Burn For You (Boys of the South) (26 page)

Caitlin

I’m starting to forget why it’s a bad idea to get in any deeper with a boy who is a walking, talking contradiction. A boy who has a taste for breaking the law, a wicked way with words, and a confident touch that leaves no doubt he’s way more experienced than I am. I’ve spent my life putting aside my own needs and cleaning up after other people’s mistakes. Now, I want to make a mistake of my own. 

I know I’m playing with fire, but for Gabe I'm willing to beg to be burned. 

Chapter One

Caitlin

Tis sweet to drink, but bitter to pay for. –Irish proverb

One moment really
can
change your life.

One moment, one kiss, one wild night when you color outside the lines, step outside the box, stop playing by the rules....

Gabe and I only spent a few hours together, but now everything is different. Now, the day-to-day grind that was grueling, but survivable—even fun at times—threatens to break me. Now, facts of life I took for granted seem ridiculously unfair. Now, I know how easy it is to turn the tables, and
take
what the world refuses to give people like me.

A chance. A shot at something more if I work hard and give it everything I’ve got—that’s all I want. But it’s something I may never have if things don’t change.

If I don’t
make
them change.

At six in the morning, lying on my lumpy second-hand mattress with the threadbare tee shirt I slept in sticking to my skin in the June heat because there’s no way we can run the air conditioning and buy groceries at the same time, with the acid reflux I can’t afford to treat burning the back of my throat, it seems like a no brainer. I should call Gabe. I should take him up on his offer to do it all again, to find a new victim, map out another robbery, and take fate into my own hands.

The kids will be out of school in two weeks. After all the snow days in January, classes are running late this year, but come June fifteenth, I’ll have three kids in daycare—four if I can convince Terri at the Kiddie Kottage to take Danny, even though he’s twelve, and technically too old for daycare.

I can’t imagine leaving Danny home alone. He’s already getting into trouble. So far he’s only been cited for defacing public property—he and the Baker boys down the street decided to spray paint penises on all the neighborhood stop signs, and were dumb enough to get caught. But give my brother a summer to run wild and I have no doubt he’ll have more incident reports in his folder down at the police station come August. If I want to keep him out of juvie, I need to make sure Danny has adult supervision while I’m at work.

But adult supervision costs a pretty penny, almost more than I can afford, even with a full time waitressing job, a part time gig selling popcorn at the movie theater, and a subsidy from the state. After paying for daycare last summer, I took home less than four hundred dollars a week. That’s sixteen hundred dollars a month to feed, clothe, and shelter a family of five—six if you count my father.

Since he’s been shacking up with Veronica, Chuck doesn’t
technically
live at the house anymore, but he still sleeps here sometimes—when he’s too drunk to remember that he moved into Veronica’s apartment above the Laundromat, or when Veronica sobers up enough to realize she’s sleeping with a man who regularly forgets to brush his teeth, and kicks Chuck out for a few days.

And when he sleeps here, Chuck eats here and makes messes here and inevitably ends up costing me far more money than he donates to the family coffers. He hasn’t had a job in almost a year and drinks away every dime of his VA pension and disability.

So...six people. Six people on sixteen hundred a month.

It’s no wonder I almost lost the house in April. If I hadn’t robbed the pawnshop, my three brothers and two-year-old niece, Emmie, would be in foster care, and I would be homeless. Homeless, after working my ass off to raise four kids by myself for two-and-a-half years. After dropping out of school, giving up my academic scholarship to Cristoph Prep, and putting every dream I had on the shelf, I would have lost everything. I would have lost my family, the only thing that makes all the backbreaking work worth it.

The property taxes have been paid and that danger has passed for another year, but we’re not out of the woods. It will be a struggle to get through the summer, a struggle that will continue into the fall when tourism to historic downtown Giffney slacks off and my tips take a dive. A struggle that will intensify come winter when I’m forced to run the heat in our drafty old house and the electric bill skyrockets.

Gabe was right. There are only two ways out: either let the state take the kids and start looking out for number one—something I could never do, even if I wanted to, even if Emmie, Sean, Ray, and even Danny, that pain in my ass, didn’t mean the world to me—or stop playing by the rules.

“And eventually get caught and go to jail,” I say to the water-stain on the ceiling, the one I haven’t gotten around to painting over since the roof leaked in November. “And have to live with knowing I’m an awful person, and a horrible example to the kids.”

But the words don’t sound sincere, even to my own ears.

The man we robbed in April was a monster, a miserable excuse for a human being who beat his wife nearly to death, on multiple occasions. He deserved what he got, and Gabe promised me there were others like him, other awful, evil people he’d learned about while trolling through his defense attorney father’s files.

I could help make sure creeps who have gotten off scot-free for their crimes are punished. I would be like an instrument of karma, avenging the innocent while lightening my own load in the process.

And if I saved up enough money, I could take time off from work to study and get my GED. It wouldn’t take long. Then I’d be able to take classes at the community college, and get qualified for a job that pays better than minimum wage. I’d have more time to spend with the kids on their homework, time to work with Emmie on the speech therapy stuff her therapist said we need to hit harder at home, maybe even time to go out dancing more than once or twice a year.

Dancing...with Gabe.

My lids slide closed and I shiver despite the heat that’s making my tee shirt stick to my skin and beads of sweat pool between my breasts.

Visions of that night—my twentieth birthday, the night everything changed—play out in the darkness behind my eyes: Gabe’s big hands pulling me into his arms, his fingers digging into my hips, his ice-blue eyes holding me captive in that moment before we kissed, promising wicked, wonderful things as his hand slipped between my legs and he made me shatter into a million beautiful pieces.

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