Charlotte almost blurted her name. Part of her wanted to tell him her name, phone number, Social Security number, and her address. Anything and everything she could tell him so that he’d call her and talk to her more in that gorgeous voice. But she couldn’t tell him everything. He wouldn’t want to hear her everything, and because of that she would tell him nothing.
But he was looking at her. Really looking from her long, bare legs to her boy shorts, to the swim shirt that was soaked and painted to her skin. He wasn’t exactly leering, but his eyes were intense and they reflected his very obvious interest, which sent an all too familiar shiver of fear down Charlotte’s spine.
She schooled her face into what her mother would call “acceptable politeness, but not an invitation” and in her best Southern belle accent said, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, Bastien. Have a lovely day.”
As the very sexy, very handsome Bastien opened his mouth to say more, Charlotte gave him a dismissive wave, quickly turned her back on him, retrieved her backpack, and without one glance over her shoulder she hurried away from him, retracing her steps down the beach.
Maybe someday … Charlotte thought wistfully. Maybe someday I can talk to a handsome young man like Bastien without being afraid, but today is not that day …
Bastien
“Didn’t know all we had to do was get you in front of a beautiful piece to get the words to roll right out of ya.” Dickie clapped his arm around Bastien’s shoulders. “What’d you say back there, anyway?”
Bastien shrugged away from the brotherly embrace. That young woman hadn’t been some piece. She was an ange. An angel. Her hair and the way the salt-licked breeze had twirled it around her head had been her halo. And those arms, long and delicate and goose-down white, would at any moment reveal the wings he knew were tucked up inside her, waiting to lift her from this cruel world. She’d landed right in front of him and he’d talked to her in the only way he knew how.
“Douces comme du miel.” Dickie’s attempt at Bastien’s line tumbled around his mouth and came out battered and broken. “I’ll have to remember that one and use it sometime. You probably just rake ’em in with that accent and all that foreign-sounding shit. Why the fuck couldn’t I have grown up in Arcada?”
“Acadiana,” Bastien corrected, promising himself that this would be the last time he did so without using his fists. Dickie was all right, once you got used to the dick part of his personality. Unfortunately, Bastien had discovered, this was 99.9 percent of ol’ Dickster, but he’d decided that having the boss’s little brother mad at him all the time wasn’t how he wanted to live this part of his life, however brief it was before he got too restless and the sea called him away.
“Yeah, Acadiana. What’d I say?”
Bastien ran his tongue along his teeth to keep from grinding them into paste. How many times did he have to explain it to this boy? His sister had even given him an article about the origin of the Cajun people and the parishes making up the Acadiana region, but nothing stuck.
“You gonna tell me what it means, douces comme—”
“Couillon,” Bastien grumbled, unwilling to listen to Dickie butcher his language again.
“Say, what?”
“Sweet as honey.”
“Damn, that’s slick.”
Slick was right. Slick like oil. Slick like sludge. Slick like all the things dumped and leaked into the great big abyss named ocean, coating and suffocating and poisoning until there’s nothing left—only silence, only stillness.
Board under his arm, Bastien charged back to the sea. He waded out until the rough waves licked his bare chest and drowned out Dickie’s shouts and questions. He needed to see them, his ocean creatures, to feel them beneath and all around him to remind him of who he was.
He was not the slick before the silence.
That had been his father.
That had been the way the rich Mr. Tibadeau had lured young women into his marital bed. He’d wrap them in satiny words and silky promises. Who cared if he got caught?
Money made everything go away.
Everything except Bastien’s mother.
Money kept her glued in place with foul liquid in her glass and hate stitched to her lips. But Mr. Tibadeau could hardly notice. He’d sweep in and out, sweet nothings spilling into his wife’s outstretched hands. And then, like a dream, like a nightmare, he’d be gone again, returning coated in glitter and smelling of vanilla, of sweetness, of lust and secrets. And the silence would cloak their home in its funeral shroud.
This family is dead.
May they rest in pieces.
Belly pressed against the glowing phoenix, Bastien paddled toward the break and its barreling waves. He gripped the edge of his board and, with surprising ease, punched through the rippling, tourmaline blue, glass-like center of the wave. He took a deep breath and he cut under as another wave surged overhead.
It has to calm if I’m going to see them, he thought, taking a quick inhale before another wave could crash against him. But it didn’t come. The ocean mellowed, absorbing the treacherous conditions as if a whole day had passed while Bastien was busy blinking. He sat up, wiggling his toes in the water as his legs draped over the sides of his board.
They would be here soon to ground him, reassure him that although he was of his father, he was not his father.
Bastien felt them before he saw them. The water cooled and thickened, but only for a moment as three majestic, shadowy creatures rose from the depths to greet him. They should have scared him, giant beasts surging close to the surface, their huge, whale-like bodies encircling him as he sat alone, on a surfboard, bobbing in the Gulf. It was the beginning of so many shark attack movies, but he could never bring himself to leave. He’d first seen them on one of their family trips to the Gulf, sitting, much like he was now, on a paddleboard atop the ocean while his parents snorkeled around him. He’d asked if they could see them, feel the cold thickness of the water, but they’d laughed and splashed and told him to stop trying to scare them, for the ocean was a vast and frightening place.
But that had been in the before.
Before the slick and the silence.