#TeaserTuesday: "Hi, baby."

 

We're getting closer! Slowly but surely. Have an extra long teaser to make up for last week's absence while I was editing. 

Slowly, Gray nodded. “Yeah.” Then he went startlingly still a moment, head cocked.

That was when Mercy heard it: the drone of an approaching boat motor.

Mercy slipped his half-smoked cigarette into the Coke can, stood, and pulled his gun. To Gray, he said, “Go through the house, tell them to get ready, then go out back, and find the path–”

“That loops back along to the east,” Gray finished. “Watch your six?”

“Yeah. Wait for my signal.”

Gray nodded, and loped across the porch and inside. Mercy heard low murmurs, and then all sound inside ceased.

As the engine’s purr drew closer and closer, he had no doubts about the crew behind him, and their ability to back him up.

He had plenty of doubts about who might be in the boat drawing closer, closer, closer.

He heard when they rounded the last corner and the throttle opened up on the straightaway toward the cabin. This was no tentative exploration: whoever was manning the till knew their destination, and wasn’t going to be shy about it.

Gun in-hand, Mercy walked across the yard and to the dock, and then down it, boots clomp-clomping over the boards. By the time he reached the end of it, he could see the boat’s spotlights panning out across the water, turning its surface murky green, alighting on duckweed and sleeping dragonflies that flitted unhappily into the air. Flogs plopped into the water.

He closed his eyes a moment, and listened. American-made engine. Evinrude, if he had to guess. The hiss of the water displacement betrayed a boat similar in size to the one Bob had loaned them: a wave-runner with an outsized motor that could make it fly in open water, with room for plenty of people and cargo.

Boyle?

Police?

He opened his eyes, and in the harsh glare of the spotlights, he saw a white prow, and the white froth of the boat’s wake.

He lifted his gun.

The engine slowed, from a roar to a held-back rumble. A sharp, two-blast whistle pierced the air, and a British-accented voice called out, “If my own father shoots me, I’ll haunt him the rest of his short, miserable life.”

Mercy was beaming before he realized it. He holstered his gun, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called, “Hey, asshole! You get lost in the swamp?”

The boat drew closer – close enough for him to make out Tenny’s lean silhouette up near the prow, arm lifted in greeting. He wasn’t working the wheel – a much larger, more swamp-savy man had hold of it.

“Colin?” Mercy called, dumbfounded.

Tenny called back, “Call off the dogs, big man, and we’ll weigh anchor, or whatever the fuck you call it.”

Mercy laughed again – it was relief, more than joy, he knew; the crushing, overwhelming slap of knowing he had more backup – and turned toward the dark tangle of forest behind him. “Down, boys! It’s friends,” he called.

He had shit-talked Colin for so long, had even felt contemptuous of him for so many years, from their youth into that tenuous period of adulthood once he learned the truth of their parentage, that he forgot, sometimes, that he was a competent boatman. He steered the boat in to the dock in a wide, graceful sweep, reversing at the right moment so he didn’t hit the dock, and Reese stepped up to toss Mercy the rope so he could tie them off.

When he was done, he straightened, loving insult for Colin already forming on his tongue…

But it wasn’t Colin standing on the boat in front of him.

I’m dreaming, he thought, because that was the only explanation. That’s it. You haven’t slept, and right now, you’re flat-out on a sleeping bag inside, and this is a dream. Because it was too wonderful, and too terrible to contemplate: Ava here, when he wanted her most; and Ava here, where it wasn’t safe.

But never in a dream was the slap of water on a boat hull, nor the tangy scent of the water so vivid. In dreams, she didn’t wobble, and brace a hand on the boat rail. In dreams, she beamed at him, and reached for him, and eyes all melted-candy soft, pink lip pulled between her teeth because she wanted him so badly. In dreams, she didn’t kick up her chin and shoot him a challenging glare, her face pale and waxy, hair glued to her neck in sweaty straggles. She was as radiant to him as ever…but this looked too real to be a dream.

Still, he blinked. Several times.

“Jesus,” Colin muttered, and heavy boots clomped up onto the dock. The rope was pulled from his hand.

Oh.

He hadn’t breathed in…a while.

Mercy drew in a deep, slow breath, and sparks flared at the edges of his vision. He could still see, though. Could see Colin bending to tie off the boat. See that the boat was full of people, actually.

But the only one he could focus on was Ava. Who straightened, and brushed her hair off her neck with a blown-out breath, lips a tired O. Then she scrounged up a smile, and said, “Hi, baby.”

Her voice, the fatigue that made it shake, was what finally convinced him he wasn’t caught in a strange hallucination, and launched him into action. Shock moved through him painfully, a lightning bolt that seized his heart and numbed his toes. “Fillette,” he breathed, “oh…” And then he lurched forward, leaned over the slapping black stripe of water between dock and boat, and grabbed her right around the waist with both arms.

Ava made a fast, wheezy sound like he’d crushed all the air out of her lungs, but wrapped her arms around his shoulders and leaned into him as he swung her up and out of the boat and set her boots on the planks of the dock. He cupped the back of her head, where her bun was falling down in the humidity, dropped his face against the side of her throat, and breathed for a minute.

She smelled like sweat, fresh layered over old, and the swamp, in the faint way it clung to everyone who entered it. But mostly she smelled of home: their dryer sheets, and their soap, the coconut shampoo she’d been using since she was a teenager. Like her skin, and their bed. Like every good thing he’d left behind when he came down here.

At first, the rush of his pulse in his ears drowned out all other sounds save the soft, close rustle of their clothes rubbing together. But as that faded, he became aware that Ava was rubbing a circle against the back of his shoulder with the heel of her hand, and that she was murmuring to him. “…alright, baby, it’s alright. I know.”

He was shaking. Shuddering. Hard, wracking shudders like he was struck with a high fever, and couldn’t seem to stop. He squeezed her tighter, and she shushed him like he was one of their babies, and for a little while, that was all that mattered.