King finally looked toward the town car. The driver got out and walked around, opening the door of the back seat.
A boy a little older than me, with dark blonde curls stepped out of the back seat. He wore black Chucks, grey shorts, and a red batman t-shirt. It wasn’t until he looked up at me when I recognized him. Or at least, his eyes.
Chestnut brown.
The eyes from my dream.
I was stunned into silence, frozen on the porch as the boy approached.
“Ray? Ray is that really you?” he asked, looking right at me.
I looked up at King whose expression had completely changed from troubled and weary to angry and vengeful. He was staring daggers at the boy. His jaw tensed so hard I swear I could hear his teeth grinding.
“Who is Ray?” I asked King.
“Don’t fucking do this,” Bear snapped from the doorway.
“Go the fuck back inside,” King barked.
“Fine. It’s your fucking life. Fuck it up more than it already is. Preppy would’ve kicked your fucking ass for this. I’m going to visit my sister. I can’t stick around and witness this shit.” Bear stepped out onto the porch and pecked me on the cheek. “Love you, pretty girl,” he said before disappearing around the side of the house. A moment later, his bike whizzed by, kicking up dust in its wake.
“You,” King finally answered. “You are Ramie Price.”
“Ray, don’t you remember me?” the boy asked. “I’m Tanner. Don’t you know who I am?”
I turned to King. “What is this? Who is he? Why is he here?”
“He’s your…boyfriend.” He forced the words off his tongue like they were stabbing him in his mouth.
“My what?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. “You knew he was coming?” Then, it hit me, and I sucked in a strangled breath. “You knew who I was?”
King didn’t say anything, but most importantly, he didn’t deny it.
“How long have you known?” I whispered.
King looked down at his shoes.
“How long have you fucking known?” I shouted.
“Since the very beginning,” he admitted. “Since before I came for you again after you escaped.”
“Escaped?” Tanner asked, reminding me of his presence.
“The entire time?” I asked, feeling as if he just stabbed me in my chest. “You knew who I was this entire fucking time?”
“What the fuck do you want me to say? I’m a shit person, and I do shitty things. You knew that. I fucking told you that, but you went and fell for me anyway.” He ran his hand over his head in frustration. “Well, it’s over now. Welcome to your new life. Or I should say your old life,” King spat.
He lowered his eyes. “You deserve better than all this shit anyway.” He waved his hand toward the house. “You deserve better than me. You’ve got a family. Go be with them, and forget I exist.”
His eyes darted down to Tanner who stood in the front yard with confusion marring his face. He glanced back and forth between me and King.
“What’s going—” Tanner started to ask.
“Shut the fuck up,” King snapped, effectively silencing the boy.
“That is NOT your decision to make,” I told him. “You don’t get to say where I go or who I go with.”
“Actually, it is,” King argued.
“What the fuck does that mean? What the fuck did you do?”
“Ray!” the boy shouted over our argument.
King looked down at him as if he were going to leap down the steps and crush his skull with his hands.
“Come down here,” Tanner said in a gentle voice. “Just for a second. I just want to see you. Talk to you.”
I looked back at King, and it dawned on me. It wasn’t my decision to make because he was giving me away.
That’s what last night and this morning were all about. He was saying his goodbyes.
King nodded to me as if to say I had his approval to go talk to Tanner. I rolled my eyes at him. I didn’t need his fucking approval.
I tentatively descended the stairs one at a time. When I got to the bottom, I sat on the bottom step. “Do you know who I am?” Tanner asked, crouching down and resting his hands on his knees.
I shook my head. “I recognize your eyes, but nothing else,” I admitted.
“As I said, my name is Tanner. We’ve known each other our entire lives. We were homecoming king and queen all four years of high school,” he said with a chuckle. Then his face grew serious. “I love you. You love me. Always have.” Tanner blushed and rocked back on his heels. “It feels weird to introduce myself to you when we’ve known each other since we were in diapers.”
“Who am I?” I asked hesitantly.
Tanner took a seat on the step next to me, careful to keep some distance between us. I didn’t need to look back at King to know he was watching Tanner’s every move. I felt his gaze on my back as if they were rays of the sun singing my skin. Tanner smelled like the beach. His unruly hair fell into his eyes. He brushed it out of the way as he spoke. A huge smile spread across his face, revealing a dimple in his left cheek.
“You are the lovely Ramie Elizabeth Price. Daughter of Dr. Margot Price and Senator Bigelow Price. You live in East Palm Cove, about an hour from here. You were enrolled in art school, and you were supposed to start in the fall. You and I were going to backpack around Europe for the summer first, but then you disappeared.”
I had a name.
Ramie. Ramie. Ramie.
“Ramie,” I whispered, testing the name out on my tongue.
Still nothing.
“I went to the police. They said no one was looking for me. No missing persons report. Why didn’t you look for me if I was missing?” I asked.
Tanner shook his head. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but you had this friend, and she was going through some bad stuff. She got in trouble a lot. You left a note, said you were running away. They didn’t look for you because they didn’t think you wanted to be found. You had just turned eighteen. You were an adult. There was no missing persons report because you weren’t missing. You were just gone.”
“I left?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“I left you?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “You left me. And your mom. And your dad. Everyone.”
I had a mom.
“Why isn’t my mom here?” I asked.
“We didn’t want to overwhelm you. Your mom is at home, waiting for you to arrive, but your dad is in the car.” Tanner said, pointing to the town car with the blacked out windows, still running on the driveway.
“I still don’t remember. I thought I would remember if I saw someone from my past, if they told me who I was, but I don’t.” My head spun. If I didn’t remember him face to face, would I ever remember him?
Would I ever remember anyone?
“You will, but it will take time. You just need to get back into the groove of things for a while. Your normal routine. It will come back to you. We won’t rush it. Your mom’s got the best doctors already on call. Specialists. You’ll be back to your old self in no time,” he said, nudging my shoulder.
King had already told them everything. At least enough for my mom to already have doctors at the ready.
The girl who I’d given up on might be back after all.
The back door of the car opened again, and out stepped a tall man in a sharp black suit and a solid red tie.
“Who is that?” I asked Tanner.
“Your dad,” he told me. “The senator.”
“Ramie,” the man said. “Your mother is worried sick. Let’s go. Get in the car,” he said sternly, buttoning the bottom button of his suit jacket.
It was ninety degrees outside, and there wasn’t one drop of sweat on his forehead. No redness on his cheeks. It’s like he was too important to be affected by the heat.
From above me, King leaned forward over the railing. With the light of the sun directly overhead, his massive frame cast a shadow onto the ground.
He really did look like a King. A force to be reckoned with. Zeus, on his perch above the world.
The senator stepped out of King’s shadow as if he were too good to be standing in it. This irked me.
He wasn’t better than King.
No one was.
King was a bad guy, but he was my bad guy. He was more than that. He was my world. My heart. These people may have known who I was before, but I knew who I was now, and the two versions of me were going to have to figure out how to merge before I uprooted what I had with King in search of something unknown.
“Senator,” King acknowledged the man.
“Mr. King,” the senator greeted, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand.
“Where’s Max?” King asked, bitterly.
“Soon, she’ll be here soon. There is another car on its way here with her in it.”
“Trade means trade.” King said. “She isn’t going anywhere until Max gets here.”
Then, it hit me. King had said I didn’t have a choice, and now, I knew why.
If I stayed, King wouldn’t get his daughter back. The trade he mentioned was me for Max.
“There she is now,” the senator said as another town car pulled up into the driveway. King bounded down the steps jumping over me as he made his way over to the car. The second it stopped, King opened the back door.