“Ashes, ashes, we all fall down,” Peter rasps out thoughtfully, “damn, that is some sick shit.”
“See how that works?” I draw out. “Everyone at this table probably knows the words.” They nod in confirmation. “That’s the crux of our lack of critical thinking. That sick rhyme and countless others have been passed down for generations because we’ve been careless as to what we teach one another.” I eye Peter. “Bet you’ll think twice before you sing that lullaby to your baby sister.”
I stop my shuffle. “And when you have a spare minute, Google the origin of Jack and Jill and some of the others, and you’ll soon find our Mother Goose was in favor of Munchausen.”
Russell makes his guess and weighs in. “So, I gather we’re going to have them all scrambling to find the balls?”
“No, brother,” Tyler says, a devious smile lighting his face as I swipe the cups off the empty table and Tyler extends a closed hand over it, slowly lifting his fingers to reveal a palm full of washers. “We’re going to eliminate the game.”
Stalking back to my Camaro when Mrs. George pokes her head out again, I leave Tyler to lay out our strategy of framing Spencer and his accomplices without drawing attention to the club. Retrieving my phone from the glove box, I power it on to see a waiting text from Sean.
Sean: Meet me at the lake, bring the usual.
Got shit to do.
The bubbles immediately start.
Sean: Yeah, you do, but you’re taking the day off.
“Encore, Maman!” Again, Mama.
“Patience.” She tosses my pajamas on the bed next to me. “Arms up.”
“Encore, Maman!” Again, Mama, I yell louder, lifting my arms.
“Such a demanding little lark,” she says, pulling my shirt down before pinching my nose. “Count with me.”
“Un, deux, trois,” One two three, we recite together before she begins to sing. “Alouette, gentille alouette.” Lark, gentile lark! “Alouette, je te plumerai.” Lark, I will pull your feathers! “You sing too, gentile lark.”
“Je te plumerai la tête.” I will pluck your feathers off your head, I sing as she begins to tickle me.
“Je te plumerai la tête.” I will pluck your feathers off your head, she sings back.
“Et la tête,” off your head, she sings high.
“Et la tête,” off your head, I drop my chin and sing low.
“Alouette,” Lark! She sings.
“Alouette,” Lark! I sing back.
She presses her nose to mine, our eyes getting bigger as we sing together. “O-o-o-oh!”
She pushes me back on the bed, hair tickling my belly as she kisses it, and I try to wiggle away.
“Encore, Maman,” I yell as she chases my foot with my pajama pants.
“Et le bec,” off your beak. She pinches my lips.
“Et la tête,” off your head. She plucks my hair.
“Alouette!” Lark!
She stops, yawning.
“Maman,” I yell. “You did not sing it all!”
“We can sing again tomorrow.”
But we didn’t. We didn’t sing.
We never got to sing again.
“Maman,” I whisper, speeding away from the lake, chest burning as trees blur in my peripheral. Irony strikes me that mere hours ago, I chastised my inked brother for taking stock in a nursery rhyme while I replay the one I’m most familiar with—a subconscious punishment.
Atonement demanded by my psyche to re-live one of the handful of vivid memories I have with my mother.
One of my last, when maman declared me her gentle little bird.
What would she think of me now?
What would she think of the fact that I’ve become a different bird entirely?
A bird of prey.
A bird fueled by retribution.
A cunning bird capable of acts so vile, that boy is almost unrecognizable to me now—a liar, a thief, a master of deception.
A bird capable of taking part in destroying an innocent girl in the name of vengeance.
But what transpired on that lake float didn’t feel like that. At all.
It felt like the opposite of that.
“Dominic.”
Cecelia’s moans skitter down my spine as her coconut-scented oil seeps further into my skin. My cock stirs at the memory of her above me—and beneath me.
The lust-filled tidal wave that crashed into me by way of a deep blue stare.
Her parted lips—and the sounds coming out of them.
A long pull of her pebbled nipple in my mouth.
The feel of her flawless skin between my bruising fingertips.
Her velvet tongue thrashing against mine.
Her endlessly long legs cradling me as she sank down onto me before we clicked into place, the fit fucking surreal.
Today’s forecast did not call for—or in any way predict—me fucking Cecelia Horner.
But it didn’t feel like fucking. What that felt like was . . . otherworldly.
The snap happened so abruptly that the static that always accompanied us caught fucking fire as the noise stopped. I succumbed so quickly that I made my own will a laughingstock but was rewarded in a way that I experienced every single moment. With just a kiss, this bird totally fell under the spell of the shiny, spinning thing.
In offering her my fuse, she ignited me.
Fire and water, she’s both burn and soothe.
The haze I’ve been immersed in lifted so fast. It was as if I had roused from a deep sleep only to open my eyes and see the world through a magnifying glass.
All of my senses became more acute as sensation and sound overwhelmed me—the lake waves breaking against the float, the sharp intakes and exhales of breath, the feel of my heartbeat, the electricity that flowed at my fingertips, the thunderous warning that rumbled through the sky. Though, I bat away any foreboding feelings induced by any idiotic fairy tale I conjured as she swept me into a fucking fantasy. I wanted her so goddamned much that I would have defied anything or anyone who tried to separate us.
“Dominic.”
For the first time since the nightmare I’d existed in for weeks began, I felt like I’d surfaced from being underwater and took a much-needed breath. A breath of realization that I am a living, breathing man. A man starved, due to self-deprivation, in dire need of the woman spread in front of me.
I took the breath allowing everything I felt to ring true, in the way I touched her, voicing the few words that came to me, my guard absent.
No longer feeling like I was watching just outside my own life but participating in it. I was capable of taste again and savored hers. Touch turned into worship. With every deep thrust inside her, the burdens weighing me down were forgotten.
Something so natural and straightforward for most . . . but so complicated for me.
If fucking was all we had done, I’d already be home, finding another way to fill my time—but it wasn’t. I totally lost myself in her, and every second of it only ramped up the one before.
Fully hard from the recollection, I speed forward in the opposite direction of the sun as I attempt to race away from the fact that the best I’ve ever fucking felt in the whole of my existence was when I was moving inside Cecelia Horner.
Speeding past any route home—knowing I can’t be anywhere near where she is—I pour every effort I have into putting those minutes, that stolen time, into its respective box.