“Christ,” Alicia mutters. “She told the doctors you were tested at your local hospital and you weren’t a match.”
“And you’re in the habit of just letting your patients tell you this shit without checking to see if it’s true?” Wow. So weird. In my head, my voice is high-pitched and full of rage. When it comes out of my mouth, it’s devastatingly calm.
Alicia makes excuses. Feeds me apologies. I’m deaf to all of it. I sit at the bar, so, so still, fending off a barrage of displaced thoughts. I wonder if Dash headed back to England for the break. Man, these shoes are uncomfortable. Where the hell is my burger? I need to get my eyes checked when I get home. My vision should not be this blurry.
“Are you hearing me? This is actually good news. If you haven’t been tested, there’s still a chance you could be a match!”
Poor Alicia’s so excited. She was all doom and gloom when I picked up the phone, but her sudden hope has me by the throat and it’s making my head spin. “I’m not getting tested.” I say it softly, but the statement rattles the windows and shakes the earth beneath my rickety bar stool; I’m the only one who feels the aftershock.
The nurse makes a confused, guttural sound. “Pah! What? No, honey, you’ve got to get tested.”
“I’m on the other side of the world. I’m trying to enjoy my vaca—”
“No,” Alicia interrupts. “You don’t understand. Your mother’s very sick. She’s got a few weeks left, the way she’s going. If you don’t come back to the States immediately, get tested and start praying you’re a match, she will die. Is that what you want?”
Something insidious unfurls beneath my ribs—a hoarfrost creeping along the bone, freezing me to my rotten core. Knock me right now and I’ll shatter like glass. “It’s not about what I want, Alicia. It’s that…I just don’t care.”
I end the call, staring at the screen as I set the phone down on the bar. A cut-glass tumbler with an inch of burnt golden liquid appears next to it as the light on the phone dims and the display fades to black.
The bartender cracks his knuckles. “Sounded like you needed something stronger than beer.”
Who the fuck am I to argue with the man? He’s a professional. It’s his job to know what I need. I drain the tumbler in one go, pouring the tequila down my throat. The raw burn from the liquor defrosts the slick, death-like cold that’s digging its fingers into my guts. It exhumes me, dragging me from a premature grave.
“Everything okay, man? I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just heard you say cancer and saw the look on your face, and…”
If I weren’t such a total prick, I’d tell him it was nothing. It isn’t my job to put people at ease, though. When I look up, I give him an assessing once over and my lip curls upward of its own volition. The shape of this expression is familiar. I know it intimately. Dash calls it my ‘move-or-die’ face. “I’ll take the check.”
He shakes his head. “Your burger hasn’t come out yet. People who order food usually like to actually eat it before they bounce.”
“You want me to settle up before I leave or what?” I will leave if he doesn’t put the check down in front of me in the next ten seconds.
The bartender places his hands on his hips. He lets his head hang for a second, sighing deeply, then he looks up at me. “No, you stubborn fucker. I don’t want you to settle up. Go on. Go.”
“What?”
“You’re white as a sheet, dude. You don’t look well. Just get your ass back to your hotel and don’t worry about it.”
Saints and martyrs, this guy thinks I’m actually upset about the news I just got. What a joke. Fucking moron. I get up and—
Whoa.
My vision darkens around the edges. I grip the bar to steady myself, but it doesn’t help. The ground’s got a mind of its own. The bartender’s brows bank together, eyes flashing with concern. “Here, man. Why don’t you let me help you?” He starts to make his way around to me, but I back away, crashing into a table behind me in my haste to get away from him.
“I’m fine. I’m…fine. I… just need to…”
Somehow, I find my feet, and I run. Out on the cobbled street, strains of music and laughter float on the night air. Cicadas chirrup their chorus in the hills close by. I stagger drunkenly in the direction that will lead me back to the marina, but I get myself turned around and end up wasting twenty minutes walking the wrong way before I manage to orient myself and figure out my mistake.
I’m exhausted and numb when I finally reach the dock where I left the boat.
The acrid tang of burning chemicals floods the back of my nose, blotting out the rich, heady scent of basil, mint and cooking meat that laced the air when I set out to find a restaurant. I ignore the stench. I ignore the push and shove of the crowd that’s formed on the pier as well. I don’t even notice the press of bodies thickening and the roar of excited conversation getting louder until I snap back into myself and realize that something isn’t right.
“It’s gonna go down before we can get it out!” an English-accented voice hollers. “Fuck, James, get back, for god’s sake. You’re gonna get yourself killed. What are you thinking, boy?”
It’s then that I process the scene.
The orange, dancing flames.
The dirty black smoke curling off into the sky.
The charred hull of the boat, listing weirdly out of the water.
The Contessa…
On fire…
…sinking.
I watch dumbly as the yacht that I borrowed from my friend, the same one I swore I wouldn’t set on fire, groans, a loud splintering sound fills the air, and then capsizes, its mast crashing down onto the deck of the super yacht which is moored in the slip beside it.
“Hey! Paxton!”
It takes a second to locate her: Margarite, the cute little French girl with the coke habit. She sits on a painted railing fifteen feet away, kicking her feet as she licks happily at an ice cream cone. She grins like a fiend when I lock eyes with her. “Sorry, Paxton,” she shouts. “I saw it start. I would have called the fire department, but I seem to have lost my phone.”
I can’t help it.
I burst out laughing.
I laugh until I double over and puke into the black waters of the Mediterranean.
2
PAX
* * *
“Oh my god. I want—I want…”
She wants my cock inside her. She wants my teeth on her neck. She wants all of me. Lord, I can smell how bad she fucking wants me. Her breath is laced with the expensive whiskey I gave her back at the house. Her skin is fragrant, like gardenias, and green spring growth, and coconut. Her pussy smells sweet, though, indescribably delectable—a signature scent that must have been designed specifically to drive me out of my goddamn mind. I can’t think around that scent. It’s turned me fucking feral. I lick, and suck, and bite at the perfect alabaster pale skin of her shoulder, losing more and more of myself as the seconds slip by.
My hands are full of fire. Her hair is so red and beautiful even in the moonlight. Her lips are a delicate, pale pink—the color of exquisite coral. I can’t get enough of those, either. That pouty, swollen, plump mouth will be the death of me. What I wouldn’t give to have that perfect fucking mouth wrapped around my shaft right now.