I swing past him and kick my legs out to go up again. Confronting the moon once more, suspended in time and space for the blink of an eye, I consider letting go of the chains to find out if the stars are as out of reach as everything else in my life. But my hair sweeps past my shoulders and hangs in front of my face until I fall back one last time.
Wilder yanks my chain and jerks me to an abrupt stop, nearly pulling his arm off in the process. Momentum whips me around, squeezing me within the plastic seat, before it slingshots me back around to come face-to-face with my captor. With his arms on each side of me like a cage, Wilder kneels down in the sand.
“You’re joking, right?” He scans my face, grasping my upper arms.
Admitting the truth about my family isn’t hard for me to do. I was severely mistreated by my mentally ill father and deserted by my battered mother, and none of that was my fault. I know that now.
It’s the rest of my story that haunts me, buried deep with guilt and shame in the desert wastelands of my mind.
“My dad was sick, Wilder. He thought I was somehow closer to God in the closet, so he threw me in there and thought he was doing the right thing.” I bow my head as the truth falls over me all at once. “God never said a damned word to me. But the darkness did, so now I light my candles,” I say as a matter of fact.
Wilder’s chest rises and falls with heavy breaths. His eyebrows furrow over his eyes dilated with rage. “He did that to you? He made you that afraid? You do understand that what he did is absolute bullshit?”
“Yes.” I press the palm of my hand to his warm face. “Of course, I do.”
I understand that my dad overestimated God’s interest in me.
“Come on.” Wilder stands and holds out his hand to help me to my feet. He lifts me from the swing like I weigh nothing at all, like that weightless vacuum at the top of the arch is possible with him on the ground. He tucks me under his arm for safekeeping, and I don’t hesitate to wrap my arms around his waist this time. “We better make another round before Dawn comes looking for us. Maybe there’s a cat we can save from a tree somewhere.”
I scoop up the flashlight as we pass the slide and direct the light to the path ahead, illuminating the concrete walkway. But it’s only so we don’t fall in the dark. Not because I’m afraid of it.
“Do you really like the vests?” I ask.
He laughs, and I find myself pressing closer to his body to feel the rumble in his chest.
“They’re not too bad,” he replies.
“And do you like me?”
Wilder tightens his arm around my shoulders and presses his lips to the top of my head. “No one is ever going to hurt you again, Camilla. You have my word.”
“I haven’t forgotten that you’ll kill for me.”
A sentiment that’s put to the test when we’re suddenly bombarded by an arsenal of water balloons. Which probably wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t forty degrees outside. My body temperature goes from cold to hypothermic the moment a water balloon hits its mark and soaks my clothes. Wilder takes multiple balloons to the chest, sparing me from the heaviest of the onslaught, acting as my human shield.
“Those little brats,” I shriek, wiping water from my face on the sleeve of my sodden hoodie. It drips from the ends of my hair and squishes inside of my shoes.
The twins from Building C make a run for it once they’re out of balloons, but the duo is no match for Wilder. He catches up to them in the blink of an eye, grabbing the boys by the back of their sweaters and hauling them up to the toes of their shoes. Even if they did manage to outrun Wilder, I know where they live. But it’s a sweet gesture.
“Apologize.” Wilder drags the two blond boys over, presenting them to me like an offering. His clothes are soaked through, and he has a broken piece of latex stuck to the front of his sweater.
“Sorry,” they mumble concurrently.
“Apologize like you mean it.” Wilder gently shakes them, and the twins’ matching frowns deepen. “This is no way to treat a lady, you little shits.”
“She’s not a lady,” the one on the left says.
“She’s Camilla,” says the one on the right.
Wilder cracks a smile at their stubbornness until my teeth start to chatter. His mouth falls into a straight line, and his jaw tightens.
“Where do they live?”
“Two buildings over.” I nod toward the last building in the row of three.
Cracking the door open slowly and then all at once, the twins’ father scowls when faced with his naughty children. He’s definitely been here before, and not only because of the dicks they drew on the pool house. These boys are naughty.
But I doubt he locks them in a closet because of it.
