Page 11 of What We Bury

Not because I have any reason to trust a man who just tackled me into the sand after I watched his friends hang someone from a jetty. But because his hands are open and his breathing is wrecked and there’s something in his face—in the space between his eyebrows, in the way his jaw keeps clenching and unclenching—that looks less like a man in control and more like a man trying very hard not to fall apart.

I sit up slowly. Every muscle screams. Amy’s dress is destroyed, soaked through, sand-crusted, clinging to me in ways that make my skin crawl. I can feel the blood drying on my arms, tightening like a second skin, cracking in the creases of my elbows when I move.

He watches me take stock of myself. Watches the moment I look down at my hands and see what’s under my fingernails and understand that no amount of sitting on this beach is going to undo what I did tonight.

“I can’t let you go home looking like that,” he says. “If someone sees you, it’s over. For you and for us.”

He shrugs off his jacket, dark and heavy, the lining warm from his body. He holds it out to me, arm extended, the jacket hanging between us like a question.

I stare at it.

“Take it,” he says. “It’ll cover the mess.”

My hands are shaking so badly it takes two tries to grab it. I pull it on and it swallows me—sleeves past my fingertips, hem hitting mid-thigh, the collar brushing my jaw. It smells like laundry detergent and cedar and something warm. The bloody dress disappears. I’m just a girl in an oversized jacket now. A girl who went for a walk on the beach and got cold.

The idea almost makes me laugh.

He stands and offers his hand. I ignore it, pushing myself up on my own, legs wobbling like a newborn deer. Autumn eyes doesn’t seem offended. Just drops his hand and nods toward the waterline.

“Come on. Let’s get the rest off.”

I follow him to where the surf laps at the shore, just past the edge of the jetty. The moonlight turns the foam silver. Behind us, the other four are doing something I refuse to look at. I can hear them—low voices, the scrape of something heavy on sand—but I keep my eyes forward. If I look back, I’ll see it. If I see it, I’llhave to know it. And right now, my brain is running on whatever fumes are left after the adrenaline burned everything else to ash.

He stops at the water’s edge, then yanks his shirt up and over his head in one practiced motion. I don’t mean to look. I really, really don’t. But the moon is bright enough to glow on every ridge and plane, and he’s built—not gym-bro built, but the kind that comes from hard labor, cords of muscle under sun-tanned skin, shoulders squared like they draw heroes in old comic books. His dirty-blond hair falls in a crescent over his brow. An ugly bruise shadows his collarbone, and a white scar sits just below his shoulder, a slash like an afterthought, or a tally mark. Tattoos snake up his ribs. He crouches before he plunges the shirt into the tide, wrings it out, and stands.

If this were any other night, any other life, I’d want to know his name. But this isn’t that life. This is the one where I’m the girl who just killed a man.

Oh god. I killed Brock.

He stands, dripping shirt in one hand, then bunches the fabric and brings it to my face. Some part of me expects him to scrub, to scrape, but he doesn’t. He dabs at my jaw, my cheekbones, the soft skin under my nose, careful as a fucking saint. I flinch anyway, shivery with memory, but his hands stay steady. He rinses the shirt in the ocean, wipes my neck and hairline, then offers it to me.

“Here. Take it.”

I scrub between each finger, then harder, cotton raking at dried blood in the creases of my knuckles and palms. I crouch and plunge my hands into the surf, scrubbing until my skin warms from the friction.

But I can’t get it off. It’s in my cuticles, under my nails, ground into the whorls of my fingerprints like it’s been tattooed there. I scrub until my skin burns, until the salt stings, until I’m not cleaning anymore—I’m punishing.

“Hey.” His hand closes over mine, stilling my fingers in the cold water. Warm, firm, unbearably gentle. “That’s enough. You’re clean.”

But I’m not. I never will be. I stop anyway, hands raw and shaking, tears sliding down my cheeks and dripping off my jaw into the ocean.

Adding salt to salt.

He waits, letting me break in quiet, ugly pieces. Not saying anything, not trying to fix it. He sits there, knee to knee, his palm warm on the back of my hand.

I rock back, knees hugged to my chest, chin dropped to my kneecaps. The jacket sleeves hang over my fingers, and I ball my hands inside them because I can’t look at my own skin.

He doesn’t ask again if I’m okay. He just looks at the water with me, waiting for the next fucked-up thing.

When I finally risk a peek behind us, the others are hauling Brock’s body toward the dunes. Two at the shoulders, one directing them with a hand while he tucks a phone away with the other. Every movement is deliberate. They don’t look at Brock. They don’t look at me.

“Go home,” autumn eyes says finally. “Shower. Get rid of the dress—burn it if you can. Don’t talk to anyone about tonight. Not your friends or family. Not the police. No one.”

“And then what?”

“Go to sleep. Get up in the morning and go to work—or school. Whatever it is you do. Live your life like none of this happened.” He pauses. “Be normal.”

I almost choke on it. “Normal?”