Later – years, months, weeks, days, sheer minutes later – Ava would say that she knew the moment she read the text that something was off. As her eyes passed over the words, a little note of nervousness played across her skin. Hormones, again, she told herself.
It was from Carter:Can we meet at my house 4 tutoring 2nite? Folks don’t want me at the clubhouse anymore.
Another set of parents swayed by the running black dog on the sign out in front of Dartmoor.
She texted back:Thought they already knew?
Um…not rlly. Mason ratted on me. Dad says NO. Hasta be our house.
Fine, need address, she texted back, and heaved herself to her feet. Already, she felt heavy, misshapen, the baby affecting her mentally.
What she really wanted was a good cry. Tissues, chocolate, curled up in bed – just sob and sob until there was nothing left inside her.
What was she going to do? Do like Becky and have it taken care of?
No. No, it was hers and Mercy’s and she couldn’t imagine that. Not even if Mercy hated her now.
Mercy…her throat ached thinking of him, of the coldness on his face and in his voice that morning.
How was she going to tell her parents? Maggie would hold her hand, would chide her in a supportive way. But Ghost would hit the roof. She didn’t like imagining his wrath.
She pulled a hoodie on over her t-shirt and collected her backpack, made sure her copy ofJane Eyrewas inside.
On the way, she texted Carter, and started punching the address into her phone’s GPS.
**
“I’ve realized something,” Tango said, from the sidelines. “Merc always lets you win, brother.”
Aidan scowled as he leaned over the pool table and lined up his next shot.
“He’s got the eye of the tiger tonight, though,” Tango said, a laughing glance thrown toward Mercy. “In it to win it, man.”
Mercy wasn’t laughing. And he wasn’t tortured by the thought of loss the way Aidan was.
He felt like shit. Like he had the flu, minus all the symptoms. Every time he blinked, he saw Ava’s betrayed face, heard the catch in her breathing when he’d burned the wordfuckinto the air between them like that.
Oh, I’m sorry, fillette. Come here, baby. I’ll make it better, I swear. Just come sit in my lap, part of him wanted to say. He’d almost called her five times that day, not giving a damn that he was a grown-ass man hooked like a caught gator to that teenage girl.
But a larger part of him was swamped with Maggie’s warning. He knew, and had known all along, that he stood to unleash a shitstorm on this whole club. He couldn’t do that, not to his brothers, to the men who’d saved him from a Louisiana jail cell.
And so with everycrackof the cue ball against the colors, he felt the anger boiling in him, screaming for an outlet. Beating Aidan’s ass at pool wasn’t helping much, but it was better than nothing. It was better than looking for a groupie, now that Jasmine had told all of them about the feel of his hand around her throat. There were a few who liked the brutal shit who’d given him the side-eye, but he couldn’t find anything appealing about their invitations.
He wanted his girl, and he couldn’t have her, and he wanted to crack someone’s head open with his cue stick.
By the end of the night, he would want to crackhis ownhead open, for not pulling her into his arms that morning and asking her what was wrong.
Carter lived in a seedy neighborhood, full of unkempt lawns and rusted-out decades-old cars. All the angles seemed a little off, a little saggy, a little too slanted. The houses gave the impression of slitted eyes peeping from the wilderness, sleeping beasts who didn’t want to be approached.
“But my place, no, that’s too shady,” she muttered to herself as she parked in front of the narrow brown bungalow with the chain link fence.
There was a pyramid of Coors Light cans in one corner of the fence, like shiny drifted snow. His dad must have been a plumber, going by the dozens and dozens of Kohler boxes under the carport. The window sashes were water-swollen and termite-eaten. The front of the house gave off the impression of a depressed basset hound.
At Carter’s, she texted Maggie.Will call later.
The front steps were littered with cigarette butts. Ava felt a hard twinge of sadness for Carter. He was so popular, so golden and so handsome, it was hard to imagine him in a place like this. It put her own problems in perspective: she might be seventeen and pregnant, just like her mother, but her home was clean. It was a place of love. People in love didn’t live in a house like this.
She was reaching for the doorbell when she heard the scrape of shoes on the concrete behind her.
