller anymore?”
“Drop it,” Finn grated through his teeth, speeding up the boat. The motor buzzed loudly, effectively ending any further conversation. When we got to Critter’s, Finn didn’t bother tying off the boat. He hoisted me up onto the shore.
“You told me to trust you, but I can’t trust you if you don’t tell me anything,” I said, trying one last time to get him to open up.
“So then don’t,” he growled; before he pushed off the dock, he added “I’ll leave the door unlocked.” He zipped back under a curtain of moss. The high-pitched zinging of the small engine was all that remained of Finn’s presence.
“Don’t,” I whispered, rubbing the skin on my arms up and down as if a sudden chill had blown through the thick humid air.
When my dad wasn’t drunk, he still wasn’t the happiest person in the world. Liquor for him was that added fuel to an already burning fire. It helped turn his irritation into full blown anger which then caused him to lash out. It was the reason why I’d come to see him as a monster instead of a father.
But with my father, it was like a predictable kind of insanity.
Finn’s anger, on the other hand, didn’t come with the courtesy of a warning in the form of a bottle. He didn’t need alcohol to help flip the switch on his demons. Even though I had a feeling it was Finn’s demons that were somehow flipping the switch on him.
Whatever he had gone through, he was STILL going through it and it was worse than I’d imagined.
I needed to keep my distance. To not allow myself to be fooled by his kiss or convinced that he was a good person to have in my life because I liked how it felt in his arms.
I knew better.
The only thing more dangerous than a predictable monster…
Was an unpredictable one.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Sawyer
“Where exactly are we going?” I asked Sterling who was leading me in the opposite direction of Josh’s apartment building. He grabbed something from a big black newer looking shiny truck parked on the side of the road and clicked the alarm button, making the headlights flash as the chirp indicated it was all locked up. “And if you have a truck then why are we walking?”
“I told you. I have a surprise for you,” Sterling said mysteriously.
“What is it?”
“You do know how surprises work don’t you?” he teased. “Hasn’t anyone surprised you before?”
“No,” I admitted. “Not very often.”
And not in any sort of good way.
“Well, I’m your first then. Just how I like it,” Sterling said suggestively, wagging his eyebrows at me. “Sorry. I was just teasing,” he reassured me when he noticed how uncomfortable his comment had made me.
I shifted my book from one arm to the other. Sterling quickly changed the subject and plucked the book from my hand. “What are you reading?” he asked, holding the book up so he could read the title in the moonlight. “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn? It’s not my favorite, but back in school, we had to read it almost every year for different lit classes. I must have read it a thousand times.” he handed it back to me. “You?”
“This will be my first.”
“So, what’s going on with you and Finn?” Sterling asked. “He seemed a little…protective of you at the junk yard.”
“He was my neighbor before the storm wrecked my camper. He’s the one who pulled me from it,” I explained.
He’s also had his tongue in my mouth and we’ve seen each other naked.
“Really? That’s…interesting,” Sterling said; he began to whistle when we approached the clearing where just beyond the trees my camper laid in a mangled mess and Finn’s house loomed at the edge of the swamp.
I stopped in my tracks. “Why are we here?”
Sterling winked. “You’ll see, come on. It’s part of the surprise.”
I didn’t move.
“Come on, I promise you’ll like it,” Sterling exclaimed,