My chest hurts because I believe every word Ryke is telling me. I’ve heard Lo tear down people in prep school until they cried, not because it made him feel better but because they hurt him first and it was his greatest weapon of defense.
“He walks away sometimes,” I say in a small voice. “He’s not always like that.” I defend him because he’s not here to speak for himself. And what I said is partly the truth too. Lo knows when to walk away. Like the first time we were at The Blue Room. If someone’s harassing him back, he won’t stand there and take it for long. He’s too used to verbal abuse, and I think he’d rather not be weakened and drained by it. He’d rather just get out of the fucking way.
“Okay,” Ryke says, “but in the context of the Halloween party, he didn’t.”
“And what would you have done, Ryke? Not stolen the liquor? Not started the fight? Congratulations.” Rehashing the past puts a bitter taste in my mouth. We can’t change that event. Talking about it rubs my skin raw.
“I would have punched him,” Ryke says easily. “I would have decked the little shit in the face. That’s the fucking difference.” He straightens up, and my jaw slowly unhinges, not expecting that.
“You don’t seem like a fighter.”
“I don’t?” Ryke says, his eyes pulsing with something fierce. “If someone is giving me shit, I’m not going to stand there and take it. Maybe Lo was defenseless all his life, but I wasn’t.”
“And then what? It would have been four to one at that party. You would have gotten your ass handed to you.”
“I never said it would be the right thing.” He shrugs. “It’s just a different kind of wrong.”
His wrong. And Lo’s wrong. Neither are better or worse, I realize. Their dissimilar upbringings make them react to situations in opposite ways. That’s what he’s telling me.
It also makes me incredibly sad. Because he basically admitted to being as damaged as his brother. I picture his fist flying into Matt’s face before awful words are spewed, impulsive and brash.
Only it’s a different kind of damaged.
Just as he said.
*
I float on a yellow inner tube in the crystal blue ocean. The girls, Daisy, and even Ryke rest on their own brightly-colored tubes, each round floating device tied together by a rope so we don’t drift from the boat or each other. I catch Harper swigging from another mini-bottle of liquor she smuggled on the boat.
Dear God, please don’t let one of my little sister’s friends drown to the bottom of the ocean because they’re so fucking intoxicated. Thanks.
The first five minutes were actually fun. I took a nap and listened to music playing from the boat’s speakers, and my feet skimmed the cool water.
However, five minutes later, and the girls become so damn restless that their shouts and high-pitched voices scar my eardrums and wake me up.
“Oh my God! Something touched me. Was that a shark?!” Katy screams in fright. She latches onto Ryke’s tube, and he nearly topples into the water. Her palm plants on his bare abs to catch herself, but clearly, her grabby hands are no accident. She has been eying his chiseled muscles since he strutted off the deck like he built it with his bare freakin’ hands. It’s mildly infuriating…and also scarily accurate.
“Relax,” Daisy tells her. “It was probably just a fish.”
Ryke tries to disengage from her, but she clutches to his bicep now, her panicked eyes darting from him to the water, two seconds away from shrieking, “Save me!”
He carefully pries her fingers off his arm. “I think you’ll survive.”
“Oh…yeah. Right.” She raises her chin and situates back on her pink tube.
Ryke unhooks his green inner tube from the pack and paddles with one hand to my lonely rope on the end. He clicks it in and rests his wayfarers back over his eyes.
“Smooth,” I whisper to him.
“That’s how it’s done,” he agrees.
I roll my eyes and sink back into my tube, my butt skimming the water underneath. Ready for nap number two. Naps are great. When I’m asleep, I barely have the urge to jump from the water, go to my room, and perform some self-love acts.
“Seriously, is that even possible?” I hear a girl ask curiously. Now I’m curious.
I listen closely.
“I swear on my life it was four fingers,” Katy says. “I was really sore afterwards.” Whaaat?
I glance quickly at Ryke, but with his sunglasses on, I can’t tell if he’s hearing what I am. Fingers. Sore. This is sexual. I know it’s not just my perverted mind.