“What am I supposed to do around here?” I mumbled. “Just be the fucking errand boy? Got some light bulbs that need changing?”

Raine stilled her fingers on my scalp for a moment then resumed.

“I heard some tourist was attacked on the beach the other day,” she said. “Some guy just punched him for no reason. There’s plenty around here for you to protect me from.”

I couldn’t help it; a laugh burst out of me.

“I’m the most dangerous person around here,” I said as I looked up into her soft, brown eyes. The anger was gone from them, but the hard determination was still there. Apparently, she forgot who was living with her. “Who is going to protect you from me?”

I shoved myself away from her and out of the kitchen. My cigarettes were on the nightstand in the bedroom, so I grabbed them and opened the balcony door. I heard Raine come up behind me as I leaned on the rail and flicked ash towards the amoeba-shaped pool below.

“Are you going to tell me what’s in your head right now?” she asked softly.

I thought about it a minute.

“You don’t need me here,” I said.

“I do need you,” she insisted.

“No,” I replied, “you don’t.”

“Sebastian…” Her voice held warning.

“I know,” I said as I raised my hands in surrender, “you love me—I know that. I don’t get it, but I know it. You want me—I get that too—but you don’t need me. Not like you did there.”

“I might not need you to find me fresh water or fish, but I still need you.”

I really didn’t want to fight with her over the fucking semantics. It was obvious we weren’t going to come to terms on this one. For a moment, I stayed silent and gathered my thoughts. I didn’t want her to leave for school with an argument behind her, so I decided to just drop it. I took one last pull on my smoke, tossed the butt in the bucket, and turned to face her.

“Agree to disagree?” I suggested.

Raine sighed and pursed her lips. I gave her a lopsided grin and held out my arms. She came to me, and I wrapped myself around her, holding her as tightly as I could. She raised her hands to grip the backs of my shoulders and placed her cheek against my chest. Tucking my face into her neck, I reveled in the smell of her hair and the softness of her skin as they calmed me.

“You mean everything to me,” she said. “I don’t like to see you hurting—you know that—but I can’t go back there. I don’t ever want to go back there.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to ignore the burning behind them.

“I know,” I whispered into her hair.

* * *

Lindsay was Raine’s best friend from Ohio. She relocated to the Miami area when Raine and I were missing in order to be closer to where the search was, and Nick was the helicopter pilot who eventually located us and removed us from the island. For that reason alone, I hated him, but I tried not to show it.

Lindsay came from money, which showed in her demeanor more than Raine ever wanted to admit. Her mother was a judge or something on the state supreme court, and her father was an executive at some corporation. Lindsay didn’t flaunt it exactly, but the chick bought fucking everything that caught her eye and then usually tried to get Raine to buy the same thing so they could match.

I didn’t get that shit.

“You have to see these shoes I found online!” Lindsay blathered as she dropped an insanely sized designer handbag next to the door and pulled Raine over to the couch. I wondered if there was a pair of Chihuahuas in the bag—they definitely could have fit. Both women leaned over the laptop on the coffee table and pulled up some bargain shoe site. The two of them giggled and pointed at the screen while Nick rolled his eyes.

“Women, huh?” he said with a friendly smile. He placed a large, brown paper sack on the kitchen island and reached out his hand to shake. “How are ya, Sebastian?”

Totally ignoring his hand along with his efforts, I grunted, grabbed my smokes and a lighter, and headed through the sliding glass door. I closed it with a slam behind me.

Out on the balcony, I tried to find it in myself to feel bad about blowing the guy off, but I just couldn’t. Every time I looked at him, I heard the whirling blades of the helicopter as it landed on the beach and destroyed my world. I knew Raine and Lindsay wanted us to get along, and Nick certainly tried, but I was an asshole about it all.

I fired up the grill and laid the steaks out on the attached tray. They were nice and thick, so I knew they were going to take a while to cook, which meant more time for talking with Raine’s friends.

Fucking fabulous.

I finished my smoke and slid the balcony door open.

“Seriously, Lindsay, what were you thinking?”

Lindsay and Raine were on the near side of the kitchen island with their backs to me, and Lindsay was holding a couple of wine glasses while Nick uncorked a bottle of Merlot at the counter by the sink.

“It’s just a bottle of wine,” Lindsay was saying. “It’s been months. I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I want to celebrate my promotion, dammit!”

“He’s going to act like a jerk whether we have a drink or not,” Nick muttered.

“Stop that!” Lindsay smacked his arm and then turned back to Raine. She placed her hand on Raine’s shoulder and leaned closer. “You know he’s going to have to learn to be around it, sweetheart. I’m not trying to be insensitive, but you both have to know other people are going to indulge occasionally, and-”

“It’s all right,” I snapped as I walked in from the living room. “Drink the fucking wine. I don’t give a shit.”

They all turned toward me with big eyes and fidgety feet.

“Bastian,” Raine sighed, “this is your home-”

I barked out a laugh and then shook my head. My home was a long way from here, and I didn’t really think a fucking bottle of wine was going to make this place that much worse. With a deep breath, I tried to calm my voice.

“It’s all right, babe,” I said. I walked up behind her and wrapped my arms around her waist, kissing her neck gently just to prove a point. I wasn’t sure what the point was, but I was sure it needed to be proven to someone. “She wants to celebrate or whatever. I’ll cope.”

And cope I did—hanging on to my fucking iced tea glass like it was a life preserver—for all of about forty minutes.

“Sounds like Raine’s doing well in school,” Nick said as he slid the balcony door shut and joined me outside.

“Humph,” I replied through my nose. I kept my eyes on the grill, hoping he’d get the hint and go back inside. He didn’t. Fucker.

“So what are you doing during the day when she’s at class?” he asked.

“Jerking off,” I replied.

He laughed, but the sound trailed away when I moved my eyes to his.

“I guess it gets pretty boring, huh?” Nick shuffled back and forth on his feet and then leaned against the balcony railing. He took a sip from his wine glass and kept that stupid grin plastered on his face. “So where are you from, Bastian?”

“Chicago.”

“The windy city!” he exclaimed, like it was something I didn’t already know. “I was there once with my parents and sister when I was a kid. Loved all the museums. We rode that big Ferris wheel at Navy Pier and went to the top of the Sears Tower.”

It wasn’t worth the effort to correct him and say it wasn’t called that anymore, so I didn’t say anything. What was it about people’s need to tell you about their visits to a place you lived? He wasn’t the first to babble about Chicago, but I had seen a lot more of the alleys on the south side of the city than I ever did of the fucking museums.

“I’m from Pennsylvania,” he continued. “Pittsburgh, actually. My dad worked for a big container company.”

I ignored him.

“Mom was mostly a housewife, but she did a lot in the schools, too. She tutored kids and worked with the PTO—you know, bake sales and all that stuff.”

I could feel tension rippling up my back and into my shoulders with every word he spoke. My brain felt as if it were spinning in circles, trying to conjure up an image of a life like the one he had or of the woman who birthed me, but there was nothing to find.

“Do you still have family in Chicago?”

“No.” I clenched my teeth and hoped he wouldn’t go there.

“So where does your family live now?”

Of course he did.

Fucker.

“I don’t have any family,” I said.

“Oh, shit…sorry.” He scratched at his head and took another drink. “What happened to them?”

“Don’t know; don’t care,” I snapped. I jammed the tongs underneath one of the steaks and tossed it on its other side. “Change the fucking topic.”

After a little silence, I hoped he’d go back inside, but my luck just didn’t run that way.

“Are you going to get another boat?”

“I never had a boat,” I said.

“Oh, uh, I thought that sailboat was yours.”

“It was a three-masted schooner,” I said, “a ship, not a boat.”

“Sorry, I don’t know much about boats.”

Fuck me.

“So, are you going to get another one?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I let out a long breath and turned to glare at him.

“Because I fucking live here now!” I snarled before I focused my attention on the sizzling meat.

I guess I knew he was only trying to be nice and make conversation or whatever, but I wasn’t interested. I didn’t have anything to say to him, and I sure as hell wasn’t planning to open up and give the fucker my life story. It would only get him killed.

Now there’s an idea.

I shook my head a little to clear the violent thoughts parading around in it. With my attention on the food, I made it all the way through Nick’s attempts at conversation while I flipped steaks. When we went back inside, I made it all the way through Lindsay’s incessant babbling about shoes and Raine’s sideways glances at me every time someone took a sip of wine.

Raine had completely ignored the glass Lindsay had poured for her and drank water.

That just pissed me off more. I didn’t want her to deny herself just because I had a fucking drinking problem. It was my issue, not hers.

“How about a toast to the new customer service manager?” Nick said as he held up his glass.

Lindsay squealed a bit. She grabbed the glass Raine was avoiding and placed it her hand. Raine looked at me sideways again, and I rolled my eyes dramatically.

“Just drink the fucking drink, will you?” I snarled. “I really don’t give a shit.”

Raine cringed a bit and nodded at Lindsay. Nick held up his glass and said something about how proud he was of little Lindsay hitting the big-time of middle management. I sat on one of the stools in the kitchen and fiddled with my lighter.

“Come on, Bastian,” Lindsay said, “you have to hold up your glass!”

“It’s tea, for fuck’s sake,” I reminded her.

“You can still toast,” Lindsay argued.

I stared at her blankly for a moment, trying to keep all the nasty shit I wanted to say from flying out of my mouth like a swarm of bees from a disturbed hive. All the tension was moving up my legs and into my gut, and I had to swallow to keep the words inside.

“Drop it, baby,” Nick said quietly.

“But he can!” Lindsay insisted as she turned toward her boyfriend.

“Please,” Raine said as I felt her hand grip my knee as she stepped closer to me, “let’s go ahead and eat, okay?”

Awkward silence ensued.

It was better than what happened afterwards.

We all sat around the kitchen island with plates of steak, baked potatoes with little broccoli florets on top of them, and one of those salads with green stuff in it you couldn’t actually identify. My fingers tapped repeatedly against my leg as I tried to keep my mouth too full to join in any discussions.

Not that I had anything to add to them.

“So proud of my girl,” Nick said with a wide smile. He tossed his arm over Lindsay’s shoulders and gave her a stupid-ass grin.

Every word that came out of his mouth I wanted to pound back into his face. It wasn’t the words themselves; it was the way he said them. It was the way he beamed at her like she was the center of the fucking universe. She was eating it up, too.

I kind of wanted to puke.

Raine smiled at both of them before tilting her head to look at me. Her smile faltered immediately as she watched me tear into another bite with my fingers clenching the knife so tightly, it probably looked like I was trying to brutalize the cow.