Pike (The Pawn Duet #1) - T.M. Frazier Page 0,5

where the road is. It ain’t far from where I just came from.” As I drive, I feel her stare on my cheek burning a hole in my face.

Finally, she speaks, “Thank you. I mean, for the ride.” Her pale sunken cheeks gain some color as she blushes. She bites her bottom lip and hisses, raising her fingers to the cut on her lip she’d forgotten about.

I haven’t done a lot of things in my twenty-two years that deserve thanks, and I sure as shit haven’t done anything recently to deserve it either. It feels wrong for her to be thanking me and even more wrong that I have no idea how to respond to simple gratitude.

We’re silent for the rest of the drive. The only sounds are the occasional passing cars and the echo of croaking frogs from the neighboring preserves.

I turn down a broken shell driveway lined with a crooked orange stained fence and broken shell plant beds housing the kind of tall skinny palm trees that sway in a slight breeze as if they’re in a hurricane. Funny enough, those fuckers are the ones who survive most hurricanes when everything around them turns to rubble because they bend like rubber bands and always snap back.

“This is it,” she says on an exhale, her face brightens.

The house itself is a sunny yellow color, sitting high on pilings with two parking spaces underneath separated by an unpainted concrete block wall. Purple shutters surround the two windows. Hanging underneath each window is a large rusty metal sun with house numbers. There’s a small outbuilding off to the side that matches the paint scheme of the house. It’s a duplex. One of hundreds just like it lining the beachfront. Like the others, I assume the wooden stair cases on both the left and right lead up to a deck on the beachside of the house where the front door is located because that’s how all of these things are laid out and there are hundreds of them lining the beach. Who knows, I could have been here before, either for business or because spring break tends to bring out wild girls with daddy issues who love nothing more than to slum it with the locals on spring break.

The kind of girls who don’t mind that they won’t be the only girl in my bed.

The girl opens the door and hops down, stumbling on the shell driveway.

“Shit,” I swear, jumping down and racing over to hold her upright. “Maybe a hospital would have been a better idea.”

“No. I’m good. I’m always good when I’m here,” she says, her eyes sparkling as she looks up at the little beach house like it’s a mansion covered in diamonds. Again, I’m not seeing what she sees.

“Which side?” I ask.

“The stairs on the right,” she replies.

I wrap an arm around her waist and place her arm around my shoulder, guiding her over to the stairs.

“You know, I’ve spent every summer here since I was eight,” she begins. She turns her head as she notices the empty parking bay. “The van. It’s not here. Maybe they aren’t back yet. Probably still out looking for me. I’m going to get an ear full from Papa for sure.”

Her eyes glaze over, reverting to the look she had when I found her.

I tighten my grip around her waist when I feel her swaying. “You okay?”

“I…I don’t know.” Rounded wide-set eyes stare up at me with confusion. “I don’t know what’s happening.” She stumbles back, and I pull her in close, anchoring her to my chest. “The rain. The sounds. The glass. Where did they all go?”

I’ve met some crazy bitches in my life, but this one might be even crazier than the girl who slashed my tires or the one who tried to set my apartment on fire. “You know,” I say. “You remind me of my sixth grade English teacher.” I rest my chin on her wet head as she burrows her face into my shirt, seeking comfort from a stranger. From me of all people. “‘Cause I didn’t understand a fucking thing she said either.”

What the hell am I supposed to do with her? She’s not the kind of crazy that leads to being naked and making questionable decisions to piss off her daddy, but the kind that ends in strait-jackets and a memoir about her life growing up in the looney-bin. I took her home; do I just leave her here? She isn’t my problem. Yet, as

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