Song of the Fireflies(26)
Author: J.A. Redmerski

“Why don’t you come up and hang out with us in our room?” Tate said. “No shady shit here. Just a friendly offer.”

“We’ll pass,” Elias said and interlocked our fingers.

“From the looks of it,” Tate said, “it’s either up there with us or out here with the sand fleas and the security guard who makes rounds every hour.”

Tate’s offer was enticing, despite our unfortunate run-in with Anthony and Cristina. But I could tell that Elias wasn’t up for finding out if Florida had a lot of Anthonys.

“Can you give us a second?” I asked Tate, putting up my finger.

“Sure thing,” he said with a nod and a confident smile. Then he lit up a cigarette.

I pulled Elias by the hand and we stepped several feet away from Tate.

“I think we should,” I whispered.

“Well, I don’t,” Elias came back. “That guy almost f**king shot you tonight and I couldn’t do anything about it. We’ll figure this out on our own, Bray. I’m not going to risk something happening to you again.”

“What other choice do we have?” I asked, my whisper becoming harsher. “And you’re right, you couldn’t do anything when Anthony had that gun on me, but that wasn’t your fault.”

“I let them in the car with us,” he said. “It wasn’t any different from picking them up off the side of the road somewhere.”

“We both let them in the car,” I corrected him. “Neither of us could’ve known he was going to pull a gun. He seemed perfectly harmless.”

“Like this guy?” Elias noted, pointing toward Tate with his thumb.

“Seriously, what are the chances that we’d get robbed twice in the same night? We don’t have anything left to steal.”

“Something worse could happen,” Elias said. While that was true, I had to believe that it wouldn’t, and Elias was just being overly protective.

“Like what?” I asked, shaking my head but still trying to be understanding. “There’s two girls and one guy. And the girls….I could take either one of them.”

“Uh, actually,” Tate said from his far-off spot, holding up his middle and index fingers with the cigarette wedged between them, “there are five of us. My brother and his current lay are upstairs in our suite. But you’re right, you could probably take Jen or Grace. Though Jen is a spitfire. She won’t go down easily.”

“Come on, Elias.” I took his hands. “We have nowhere else to go.”

Elias sighed and shut his eyes briefly.

Minutes later we were walking into a fifth-floor suite set up like a small one-bedroom apartment. Coming in behind Tate, we were greeted by the casual glances of two more people we hadn’t seen before. The first was another blonde, this one with much shorter hair than Jen’s, a vacant look in her eyes, and freckles splashed across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. Something bothered me about her, and she hadn’t even spoken yet. And there was another guy, who looked younger than Tate but very much like him, with the same light-brown hair and soft hazel eyes. Those two lost interest in us quickly. But Jen, who had been out on the beach with us, held her glare on us all the way through the room.

Grace, on the other hand, smiled at me. Of the three girls, Grace was the one I felt the biggest connection with. She had a kind and caring air about her, and I liked her instantly.

Jen snarled and then gave Tate one helluva pissed-off look. He bent over and kissed her on the side of her temple. I blinked, stunned, when her hand shot out and slapped him across the side of his neck. “Get the hell away from me,” she snapped.

Tate was surprisingly unfazed by the blow. I halfway expected the smile to drop from his face and for him to snatch her up from the couch and at least yell at her for slapping him. But his smile remained, and he just kissed her again. Ultimately I shrugged it off, realizing quickly that we weren’t the only people in the room with a complicated love life.

Jen went back to her quiet conversation with Grace sitting beside her.

“This is my baby brother, Caleb,” Tate announced. Caleb nodded from his spot on the floor. And then Tate pointed at the blonde sitting behind him in the chair with her knees at each of his shoulders. “That’s Johanna. And you’ve met Jen and Grace.” He turned to Jen, who refused to give him her attention, let alone look at us. “Say hello to our guests, Jen. No need to be rude.”

I got the feeling Tate was taunting her in his own quiet way, but I also got the feeling that Jen was used to it and probably liked it more than she was letting on. Still so pissed off at him that she would probably slap him again if he stuck his head near her too closely, but she liked it just the same.

“Pick a seat,” Tate said, waving his hand about the room. “We’re only here for tonight. Headin’ out in the morning back to Miami. Home sweet home.”

I sat down on Elias’s lap at the table by the window overlooking the beach. Tate opened the mini fridge in the kitchenette and reached inside. He had three bottles of Heineken wedged between his fingers when he straightened up, and he held two of them out to us. Elias took them and opened mine before handing it to me.

Tate plopped down on the couch beside Jen, slouching down far into it with his long, tanned, and muscular legs splayed into the floor. Jen made a hateful face as his shoulder pressed against her back, but she continued to give Grace all of her attention and didn’t exactly push Tate away. She and Grace were looking into a cell phone screen, Jen’s finger moving across the glass.

“So if your car was stolen,” Tate said, “how are you getting back to Indiana?”

These were the kinds of questions that Elias and I didn’t want to answer. Me, worried about screwing up whatever story Elias had in mind to tell them, I just kept quiet and let Elias do all the talking.

“We’re not going back anytime soon,” Elias said. He drank from the bottle and set it on the table, then rested his elbow next to it. “We’re just traveling.”

“By foot now?” Tate pointed out and took a sip.

“I guess so.”

When Elias didn’t offer any more information and the room got quiet, Tate took the hint.

“Hey, it’s all right,” he said. “I understand. TMI too soon.” He looked at Caleb and said, “Why don’t you roll one up?”

Caleb leaned back and away from Johanna’s chair and reached inside his back pocket. A rolled-up plastic sandwich bag appeared in his hand. He settled between Johanna’s bare legs again and started rolling a joint. I watched him for a moment, still struck by how much he and Tate looked alike. Same hair color and build, except Tate appeared taller and Caleb only had one tattoo that I could see, an Asian girl on his left arm surrounded by swirling wind or water, I couldn’t tell at this angle. He and Johanna seemed the quiet type, or maybe they were just really into that movie playing on the television in front of them. Caleb kept looking up at it while rolling the joint.