“That’s normal,” he continued. “It’s true what they say, you know. That you can’t go home. You’re not the same person you were when you lived here, Ava. It’s normal to be underwhelmed with what you left behind.”
Red misted her vision. Before she could catch herself, remind herself that she was a soon-to-be grad student and not a biker chick anymore, she said, “That’s the dumbest phrase in the English language. ‘You can’t go home.’ ”
Ronnie said. “Um, what it means–”
“I know what it means!” she snapped. “It means every educated person it supposed to put their hands on a Pat Conroy novel and sob about how awful their childhood was and how much their parents warped them, and how far beyond that they’ve grown. Right?” She turned blazing eyes to him. She might have snarled. “Well I am not warped, Ronnie. I’m not basking inPrince of Tideshometown shame right now. You got that?”
His brows were fused to his hairline, his eyes horrified saucers. “I – I got it.” In the moon and the lamplight, he waxed pale, each line at the corners of his mouth a harsh cut against his white skin.
“Oh,” Ava said. She put her hand to her mouth and turned away from him, facing the garden and its dancing apple branches. “I shouldn’t have – . God, I’m sorry.” She faced him again, vision swimming as the tears came. “Ronnie, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.”
He pushed a hand through his hair and regained some of his composure. “I think you did, actually. That’s all you’ve done since we got here.”
“No, I–”
“You don’t want me here.” He flashed her a grim, tight smile. “Do you?”
She swallowed hard. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to. It’s how you’re acting that counts.”
Ava bit down hard on her lower lip, watching the twisted limbs of the apple trees sway in the breeze. Yes, she was acting that way, but not because she wanted to. She couldn’t seem to grab hold of the turbulent emotions boiling inside her, and she didn’t trust herself to explain it with any amount of elegance. She couldn’t tell Ronnie about Mercy, not when the whole world wanted to pretend nothing had ever happened between them. She couldn’t express one fraction of the pain it had caused to feel his touch again and then walk away.
But she couldn’t be kind, either.
Is this what it felt like, that contamination her grandmother had always warned her about? “When you lie down with dogs, you get fleas,” Grammie Lowe had said once before. Maybe the club had poisoned her against regular, normal, decent people. Her fleas were cruel, secretive, and unforgiving.
She turned, not sure what she’d say to Ronnie, only that it would be idiotic…
And saw someone bolting toward them, a ghostly white figure flailing against the darkness, a banner of shimmering pale hair trailing over slender shoulders. It was a woman in a denim miniskirt and knee-high boots running toward them, her strides uneven, lurching, panicked. Her bright orange tank top was like a warning flag in the shadows.
“What the hell?” Ronnie asked as the woman rushed closer.
Ava stepped into the pool of light afforded by the security lamppost. “Hey,” she called. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”
The woman emitted a high, thin scream and stumbled against Ava, catching at her shoulders with shaking hands. Ava staggered and then grabbed hold of the woman’s arms.
“Andre!” she gasped. Tears tracked down her face, her mascara in black rivulets down her cheeks. “Oh God, Andre!”
“What about him?” Ava felt her pulse kick up a notch but kept her voice even, trying to hold the woman back and keep her from collapsing completely.
“He – he – he–” A sob contorted her face, bent her almost in half. “I think he’s dead!”
“Dead? He overdosed?”
“He got stabbed!” Then she sank to her knees and dissolved into ugly tears, hiccupping and snuffling.
“Hey, wait.” Ava tugged at her arms. “Where is he? Hey, listen a sec. Where’s Andre?”
She mumbled something through the sobbing.
“Shit,” Ronnie said. “What kind of party is this?”
“It has nothing to do with the party,” Ava said. She gave the woman another shake. “Where’s Andre now?”
“D-d-down by the water.”
There were two kinds of suspicion: the vague kind, and the certain kind. Growing up within the MC, Ava had grown accustomed to the certain kind, the kind where she just knew that something truly awful was happening.
