Kingmakers, Graduation

15. Sabrina

15

SAbrINA

I ’m supposed to fly to Dubrovnik tomorrow. I have my suitcase with me, full of a fresh batch of uniforms, and I already said goodbye to my parents and Damien back in Chicago.

Nix can tell I’m in a funk about leaving. She’s so honest that she ignores social niceties and the bullshit people say, cutting right to the heart of what she sees: “You don’t want to go back to school.”

We’re laying on the back deck of the Petrovs’ house. The wooden beams are warped and graying from the constant salt spray tossed up from the beach below. In the large hammock we can lay side by side, head to foot. Nix’s red hair sprawls across my brown arm, my dark hair across her pale one. From above we must look like a yin-yang.

The breeze is strong enough to keep us rocking, though neither of us is pushing .

Adrik has gone on some errand with Kade and Rafe, and Rafe’s sister Freya, something to do with the dispensaries. I didn’t ask Adrik for details because there’ve been people all around us today, and the things we actually want to talk about can only be said in private.

“I like school,” I say to Nix.

That’s mostly true. I spent years yearning to go to Kingmakers. Once I arrived, the classes and training and ferocious competition were everything I’d dreamed.

It was a firehose of information straight to my brain. I guzzled it down, always with more and more and more coming, no end of everything to learn.

But the rules, the strictures, the monotony of it …

I don’t want to be on someone else’s schedule. I don’t want to be chastised. I don’t want to be a student.

I’ve always felt older than my years. I like Kade and Cara, and most of my classmates. But the one who feels like my equal is Adrik. I want to be eight years ahead. My mind is already there, I’m ready.

“That’s not what I said.” Nix pushes off the closest post with her bare foot, sending the hammock into a dramatic swoop. “I said you don’t want to go back.”

“No,” I admit, after a moment. “I don’t.”

“Because of Adrik?”

It’s the first time she’s said it out loud.

She knows that we’re involved. But Nix is never one to pry. She flows like water and allows everyone else the same luxury. She accept s us all as we are.

It’s probably the only way anyone can be close to me.

Ilsa wanted me to be better than I am—leading to endless disappointment.

“I don’t know if it’s because of Adrik, or because of what he makes me want.”

“What does he make you want?”

“He makes me want to follow my impulses.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

I look at the long stretch of sand below us, pocked by countless footprints, then perfectly smooth where the waves have washed them away.

“Historically, yes.”

Nix laughs softly. “Sometimes bad decisions take us to the best places.”

I sit up a little so I can see her face. Her eyes are closed, her red-gold lashes laying against cheeks dusted with freckles finer than sand.

“Not everyone’s story ends as well as yours.”

Without opening her eyes, Nix replies, “My story isn’t over. It’s been painful along the way … but I can accept anything if it’s my choice. Regret comes from what you wish you did. You can’t regret what you know was right.”

She’s thinking of her father, I’m sure. She loved her father more than anything. He was her whole world—until she met Rafe .

Nix chose the Petrovs. Because Rafe was what she wanted.

“I thought I wanted to go to Kingmakers. Maybe I’m one of those people who’s never satisfied.”

Nix tilts her face up, catching more of the sunshine. She takes a deep breath and lets it out. I feel the sigh more than I hear it, our bodies pressed together all the way down our sides.

“I don’t think Rafe and I will stay here forever,” she says. “But it’s where we want to be right now.”

“You’re saying I don’t have to plan so far ahead.”

Now Nix does open her eyes, and I see the sympathy in them, her desire to help me, not to push me in any direction. She takes my hand and squeezes it.

“I’m not saying anything—except I’ll miss you wherever you go.”

My face is hot with the discomfort that comes whenever anyone is kind to me. Aggression is easier to match.

“My dad always says in our world you’re dead if you can’t think eight steps ahead.”

“Well … I don’t want to fight with your dad,” Nix says, lazily swinging the hammock again. “But life isn’t chess. You’re not looking down on an open board. No one can actually see the future. Sometimes you just … jump.”

She digs under her thigh, retrieving her phone.

“Look,” she says, scrolling. “You look pretty happy to me.”

She holds up the screen for me to see. It’s a picture of the four of us at the arcade. Nix is eating cotton candy, Rafe has his arms wrapped around her waist from behind, and I’m holding a giant teddy bear that A drik won at the shooting gallery. We could all have won bears if the barker hadn’t banned us from the game after Adrik dented half his targets.

That bear’s sitting up in Nix’s room right now. Like an idiot, I’m wishing it could fit in my suitcase.

“Did you post that pic?” I ask Nix.

Adrik is standing right next to me—not touching me, but close enough that it’s pretty clear we’re on a double date.

“Yeah,” Nix says, “but don’t worry, my account’s private. I’ve only got like twenty-eight followers including you.”

Nix wasn’t exactly popular at Kingmakers. That’s probably what drew me to her in the first place—if I were a gardener, I’d only grow cacti.

I hear the commotion in the house that can only mean that Adrik and the others have returned. The dogs bark with joyful excitement. Rafe tells them to shut the fuck up much too nicely for them to actually obey.

Rafe comes out on the porch, hunting for Nix. She jumps out of the hammock, almost swinging me out on my ass, so she can throw her arms around his neck and kiss him.

Adrik stands in the doorway, dark and unsmiling.

The urge to jump up like Nix and put my hands on him is almost overwhelming. I can’t not look at him when he’s close. I can’t stop this burning all over my skin, this anxious churning in my guts. It’s lust and it’s need and it’s something else I can’t put into words because I don’t understand it—I don’t understand how it can be so strong when we’ve only spent a dozen days together, spread out over m onths.

How has he become so essential to me?

I don’t like this at all.

I’m vulnerable. Cracked open like one of those crabs down on the beach, exposed to any gull that wants to drive its beak through my heart.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” Adrik asks me.

I should say no. I’m only making this harder on myself.

Instead, I’m already on my feet.

We take Rafe’s car, which he’s lent repeatedly without question. Rafe knows what it’s like to keep secrets. To want something you’re not supposed to have. To sneak away again and again for a taste of it, promising yourself each time that this will be the end, you’ll finally be satisfied …

I let Adrik drive because it’s his cousin’s car.

My rules about cars aren’t as strict as bikes. Even so, I don’t sit in the passenger seat unless I’m confident in the driver.

Adrik operates the Mustang smoothly and efficiently. He knows competence is more impressive than speed.

The road unspools beneath us, his arm resting lightly across the back of the bench seat.

“You leave tomorrow,” he says.

It’s not a question; we both know this already. The silent clock has been counting down in his mind as much as mine.

“Seven a.m.”

“I’ll drive you to the airport.”

I want to say, thanks, but I can’t trust my voice. It might break or come out in an embarrassing squeak. Better to say nothing.

Why does this feel like we’re parting forever? Why am I so upset?

The sun sinks down heavy and red ahead of us, casting long shadows from every tree and post.

Because no one knows how many days they have, or how many chances. Everything changes. No one stays the same.

Adrik pulls into a lookout point, high above the Pacific. The beach below is dark rock, no sand and no sunbathers. We’re surrounded on two sides by towering fir trees and Ponderosa pine. The sunset is bloody—vivid and angry.

Adrik kills the engine, turning to me. For once he doesn’t seize me and kiss me, but only looks at my face, eyes narrowed, jaw stiff. He runs a hand through his thick shock of hair. His fingers are like claws, his shoulders hunched.

“I don’t want you to go.”

“That’s insane.”

“Yes, I’m insane. I’m crazy for you, I’m not afraid to say it.”

His heat and candor are like nothing I’ve known from a man. No posturing—only the truth, given freely .

My heart hammers, my hands twist in my lap.

“You think I’m afraid?”

“Yes.” His eyes burn like blue gas flame, he won’t smile even a little. “You’re afraid to come to Russia. You’re afraid to be alone with me. You want the protection of your family or your school, even when you hate how they chain you.”

“I know nothing about Russia and we’ve only been dating a week! I’d be a lunatic to come live in your house with your Wolfpack. A bunch of guys all together and then me—how the fuck does that work?”

“It works how I say it will.”

“Because you’re the boss.”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t want to be your soldier. I want freedom, not a new master.”

“You’ll be my partner.”

I make an impatient hissing sound. Everyone knows when there’s a king and a queen, the final word comes from the king.

“Let me show you,” Adrik says, enclosing my hand in his much larger one. “Come to Moscow. See what it’s like.”

I try to pull my hand back, but he won’t let me. Without even trying, he holds me trapped.

“I can’t just roll up to Kingmakers a week late. If I miss the ship, I miss the year.”

He won’t stop looking at me, he won’t give me an inch of space.

“Come with me. You won’t regret it. ”

But I might. How can I know?

“ Come with me.”

He overpowers me like a wave. He wants to swallow me up in him, to make us one and the same.

Fighting his pull is miserable. I’m in physical pain.

I want to cry with frustration, with confusion, but I won’t let myself, never, never, never.

Instead I fling myself on him. I silence him with my mouth. I show him with my body how badly I want him, how wild he makes me. I straddle his lap, ripping off my clothes and his, not caring who might drive in here, or who might see us.

Adrik responds as I knew he would—pulling up my skirt, tearing my underwear, shoving his cock inside of me. Letting me know that he understands our purest, truest communication is always our bodies together, giving in to what we both want with equal passion, equal need.

We can never be misunderstood when we’re in each other’s arms. Our words could never match our bodies. This is what’s real, this is what matters.

I fuck him in the scent of leather and gasoline, the blood-red sun beating on the dashboard, glinting off the chrome dials and the sparkling glass.

This is where I want to be. I’d trade my whole life for this moment, and I’d trade this for nothing, not anything that exists.

In this moment we are one person, we are one thought. And the thought is this :

This is right, I’m supposed to be with you. I don’t care about anything else. I don’t care what I believed before I met you, or what I planned. You smashed what I was and you made me something new.

Is it love or is it madness?

I accept either one.

My climax is a rush of chemicals and light, my body an engine and Adrik the fuel. We burn and burn and burn together.

When it’s over I cling to him for hours, until the sun sinks all the way down, the air cold, my fingers chilly against his warm neck. I curl up against him like a child. All I want is his arms around me forever.

We drive home slowly, trying to stretch out each moment. I haven’t given him my promise, but I want to. The words are in my throat, waiting to be spoken aloud.

As we near the entrance to the long, winding driveway up to the Petrov house, I see a car parked at the side of the road. Right where the mailbox would be, if it weren’t blocked by the front wing.

My heart stops in my chest.

The street lamps are far apart on this lonely stretch of road. The man stands in shadow, his face indistinguishable. Still, the lean body is all too familiar to me. Even if I could see nothing of him, the vehicle itself is too distinct to mistake.

My father is waiting.